Merlin: A Casebook (Arthurian Characters and Themes, 10)

Merlin

Arthurian Characters and Themes Norris J.Lacy, Series Editor King Arthur A Casebook Edited by Edward Donald Kennedy Tristan and Isolde A Casebook Edited by Joan Tasker Grimbert Arthurian Women A Casebook Edited by Thelma S.Fenster Lancelot and Guinevere A Casebook Edited by Lori J.Walters The Grail A Casebook Edited by Dhira B.Mahoney Perceval/Parzival A Casebook Edited by Arthur Groos and Norris Lacy Merlin A Casebook Edited by Peter H.Goodrich and Raymond H.Thompson

Merlin A Casebook

Edited by Peter H.Goodrich and Raymond H.Thompson

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Peter H.Goodrich and Raymond H.Thompson Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merlin: a casebook/edited by Peter H.Goodrich and Raymond H.Thompson. p.cm.——(Arthurian characters and themes; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-065-X (Print Edition) (hard cover: alk. paper) 1. Merlin (Legendary character) in literature. 2. Arthurian romances—History and criticism. 3. Merlin (Legendary character) 4. Wizards in literature. I. Goodrich, Peter, 1950–II. Thompson, Raymond H. (Raymond Henry), 1941–III. Series. PN686.M4 M465 2003 809′.9335l–dc21

ISBN 0-203-50306-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58492-9 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction PETER H.GOODRICH Select Bibliography

vii 1 89

Part I: Evolution of the Legend 1

The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy A.O.H.JARMAN

103

2

Merlin: Prophet and Magician PAUL ZUMTHOR

129

3

Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake ANNE BERTHELOT

160

4

Merlin in Italian Literature DONALD L.HOFFMAN

183

5

Merlin in Spanish Literature BARBARA D.MILLER

193

6

Merlin in German Literature ULRICH MÜLLER

214

7

Merlin as New-World Wizard ALAN C.LUPACK

225

8

The Enchanter Awakes: Merlin in Modern Fiction RAYMOND H.THOMPSON

245

Part II: Major Motifs and Works 9 10

Merlin as Wise Old Man HEINRICH ZIMMER

258

Merlin in the Grail Legend EMMA JUNGMARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ

273

vi

11

Robert de Boron’s Merlin ALEXANDRE MICHA

289

12

Merlin Romancier: Paternity, Prophecy, and Poetics in the Huth Merlin KATE COOPER

301

13

Malory’s Tragic Merlin DONALD L.HOFFMAN

324

14

Spenser’s Merlin WILLIAM BLACKBURN

334

15

Druids, Bards, and Tennyson’s Merlin CATHERINE BARNES STEVENSON

354

16

Illusion and Relation: Merlin as Image of the Artist in Tennyson, Doré, Burne-Jones, and Beardsley LINDA K.HUGHES

371

17

Master and Mediator of the Natural World JEAN MARKALE

405

Proper Name Index

421

Preface

This is Volume VII of Arthurian Characters and Themes, a series of casebooks from Routledge. The series includes volumes devoted to the best-known characters from Arthurian legend: Tristan and Isolde, Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere, Merlin, Gawain, and Perceval. One is also devoted to Arthurian women in general. A single volume treats an Arthurian theme—the Grail—rather than characters. Each volume offers an extended introductory survey and a bibliography and presents some twenty major essays on its subject. Several of the essays in each volume are newly commissioned for the series; the others are reprinted from their original sources. The previously published contributions date for the most part from the past two decades, although a few older, “classic” essays are included in several of the volumes—the criterion being the continuing importance of the study. All contributions are presented in English, and most volumes include essays that have been translated for the first time into English. Heaviest emphasis remains on the development of the legend and its characters and themes during the Middle Ages, but each volume gives appropriate attention also to modern, even very recent, treatments. Similarly, the central focus is on literature, but without excluding important discussions of visual, musical, and cinematic arts. Thus, a number of the volumes are intently interdisciplinary in focus. The proliferation of scholarly studies of Arthurian material continues at a daunting rate. When the Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society began publishing annual bibliographies, the first volume (1949) included 226 items (books, articles, and reviews), and some sections of that compilation represented national bibliographies over a full decade. The number of entries has increased regularly and dramatically, to the point that the most recent numbers of the Bulletin list well over one thousand items. Furthermore, the major contributions to Arthurian scholarship are often dispersed widely throughout North America, Europe, and elsewhere, and are in books and articles that are in some instances very difficult to locate. As a result, it is extraordinarily difficult even for the professional medievalist to keep abreast of Arthurian scholarship, and it would be very nearly impossible for the nonscholar with serious Arthurian interests to identify and locate a score of the major scholarly contributions devoted to a particular character or theme. These difficulties surely dramatize the value of the Arthurian Characters and Themes series, but they also remain an insistent reminder that even the most informed selection of major essays

viii

requires us to omit many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of studies that merit serious attention. The editors of the volumes have attempted to remedy this situation insofar as possible by providing introductions that discuss numerous other authors and texts and by compiling bibliographies that document a good many important studies that could find no room in these volumes. In addition, many of the contributions that are included here will themselves provide discussions of, or references to, other treatments that will be of interest to readers. This volume, coedited by Peter H.Goodrich and Raymond H.Thompson, includes a detailed introduction examining the development and character of Merlin, who is perhaps the most popular of all Arthurian figures. Following the introduction and select bibliography, this volume offers seventeen essays. Twelve of them were previously published (some as portions of books), and two of those are presented here in English translation for the first time. The remaining five essays were newly commissioned for this volume, though three of the five are revisions and major expansions of previous studies. Because permissions from copyright holders sometimes prohibited us from modifying the texts in any way, there are instances in which notes or documentary form will differ from essay to essay. In addition, style, usage, and even spelling (British vs. American) might vary as well. In a few instances, the editors have been permitted to modify the form in which the essay appears, and in those cases modifications have often gone well beyond the correction of minor and obvious errors. Offsetting the remaining inconsistencies is the advantage of having available, in a single volume, a substantial selection of the finest available studies, new as well as previously published, of the figure of Merlin. Such a volume could not be produced without the generosity of museum officials and editors of presses and journals, who kindly gave permission for us to reproduce illustrations and articles. We are pleased to express our gratitude to all of them. Appropriate credits accompany the essays. —Norris J.Lacy

Introduction PETER H.GOODRICH

Merlin, the prophet and magus, is historically the second-best-known character from medieval literature, barely outstripped by his liege lord King Arthur. Beyond literature, he has entered our public consciousness to an even greater extent than Arthur, through the association of his name with all kinds of technological devices and commodities, many of them not in the least Arthurian. Most people know that Merlin is the epicenter of the supernatural in the Arthurian legend, his secularized male magic counterpoised by the female magic of Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake and by the mystical religious miracle of the Holy Grail. Like theirs, his marvels are deeply rooted in pre-Christian traditions and molded by the Christian faith. The most famous stories about Merlin are tied to the matter of Arthurian Britain: his own miraculous birth foreshadows that of Arthur, which he arranges; his prophecies to King Vortigern announce the destinies of Arthur and the Britons; the building of Stonehenge creates a lasting monument to the ancient British; his training and advising of the young king—including the sword in the stone and the finding of Excalibur—establish the qualities of Arthur’s rule; his own doomed love affair reflects the erotic susceptibilities that undermine and finally ruin the society of Camelot; and his uncertain end leaves him, like Arthur, poised outside of history for return or rebirth, quondam et futurus. Merlin is nearly ubiquitous in Arthurian literature, appearing most often as a significant supporting character, sometimes as the chief character, and occasionally (especially in twentieth-century literature) as the narrator himself.1 In fact, his early roles of prophet and chronicler of the Grail and Arthur’s reign establish him (fictionally, at least) as the person directly responsible for the legend’s transmission, and consequently—even at several removes—as its master narrator. As Merlin in the French Lancelot-Grail cycle explains this role to his scribe Blaise, “God has chosen me to work in His own service, for no one but I can do it and no one knows things as I know them…. There will be no noble man or worthy woman in the place where I am going some part of whose life I will not have you write down. You should also know that never have the lives of royal personages or the righteous been so gladly listened to as will be those of King Arthur and the people who in that time will live and rule.”2 Consequently, Merlin’s absence connotes either a narrative that is set in the middle or later years of Arthur’s reign, after the mage’s disappearance, or a strictly empirical approach to the legend. The empirical reason for omitting Merlin is that his legend

2 • MERLIN

was originally separate from Arthur’s; if their historical originals did exist, the two never could have met because they probably lived a century apart. To become the first to link Merlin with Arthur, the twelfthcentury cleric and chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth had to conflate at least two separate characters: one the child of a reputedly virgin birth who supposedly lived in the mid-fifth century, and the other a Welsh soothsayer who lived in the latter part of the sixth century. And even Geoffrey’s Merlin drops out of the narrative entirely before Arthur’s birth; it was up to later writers to make him King Arthur’s mentor. A lesser reason for omitting Merlin is that his abilities and actions in the literature are strongly supernatural. Thus a purely empirical approach to the legend must rationalize them to such an extent that Merlin would, in effect, become impossible to acknowledge or would be a vastly different character. However, such thorough rationalizations are rare, and they have only been attempted in the twentieth century.3 Indeed, it is Merlin’s magic that has defined him throughout the long history of Arthurian literature, and it is the magical power of words to shape as well as represent reality that underpins his function as the master narrator and architect of Camelot. The personified faculty of our imaginative powers, the mage serves the Arthurian legend by elucidating order on the phenomenal and supernatural levels of being through his words and deeds. According to authorial and cultural interests, he assumes seven primary roles: Wild Man, Wonder Child, Prophet, Poet, Counselor, Wizard, and Lover. Most literature about the mage is selective, emphasizing and elaborating one or more of these features and de-emphasizing or even eliminating others. Moreover, Merlin was not always all of these things. Instead, his figure developed by gradually accreting varied capabilities to itself, each one suggesting further capabilities and roles. With the runaway popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, this figure exploded throughout Europe into a “meta-Merlin” whose primary characteristics continue to be recalled, refined, and expanded today, continually encompassing new ideas and technologies as well as old ones. The ability of this complex figure to endure for more than fourteen centuries results not only from his manifold roles and their imaginative appeal, but also from significant, often irresolvable tensions or polarities corresponding to each role. The mage’s character and actions incorporate these tensions and mediate them to other characters and to us. Reduced to simple terms, the primary polarities within each role are between beast and human (Wild Man), natural and supernatural (Wonder Child), physical and metaphysical (Poet), secular and sacred (Prophet), active and passive (Counselor), magic and science (Wizard), and male and female (Lover). Interwoven with these primary tensions are additional polarities that apply to all of Merlin’s roles, such as those between madness and sanity, pagan and Christian, demonic and heavenly, mortality and immortality, and impotency and potency. Ruling all of these tensions is the master polarity of illusion and reality, which interrogates the limits of the mage’s power and insight. These dichotomies have long been central concerns of world culture (most of all Western culture, because of the dominant influence of the Christian religion upon the development of the Arthurian legend and its themes, and because the legend soon spread beyond Britain to continental Europe and eventually

INTRODUCTION •

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other lands, incorporating international characters, locales, and motifs). Therefore, it should not be surprising that “the legend of King Arthur is our most pervasive and enduring secular myth.”4 Merlin and King Arthur have remained popular and influential figures, for they are drawn from the vital emotional and cognitive dissonances that define culture and perhaps even the human cortex.5 The foregoing summary, designed to establish the importance of Merlin in broad terms, deliberately omits the differences between individual Merlins in various national literatures and historical periods; nor does it explain how his figure attained its characteristics and appeal as it developed through time and diffused throughout western culture. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of the literature on Merlin is its multiplicity and how it transforms the core details of his legend to create a panoply of mages who are remarkably varied yet all, somehow, recognizably the same. A more thorough historical discussion of this development and variety will help us to understand Merlin’s metamorphoses and will prepare us for the insights offered by the essays in this volume. Origins Both oral and written texts adapt historical fact and character to preconceived patterns or themes. Because written literature was late in coming to Northern Europe, accurate historical records are hard to come by, and archaeology cannot always fill in the gaps. Consequently, the evidence for an actual Merlin is limited to late written texts, circumstantial at best, and likely to remain so. This has not prevented many people from believing that there was a specific historical Merlin upon whom the legend was founded, nor from speculating about the life of such an individual. But the roots of his legend predate any historical person, since they derive from (among others) the Indo-European type of the priest-king, the shaman or holy man, the convention of the wild man, the model of the biblical prophets, and the widespread conviction that natural and supernatural elements can intermingle in the physical world. With this confluence of models in the British cultural background, the research of A.O.H.Jarman and others explains how the story of Merlin developed from that of a warrior who went insane during the course of the battle of Arfderydd in 573 and fled to the neighboring Caledonian forest in Strathclyde. Named Lailoken by the twelfthcentury hagiographer Joceline of Furness and in two fragments of his legend preserved in another Latin manuscript (British Library Cotton Titus A. XIX), this wild man apparently developed the capability to perceive hidden causes and predict the future (including his own death).6 The kernel of this legend is best summarized in a Welsh poem, the Afallennau (Apple Trees) preserved in the Black Book of Carmarthen from about 1200. In John K.Bollard’s translation, the two most crucial stanzas read: Sweet apple tree that grows in a clearing, its virtue hides it from Rhydderch’s lords,

4 • MERLIN

a crowd around its base, a host around it. It would be a treasure to them, brave ranks [of warriors]. Now Gwenddydd loves me not and she welcomes me not. I am hateful to Gwasawg, Rhydderch’s supporter. I have destroyed her son and her daughter. Death has taken everyone; why does it not greet me? And after Gwenddolau, no lords revere me, no amusement gladdens me, no lover visits me. And in the battle of Arfderydd my torque was of gold, though I may not be a treasure today to [a maiden with] a swan’s form. … Sweet apple tree that grows on a river bank, passing by it a steward will not succeed in getting its splendid fruit. While I was calm in mind I used to be at its base with a fair, playful maiden, a slender and queenly one. Two score and ten years in constraints of outlawry I have been wandering with wildness and wild ones. After irreproachable goods and pleasing minstrels, now there visit only want with wildness and wild ones. Now I sleep not; I tremble for my leader, my lord Gwenddolau, and my neighboring kinsmen. After suffering sickness and sadness around Celyddon Wood, may I become a blessed servant to the Lord of Hosts.7 His story was transplanted to Ireland where it became the model for the tale of the mad king Suibhne, and to southern Wales where it was either recontextualized or superimposed upon the career of another seer or bard, named Myrddin after the seacoast town of Carmarthen. This seer is even given a pedigree in the Welsh Triads that would be disregarded and radically changed when he gained international notoriety in the twelfth century: Three Skilled Bards were in Arthur’s Court: Myrddin son of Morfryn, And Taliesin.8 This late triad reflects both the early tradition and the subsequent one: As the second Myrddin he became known to an ambitious and literaryminded cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth. For his Norman patrons, Geoffrey produced three works portraying this figure in different ways: the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin, 1135), Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, ca. 1135–38), and Vita

