The Mammoth Book of Merlin

by Mike Ashley

  This then was the period of Vortigern and Hengist. On Hengist’s arrival all at first went well. The Saxons aided Vortigern in the repulsion of the Picts and for a short period there was peace. Vortigern even married Hengist’s daughter, Reinwen, to form an alliance. But Hengist now had a toe-hold on Britain and, in 455, he sent for further reinforcements. It would be at this time that Vortigern fled. How long he remained in the Welsh hills is uncertain, but we can imagine there were a few years before his death. The likely date for the first appearance of Merlin, therefore, is around AD 457 or 458, which would place his birth at about the year 450.

  Geoffrey’s chronology becomes a little truncated over the next events. Aurelianus and Uther return from Gaul almost immediately; Vortigern and Hengist are killed. This is at variance to the traditional story. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the death of Hengist in the year 488, thirty years later. In place of Geoffrey’s record we can envisage that Aurelianus fought back the Saxons from overrunning Britain and established an uneasy peace with Hengist’s men remaining in Kent, and Aurelianus having lordship over the rest of southern Britain.

  Not much is known about Aurelianus, or Ambrosius Aurelianus (Aurelian the Divine) as he is sometimes called. He is believed to have been a descendant of a Roman family who sought to uphold the last vestiges of Roman civilization in Britain. He may well have been from a noble British family with Roman sympathies. He was certainly alive around AD 437 when he was involved in a battle at Guoloph, or Wallop, in Hampshire. The date of his death is uncertain but it was probably around the year 473, because it was then that the Saxons began again their incursions, which suggests that opposition to them had weakened.

  Geoffrey, of course, now records Uther, called the Pendragon (or chief dragon or ruler), as king, and no doubt there was a successor to Aurelianus who sought to hold back the Saxons, though less successfully than his predecessor. It is possible that there was a second Ambrosius, the son of the first, because some records suggest Ambrosius survived until perhaps AD 500.

  Uther must have ruled a few years before he succumbed to the beauty of Ygraine, though that period is not identified in Geoffrey. Allowing for some uncertainty over the dating of the death of Aurelianus, we could place Arthur’s conception at around AD 470.

  Geoffrey tells us that Arthur was fifteen years old when Uther died, which would bring us to about the year 485, by which time Merlin would be approaching forty. Although a boy king may sustain the support of his people, he would still require a wise counsellor to help him in his judgements, and that would be an obvious role for Merlin.

  If Merlin held such an important role, it would seem that there should be some record of him somewhere. It is strange that Geoffrey makes no record of this. But there is something in Geoffrey that may give us a clue. When Uther dies the noblemen of Britain implored to “Dubricius, Archbishop of the City of the Legions, that as their king he should crown Arthur”. Here was someone with clear authority and the power to anoint kings. Who was Dubricius?

  Dubricius is an acknowledged historical person, who in later years was raised to the sainthood. He is claimed to have founded the bishopric at Llandaff, and to have ordained Samson, late Bishop of Dol in Brittany. Some of the recorded dates conflict here. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Dubricius died in about AD 612 (his entry states that the date of his death is “the most authentic information we have about him”). However, Samson’s life is recorded as 480–565. Something is wrong. It may be that because of his later fame, Dubricius’s life became entangled with other great names of history. However, other studies assign different dates to Dubricius, such as The Oxford Dictionary of Saints which gives his death as about AD 550, whilst other sources date him even earlier living from about 465 to 530. These dates would not only accord with the dates for Samson, but are remarkably close to Merlin’s supposed life.

  It does seem strange that once Arthur becomes king, Merlin does not appear again in Geoffrey’s history. When we come to the all-important battle of Mount Badon, where Arthur convincingly defeats the Saxons and establishes a peace that lasts for forty years, we find that it is Dubricius who speaks to the troops from the Mount. You might think, considering the reputation that Geoffrey has been building for Merlin, that it would have been he who delivered the speech. It is as if Dubricius had supplanted Merlin – the Christian bishop replacing the Druid mage. If so, what had become of Merlin?