INTRODUCTION •

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Merlini (Life of Merlin, 1150).9 The second of these, at the midpoint of which the Prophecies was inserted, became so popular throughout Europe that it established the primary features of the legend and started a vogue for Arthurian literature with Merlin as a permanent fixture. Geoffrey of Monmouth In the History of the Kings of Britain, the character is introduced as a boy from Carmarthen “who was also called Ambrosius” (169). He is sought out at the advice of King Vortigern’s wizards to become a blood sacrifice for stabilizing the foundations of a fortified tower. His father is unknown, described by Merlin’s mother as a nocturnal phantom and identified by Vortigern’s desperate magicians as an incubus demon. The precocious Merlin confounds their bloodthirsty intentions by revealing the true reason for the tower’s instability—a hidden pool concealing a stone under which two dragons are penned. When they are released, the boy states the famous utterances contained in the Prophecies of Merlin (ca. 1135), the midpoint of Geoffrey’s romantic chronicle, which foretell Vortigern’s death, the coming of Arthur and defeat of the Saxons, the eventual downfall of the Britons and an apocalyptic end to history. Nearly fifteen years later, the Life of Merlin (ca. 1150) recounts the adventures of a mad king and prophet of South Wales whom Geoffrey blandly asserts has known both Vortigern and Arthur. This is, he claims, the same Merlin Ambrosius. Geoffrey’s dates begin Vortigern’s rule at about 425 and end Arthur’s at about 470 (corrected from Geoffrey’s figure of 542).10 However, the battle of Arfderydd, at which Merlin was driven insane, occurred in 573. Therefore, in order to be Ambrosius, serve Arthur, take part at Arfderydd and live in the Caledonian forest for fifty years, this Merlin would need three long lifetimes—from youth to old age in the time of Vortigern and Arthur, then perhaps in reverse so as to be young again before Arfderydd, and forward once more to old age during his mad wandering. The absurdity of this career was immediately apparent to Geoffrey’s readers, who concluded that there must have been two Merlins—a distinction that further established Merlin’s dualistic nature and that prepared the way for future transformations. Part of the discrepancy may be accounted for by Geoffrey’s mistaken date of 542 for Arthur’s death—a chronology corrected by dating from the birth rather than death of Jesus. As many scholars have observed, it is also probable that Geoffrey learned more about Merlin from his Welsh sources between writing the Prophecies and the Life of Merlin. At first, Geoffrey must have heard enough about a prophetic bard named Myrddin to associate him with Nennius’s wonder child from South Wales, but probably not enough to place him in the north or at Arfderydd. As a resident of Oxford who had ready access to many ecclesiastics and libraries from London to Wales, and who was perhaps himself sought out by clerics who knew not only of his History and Prophecies but also of the Welsh Myrddin poetry, Geoffrey was able to learn more about the earlier tradition during the 1140s. His election in 1151 to the small Welsh bishopric of St. Asaph—although he never traveled there—also suggests

6 • MERLIN

eventual access to northern as well as southern sources of the Myrddin legend. Certainly the unification of Welsh kingdoms Dyfed, Gwent, and Gwynedd under the rule of Gruffydd ap Llewellyn ap Seisyll in 1060 had helped to create the conditions under which Myrddin’s transplantation from Strathclyde to Carmarthen could have been accomplished, and the protonationalism of Welsh war-leader Owain Gwynedd confirmed such legendary figures as the property of all the Welsh even as Geoffrey appropriated Myrddin for the political purposes of the Norman dynasty. Despite Geoffrey’s awkward attempt at conflation, Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146– 1223) soon solidified the perception of two Merlins: the child and prophet Ambrosius or Emrys of the History and Prophecies, and the Merlin Celidonius or Silvester who dominates the Life, and whom Giraldus associates with Arthur.11 Curiously, Geoffrey had dropped all mention of Merlin in the History after the mage aided Arthur’s conception, with one exception: the assertion late in the History (colophon xii. 17) that “God did not wish the Britons to rule in Britain any more, until the moment should come which Merlin had prophesied to Arthur.” This inconsistency so bothered the scribe of one manuscript (Jesus College, Oxford MS LXI) that he felt it necessary to correct the passage from Arthur to Vortigern (History, 282–83). Presumably Geoffrey had omitted Merlin from Arthur’s career because no tradition known to him had brought them together, yet he clearly had all but united them through Arthur’s nativity, and other writers took the point. Perhaps Geoffrey, too, for-got that his History’s Merlin had not prophesied to Arthur—like other medieval writers, he undoubtedly regarded complete consistency as a sort of “hobgoblin.” Geoffrey’s confusion about Merlin’s actual identity—if it was confusion—is also instructive because it reveals a multiplicity of sources and subtexts that come to constitute the mage himself. Consequently his Merlin becomes both plural and paradigmatic, with transformation as his master trope. The figure’s primary roles are all established in Geoffrey’s works, and his transformations end only when God closes up his mouth and his book at the end of the Life. Like the two Merlins—the sage and the madman—Geoffrey bridges two styles of writing: the factual and the fantastic. His use of multiple genres, from oracle, to chronicle, to protoromance, illustrates the effects of increasing literacy. Writing enables things like lists, genealogies, exegesis, and encyclopedias to detach themselves from verbal narrative formulas, yet Geoffrey himself was certainly dependent on those formulas as well as on the products of earlier writers. The incorporation of prophecy and the nascent evolution of narrative from chronicle to romance that is apparent in the History, followed by the mixed genres of the Life, are themselves personified by the ever-shifting composite character of Geoffrey’s Merlins. For example, this figure demonstrates the frequent hagiographic movement from isolated wonder child to trusted royal counselor, and from unholy wild man to monastic leader. Through Geoffrey’s works, Merlin also becomes a model for later chivalric romance by developing into a figure that reconciles criticism of the hermit-ideal as private and personal quest with the Christian demand of love and service to others and to society.12 As Robert W.Hanning observes, Merlin “embodies…the selfawareness of his creator’s historical imagination”13 as it moves from historical to

INTRODUCTION •

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romantic vision. He not only observes and prophesies, but he also performs marvelous deeds. Thus he becomes a fundamentally self-fulfilling as well as dualistic figure, who acts as both creator and agent, “whose insight into predetermined history gives him some control over the historical process. But he is also to be equated with the androgynous, passive-active form of history itself.”14 In other words, he personifies Geoffrey’s multigeneric narrative forms as they converge on the complementary goals of instruction and pleasure, and he also comprehends British history both in action and as it is vicariously experienced through narrative. The manifold character of Merlin consequently embraces the popular alternative views of Geoffrey himself. One is of Geoffrey as he professes to be—a tale-repeater or historian, the (conditionally) responsible user of (reputedly) factual sources. The other is of Geoffrey as tale-maker or romancer who makes it all up. While the scholarly balance of opinion from William of Newburgh onward has leaned in favor of the second view, the first has always had adherents. Giraldus Cambrensis is one near contemporary who combines both approaches: His travels in Wales confirmed for him Merlin’s existence as a folkloric character with two originals, whom he designates Ambrosius and Celidonius or Silvester. The first was sired by an incubus and prophesied to Vortigern; the second was a frenzied prophet from Scotland who, Giraldus mistakenly claims, “lived in the time of Arthur” (192–93). Though he refers to the seer’s “well-known fiction and prophecy” in the same breath (167), Giraldus later argues that Merlin could have been capable of true prophecy (248–49), and then he tells us that “we read of the faith of Merlin, and we read of his prophesying; but we do not read that he was saintly or that he performed miracles” (250). Giraldus also critiques Geoffrey’s veracity with the amusing story of Meilyr, who could see “unclean spirits” clustering profusely upon that writer’s History (116–18). Because of such conflicting views about Geoffrey’s trustworthiness, it seems more accurate to interpret the dichotomies in the figure of Merlin as testimony to the nonlinear dynamic of Geoffrey’s narrative art. From this perspective, his talerepeating, tale-making narrative adopts a series of unpredictable and eclectic compromises between chronicling and romancing the subject. This art of compromise, of recasting “found” story elements and rhetorical conventions, appears at every stage of Geoffrey’s work and is made most evident in the inconsistent yet compelling character of his Merlins. Chronicles and the Prophecies after Geoffrey of Monmouth Because Geoffrey’s work immediately established the Arthurian legend throughout Europe, subsequent chroniclers depended upon it as a primary source—whether they respected his veracity or not.15 Medieval historians were most struck by Merlin’s unnatural birth and oracular powers, and they displayed widely varying credulity regarding them. Prominent among the translations are the Anglo-Norman Le Roman de Brut of Wace (1155) and the alliterative English Brut of Layamon (ca. 1200) which is based upon Wace.16 The Anglo-Norman poet was sceptical of the most marvelous

8 • MERLIN

elements from Geoffrey and started a trend among chroniclers for omitting all or most of Merlin’s prophecies.17 He plays an important part in transmitting Merlin’s legend nonetheless, for the Brut was presented to Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and thus came to the notice of King Henry II, who perceived the potential of the Arthurian legend as a repoliticized Norman myth. Wace also becomes a source, like Geoffrey, of later chroniclers and of French romance writers who vastly expanded Merlin’s role and functions, for, as Christopher Dean has pointed out in A Study of Merlin, the effect of Wace’s omissions paradoxically strengthened the perception of Merlin as a magician.18 Layamon contributes by translating the legend into early Middle English, thereby presenting Arthur and Merlin as models, not only for the Norman aristocracy, but also for their putative foes—thereby transforming it into a national legend for all England. Like his Arthur, Merlin is associated with the faery otherworld, but the precise nature of Merlin’s magical powers remains vague: his removal of Stonehenge and disguise of Uther have the appearance of magic, but there is no assertion that magic has been used. Later chroniclers, however, were writing after French romances made Merlin’s magic more abundant and explicit, though not necessarily more credible. As Caroline D.Eckhardt describes their view of Merlin’s character in “The Figure of Merlin” it surpasses that of a traditional folkloric hero. They make of him a “time-binder”—not only embedded in history but able to transcend it through his prophetical power— who can thus construe causality from the past into the future. This capability permits him to become an “explicator,” “facilitator” and “mystifier of events.”19 Robert of Gloucester’s rhymed Chronicle late in the thirteenth century mentions his suspicion that Merlin’s cleverness may be due to “som enchanterie” (l.3109), but his reticence on this subject is paralleled by his refusal to recount the prophecies in Geoffrey that cannot be clearly understood by common folk. Robert Mannyng’s rhymed Story of England (1338) takes the same approach toward the mage’s prophecies while expanding upon his origin and deeds, and it refers more decisively, as does John Hardyng’s Chronicle (1457–64), to his “coniurisouns” that move Stonehenge (Mannyng, l. 8903) or change Uther’s appearance to that of Duke Gorlois (Hardyng, Ch. 72).20 Pierre de Langtoft’s French verse Chronicle (1307) and Thomas Castleford’s English Chronicle (ca. 1327) attribute even greater abilities to Merlin.21 De Langtoft, a canon in Yorkshire, already reflects the French romance view of him as a seer and enchanter whose powers derive in part from the Devil.22 Castleford dwells upon him at greater length than any other chronicler, even including his complete prophecies and emphasizing the mage’s power to fulfil the British kings’ desire and to engineer that which he foresees.23 The main difficulty that chroniclers experience with Merlin is credibility; it was easier to conceive of Arthur as an actual king of Britain than of Merlin as an actual magician, and easier to credit Merlin’s fatherlessness and straightforward soothsayings than to logically explain his magic arts and mantic prophecies. This problem of belief led some chroniclers to comment on what to include or omit. For instance, Robert of Gloucester is typical in omitting the prophecies that are “derc to simplemen” (l. 2820); Robert Mannyng admits he cannot “open the knottes that Merlyn knyt” (l.

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8224); and John Hardyng (Ch. 69) “cannot wryte…affirmably” of Merlin’s birth, nor his encounter with and prophecies to Vortigern, even though he accepts the mage’s other prophecies and ability to move Stonehenge and change appearances.24 Their concerns sometimes prompt innovation: Like most chronicles, the English Prose Brut (late fourteenth century) omits the lengthy prophecy to Vortigern, but then it goes on to add a new one to King Arthur. This includes the Six Last Kings prophecy whose animal imagery imitates Geoffrey’s style, but it more clearly refers to actual English monarchs from Henry III to Henry IV.25 Most interesting in this regard is the influential Latin universal history or Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden (mid fourteenth century) and especially its English translation with commentary by John Trevisa (1387), which view Merlin with suspicion despite his reputed gifts.26 They both regard Merlin chiefly as a prophet whose prophecies and deeds are dubious. Trevisa accepts the convention of the two Merlins and that Silvestris’s prophecies to Arthur were relatively comprehensible. However, he rejects the idea that Merlin Ambrosius was begotten by a goblin or incubus, incredulously asking, “What wight wolde wene/ that a fend myght now gete a childe?” and deciding that Merlin’s mortality refuted the tale (Polychronicon I, 419). Similarly, he questions the story of Vortigern and the tower, the “prophecie that is so derk,” and the magical transportation of Stonehenge to Salisbury plain. Geoffrey’s Prophecies also enjoyed a widespread vogue. Merlin’s oracular forecasts soon became a device altogether separate from Geoffrey: they were individually inserted in chronicles, romances, and other texts wherever a text’s author deemed them apposite—just as Geoffrey himself had done with the original Prophecies and in the Life of Merlin—and his soothsayings were generally made in practical, easily comprehensible form when they relate to the deeds of Arthur and his knights, and in mantic, incomprehensible form when they refer to historical and political developments outside the scope of Arthur’s reign. The device of serial prophecies remained popular, too. In addition to the works just described, which either incorporate or allude to them, many other Latin and vernacular prose translations were produced during the Middle Ages. Latin versions of the Prophecies rapidly followed Geoffrey, including Orderic Vitalis’s prose Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History, 1134), John of Cornwall’s verse fragment Prophetiae Merlini (1155), and Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon (1186), which included a messianic prophecy that Arthur would return from a land beneath the sea.27 The Icelandic poet Gunnlaug Leifsson added several new stanzas to his Old Norse translation, the Merlínusspá (1250).28 The independent strain (both in terms of innovation and of manuscripts separate from chronicle) of Merlin’s prophecies is retained on the Continent as well as in England. For example, the Prophécies de Merlin (1272),29 reputedly translated from Latin by Richard d’Irlande, departed almost entirely from Geoffrey’s text in creating prophecies related to contemporary politics, yet it followed Geoffrey’s and the French romance cycles’ pattern of employing the prophet as a source of scribally recorded wisdom. And it establishes another new tradition by making this wisdom available even from the seer’s tomb—an idea that subsequent works would amplify by various figures’ pilgrimages to it for advice. A

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hybrid of chronicle and romance forms, the Prophecies became a model for Paolo Pieri’s La Storia de Merlino (The History of Merlin, ca. 1305)30 and other fourteenthand fifteenth-century works in Italian, Catalan, and Spanish. Whether independent or linked to chronicle and romance, the prophetic tradition remained the most vital aspect of the mage’s legend well into the Renaissance. Medieval Romance: France What we might call the “Merlin problem” for chroniclers, who were concerned with “saying sooth” in the factual sense, was no problem at all for writers of romance. They were interested not only in warlike exploits like those celebrated by the chansons, but also in the marvelous and (in recognition of their female audiences and patrons) in women and courtly or domestic social issues. Merlin does not appear in surviving romances before the end of the twelfth century: He receives a single passing mention, for example, from the genre’s defining practitioner, Chrétien de Troyes, in Erec. Yet his legend was apparently known not only from Geoffrey and Wace, but also through at least one lost Breton lai, Merlin le sauvage.31 French romance soon promoted him not only as a major figure in the years preceding Arthur’s birth, but as the primary influence on Arthur’s early reign. Robert de Boron, most likely a Burgundian cleric writing in verse for a noble patron, Gautier of Montbéliard, devised a new scheme for the legend.32 Building upon Chrétien’s unfinished Grail romance and Geoffrey’s tale of the wonder child Ambrosius, Robert reshaped the tale of Merlin’s engendering by an incubus into a major event of salvation history: a plot of the infernal devils to counter Christ’s redemption of souls through harrowing Hell by creating their own Antichrist. His tale of Merlin, preceded by the story of Joseph of Arimathea and his descendants who bring the relics of Christ’s crucifixion to Logres (in Britain), is modeled upon the book of Job. The devils progressively destroy the fortune and reputation of a good and wealthy man until he and his wife die and his two eldest daughters become harlots. The youngest and most virtuous daughter resists corruption until one night she falls asleep without commending herself to God’s protection. A demon cohabits with her in her sleep, engendering Merlin. However, she seeks the protection of her confessor Blaise, who helps to redeem the child from the devil’s control by baptizing him at birth. While Merlin inherits the dark and hairy body of his father, his precocious intelligence and clairvoyance are thus claimed for God’s service and turn evil into another tool of divine providence. The Grail theme of evangelizing the West thus enrolls Merlin as its prophet and facilitator, who supports the hidden line of Grail guardians that began with Joseph of Arimathea. As Stephen Maddux points out, both Joseph and Merlin “function as points of contact between God and the world, indeed as the chief means by which he acts upon history”;33 Joseph is the link to the past and the inner kingdom of mystical communion with God, and Merlin is the link to the future, public kingdom of Arthurian chivalry.34 Robert’s conception of the mage makes Merlin a Christian spokesman of the divine will and narrator of the Grail history that will culminate under Arthur’s reign, with Arthur’s Round Table third in a sequence of holy Tables

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begun at the Last Supper. This enlarged role for the mage is exemplified by many new adventures and marvels. Prominent among them is another of Robert’s innovations, the tale of the sword in the stone, which Merlin prepared and the archbishop of Logres (or London) sanctioned as the means of revealing Uther Pendragon’s destined successor. With this tale, the work attributed to Robert himself ends and that of his continuators begins. While only Robert’s Joseph d’Arimathie and an opening fragment of his Merlin remain, he is now credited with at least planning, if not completing, a three-part Grail romance that was subsequently copied, rewritten, expanded, and revised in alternative forms during the first half of the thirteenth century, becoming the definitive romance history of King Arthur and his knights for nearly three centuries. Whereas the chroniclers’ version of Merlin’s legend had concentrated on secular politics and lifestyles, romance writers added a religious dimension. Moreover, they contrasted Merlin’s and Arthur’s beginnings in lust with the new courtly convention of fin’ amor or the virtuous romantic attachment between a noble and his lady, exploring with great detail (and often subtlety) all the dimensions of earthly and spiritual love. Merlin is especially problematic in these explorations, for he fulfils the folkloric motif of the creature that can only be captured by a woman. Not only is he a product of unholy masculine lust who sometimes aids and abets it with the kings Uther, Arthur, and Ban, but he also meets his demise by succumbing to lust, or love, himself.35 In this way, he remains his father’s son and an ambivalent figure who mediates not only many narrative events, but many dimensions of spiritual and sexual affiliation, becoming culpable in Arthur’s fall as well as instrumental in Arthur’s rise. Merlin’s roles and capabilities are greatly elaborated in the great romance cycle begun by Robert de Boron. As a redeemed Antichrist, he foresees and arranges not only Arthur’s birth but also Arthur’s upbringing, accession, and conquest of both internal and external enemies in order to unify Britain. As he also narrates the history of the Grail and the events leading up to and including Arthur’s reign to his baptiser and scribe Blaise, he becomes in a sense the controlling voice of the narrative. Through the kings and others (like Gawain) whom he guides, Merlin orchestrates political, military, and social history, engineering events in such a way that even long after his demise the memorials he has constructed and the predictions he has made continue to be borne out. His gifts are manifold. He can shift shape to that of a male of any age—fair or ugly, noble or common—and he appears as a wild man, herder of animals, or animal itself (usually a stag). He is able to disappear and reappear, not in a stagey flash and puff of smoke, but simply without anyone noticing how he has come or gone, and to travel far distances without any apparent lapse of time. It is as if he can step outside the conditional reality of the narrative world and reenter it anywhere he desires. He serves also as a diplomat, counselor, strategist, and general, using the psychology of love and honor to motivate others, relaying crucial messages, orchestrating campaigns, and bearing down on enemies in battle on a black stallion though he never bears conventional weapons. Instead, when he carries anything it is Arthur’s dragon banner, which he can cause to breathe flames. He is a master at logistics and at transporting troops undetected to their appointed places. He also

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controls climate, summoning darkness, mist, storms, fire, and smoke to aid Arthur and his allies and to dismay opponents at critical moments. He prophesies future events, explains the significance of past or present ones, and constructs permanent markers and inscriptions to commemorate them. He can detect the presence of buried treasure (a handy thing for the king’s coffers) and can create illusions to entertain his love (though she, at least in the French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate romances, is apparently the only one whom he so entertains). He can cast sleep upon an entire castle, and he knows many spells besides. In fact, these spells prove to be his downfall, for he teaches them to Viviane (in the Vulgate, or Niniane in the PostVulgate) and she uses them to imprison him. He is, in short, a medieval polymath as well as polymorph. The pivotal difference between Merlin’s treatment in Robert de Boron’s work (that grew into the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail prose cycle) and the fragmentary PostVulgate cycle of romances that tells essentially the same story is their attitude toward the role of religion in chivalry.36 This changed attitude reveals itself especially in Merlin’s character. He reaches his high point in the Vulgate: largely portrayed as a benevolent mastermind, he succumbs in the end to peaceful circumscription by the woman who loves him. Conversely, he is regarded as irredeemably tainted by his infernal paternity and hypertrophied into a leering ancient—feared, hated, and ultimately entombed by the object of his attentions in the Post-Vulgate Suite or Huth Merlin. Thus his character in thirteenth-century French romance suffers a decline equal to that of his one-time amie and pupil Morgan, whose reputation is also progressively blackened by her necromantic and erotic proclivities. This change in attitude has less to do with the narrative necessity to get Merlin off the stage so that the great society of Arthur’s Camelot and its knights can unfold undiminished by his machinations, than it does with a misogynistically tinged shift toward Christian asceticism, lessening clerical tolerance of the non-Christian supernatural, and increasing emphasis on the vanity of chivalric lifestyles not strictly governed by spiritual and doctrinal norms. In both the Vulgate and the post-Vulgate cycles, however, the public world of Merlin and Arthur is ultimately viewed with irony as flawed—not because of any flaw in God’s will or the inner-directed salvation pattern of the Grail quest, but because of human and social imperfections implicit in the personal histories of Merlin and Arthur themselves. These French cycles provided the basis for subsequent medieval treatments, and their difference in Merlins is picked up by other romance writers according to source and inclination. As Anne Berthelot points out in this volume, for example, the French Prophécies de Merlin mediates between benevolence and depravity by having the mage both exact a sexual price from women for his tutelage and admit lust as his greatest failing. As the figure of Merlin diffuses into the literature of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, he remains not only a gifted “shower of the way,” but is increasingly referred to as a conjurer tainted by his own demonic nature. As a prophet, he is therefore associated more overtly with other non-Christian prophets like the Sibyl than with John the Baptist or the Old Testament prophets and Christian ascetics with whom he also shares many characteristics. He becomes increasingly linked to the

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earth, to caverns, grottoes, and fountains where he was reputed to reside and work his spells, command demons, lie imprisoned or entombed by his mistress, or guard over the sleeping Arthur. Other works incorporating Merlin that may be considered part of these cycles are the prose fragments about Vertigier’s (Vortigern’s) usurpation and Merlin’s early life by Bauduin Butor—collectively known as Les Fils du Roi Constant or Pandragus et Libanor (1294)—and Le Livre d’Artus (Book of Arthur, early thirteenth century), a continuation of Robert de Boron’s Merlin, in which the mage closely monitors the adventures of Gawain and suffers a Post-Vulgate end.37 Another early prose work derived from de Boron is the anonymous Didot-Perceval (ca. 1220–30), based upon his conjectured third romance about Perceval’s Grail quest.38 In this work, Merlin actively guides Perceval. Once the quest is successfully completed, the mage joins Blaise in retirement near the Grail Castle, building a hermitage that he calls his esplumoir (a word referring to the cage of a molting hawk), and emerging only to report Arthur’s death and departure for Avalon to Perceval. Thus, a tertiary tradition of Merlin’s survival, as in Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini, was created alongside that of his disappearance immediately after Arthur’s conception (as in Geoffrey’s Historia) or early in Arthur’s reign (as in the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate). And although it was not itself a significant influence upon later literature, it did signal a continuing tendency to improvise upon Merlin’s characteristics in newly fashioned narratives that were often only tangential to the Arthurian legend. For example, the Prophécies de Merlin hybridized the prophecies by developing a narrative context of Merlin’s conversations with his scribes—even from his tomb. The final episode of Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence (ca. 1270) follows the convention of Merlin’s sardonic laughter in Welsh tradition, Geoffrey’s Life, and the Vulgate by introducing him as a wild seer who identifies his captor as a woman.39 Another romance, Claris et Laris (ca. 1268),40 brings him in as a guide who helps to free the captive Laris. In each of his primary roles—particularly as seer and commentator, guide, magician, and lustful lover— Merlin’s intervention thus becomes a popular device for advancing a narrative or explicating an adventure’s meaning. As Geoffrey of Monmouth had established the figures of Merlin and Arthur for chronicle, so the further elaborations of Robert de Boron and his continuators established the pattern of their life histories for subsequent romances composed in other languages. Through the copying, circulation, translation, and adaptation of French manuscripts, the mage’s central role in establishing King Arthur’s reign and documenting its relation to secular and salvation history remained characteristic to the end of the period in both English and continental literatures. Medieval Romance: Beyond France Although rough-hewn by French standards, the early Middle English romance Of Arthour and of Merlin (1270)41 signals in its very title the dualism that had by this time constructed the king and his mage as in fact a doppelgänger for the full cultural potential of the hero. Arthur and Merlin adapt the complementary functions or

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“estates” of warrior and priest to a medieval Christian context without ever quite losing their pre-Christian associations (such as Arthur’s magical sword Excalibur and Merlin’s oracular, shamanistic, or druidical capabilities). By implying the third estate of producers through the king’s apparently humble upbringing and acclamation by the people, and by the mage’s marvelous ability to assume humble forms and master crafts, they also incorporate the full heritage of Indo-European culture into their courtly administrative model.42 The emphasis of this English verse romance, however, is upon the practical (if often supernatural) events by which Arthur’s kingdom is established. It and most subsequent English versions of the legend are less interested in ideology than in action. Only through Merlin’s insight and intervention is Arthur’s birth brought about and his reign successfully begun; only through the youthful Arthur’s martial prowess and skill at attracting and inspiring allies is it instituted. Yet both figures are required for greatness, for each encompasses a complementary aspect of the human potential for heroic action. In Of Arthour and of Merlin, the Grail concept is de-emphasized in favor of political action and battle: this straightforward, secular orientation toward Merlin and his protégé is perhaps due not simply to its English provenance but also to its anonymous author’s sources in chronicle as well as in the Vulgate Merlin, and to the predominantly male, rather than mixed, audience that may be conjectured for it. The poet establishes a precedent for Thomas Malory’s use of sources by rearranging material from the Vulgate, such as the circumstances of Merlin’s birth, or omitting it, as in many details of his relationship with Viviane and his appearance to Arthur as a rude and ugly churl aware of buried treasure. Thus he drastically reduces the scope of the mage’s actions as compared to his French source, along with the length and interlaced complexity of the narrative. Yet this does not significantly decrease Merlin’s importance, for Arthur’s own actions are similarly circumscribed—most notably his begetting of Mordred. The narrative’s modest but continuing appeal is indicated by seven manuscripts dating through the sixteenth century. Such reduction and, apparently, popularity was not the case with two later translations of the Vulgate Merlin written in about 1450—Henry Lovelich’s verse Merlin and the anonymous Middle English prose Merlin.43 Each survives in only one representative copy and derives from a different Vulgate manuscript, but both attempt to tell the full story of Merlin, including digressions such as Merlin’s trip to Rome to replace the emperor’s lascivious and unfaithful wife with the clever, cross-dressed female counselor Grisandole, and the sexual material characteristically excised by the Of Arthour and of Merlin poet.44 Merlin’s influence in both these late translations is indicated by Lovelich’s periodic observation that “Rhyt as Merlyne devisede in alle thing,/Riht so aftyr hym evene wrowht the kyng” (ll. 4391–92, for example). Besides their mediums (poetry and prose), they differ primarily in their contextual setting—Lovelich’s Merlin is, like the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles, a continuation of the Grail story (he also translated de Boron’s Josephe d’Arimathie), whereas the Prose Merlin exists in isolation from other parts of the Vulgate cycle; to this is added his more frequent invocation of the deity, giving his verse a religious tone. Lovelich’s translation also breaks off sooner than the Prose Merlin, although neither completes