  There could, of course, be plenty of explanations. In real life, Merlin and Dubricius may have been enemies. Dubricius represented the church whereas Merlin, because of his dubious birth and magical arts, represented a pagan culture, synonymous with the Druids. For Arthur to be a Christian king, it would have been impossible for Merlin to crown him or, for that matter, to remain his principal adviser.

  There is another interesting point. Tales and legends about Dubricius were abundant at the time that Geoffrey was researching his History. Dubricius’s remains had purportedly been discovered on the Isle of Bardsey and transported to the abbey at Llandaff in the year 1120, the same year that a book about him, Lectiones de vita Sancti Dubricii, appeared. This book, and other writings, gave Dubricius a miraculous birth. Apparently he had no father, but was the son of a nun, herself a granddaughter of King Constantine and thus second cousin to King Arthur. This accords entirely with the supposed origins of Merlin, and it is more than tempting to think that Geoffrey either confused or linked the stories of Dubricius and Merlin.

  In Book 8 of his History, Geoffrey mentions Dubricius and Merlin in almost the same sentence. He notes the raising of Dubricius to the see of Caerleon, and he then goes on to describe how Merlin raises the memorial of Stonehenge as a “sepulchre”. It does seem strange that within almost one breath Geoffrey would favour a Christian and then a pagan act. In fact Merlin would seem to be performing a Christian ceremony. However, in Book 9, when describing the members of Arthur’s court, Geoffrey makes no reference to Merlin but not only mentions Dubricius as “Primate of Britain”, but attributes to him miraculous powers of healing. The last reference to Dubricius tells us that the saintly man had resigned his archbishopric in order to become a hermit, and presumably to devote his final years to solace and prayer.

  However you consider it, there are several similarities between the roles of Merlin and Dubricius, both as Arthur’s mentor and adviser. This even extends to their names. They could easily be the same person, regardless of the legends that grew around them in later years.

  Dubricius is, of course, a Latin name and not the original Welsh, which was Dyfrig. Dyfrig, in Welsh, means “waterman”, which might be likened to “baptist”, although in Latin it became confused with “merman”. By a coincidence one translation of the name Merlin was “mermaid”, although the real meaning of the word “mermaid” is maid, or lady, of the mere, or lake!

  Merlin was also a Latin name, the original Welsh being Myrddin, a name which is believed to mean “fortress”. It was, in fact, an ancient and much revered name, possibly attributable to a god. In ancient days, the island of Britain was referred to as the Fortress Isle, or Myrddin’s Isle. It would be no surprise, therefore, to want to link the legendary status of Merlin, as Arthur’s protector, with that of the very matter and origin of Britain itself. And if Dubricius was recognized in his day as the Primate of Britain he may have been termed Dubricius of Myrddin.

  Either way there is some substance here which could untangle the tales. It seems possible that Geoffrey, knowing the stories and legends of Dubricius, and knowing the other names by which he was called, interlaced these with tales he read in his “little book” and developed the story of Merlin, as Britain’s kingmaker, out of the original tales of Dubricius. Although the actions of one were pagan and of the other Christian, six centuries after their existence these events had become impossibly entwined.

  There is one other matter to resolve, though, which may provide an additional explanation, and that is the later life of Merlin, or Myrddin, and his re
lationship to King Gwenddolau. Here we really run into problems with dates. Gwenddolau died at the battle of Arderydd, which is assigned to the year AD 573. The Merlin of Vortigern would have been over 120 by then. Our image of Merlin as a white-haired, white-bearded old mage, rather like the near-immortal Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, might fit that dating, but in all seriousness it is pushing credibility, even with all of the accepted anachronisms.

  In his book The Quest for Merlin, Nikolai Tolstoy establishes that this Merlin or Myrddin is a later and distinctly historical person, recognized in the Dictionary of National Biography as Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin the Wild. Myrddin was a bard and adviser at the court of King Gwenddolau. He was known to the Strathclyde bishop of Glasgow, Kentigern, who lived from 550 to 612. Kentigern was appointed bishop by Riderch, the new king of Strathclyde who had defeated Gwenddolau at Arderydd and was, apparently, threatening to hunt Myrddin down – probably because of propaganda Myrddin had been spreading against him. It was for this reason that Myrddin fled into the forest, having already almost lost his reason because both his king and his brothers had been killed in the battle.