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the narrative of its source. Together, they suggest that the late medieval popularity of the French Arthurian romances prompted their production in a form that a nonFrench-speaking, middle-class audience could understand. They also show that thirteenth-century French romance predominated in presenting Merlin to English audiences until late in the medieval period, for he seldom figures in other Middle English romances. The culmination of Middle English romance in Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (1470)45 indicates that Merlin, though a key character, has become subordinated to Arthur and his knights, much as John the Baptist is subordinated to Jesus in biblical narrative. Merlin, however, still possesses in Malory supernatural powers that go beyond John’s in the gospels—and his supernatural character, poised ambiguously between good and evil, may well have motivated Malory’s treatment of him. Whether one reads the Caxton text that has served as the English language template of the legend for centuries, or the Winchester text discovered in 1934 and published in 1947 by Eugène Vinaver, Malory’s ambivalent treatment of the mage “turned a long book about Merlin into a short book about King Arthur.”46 He does this by beginning with Arthur’s conception, rather than Merlin’s or the origin of the Grail. The work as a whole (it is termed “The Whole Book” in the Winchester manuscript) focuses on Arthur and his knights, including the independent tradition of Tristan and Isolde as a counterpoint to the involvement between Lancelot and Gwenever, and it is based on a variety of French and English sources available to Malory—especially the Vulgate cycle and the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. Malory’s portrait of Merlin reduces his actions to those that arrange Arthur’s conception and fostering, establish him as king, and educate the king and his court to the significance of their actions—both good and bad. The mage’s powers are also curtailed, especially his role in Arthur’s battle campaigns, and his end comes early in Arthur’s reign. Malory adopts the harsh PostVulgate view of Merlin’s relationship with Viviane (here a lady of the Lake called Nyneve or Nimuë), and represents it only in Merlin’s forecast to Arthur of his fate “to be putte in the erthe quycke,” and in the brief account of his lecherous “dotage” upon, and entombment by, the harried maiden. Unlike Lovelich or the Prose Merlins author, who were translating a single text, Malory was reworking an entire body of texts into a more-or-less coherent whole, in which Merlin performs as the marvelous catalyst who gets Arthur’s society going—but who must then vanish in order for it to work out its own brilliant, yet ultimately tragic, destiny. The mage’s flawed greatness forecasts the imperfection of Camelot itself—an imperfection developed in Le Morte D’Arthur through the complex social, political, and moral entanglements of the characters, rather than through supernatural merveille or received religious doctrine as in its French forebears. On the Continent, the Prophecies tradition, together with the French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate romances, also provided most of the source material for romance writers from the thirteenth century on. Merlin’s reputation throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages was such that he is named in some manuscripts of the widely copied Seven Sages of Rome (fourteenth century).47 In a tale called “Sapientes,” a close analogue to Geoffrey’s tale of Vortigern’s tower in the Historia, he is the fatherless child who

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is brought before a Roman emperor, ill advised by his seven wise men.48 In several English versions of another tale about the magically empowered Virgil, the name “Merlin” replaces that of the Roman poet.49 In Germany, Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s Der Theure Mörlin (The Esteemed Merlin) retold the Vulgate Merlin story in latethirteenth-century verse, but it survives only through Ulrich Fuetrer’s “Mörlin” in his Buch der Abenteuer (1473).50 There, the account from the mage’s conception through to Arthur’s coronation serve as part of the larger Grail narrative. Merlin did not become a significant character in early German romance, however, and the greatest German writers—Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg—did not make use of him. This neglect may have had less to do with Merlin than with these authors’ focus on the careers of individual Arthurian knights (especially Tristan and Parzival [German for Perceval]) in which Merlin traditionally plays little part, rather than on Arthur himself or his rise to power. Where the mage does appear in German romance, treatment of him tends to be limited and iconoclastic.51 Merlin fares better in other medieval languages. Jacob von Maerlant translated the section of the Vulgate Merlin concerning Merlin’s origin and early years into Middle Dutch verse as Merlijns Boek (or Boek van Merline, 1261), adding a scene in which Satan is on trial; his work was continued by Lodewijk van Velthem’s Merlijn-Continuatie (or Boec van Coninc Artur, 1326), based upon the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. Both works currently exist only in fragments and a Middle Low German redaction.52 Finally, the medieval tradition survives in the Merlijn Volksboek (or Historie van Merlijn, 1540), a fragmentary prose chapbook concerning Merlin’s birth and Vortigern based upon Of Arthour and of Merlin.53 These Dutch works typify the general European trend to translate and popularize existing sources, with occasional innovative twists, after the great early thirteenth-century efflorescence of the Arthurian legend. The trend is even more apparent in romances from the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. In both places, the prophecies were frequently combined with romance in a hybrid narrative form that emphasized Merlin’s supernatural qualities—qualities that occasionally allow him even to overcome his own death in body or in spirit, something only Arthur is reputed to do in medieval French and English romances. Merlin is more often referred to in passing than as a central character. However, Il Novellino or the Cento Novelle Antiche (One Hundred Ancient Tales, 1300)54 includes three tales of Merlin in which he chastises a woman who profits from her husband’s usury to purchase an expensive coat and prophesies twice. Pieri’s Storia di Merlino (mentioned previously) differs from the work of de Boron by including an original enfance for the mage along with his prophecies, an innovative approach to be adopted in the seventeenth century by Thomas Heywood’s Life of Merlin. Yet such extreme departures from the cyclical tradition in Arthurian romances involving Merlin were eschewed by both the Italian Vita di Merlino con le Sue Prophetie (The Life of Merlin with His Prophecies—also known as the Historia di Merlino—1379), which was loosely adapted from the Vulgate Merlin, and the Spanish El Baladro del Sabio Merlín (The [Death]-Shriek of Merlin the Sage, 1498), which was based upon an earlier Hispanic translation of the Post Vulgate.55

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As with Malory, these continental romances indicate the increasing extent to which later writers adapted material from a variety of sources to their reconstruction of a primary source, while adding unique episodes. For example, the author of the Baladro employs not only his Post-Vulgate source with commentary of his own, but also contemporary sentimental romances, the Prophecies tradition, and perhaps the hypothetical Conte del Brait in which the doomed Merlin prophecies to Bagdemagus from his tomb before setting off marvels with his final cry.56 In this way, the slippery figure of Merlin was well suited not only to the interlacing narrative technique of the major romance cycles as both narrator and shape-shifting model, but also to continued adaptation to changing times and tastes, displaying a diverse iconoclasm that would soon enable him to assimilate new technologies and outlooks. For Spanish romance writers, who tended to adopt the darker Post-Vulgate view of his demonic nature, Merlin appears to have been an equivocal creature whose actions could as easily compromise as assist one. Emphasis on his equivocal nature was to continue into Renaissance and early modern literature, with its competing magical, religious, and scientific paradigms for reality. Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries The Arthurian literature of the Renaissance treats this duality in several characteristic ways. There, Merlin is a secondary character who advances the plot, comments on the hidden significance of events, or serves as an exemplar. His relationship with the aristocracy remains a linchpin of his characterization. According to Richard Bernheimer, this relationship grows out of a late-medieval shift in the conventional use of the wild man—from a symbol of unredeemed humanity to a wholesome corrective for the increasingly sterile chivalric lifestyle. This shift was accompanied by a growing interest of the aristocracy in folk culture and the pastoral mode.57 Signs of this shift may be seen in the mage’s frequent disguises as a wild man or commoner to admonish kings and knights, and such interpolated stories as the Grisandole episode in the Vulgate and its translations. This role consequently merges into that of counselor, so that Merlin becomes a figure who keeps the aristocracy in touch with human nature and the natural world, defining aristocratic cultural values by counterpointing them. His purpose may ultimately be to support these values, as in Renaissance epics and masques, but it is potentially subversive as well. As Jeff Rider notes, a tendency already exists in medieval chronicles such as the Brut to situate the mage on the “fictional margin” as “implicitly in competition with the kings and…to some degree a threat to them” by signifying “the free play of language and historical imagination within historical writing, a force potentially independent of the line of kings.”58 In the Middle Ages, this force was largely bound by religious doctrine, and Merlin was made a representative of God and messenger of the Grail—though a significantly compromised one. In the early modern period, however, this religious hegemony began to crumble and consequently brought forth both “reformational” and “counterreformational” characterizations of the mage, which increasingly liberated him from received religious doctrines to serve secular purposes, and eventually from Arthurian

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legend itself to find a place in superstition and popular culture. There the figure subsides below the high-culture horizon for a time, to be revived by renewed Romantic interest in the legend. One way in which this process operates is through Merlin’s wizardly role and his connection with demons. This feature was also emphasized in the Renaissance through the introduction of printing, which brought about an immediate efflorescence of speculative material that had previously existed in expensive and hard-to-obtain manuscripts, for a readership reaching far beyond the aristocracy and clergy. Merlin and his demonic origins were popularized along with the rest of the Arthurian legend. His notoriety was also fueled by a fascination with demonology and witchcraft, lasting well into the seventeenth century and influencing debates over the rise of empirical science. The Greek term “magos” or magus had become associated specifically with those able to consult or command “daimones” or the spiritual intermediaries between the natural and divine realms of being.59 One such had been the incubus who sired Merlin, pejoratively rationalized in Christian terms as a devil from Hell. Thus Merlin’s power over demons arises from two sources: his own nature and his superior knowledge, which was by now understood to be acquired through constant study and book learning (like that of the cleric or clerk) rather than simply inborn. In the Renaissance, his intercourse with devils—prefigured most directly by his ability to summon spirits and create illusions for his lady love—became a commonplace of his magical technology and a staple of the wizard’s more sensational appearances. Merlin became a type of the Renaissance magus, whose protoscientific ontology assumed the interpenetration of natural and supernatural phenomena. Moreover, a tradition of the fairy world concurrently developed that euphemized the conflict between continued folk belief in the supernatural and Christian dogma. A clear expression of this view is Michael Drayton’s massive encomiastic poem about Britain, Poly-Olbion (1612), which relates Merlin’s marvelous birth, magical deeds and everlasting prophecies, and captivity in “the Fairie Land.”60 Following medieval sceptics such as William of Newburgh and John Trevisa, early modern rationalists attacked Geoffrey of Monmouth—even, in Polydore Vergil’s Anglicae Historiae (History of England, 1534),61 dismissing the historicity of his Arthurian characters out of hand. William Stewart in The Buik of the Chroniclis of Scotland (1531–35), Robert Fabyan in The New Chronicles of England and France (1516), and John Rastell in The Pastime of People, or, The Chronicles of Divers Realms; and most especially of the Realm of England (1529)62 accepted Arthur and Merlin but rejected the supernatural element of Merlin’s reputation—particularly as applied to such episodes as Arthur’s conception and Stonehenge’s transportation to Salisbury Plain. John Leland’s judgment in his Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae (1544, trans. Richard Robinson, 1582) represents this empirical view: “Merlinus was in very deede a man euen miraculously learned in knowledge of thinges naturall, and especially in the science Mathematicall: For the which he was most acceptable and that deseruingly vnto the Princes of his time.”63 Commenting on Drayton’s account of Merlin’s birth, John Selden questions the very idea that supernatural beings can have children unless through artificial insemination: “I shall not beleeve that other then true bodies on

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bodies can generate, except by swiftness of motion in conveying of stolne seed some unclean spirit might arrogate the improper name of generation”—and conjectures that his actual father was a Roman consul (Poly-Olbion, 107–8). He scorns Merlin’s power to prophesy, as well: “I should abuse you, if I endevered to perseuade your beleefe to conceit of a true fore-knowledge in him” (211). But such views never erased the mage’s usefulness as an icon of the marvelous. As Christopher Dean explains, “Drayton looks back…to a vanishing world of legend…; Selden looks forward…to a new world of enlightenment…. Drayton’s world can easily embrace a figure such as Merlin; Selden’s world still does but with increasing discomfort.”64 The fact that Selden’s commentary was written at Drayton’s own request demonstrates, rather than the triumph of either view, a prevailing “double vision” whereby both supernatural and rationalist conceptions of this ambiguous intermediary continued to be upheld. Even as he descended into the arena of popular superstitions, Merlin retained an honorable role in epic poetry and dynastic propaganda. The most notable sixteenthcentury examples are Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Orlando’s Madness, first published in 1516 and revised until 1532) and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (the first three books of which were published in 1590, with three more in 1596).65 Ariosto’s chivalric epic derives from Carolingian and Arthurian tradition to continue Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorata (Orlando in Love, 1490),66 and he uses Merlin’s prophetic powers from the tomb to celebrate his and Boiardo’s patrons, the Este family of Ferrara. It was translated into English heroic couplets by Sir John Harington in 1591, but Spenser probably used an Italian source of this episode for Book III, Canto iii, of The Faerie Queene, his tribute to the Tudor dynasty and Queen Elizabeth I. Spenser’s version is very close to Ariosto’s but relocates Merlin to his traditional Carmarthen cavern, where he prophesies to the female knight Bradamante directly rather than through an intermediary. The enchanter’s history is briefly summarized, with special attention to his command of devils, yet his magic works to reveal truth rather than conceal it as corrupt necromancers like Archimago and Busirane do. Moreover, he has tutored Arthur—Spenser’s embodiment of Magnificence, a virtue that encompasses all other virtues—and conveyed him to the realm of Faerie after Camlan. His most notable creations are Arthur’s arms and armor (which include a shield made of diamond that deflects magical attacks), a mirror that reveals what is happening elsewhere (or elsewhen) and in which Britomart first sees her beloved (Arthur’s half-brother Artegall), and an unfinished wall of brass for the protection of Britain.67 Merlin’s prophecies in Spenser depart from Geoffrey to encompass more actual British history and to present, in the words of Harry Berger, a pattern of “early ascendancy followed by some kind of failure which leads to a phase of captivity, withdrawal, or exile.”68 This pattern resonates not only with Geoffrey’s Prophecies, but also with Old Testament history, Arthur’s personal history, and the experiences of Spenser’s other heroes as they strive to become worthy of their gifts. With the decline of romance by the end of the sixteenth century and of chivalric epic after Spenser, the figure of Merlin was not fated to feature in the great literature of the early modern period. Interest in him had by then assumed a distinctly antiquarian

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tone. Most often, he is used for incidental purposes, such as the Scottish folk tradition of his prophecy that when the Tweed and Pausayl streams united (as they apparently did at the accession of King James I), so would England and Scotland be united once more as under Arthur. At the same time, the development of empirical modes of inquiry gradually reduced him to a fanciful figure whose magical mechanics were based upon superstition and illusion. Consequently, he becomes a deus ex machina, semiallegorical in function, increasingly divorced from literal belief in either his historical existence or purported powers. Such a diminution of belief could make him a farcical figure, as in Sir Aston Cockayn’s The Obstinate Lady (1657),69 where a fop tries to impress a young lady by reporting his visit to “Merlin’s Cave, which is obscurely situated on the top of a beech, where all the night he lay on the ground.”70 To be sure, abundant skepticism about him had existed even in the Middle Ages, but during the sixteenth century the figure of Merlin dwindled into a literary convention enlivened by the stage and by lingering popular faith in astrology. The mage’s popularity lay in lesser, mostly English fictions, from court masques to astrological almanacs where he became more a marketing device than a character.71 Like the Renaissance epics, these fictions increasingly depart from the medieval tradition in their plots, characterizations, and settings. The enchanter’s stage potential was little used in Thomas Hughes’s tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587),72 but it proved highly appropriate to the composers of court masques— allegorical aristocratic theatricals that combined dialogue, song, and dance with extravagant settings, props, costumes, and tableaus. In Jacobean masques such as Ben Jonson’s Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1609) and William D’Avenant’s Britannia Triumphans (1637)73—both collaborations with the brilliant architect and stage designer Inigo Jones—the mage is literally raised from his tomb, not only to act as prophet and counselor, but also to personify the stage illusion and its creators. In Jonson’s masque, Merlin is released by the Lady of the Lake to exemplify Jonson’s ideas about the poet’s importance as a conscience and guide to royalty—here specifically James I’s heir Prince Henry. In D’Avenant’s spectacular for King Charles I, Merlin declines into the foppish parody of a necromancer with a splendid gown and magic wand, commanding demons and serving Imposture. Jones’s contribution was to make their messages as apparent in the material means of production as in the words—an important stage in development toward modern multimedia Arthurian productions. Burlesque is also the mage’s fate during moments in The Birth of Merlin: or, The Childe hath found his Father (1620, published 1662), a play ascribed to William Rowley.74 Here, the mage is begotten by a suave devil upon a woman of dubious propriety, Joan Go-too’t, only to suffer Merlin’s usual fate of enclosure in a rock. This uneven play modulates from comedy to melodrama, and it includes the episode of Vortigern’s tower as well as Merlin’s promise to erect Stonehenge as his mother’s sepulcher. He asserts his grandest power in the climactic confrontation with his father, banishing him with a Latin incantation that implicitly reverses the one summoning Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Like Jonson, John Dryden is another major writer who employs Merlin in a minor work. His magnificently staged “dramatick

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opera” King Arthur: or, The British Worthy (1691),75 with music by Henry Purcell, likewise makes the seer a “spokesperson of heaven’s will” who establishes “the religious and national significance of Arthur” and successor kings.76 He is not only a prophet and guide to Arthur, but in the Renaissance masque tradition a master of industrial light and magic who makes his initial entrance in an airborne chariot drawn by dragons and conducted by his spirits. The popularity of such special effects with the mage as mastermind is attested by the drama’s 1736 revival under the title of Merlin: or, The British Inchanter.77 Dryden’s theatrical extravaganza was soon followed by Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur (1695) and its sequel, King Arthur (1697).78 These works confirm what little importance historical accuracy (if such a term can even be applied to a legend born as an anachronism!) held for early modern writers. Blackmore’s Merlin is almost entirely detached from his roots as a sinister and pagan British necromancer, banished from his homeland and supporting the Saxons against Arthur, and ultimately converted into a prophet by God’s holy power. Although Saxons are the Britons’ enemies in these works, Merlin’s foresight in Dryden and in other literature from the accession of William and Mary onward often celebrates a Britain in which these enemies are united.79 In fact, he is frequently invoked solely for the purpose of conferring supernatural approval upon the monarchy, as the prophet of a national identity rooted in King Arthur’s legendary unification of Great Britain and (not incidentally) establishment of an imperial hegemony beyond its borders. The popular writer Thomas Heywood makes the most of this convention in The Life of Merlin, a hybrid of the chronicle tradition and prophecy printed in two editions of 1641 and 1651.80 Heywood recycles long sections of Fabyan’s The Chronicles of England and France and Alanus de Insulis’s (Alain of Lille’s) edition of Geoffrey’s Prophecies,81 explicating them in view of English history, and adding new prophecies as well as a defense of the seer ‘s veracity and an account of his early life. He recast some of the prophecies in two later pamphlets purporting to be the prognostications of a Puritan preacher named Thomas Brightman (1562–1607).82 In fact, an industry of such pamphlets and astrological almanacs soon followed, adapting the prophetic figure of Merlin to the religious and political unrest of the seventeenth century. Those by William Lilly, starting in 1644 under the names of Merlinus Anglicus and Merlinus Junior, and continuing from 1689 onward by Lilly’s publisher John Partridge as Merlinus Liberatus, remained particularly popular into the early eighteenth century.83 This vogue and the prescientific credulousness that underlaid it was soon satirized by mock almanacs and by Jonathan Swift’s A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, Written Above a Thousand Years Ago and Relating to the Present Year 1709.84 Merlin’s continued fame as a prophetic icon was both a response to contemporary needs and a function of his intermediate nature between the pagan past and Christian present, spiritual and material realms of being, and magical and empirical ways of reasoning. He incorporates an uneasy amalgam of revelation and rationality, attractively linked, for the English, to a sense of national identity. As the eighteenth century Enlightenment progressed, there no longer seemed to be a place for the mage other than as a fanciful figure of popular superstition in vulgar

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sideshows. Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies: or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730) parodies the vogue of Senecan tragedy, Arthurian dramatic productions by authors like Hughes and Dryden, and even the legend itself, making Merlin responsible for the diminutive Tom’s conception as well as Arthur’s.85 Lewis Theobald (1734) makes him the Mephistopheles of Stonehenge, whose demons and sorceries corrupt Faustulus, and Aaron Hill’s unperformed commedia dell’ arte pastiche Merlin in Love (1737) humiliates the amorous mage by having Columbine, the object of his attentions, turn him into an ass with his own wand so that she may be free to marry Harlequin.86 The great London actor and producer David Garrick not only revived Dryden’s King Arthur with increased emphasis upon Merlin, but preceded his revival by three years with Cymon (1767).87 This spectacle reworked Dryden’s narrative poem Cymon and Iphigenia with a plot driven by Merlin as the rejected lover and rival of the enchantress Urganda.88 Interest in Dryden continued to provoke interest in Merlin during the nineteenth century, with revivals of King Arthur in 1803, 1819, 1827, and 1842.89 Even as the legend’s popular appeal dwindled into nontraditional spectacles, however, a romantic revival was being prepared by antiquarian scholars and minor poets such as Richard Hole. In Hole’s Arthur: or, The Northern Enchantment (1789),90 Merlin is given a forest dwelling and a daughter, Inogen, whom Arthur loves, and he is awarded the supernatural power to aid the king by the Genius of the Isle. The admixture of other literary traditions is manifest: Hole numbers among his influences Virgilian, Scandinavian, and Miltonic epic, as well as Ossianic and fairy lore. Little more Arthurian than its postmedieval forebears, it nonetheless prefigures the nineteenth-century return to early literary sources and, just as significantly, signals that Merlin and Arthur have become figures capable of survival by absorbing other literary models—master tropes in their own right. On the Continent, Merlin fared even less well during the three centuries after Malory’s epochal revision of his French (and English) sources. Ariosto’s earlysixteenth-century epic Orlando Furioso revives, after all, only Merlin’s spirit; his dead body remains locked in its marble tomb. Nevertheless, the volume of printed Arthurian romances and retellings penetrated an ever wider and more socially varied readership, and it thus laid the foundation of the legend’s survival on the Continent as in England. The chief Arthurian characters like Merlin even retained enough popular appeal to merit mention by major writers, such as François Rabelais in the sixteenth century91 and Miguel de Cervantes early in the seventeenth. Cervantes’s use of the mage in Part Two of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha, 1615)92 is unusually suggestive, and in fact is central to the theme of illusion and reality that pervades the work. In chapters XXII–XXIII of this work, Quixote visits a great natural marvel, the cave of Montesinos. He is lowered by rope one hundred feet into the cave and pulled up with eyes shut as in a sound sleep after half an hour. As he tells it, his sojourn there lasted three days, during which he discovered a pastoral Elysium with enchanted inmates (including Guenevere) and a crystal castle (like Merlin’s house of glass in Welsh tradition, or castle of air in the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin), all enchanted by the

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mage more than five hundred years before. There he meets the spirit of the minor Carolingian ballad hero Montesinos and hears the voice of the hero Durandarte speaking, like Merlin, from his tomb. Quixote learns from Montesinos that the lakes of Ruidera are women whom the magician has transformed, and that Merlin has even prophesied “great things” of him. His servant and squire, Sancho Panza, thinks that Merlin has enchanted the Don, too, and even the fictional author of the book, Cide Hamete Benengeli, comments in a marginal gloss on the apocryphal nature of the episode. Quixote’s subterranean experience becomes a conundrum about the margins of plausibility, as Merlin’s magic often is in Arthurian romances. Because Merlin himself is both a natural and a supernatural being, he is capable of giving space, time, and even the bodies and environments surrounding him a fluid nature in which the concrete particulars of fantasy are coeval with those of the physical world.93 The influence of Cervantes extended to France, where theater and ballet made Merlin the center of several seventeenth-century works, including Guérin de Bouscal’s adaptation of Cervantes, Don Quichot de la Manche (1640) and its revision by Madeleine Béjart, Don Quichot ou les Enchantements de Merlin (1660) ,94 The increasing focus on Merlin’s stage magic in the English masque and in such plays as these foreshadows the two versions of Dryden’s Arthurian drama. Other elements of the mage’s tradition and signs of his decline into a comic figure appeared on the French stage in Rosidor’s Les Amours de Merlin (1671) and the Comédie Française’s Merlin Peintre (Merlin the Painter, 1687), Dancourt’s 1690 production titled Merlin Déserteur, and Jacques Siret’s Merlin Gascon in the same year.95 Cervantes’s Montesinos episode and the stage appearances of Merlin in England and France had little apparent impact on German or Dutch Arthurian literature, however. There was no Dutch revival of Merlin until the nineteenth century; despite Hans Sachs’s interest in the Tristan legend, there was no new German Merlin beyond the occasional allusion, until the Romantic period with Christoph Martin Wieland’s brief summary of the mage’s legend from Comte de Tressan’s Bibliothèque universelle des romans in Merlin der Zauberer (Merlin the Enchanter, 1777).96 Then, as it did elsewhere, interest soon focused upon Merlin’s prophetic powers and entombed voice, mentioned in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s second “Kophtisches Lied” (Coptic Song, 1787),97 and followed in the next century with a new round of translations and works by Wieland, Karl Leberecht Immerman, and others. Nineteenth Century Most accounts of the Arthurian revival during the nineteenth century begin with reference to the Romantic poets, and poetic interest in Merlin did increase during the 1790s. It is, however, more accurate to emphasize the influence of antiquarian collectors and summarizers like the Comte de Tressan, Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, Joseph Ritson, and George Ellis.98 Ellis’s commentary and detailed prose paraphrases of much Arthurian romance material regarding Merlin and others in Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805) also provided a model for Robert Southey in his influential 1817 edition of Malory.99 They reintroduced the details of

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Merlin’s exploits (and to the particular fascination of the century, his fatal love affair), and it was often they upon whom the later Romantic and other Victorian writers drew. Not only were earlier romances rediscovered, but local lore bruited topographical traditions such as the mage’s connections with Stonehenge, the confluence of the Tweed River and Pausayl Burn at Drummelzier in Scotland, and assorted caves and supposed resting places in the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. Examples of this group include Peter Roberts’s attention to Merlin and Arthur in The Cambrian Popular Antiquities (1815) and the Cornish traditions related by Richard Polwhele (The History of Cornwall, 1803) and Thomas Hogg (The Fabulous History of The Ancient Kingdom of Cornwall, 1827). Even more romantically inclined than historical studies were travel writers reporting on visits to places like Tintagel, Snowdonia, and Barenton in Brittany; for example, Louisa Costello’s guidebook The Falls, Lakes and Mountains of North Wales (1845) locates Merlin’s grotto for the “fairy Viviana, or the White Serpent” near the top of Mount Snowdon. As Roger Simpson observes, the term “Enchanter” was commonly applied to Merlin,100 with his mantic power, command of spirits, and fate at the hands of his fairy lover being the primary invocations of his legend. By Tennyson’s day, interest in the mage had reached such a pitch in some quarters that he had been reclaimed, not only as an attraction of romanticized travel literature, but as the archetypal Druid of pre-Christian British religion. He was proudly identified in the banner of the Monmouthshire Merlin, a regional newspaper inaugurated in 1829 with “Merlin Redivivus,” a poem reviving him to witness the wonders of newly industrialized Wales.101 While romantic interests were piqued by Merlin and the Arthurian legend, the great Romantic poets made only sparing references to them in their work, including William Blake’s “Merlins Prophecy,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Pang More Sharp than All,” John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Charles the First,” Robert Southey’s “Madoc,” and four poems by William Wordsworth.102 Only Wordsworth’s “The Egyptian Maid” (1835) is Arthurian.103 Except for Southey, their acquaintance with the legend also seems scant: Wordsworth’s narrative poem relates an original tale in which Merlin is all-powerful but “freakish” and “envious,” wrecking the vessel carrying the Egyptian Maid on a whim. Nonetheless, Wordsworth is following both a major and a minor tradition. Merlin has always been a dualistic if not Manichaean being (the major one), who also had cast malicious spells (the minor one) in Blackmore and Theobald; in Reginald Heber’s The Masque of Gwendolyn (1816), the infernal enchanter turns the unlucky Gwendolyn, after she rejects his advances, into a loathly crone who may only be restored by her knight’s kiss.104 A no less freakish but considerably more compassionate wizard is portrayed in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Bridal of Triermain” (1813), where he raises a whirlwind and earthquake to end the carnage of a tournament and casts its cause, Arthur’s daughter Gyneth, into an enchanted sleep.105 Henry Hart Milman’s Samor, Lord of the Bright City: An Heroic Poem (1818) is an extended revision of Arthurian legend in which the mage’s prophecies about Britain’s destiny are recast by the author’s royalist hindsight and Christian faith.106 Milman’s hero is a completely new invention; even his traditional characters such as Uther and Gorlois, Merlin and Arthur, jarringly trade