  Perhaps of most significance is that this later Myrddin, who lived from perhaps 520 to 590, was a contemporary of the Scottish prince Artúir, son of Aedan, king of Dalriada. This Artúir never became king because he was killed in battle against the Picts in 596. Although Myrddin was not his counsellor or mentor, Myrddin was active in the neighbouring kingdom of Strathclyde so there is little doubt that they would have known each other. Moreover, Myrddin was the contemporary of another Artúir who ruled Dyfed sometime around the end of the sixth century and start of the seventh. Dyfed was a small kingdom in the west of Wales though it is unlikely, but not impossible, that Myrddin ventured that far south. The point here is that this later Myrddin/Merlin lived at a time when two warlords called Artúir/Arthur were active, suggesting that Geoffrey had found details about a genuine Merlin but in his History transplanted him in error a century earlier.

  Although Geoffrey in his Life of Merlin sought to reconcile these two legends, clearly they cannot be. What is more likely is that in his research for the History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey had come across the Prophecies of Myrddin (the sixth-century bard) and had worked them into his story of Dubricius, either because they seemed to fit well with the story of Vortigern, which he had copied from Nennius, or because he genuinely confused Myrddin with an earlier Merlin. As a result, over the centuries, some of the writings and stories associated with the later bard have been grafted on to the story of the earlier enchanter and kingmaker.

  This is all, of course, supposition, although it’s fairly convincing. If we start from the viewpoint that King Arthur existed, it is not difficult to believe that he would have had a senior adviser, and that that adviser could have been Dubricius. It could also follow that Dubricius became confused with a man of equivalent miraculous powers whom Geoffrey called Merlin, a name he possibly confused with the later bard Myrddin.

  It is not surprising that because of, not despite, this confusion, Merlin has become such a fascinating character, with a blending of so many facets: wisdom, madness, good and evil, adviser and schemer. The Arthurian world would be fascinating enough without Merlin: all of those chivalrous and heroic adventures, but add the dimension of magic and mischief provided by Merlin, and you have the greatest fantasy on Earth. For near nine hundred years, since Geoffrey unleashed the story of Merlin and Arthur, writers, poets and artists have been fascinated with the life and the legend.

  The Literary Merlin

  I will not dwell long on the medieval romancers. We have already seen that the legend of Merlin evolved after Geoffrey through the work of Robert de Boron. He wrote at least three Arthurian ballads, Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin and Perceval, though none of the last-named sur vives. All were composed sometime between the period 1190 and 1202, and between them would have provided contemporary and later troubadours with enough of a basis for the Merlin story to embellish it continually from court to court. At length the tales were incorporated in Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, writing around 1470, from where it passed into the very fabric of literature.

  With the rebirth of the romantic age in literature in the early nineteenth century the poets and artists focused more on the heroic and tragic aspects of the Arthurian legends, and though Merlin featured he did not have a central role. The writers tended to repeat only the basic legends.

  Merlin did not return to centre stage until T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone in 1938. Typical of the literature of the day, White’s Arthurian world is somewhat anachronistic with modern-day elements as visible as the elder world, and the whole book having an air of general amusement. Merlin, or Merlyn as White chooses to spell the name, is already old, with a long white beard, and is rather scruffy and dirty – “some large bird seemed to have been nesting in his hair”. His wizard’s den included, amongst its paraphernalia, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a complete set of cigarette cards featuring wild fowl by Peter Scott! He wears spectacles and knits. Clearly this is no historical Merlin, certainly not from the fifth century. White has set his story closer to the period of Malory, but lumped in whatever anachronisms he wanted. What makes White’s book so enjoyable is that he uses enough of the legend to make it familiar and acceptable, but blends it with a light-hearted dig at contemporary society and morals. White wasn’t the first to do this. Mark Twain had created the concept in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court in 1889, but White went much further in developing his own character of Merlyn, so much so that it’s the one we’ve come to accept, without thinking, today. Merlyn appears throughout the four books of The Once and Future King, though he’s not central to the later ones. Toward the end of the Second World War White added a fifth book, The Book of Merlyn, which was not published until 1977. It sits uneasily with the earlier books, and reflects the mood in Britain during the war years. Some of the humour remains, but it is less successful.

  It was up to the American pulp magazines to give further consideration to Merlin. Some were deliberately humorous fantasies, like “The Enchanted Week End” by John MacCormac (Unknown, October 1939). Here, Merlin is released from his tomb by an American scholar who then seeks the wizard’s assistance in making him an all-rounder on the local sports day. This story was apparently very popular at the time, but it’s rather too shallow and contemporary for my liking.

  Much better was H. Warner Munn’s “King of the World’s Edge” (Weird Tales, September–December 1939). Munn brought much originality to the legend. He considers a Roman commander who had remained in Britain and fought with Arthur. After Arthur’s death, the commander writes a letter back to Rome which tells of Merlin’s plans to leave Britain and explore the lands to the West, ultimately settling in America. An extract from this work is included in this anthology.

  Other stories at this time were essentially retellings of the original legends, although Theodore Goodridge Roberts, writing in Blue Book, at least brought some verve and excitement to his embellished tales, one of which is also reprinted in this anthology.

  A major step forward was made by John Cowper Powys in his long and detailed novel Porius (1951). Set in the year AD 499, it tells of a young lad, Porius, who determines to join Arthur’s cause. Porius, though, must experience the rites of passage to prove himself. This includes taking upon himself the demands of Merlin, here called Myrddin Wyllt. Merlin is given a strong mystical aura – he is called a “creature of earth”. He has a long black beard and wears sheepskin clothes. He is depicted as sinister, but forgetful, something of a shaman with shape-changing powers but finding this harder to achieve in his later years. Powys injects some humour into what is otherwise a bleak novel seeking to depict as accurately as possible Britain at the end of the fifth century. It was the first honest portrayal of Merlin to appear in fiction. Powys’s achievement was further advanced by Henry Treece in three novels, but especially The Green Man (1
966), which also depicted the historical world of Arthur and sought to rationalize the Merlin of legend with the known mystical and religious beliefs of the day.

  Merlin moved centre stage with a vengeance in the trilogy by Mary Stewart which began with The Crystal Cave in 1970, and continued with The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979). The Crystal Cave remains the most complete novel about Merlin’s youth, and ends with the conception of Arthur. It is one of the few to consider the legend of the creation of Stonehenge, and Mary Stewart brings a most satisfactory logic to the tale. The Hollow Hills follows the same time-frame as White’s The Sword in the Stone, but is deliberately less facile in its treatment. Merlin supervises Arthur’s upbringing from a distance but is still seen as engineering his future. Since these novels are related in the first person we see little of Merlin’s physical appearance but get to know much about his thoughts and motives. The Last Enchantment is the most powerful of the novels and considers Merlin’s own fate. In all three of these books Mary Stewart draws from a basis of legend but applies her own interpretation. She was the first to consider Merlin’s whole life seriously and place him, not in an historical context, but in a legitimate interpretation of the legend.

  Mary Stewart’s novels set the standard for later works, and were a difficult act to follow. Most Arthurian novels since then have continued to focus on the tragic life of Arthur, his knights or his queen, and only a few have looked in depth at Merlin. Robert Nye brought an erotic and bawdy interpretation to the legend in Merlin (1978), a book which nevertheless pumps life into the old man, and develops the links between Merlin and the source of life. Some of these mystical aspects also emerged in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s brilliant The Mists of Avalon (1982), which sought to blend history, legend and the religious beliefs of the day. It depicts Merlin, or the Merlin as he is here (recognizing the name as a title not a personal name), as a victim more than a vehicle of fate as Christianity seeks to blend with pagan beliefs in sustaining the elder world of ancient Britain.