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some of their received roles (with Uther as lawful husband, Gorlois as adulterous abductor, and Arthur, not Merlin, as the infant prodigy). Thomas Love Peacock’s Merlin in The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829) and two lesser works (the fragmentary Calidore, 1816, and “The Round Table; or, King Arthur’s Feast,” 1817) is a druid and spell-caster on intimate terms with nature’s secrets.107 Peacock’s interest in Welsh legend, despite his use of it to satirize contemporary British society and politics, points out the intense antiquarian interest in rediscovered sources; Merlin’s entertainment for King Arthur in “The Round Table” echoes his illusions summoned for Viviane in the Vulgate and for Vortigern in Heywood’s Life of Merlin, and his inexhaustible picnic hamper in The Misfortunes of Elphin recalls magical vessels such as Ceridwen’s cauldron and the Grail. Some writers, like John Moultrie, conceived of his magic as thoroughly up to date. In his comic verse narrative La Belle Tryamour (1823–24, revised 1837), Moultrie shows the eclectic influences of Thomas Chester’s Sir Launfal (1400), Dryden, and Peacock.108 He not only recapitulates Merlin’s biography, but has him cure Arthur of the “blue devils” by providing a magic-mirror peep show of Guenever taking a bath. Moreover, he reveals, “He knew as much as ever mortal knew” (I. xlviii),109 in such varied occupations as literary critic, pharmacist, cobbler, surgeon, and farrier. Such readjustments of Arthurian legend, and even the mage’s frequent detachment from his original legendary context and placement into new plots, show his power both as a popular icon and as a Romantic symbol of supernatural forces penetrating natural mysteries. Even the infernal element of Merlin’s character could serve the Romantic temper, with some portrayals of his titanic capabilities verging upon the gothic—as in Wordsworth and Heber, as well as in John Magor Boyle’s Gorlaye (1835),110 which emphasizes his demonic, even animalistic, appearance.111 Iconoclastic plots like these expanded traditional Arthurian ones with new or reconfigured episodes, as had been the case even in medieval romance. The most ambitious departure from tradition was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s verse epic King Arthur (1848).112 Although its author’s favorite among his voluminous works, it seemed stilted and pretentious to most critics even in its own day. In it, Merlin, an amply bearded patriarch living in a lonely tower at Camelot, orchestrates a quasiallegorical struggle between Cymri and Saxons. A plethora of individual quests (especially for Arthur, Gawaine, and Lancelot) that were never in Malory compose a “national romance” that is not only awkwardly reminiscent of Spenser’s Faerie Queene but also freighted with an antiquarian pot-pourri of allusions. Nevertheless, it has occasional defenders, such as Christopher Dean, who perceives a certain “grandeur” in its portrayal of the prophetic master-mind: in Lytton’s own words, “less as the wizard of popular legend, than as the seer gifted with miraculous powers for the service and ultimate victory of Christianity.”113 During the first half of the nineteenth century, therefore, Merlin was known primarily as a magician and secondarily as a prophet.114 The steadily increasing references to him and to the Arthurian legend continued the pattern of the previous three centuries, with scattered allusions, gradual rediscovery of original sources and local lore, and eclectic adaptations or departures from a medieval legend that was

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partially and imperfectly remembered. In the hands of major Victorian poets, however, the treatment of Merlin and other Arthurian characters became less “freakish,” more soundly based upon Malory, and particularly focused on the mage’s connection with the Grail quest and even more so with his fatal love affair, which became a major theme. Merlin takes a secondary role to Arthur’s knights in the Grail quest, but he prepares and foretells its events. As the Grail itself became a mystical talisman of Victorian true manhood and the spiritual aspirations of the Victorians, in literary fiction the mage remains a guide to the quest but not to its purportedly Christian theological mysteries. With his compromised origins, either he departs from the scene before the quest takes place or, as in Robert Stephen Hawker’s The Quest of the Sangraal (1863),115 he remains only to show the significance of its loss. In the nineteenth-century reinvention of druidism and subsequent occult studies, however, he would develop a much more active role as an initiate and shower of the way. From early in the century, Merlin’s often pyrotechnical magic was frequently contrasted to the Lady of the Lake’s gentler spells, whether she was treated as his paramour or not. Even the earlier Welsh tradition occasionally becomes a source, as in Glasgow professor John Veitch’s “Merlin” (1889).116 In this poem, Merlin has pursued a Faustian thirst for knowledge and power, only to be redeemed from his madness by his sister Gwendydd and lover Hwimleian just before he drowns in the Tweed. The Lady of the Lake (effectively displacing Merlin’s sister in medieval romance) and beloved Nimuë were often conflated following Malory’s identification of Nimuë/Nyneve as one of the Lady’s damsels, and both figures had retained characteristics of fairy folk. But Victorian public morality also suppressed a strong sexual undertow. The Lady herself often became (when differentiated from her damsel as in Wordsworth and later Tennyson) a gracious, almost allegorical paragon of “true womanhood” and feminine wisdom, with an interest in reconciliation akin to Wealtheow’s in Beowulf. But Nimuë, under her various names, often acquired more duplicitous and sinister characteristics as a femme fatale, with destructive consequences for Arthurian society through her removal of its chief advisor. In this respect, Merlin’s affair with her could resonate with similar transgressions—especially Tristram and Iseult’s. Matthew Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult (1852) and Charles Algernon Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) both establish links between those fated lovers and Merlin’s attraction to Vivian/Nimuë, as in each poem the love-death theme is mirrored through the mage’s enclosure in a serene stasis that escapes mortal disappointment and physical decay.117 The two poems present Merlin’s romance as a story or dream rather than an event, elevated from the realm of action to that of art. In Arnold’s poem, Iseult of Brittany tells the story to a group of children; her Vivian is a fairy, “witching fair” (l. 181), who ensorcels her lover in the “magic ground” (l. 220) of Broceliande because, as in Malory, “she was passing weary of his love” (l. 224). Vivian’s “weariness” of the wizard (as Iseult of Ireland and Tristram are at times “wearied” by their inescapable attachment to one another) contrasts with Merlin’s sleepiness, and she transforms his sleep into a kind of death; an undercurrent of the second Iseult’s narration is her own frustrated love for Tristram. In Swinburne, Tristram tells his lover the tale of Merlin’s begetting in his mother’s sleep, and later he

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imagines with her how Nimuë, who is also the Lady of the Lake, “shut him in with sleep as kind as death” (p. 48). In this state, he passes the seasons listening to her song, sensuously absorbed into nature and united with her “as blood recircling through the unsounded veins/Of earth and heaven with all their joys and pains” (p. 116). It is a fate envied by the lovers. The definitive treatment of the wizard in nineteenth-century English literature is that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In the unpublished “Ballad of Sir Launcelot” (early 1830s), he envisions Merlin Emrys conventionally enough as a bony, thin-legged enchanter “wise and gray”—“Worldly Prudence” according to Tennyson’s friend J.M.Kemble. His prose drafts of the same period describe him allegorically as Science, who marries his daughter to Mordred.118 Dean regards this relationship with Mordred as an indication that Tennyson began by regarding Merlin as “evil,”119 but the evidence is too slight and speculative for such a conclusion. It is more feasible to say that, as Tennyson’s characterization of him developed, he became a more sympathetic and less stereotypical academic figure. The magic of this embryonic Merlin seems uneasily poised between superstition and rationalism. His development during the composition of The Idylls of the King, from 1857 when the first trial edition appeared, to 1885 when the last idyll (“Balin and Balan”) was added, remained significantly allegorical but became fascinatingly complex. Part of the reason for this complexity may be apparent in Tennyson’s growing personal identification with the character: by 1852 he was employing “Merlin” as a pseudonym; he later had his picture taken as the wizard; and at the end of his career he wrote “Merlin and the Gleam” (1889) as a capsule verse autobiography.120 Dan Beard caricatured this selfidentification in his illustrations for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by using Tennyson’s portrait as the basis for Merlin. The Merlin of the Idylls is a major character, with emphasis on his roles of prophet, counselor, wizard, and “lover” (reflecting, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of, Victorian delicacy about the last). Though playing only a supporting role in the early idylls, he becomes a major harbinger of the kingdom’s decline and failure in the central idyll of “Merlin and Vivien” (1859). Moreover, he is presented as the kingdom’s architect, the man whose vision prepares the way for Arthur, receives him, and builds his citadel. In the initial idyll “The Coming of Arthur,” Tennyson introduces the mage whose “vast wit/ And hundred winters” (ll. 279–80) are described by Bedivere and immediately contrasted to the Lady of the Lake, “Who knows a subtler magic than his own—” and who gives Arthur Excalibur (l. 283). Despite “knowing all arts” (“Gareth and Lynette,” l. 300) and “the range of all their [i.e., Camelot’s] arts” (“Merlin and Vivien,” l. 165), Merlin’s ability to distinguish between illusion and reality falls prey to melancholy at the encroaching enviousness and dissolution in Camelot’s society, and this leaves him vulnerable to the snakelike wiles of Vivien, whose own “subtler magic” is rooted in sex and death. Following a hint by Tennyson’s son Hallam, who saw Vivien as “the evil genius of the Round Table,” Fred Kaplan suggests that she is an anima figure, “a projection” of the mage’s own romantic imagination in its darker, perverse aspect.121 The young Vivien functions not only as a foil to Merlin but also as an ignoble counterpart to the noble

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Lady of the Lake; together, they encompass the range of women’s arts that even Merlin cannot master. In this sense, their female magic is like the “scroll/Of letters in a tongue no man could read,” carved “like a serpent” on the Siege Perilous where “once by misadvertence Merlin sat/…and so was lost” (“The Holy Grail” ll. 170–71, 175–76)—a chair that dooms all but the virginal Galahad. That Merlin himself has fashioned the chair, as he has Camelot’s towers and so much else, is no proof against his human weakness. Completely reversing his dogged pursuit of Nimuë in Malory, Vivien stays with him, fixed in her purpose to seduce and destroy until she learns his charm of enclosure and uses it against him. The patriarchal, Victorian conception of ideal womanhood as domestic, nurturing, and subservient to male authority was significantly undercut by fear of the independent, seductive woman who threatened to usurp the masculine prerogative of power and active involvement in public life. Tennyson’s Idylls defined this ideology as memorably as any literary work of the period, representing Merlin, Arthur, and the knights of the Round Table as either supported or betrayed by their women. In the first official edition, The True and The False: Four Idylls of The King (1859), the true women Enid and Elaine are contrasted with the false women Guinevere and Vivien (renamed from Nimuë in the 1857 trial edition of two idylls), and it is indicative of Camelot’s fate that the two betrayers are erotically linked to the kingdom’s two most powerful men. Tennyson’s theme of the highest aspirations undone by the power of the worm, of Adam cast out from Eden through Eve and the serpent, thus speaks not only to a certain social model (that would itself be rewritten a century later by the feminism and the neopaganism that were already beginning to stir in Tennyson’s time), but to suppressed and sublimated masculine fear of women’s sexuality. Tennyson’s Merlin, for all his powers, ultimately becomes a “rotted branch,” not simply as a lustful old devil in the senex amans tradition, but in an uncharacteristic moment of weakness—wavering among avuncular indulgence, erotic importunity, and suppressed recognition of his seducer’s evil. Noted as a riddler, the mage himself becomes a riddle, unmanned by forces more sweeping than either he or Vivien can command. As the dying Arthur observes, these forces transcend human morality: “And God fulfils himself in many ways,/Lest one good custom should corrupt the world” (“The Passing of Arthur,” ll. 409–10). In God’s order, even Vivien’s corruption is finally another expression of change in “the hall that Merlin built” (“Pelleas and Ettare,” l. 542). Merlin’s demise, however, necessitates that Arthur and his knights and ladies work out their destinies on their own, and in this fact lies perhaps the story’s strongest appeal for the Victorian-era conscience: every individual must eventually assume responsibility for his or her own fate; no Merlin can guide us forever, nor should he. This point is made at the century’s end even in J.Comyns Carr’s King Arthur (1895), a dramatic spectacular starring Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, the most famous actors of the day.122 There the wizard’s chief function is to comment upon the fated actions of the principals, beginning with the achieving of Excalibur and ending with a valedictory upon Arthur’s passing. But when Arthur asks, “Hath not thy magic art all power to stay/The hand of Fate?” Merlin answers, “Our knowledge is not power”

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(240). Ultimately it is the sage’s human limitations, not his allegorical weight as magus ex machina, that ironically redeem him by making him perennially interesting as a literary character.123 Despite these limitations, Merlin is capable of inspiring and even undergoing rebirth himself. Ernest Rhys’s interest in romance and Welsh tradition produced a series of short Arthurian works between 1897 and 1915, including poems such as “The Death of Merlin” (1898) in which a monk named Morial writes Merlin’s history, reflects upon traditions of the mage’s burial in a Cornish cave or enclosure in an otherworldly glass ship or castle, and dies dreaming of his rebirth (that will lead to Arthur’s) through a druid ceremony. In American literature, this theme developed increasing importance as the mage gradually became associated with democratizing models of individualism. As the work of Alan and Barbara Lupack demonstrates, “Merlin, like the mythic American, has the potential to create a new world,” just as the Grail quest that he foresees or prepares has the potential to become “a common metaphor for the American Dream.”124 It was in the nineteenth century that Merlin first entered American literature—not surprisingly, as a prophet—through Joseph Leigh’s anti-British pamphlet Illustration of the Fulfilment of the Prediction of Merlin (1807).125 He next became a symbol of magical power in Lambert A.Wilmer’s Merlin: A Drama in Three Acts (1827), where he unites the star-crossed lovers Alphonso and Elmira.126 Despite its undistinguished verse and nodding acquaintance with Arthurian tradition, Wilmer’s poem foreshadows what would become an American tradition of altering the wizard’s received legend with influences from non-Arthurian literature: hardly a new strategy, but one perhaps more readily applied to a tradition that is itself imported rather than native, at least until that tradition has rerooted itself in the new cultural milieu. In Wilmer’s case (as in many others), a major influence was another commander of spirits associated with the New World, Shakespeare’s Prospero. The litany of Merlin’s functions continued in a group of lyric poems by transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, which represent him as the ideal poet just before Tennyson came to regard him as a personal icon of that vocation.127 In five poems, mostly from 1846, Emerson’s “kingly bard” and his “mighty line” are identified with the harp. Whether plucked by human or the wind’s fingers, its rhymes “Extremes of nature reconciled” (“Merlin I”). Like Ben Jonson’s master bard, prophet, and counselor, he governs “the king’s affairs,” bringing all things into balance (“Merlin II”) and “modulating all extremes” (“The Harp”). As the Lupacks point out, by recognizing the order of the universe he establishes the necessity for human society to reflect that order.128 Thus Merlin’s bardic function links prophecy and counseling. Yet in Emerson Merlin is still not so much a person as a concept, marking both an absence and a potential in American society—as the critic R.A.Yoder describes him, a deus absconditus, or visionary force that is missing from mundane life and needing the poet’s voice to be restored.129 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Merlin is similarly absent, but his potential influence in “The Antique Ring” (1842) is less benign.130 In this story, Edward Caryl invents a romantic tradition for the antique ring he gives to his fiancée, in which the wizard

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imprisons in its diamond a demon who may work only good when faithful love unites the giver and recipient, but evil if it does not. This pastiche treatment of Merlin’s own double-edged pledge to his lover invokes both his magical art and his infernal nature, and it typifies the way that most American writers use the mage: indicating at least a partial dependency on European cultural roots by appropriating and reinterpreting them for local purposes. Two widely differing treatments of Merlin’s legend that appeared in 1889 do just this to both the character and Tennyson’s influence. The minor work (from Britain), Ralph Macleod Fullarton’s Merlin,131 portrays a love triangle of Morgan, Merlin, and Vivien. Seeing Morgan as a rival for the magician’s power and affection, Vivien schemes to entomb him but then dooms herself as well by entering the tomb to ensure that he is dead. The mage is presented as attuned to nature and to love, the “secret soul” of all things (12), but he has little personality. The opposite, however, is true of him in the major work from 1889, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.132 There, Merlin is a humbug enchanter and rival of Hank Morgan, the arms factory superintendent who is transported back in time by a blow from a crowbar. Twain himself described this premise at a reading prior to the novel’s publication: “Take a practical man, thoroughly equipped with the scientific enchantments of our day and set him down alongside of Merlin the head magician of Arthur’s time, and what sort of a show would Merlin stand?”133 Arthur’s wizard unsuccessfully attempts to have Hank burned at the stake, but Hank’s knowledge of a fortuitous full eclipse saves him and establishes his reputation, which he enhances first by blowing up Merlin’s tower in a duel of “magic” and then by assigning him to work (ineffectually) the weather. Envious of the Yankee’s nineteenth-century technical know-how, and especially of his growing power in the kingdom, Merlin is bested during two more confrontations—the Yankee’s restoration of the fountain in the Valley of Holiness and his joust with Sir Sagramor and the assembled knights-errant of Camelot, using a lariat and a pistol in lieu of lance and armor. “Somehow, every time the magic of folde-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left” (393). Nevertheless, Merlin’s magic proves not to be completely impotent, for when Hank proclaims a republic after Arthur’s death and defeats the traditional forces assembled against him by the Church, the magician casts him into a thirteen-century sleep before electrocuting himself. Twain’s parody of the Arthurian legends’ idealism and Tennyson’s sage was made all the more pointed by Dan Beard’s visual jabs at the Poet Laureate and aristocracy, and it was taken unkindly by many British critics. The anonymous reviewer of the January 13, 1890, London Daily Telegraph accused Twain of “fling[ing] pellets of mud upon the high altar” of Arthurian idealism, and the book even offended British authors otherwise appreciative of Twain’s humor, like Andrew Lang and Rudyard Kipling. Yet the narrative is much more than the simple parody of Twain’s early conception. For Hank is clearly Merlin in modern guise, his darker qualities as well as his rivalry with Merlin suggested by the eventual choice of “Morgan” over “Smith” as his last name, as well as his imprisonment in a cave by Merlin himself in woman’s guise (an “antiVivian,” one could say). If Merlin is Camelot’s architect in Tennyson, Hank becomes

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its engineer in Twain. Moreover, the narrative is intentionally slanted by framing the Yankee as its amusing, impassioned, but untrustworthy narrator. Both characters are interlopers, rearranging history to suit their vision. The satire is double edged: not just against the “benightedness” and injustices of a Middle Ages dominated by aristocratic and ecclesiastical privilege, but against the consequences of human and technological abuses in modern times as well. Thus the novel has two Merlins as well as two Morgans, who merge in the Yankee. Twain’s dual Merlins are primarily magicians, counselors, and prophets, but Merlin is also a bard of sorts (his lengthy story puts everyone to sleep) and Hank becomes a lover (marrying Alisande la Carteloise, the damsel who accompanies him on a quest and bears him a child, HelloCentral). The contrasts among these intentionally replicated figures demonstrate the corrupting influence of power and eventually call into question nineteenth-century assumptions about reality and progress, as Henry Nash Smith suggests about Hank’s account of the joust: “The most obvious meaning is, of course, that Merlin is only a fraud, with no real power, whereas the Yankee wields the true power of science, which is magical only in the eyes of ignorant spectators. But the Yankee implies that he and Merlin are almost evenly matched….”134 Does the Yankee say this only for purposes of showmanship and suspense? And what should the reader make of this implied equivalence? By the century’s end, it was clear that the Arthurian legends and character of Merlin in particular had been absorbed into the mythopoeic imagination of North America. Indeed, Richard Hovey’s nine-part cycle Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Dramas, begun in 1891 and unfinished at his death in 1900,135 draws wholesale upon the European mythological inheritance by placing Greek and Roman, Scandinavian, Celtic, Christian, and folkloric divinities on the same stage as the Arthurian characters. The opening masque, The Quest of Merlin (1891), has the mage travel to Avalon—where it appears that all mythological beings reside—for advice about Arthur’s impending marriage. Philosophically aligned with the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne rather than with Tennyson, Hovey translates his own flamboyantly nonVictorian romance with an older married woman into Merlin’s relationship with his guide and lover Nimuë, and even more into the transgressive love of Lancelot and Guenevere. On the European continent during the nineteenth century, Merlin and the Arthurian legend remain in eclipse except for antiquarian revivalism, occasional nationalistic themes, and romantic symbolism—and then only in France and Germany. In France, the work of Hersart de la Villemarqué and Paulin Paris adapted the Arthurian legends into modern French, but with little immediate influence on other writers. Villemarqué’s main contribution to the Merlin legend, however, was Myrdhinn ou l’enchanteur Merlin, son histoire, ses œuvres, son influence (Myrdhinn or Merlin the Enchanter, His History, Works, and Influence, 1862) and a group of Merlin poems in his Barzaz-Breiz: Chantes populaires de la Bretagne (Breton Poetry: Popular Ballads of Brittany, 1867).136 For many years, the ballads were considered to be Villemarqué’s own forgeries, but recently they have been discovered to be authentic, though greatly emended.137 As Françoise le Saux summarizes them, “The

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Breton ballads chart Merlin’s development from wonder-child to powerful enchanter to marginalized victim, culminating with his reconciliation with God and the social group that had never truly adopted him.”138 The four poems capture different aspects of the wizard, from his conception by a spirit in bird’s shape impregnating his mother by song and kisses at her ear, to his gifts of prophecy and divination, to his involvement in a betrothal quest where the bride’s suitor must retrieve Merlin’s harp, ring, and person, to his final retreat as a madman into the forest and blessing by St. Kado (the Breton equivalent of St. Kentigern). They reflect the early themes associated with Merlin, emphasizing the otherness that makes him an object both of wonder and fear. In Le Saux’s view, they ultimately construct a tale about Christian mastery of the supernatural and the conversion of Merlin himself. Perhaps the major French work of the nineteenth century to feature Merlin is Edgar Quinet’s immense philosophical novel Merlin l’enchanteur (Merlin the Enchanter, 1860).139 As a supporter of the French Republic critiquing the nation’s decline under Emperor Napoleon III, Quinet took Merlin as an alter ego of himself and the symbolic spirit of France. As in the Breton ballads, his epic is not simply about exile but, according to Michael Glencross, about its “inner experience…, a sense of the gulf between the artist and society and of the conflict or misunderstanding between individuals.”140 Villemarqué had recast the early Merlin tradition in romantic form, but Quinet liberally uses anachronism to bring Merlin together with a cross-section of historical and literary figures, such as Hengist, Robin Hood, Robespierre, Faust, and Don Juan during his wanderings, and the enchanter eventually rescues Arthur (and the republic) from apparent death with the cup of the Grail. Quinet thus reaffirms the otherness of Villemarqué’s enchanter as an essential part of the French spirit, combining rationalism with questing “Celtic” individualism in contrast with stereotypical Germanic abstraction and pedantry.141 Unusually, Merlin’s falling in love with Viviane (a nature deity in the narrative; also the name of Quinet’s second wife) proves not the end but the beginning of his magical powers, and his final enclosure is in the Vulgate tradition of her wish to preserve him for herself in a life-in-death embrace. In Quinet’s imaginative world, as in Twain’s, however, corrupting forces beyond the control of democratic champions sometimes whittle away the difference between despots and charismatic leaders such as Arthur and Merlin. This potential for corruption is, of course, inherent in Merlin’s character and used “against the grain” by writers wishing to emphasize it; it had been part of Merlin’s attraction to the Romantic temperament and would soon be featured in Guillaume Apollinaire’s L’Enchanteur pourrissant (The Putrescent Enchanter, 1904).142 Although French nineteenth-century writers explored all of Merlin’s roles, they appeared most enchanted with Merlin’s mercurial talents and symbolic availability as a magician. German Romantic literature treated Merlin in similar symbolic ways, but more frequently—emphasizing Merlin’s demonic inheritance, nation-making powers, and internment by his beloved. The elegiac motif of Merlin prophesying from his tomb was used by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and established by Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin (Story of Merlin the Magician, 1804) published by Friedrich Schlegel.143 This

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book was actually a translation by Schlegel’s wife, Dorothea, of the French Vulgate Merlin; its influence in Germany was comparable to that of Southey’s edition of Malory in England, and like Southey’s Malory reestablished patterns that would be mined repeatedly. Ludwig Tieck translated two English farces: Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb (in 1811) and William Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin (in 1829),144 but these proved to be anomalies in the century’s thrust to make Merlin a touchstone of German philosophical concerns and of nature. Near the end of his career, Christoph Martin Wieland followed his eighteenth-century prose summary of Merlin’s life with a long narrative poem, Merlins weissagende Stimme aus seiner Gruft (Merlin’s Prophetic Voice from His Grave, 1810), in which he uses the passing of Camelot to express nostalgia over the end of the German classical age. Karl Leberecht Immerman’s two poems, “Merlins Grab” (Merlins Grave, 1818) and “Merlin im tiefen Grab” (Merlin in the Deep Grave, 1833), also employ Merlin as a symbolic voice for the natural world,145 the circularity of life, and the immortalizing influence of mortal love—motifs once more foreshadowing his fate as envisioned by Swinburne and others. Through these motifs, the prophetic or bardic voice even outlasts the speaker’s removal from active life in society and his absorption into the processes of nature. This philosophical thrust of his entombment implicitly contrasts his attunement to nature, both in the sense of “enlightenment and consolation”146 and in the more limited sense of the beauties and rhythms of the physical environment, with the narrowness and hurley-burley of everyday concerns, social fashions, and political ideologies. Merlin’s return to his roots in nature, either as a recluse or as a lover, is also alluded to by several other poems. Ludwig Uhland’s “Merlin der Wilde” (Merlin the Wild Man, 1829)147 explores the early Welsh identity of Merlin as covalent with the forest from which he draws his strength and for which he rejects the court of King Roderick (Rhydderch)—far from the predominant medieval Christian view of the wild man as suffering from bestial reversion and extremes of weather. Yet the motif of his love for Nimuë also remains important in poems by Heinrich Heine (1837) and others, as well as in a modernization of the affair in Paul Heyse’s novel Merlin (1892); Alexander Kaufmann’s “Merlin und Niniane” (1852) further demonstrates the tendency to associate Merlin with thought and his beloved with nature or emotion.148 Another enduring motif regarding Merlin in nineteenth-century German literature is his dualism. Rudolph von Gottschall’s novel Merlins Wanderungen (Merlin’s Travels, 1887), for instance, features the conflict between his infernal origins and his redemptive goals.149 The century’s most ambitious treatment of the figure, Karl Leberecht Immermann’s lengthy drama Merlin, eine Mythe (Merlin, a Myth, 1832),150 used this theme to enlarge the scope of his character. Drawing from a wide array of sources, including Wolfram von Eschenbach, Schlegel, and Tieck, Immerman conceives of Merlin in a post-Romantic mode as a super-powered Everyman who is tainted (but unbowed) by his infernal inheritance. Artus (not Vortigern, who does not appear in this drama) “searches for the child without a father”; in a meeting at Stonehenge, Satan fails to recruit his son’s assistance. Satan does enlist the aid of Merlin’s rival at Artus’s court, the magician Klingsor, who suffers Vortigern’s fate by dying in his burning castle. Merlin rebels against the demonic plan that he become the

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Antichrist, but his attempt to crown Artus as the Grail King fails: he is seduced by Ninianna, who takes advantage of his equivocal being and his need for love to work his magic. Lacking his guidance, the questing knights die in a desert, and the discovery of his guilt drives Merlin mad. He is killed by his father when he once more refuses to obey his bidding. An epilogue invokes the device of the voice from the grave to deliver Immerman’s message: one must save oneself before saving others, support nature and family, and search for the Grail in one’s heart. Merlin becomes “a myth” in that he is a guide and example: his spirit can never die nor rest until this message is fully comprehended. The voice therefore implies that the dualism of human nature impels a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle to resolve our conflicting impulses, making tragic our predominant experience of history. The consequences of eventual perfection are perhaps uplifting, but less compelling than imperfection. Twentieth Century The steadily increasing volume of Merlin literature during the nineteenth century has necessitated the omission of many lesser works from mention here; it becomes all but impossible to cover adequately the spate of literature that ensues in the twentieth— especially during its last two decades. The steadily increasing wealth of scholarly editions and translations of both old and new works, together with rapidly developing efficiencies of distribution, have vastly improved access to previous treatments of the Arthurian legends; in turn, this availability inspires their continued adaptation to current issues and technologies. This popularity of the legend necessitates some further classification to help sort out the permutations of Arthurian characters and themes, such as those discussed in the Scholarship section later in this Introduction. Formal generic systems of classification work best, however, to organize a large chronological sequence of works related to the Arthurian legend. For the study of individual characters, roles such as the seven previously described for Merlin (Wild Man, Wonder Child, Prophet, Poet, Counselor, Wizard, and Lover) are most suitable. Because most Arthurian characters have a history, to these may also be usefully added overlapping modern modes of representation, such as whether the fig-ure is portrayed as an atavism, anachronism, avatar, adaptation, or commodity. The figure of Merlin is an atavism when he appears in the costume of an earlier time or practices an outmoded form of science; an anachronism when he is placed into an age where he and his belief system are not native; an avatar when he assumes a new body or persona (which tends to establish him as a divine or mythological creature); an adaptation when this avatar is recognized as an independent identity (like Gandalf, Spock, or Doctor Who); and a commodity when any of these forms is employed for commercial purposes. Through these modes of representation, as well as the genres and subgenres described previously, the figure of Merlin has attained ubiquity. Consequently, rather than attempting complete coverage of multitudinous short poems, plays, and stories, the following discussion of twentieth-century works is limited mostly to influential or illustrative treatments featuring these primary roles and modes of representation.

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In Great Britain, both Malory and, to a lesser extent, Welsh and folkloric traditions continued to sculpt portrayals of Merlin early in the century, as did reactions to Tennyson. Dramatic and lyric poetry remained popular vehicles, though with decreasing frequency throughout the century. Francis Burdett Coutts’s tetralogy of verse plays The Romance of King Arthur (1907)151 presents Malory’s (by twentiethcentury standards) atavistic Merlin in all of his roles, but especially as commentator and exemplar of the dramas’ main theme: “the eternal conflict between the spiritual and sensuous part of man’s nature.”152 His wizard is “grown so wintry old/That none alive had seen his autumn days” (King Arthur, 3), perhaps making inevitable his betrayal by Nimuë, whom Coutts portrays as a Saracen slave girl. Gordon Bottomley’s one-act verse play “Merlin’s Grave” (1929)153 locates a reenactment of Merlin’s demise at Nimuë’s hands in Caledonia when a young gipsy woman encloses an old man pruning “Merlin’s tree” within its thorny branches. Whether this occurs through possession or reincarnation, the spirit of place or the power of legend, is unclear, yet the play features the pair as erotically linked avatars, suggesting that eternal patterns organize reality and compel human actions. This sense of recurring experiences and paradigmatic narratives underlies much of the Arthurian legend’s appeal, and is perhaps the fount of Merlin’s “wisdom.” Charles Williams’s Arthuriad suggests a similar pattern of anachronism and avatar, though in a much more abstruse way. The poems Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) form a knotty mystical sequence whose ambiguities and multiple layers of signification readers must sometimes untangle by conjecture. Several factors feed this complexity. First, Williams constructs a series of symbolic and allegorical relationships between the female body and geophysical topography, between historical and fictional geography, between political geography and social systems, and between characters, their societies, and philosophical or religious concepts. These relationships are often more mystical than concrete, flavored with Williams’s iconoclastic Anglicanism and evoked in difficult syntax. Second, the poems are not in a clear linear order, but constitute a series of snapshots, vignettes, and episodes that allude to traditional Arthurian legends rather than retell them; when events such as Arthur’s coronation, Merlin’s relationship with Nimue, Galahad’s birth, the Grail quest, Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s adultery, and Arthur’s passing are recounted, they bear little resemblance to the same events in Malory. Rather than rewriting the legends, Williams disassembles them into their constituent parts, selects elements of them, adds new elements of his own, and reassembles them evocatively. Third, his conceptions of the sequence and its meaning changed as they developed and were still incomplete at the time of his death in 1945. Many readers find all this exhilarating and rewarding; others find it simply incoherent. Either way, it demonstrates that Arthurian legend can be reshaped in the minds of its artists and readers to fit their individual interests.154 Merlin is a good example of Williams’s muse. In his notebook, he first describes Merlin as “natural man (‘heathen’) conscious of the quest, planning it and working for it, ignorant of its full meanings.”155 His mother is Nimuë, who in “Nimuë’s Song of

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the Dolorous Stroke,” an unpublished poem written in 1929–31, names herself “The Lady of the Lake” and describes her unusual relationship with Merlin, my fosterchild and care, whom I have taught his art and rare sciential mastery, to quell the evil working of the earth and be a watcher by the king … He is my secret and I his, we also having ways of love; though men shall make a mock thereof saying ‘an old man seeks to kiss a young girl’ they shall never see how I am his and he is mine, he being my voice and I his shrine, yea, his the speech of Nimuë. (193) Here, and in another unpublished poem of the same period, “Taliessin’s Song of the Passing of Merlin,” in which Merlin “is gathered” to her (221), Nimuë derives from Swinburne, and their relationship shows clear signs of the archetypal great goddess/ priest-lover bond that predominates in esoteric and feminist treatments of the late twentieth century. In the later, published poems, she becomes even more the personification of Broceliande, the forest that represents the shaping processes of nature; Brisen, formerly her servant, becomes Merlin’s sister who (like Dame Brusen in Malory) arranges the conception of Galahad. By 1941, Williams’s symbolic conception of Merlin also personified him as Time and Wisdom, and Brisen as his complement Space; together, “the children of Nimuë timed and spaced the birth [of Galahad]” (“The Son of Lancelot,” 67). The mage is a shape-changer who also retains bestial or demonic characteristics; to the young Arthur, he first appears “Wolfish… coming from the wild,/ black with hair, bleak with hunger, defiled/from a bed in the dung of cattle, inhuman his eyes” (“The Calling of Arthur,” 31). He intercepts Lancelot while both are in wolves’ shapes, before the maddened knight can kill the newborn Galahad, and carries the child to Logres on his back. The lycanthropic motif signals both the debased state of human society before Arthur’s coming and the continuing curse of its appetites; yet it mirrors as well the natural processes of Nimuë, in which shape changing shows not only what we are but also that we carry within us the makings of redemption—spiritual metamorphosis out of wolves’ shapes. Thus, Williams’s Merlin is rooted in the roles of wild man and wonder child, while growing into his other roles—especially as prophet (but not as poet, a role taken over by Williams’s Taliessin)—in the service of the Grail quest that measures the spiritual values of Arthur’s court at Logres. Laurence Binyon’s verse drama The Madness of Merlin (1947)156 was also an uncompleted work that gave the mage’s atavism and anachronism symbolic weight,

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retelling the Lailoken/Myrddin story as the first of a three-part sequence reflecting upon the war-torn first half of the twentieth century. Merlin is unredeemed from madness at the end, but in the birth of their son his peasant lover Himilian sees the dawning of new hope. Binyon’s plan for parts two and three was to develop Merlin’s reputation for wizardry and his search for utopian happiness in Atlantis and other mythical societies (ix). Another drama, Christopher Fry’s Thor, With Angels (1948),157 reverses Merlin’s traditional end and strengthens his anachronism by having a servant girl dig him up on a Jutish farmstead in 596 after the dissolution of Arthur’s kingdom: I found him in the quarry where it caved in. His beard was twisted like mist in the roots of an oak-tree, Beaded and bright with a slight rain, and he was crying Like an old wet leaf. His hands were as brown as a nest Of lizards, and his eyes were two pale stones Dropping in a dark well. (121) Thus Merlin’s sleep is treated as a motif for insight; taking him out of history is a convenient way to ponder it. Although he is recognized, he soon disappears again, feeling out of place in time and wishing to resume his dreaming despite the “very obdurate pressure/Edging men towards a shape beyond/The shape they know”(46).158 He also reawakens in Martyn Skinner’s long and playful satire The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future (1951–66),159 but, unlike Fry’s Merlin, he adapts readily to the future. A farmer himself, Skinner was one of many twentieth-century English writers who saw the figure of Merlin as a champion of agrarian landscapes and village culture against modern industrialization, urbanization, and technocracy. His anachronistic mage is “an oracle-of-all-work” who “can-cel[s] out” opposites (26) and brings Arthur from Avalon to stage a counter-coup against a totalitarian Marxist regime in 1999. Their major opponent is, of course, the sorceress Morgan. One more notable drama, John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s Island of the Mighty (1974) combines an atavistic Caledonian setting and characters, with socialist comment on modern affairs, bringing on stage all three legendary Welsh bards: Aneirin of The Goddodin, Taliesin, and Myrddin.160 The tendency throughout most of the twentieth century to revive the earliest Merlin legend as well as the legend according to Malory, and to explore the figure’s multiple roles—most often with atavistic or anachronistic portrayals—also holds true for prose fiction, the major vehicle of twentieth-century Arthurian literature. The chief examples in Britain are Clive Staples Lewis, John Cowper Powys, and Terence Hanbury White. Lewis’s Merlin in That Hideous Strength (1945)161 is both atavistic and anachronistic, aroused from an age-long sleep under the wood on the grounds of Bracton College to side with the reincarnated Pendragon (named Elwin Ransom, also the hero of two previous novels in Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”) and his allies against the chillingly fascist and technocratic National Institute of Coordinated Experiments

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(NICE) in Belbury. The narrative universe of this work is influenced by the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings, particularly Lewis’s friends and colleagues Charles Williams and J.R.R.Tolkien, from whose works he develops the deities that he names “eldils.” Earth has been isolated from the other planets of the solar system because its native spirit-beings have been corrupted by Satan, the “Bent Eldil” who speaks to the NICE’s administration through the disembodied head of a criminal scientist named Alcasan. The NICE program for social change includes “sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races…, selective breeding. Then real education, including prenatal education” (37) to improve human “efficiency.” Although the sinister institute’s leaders scheme to recruit Merlin for his prescientific sorcery, the reawakened mage abhors their contempt for natural processes and creatures, preferring to ally himself with Ransom’s circle. He is an impressive, almost numinous figure (Lewis later chided Martyn Skinner for creating a Merlin who was not mysterious and archaic in at least his speech.162) His magic is a personal operation upon nature for which he has an animistic affinity so complete that it penetrates to the transcendent agencies that nature expresses, and he is ruthlessly pragmatic about eliminating enemies. Merlin’s own nature is not evil but amorally ambiguous, which makes him the pivotal figure in the supernatural struggle between good and evil. By disguising himself, misrepresenting the speech of a tramp whom the NICE arrogantly mistakes for Merlin, confusing the NICE members’ own speech, and releasing upon them the animals on which they have been experimenting, he indulges his medieval flair for instructive jokes and poetic justice. Yet Lewis’s mage, though a master of magic, is definitely out of place in modern society. Unlike Arthur’s avatar Ransom, whose name signifies that he is also the Fisher King—both secular and spiritual leader returned to save England (and by implication the world)—Merlin is the original article. He must even sacrifice his life to cancel out his own satanic inheritance, by receiving and releasing the cataclysmic planetary powers of the good eldils in order to eradicate the Institute. Merlin is no model of future man but rather of archaic man: a prime example of mythic consciousness that philosopher Ernst Cassirer defined as the homeopathic construction of reality, an undifferentiated perception of physical nature and spiritual power as a seamless whole.163 This view of the wizard as one who does not operate upon the elements in the mode of split consciousness, but who is himself elemental as in medieval alchemy, became extremely influential in late-twentieth-century fantasy and New Age thought. This viewpoint also characterizes John Cowper Powys’s Merlins. Merlin appears in Powy’s early books, A Glastonbury Romance (1932) and Morwyn: or, The Vengeance of God (1937), and as the aboriginal Myrddin in Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (1951),164 the Welsh novelist’s last and favorite Arthurian work. In the first, his avatar is John Geard, Glastonbury’s mayor and supporter of a nondenominational religious fair designed to revive the spirituality for which Glastonbury had long been famous. Many of the novel’s other characters also play Arthurian roles (as well as roles from other myths and religious stories). Geard’s primary power is empathy with others, particularly a Christ-like identification with human suffering, and through this gift he

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discovers the evocative control that thought has over reality. In Morwyn Merlin makes only a cameo appearance, but in Porius he is a major character—perhaps even, it is strongly implied, an incarnation of the primeval god Chronos himself (Saturn in Roman mythology). The novel exists in two versions: a severely cut (over Powys’s objections) but still lengthy book (1951, quoted here) and a restored edition of the original massive manuscript (1994). Set at the end of Roman rule in the Wales of 499 C.E., the story presents Myrddin as a throwback even in an archaic age, who “spoke in a low, hoarse gutteral whisper, like someone who had given up the use of human speech” (54). Prince Porius, through whom the third-person narrative proceeds, feels that this giant is “a multitude rather than a single individual” (58); he is “an organism whose conscious recession into its primordial beginnings extended far beyond the prophet’s temporary existence” (59) so that “it embraced other identities, till it could escape at will into others” (60; Powys’s italics). Myrddin’s “cyclopean” ugliness further identifies him as the Savage Herdsman (104), an archetypal form he occasionally takes in medieval romance, and this characterization suggests shape shifting even though nothing can disguise his primitive roots. His complementary opposite, Nineue, also eludes full comprehension. To Porius, she is “a yielding image of femininity in the abstract, the resilient, lithe, magnetic, slippery Platonic Idea of all the evasive allurements in the world that are the objects of impersonal desire”; in her, too, “there was a sensation of the un-fathomable and the infinite” (93; Powys’s italics). Thus, if Myrddin is a shamanistic avatar of Time (one of his roles in Williams’s work), capable of voicing history and communicating with beasts, intimate with the mutability and mortality of nature, then Nineue is a personification of Eternity, upon which time depends and which overcomes Time: the “Seducer sense of Prophets” (675). In the novel, Myrddin is shown leaning on her, is imprisoned by her under an immense boulder atop y Wyddfa (Mount Snowdon), and is released by Porius, to whom she has given a meteorite carried in both the prophet’s body and her own to revive him. Looking upon the prophet in his tomb, Porius feels “as if he stood on an earth-crust that covered a cosmogonic cavern wherein the bones and ashes and the mouldering dust of gods and men and beasts and birds and fishes and reptiles had been gathered into a multitudinous congregated compost, out of which by the creative energy of Time new life could be eternally spawned” (678). Atavism can’t be carried much further than this. The combination of overwriting, multiple symbolic systems, and perhaps editorial slashing has made the published novel incoherent to many readers, but the work amply demonstrates Merlin’s symbolic magnetism and mystical connection with Nimuë. Even with such striking portraits, the twentieth century’s most popular and influential picture of Merlin was penned by T.H.White. His imaginative retelling (and critique) of Malory in four novels began in 1938 with The Sword in the Stone and culminated with their revision and combination with some material from a fifth, unpublished (until 1977) work, The Book of Merlyn, in an omnibus edition called The Once and Future King (1958).165 White’s work is set in a pseudomedieval AngloNorman past, complete with anachronistic historical as well as fictional figures and contrasted by its narrator with the twentieth century. The narrator’s humorous and

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frequently argumentative consciousness of the absurdity of both this constructed past and the present is reflected in the character of Merlyn, who is born in the future and lives backward in time. The wizard’s prophetic power is thus explained as “backsight” rather than foresight, and the resulting ability to deal only with the consequences of human actions rather than their temporal causes makes him ineffective in forestalling the tragic end of Camelot. Yet this striking conceptual innovation is also impossibly contradictory, for the narrative must necessarily treat Merlyn as living and acting like the other characters according to the linear forward flow of time. Neither his birth nor his death is actually described. The portrait of a mage who is constantly conscious only of what he is about to do and ignorant of what he has already done (except in the future), and always becoming younger rather than older, is impossible for White to sustain, and so it appears mainly in flashes of comic relief and anachronistic descriptions of the magician’s possessions or reminiscences of future events. White makes the mage (and sometimes Arthur) his mouthpiece, a strategy generally charming in The Sword in the Stone but obsessively strident in The Book of Merlyn. Written during World War II, this returns Arthur, on the eve of his last battle, to the milieu of his early training. Like Tennyson, White imagined himself as Merlyn and grew a full Merlynesque beard. He portrayed the enchanter in The Sword in the Stone as the kind of boys’ tutor he himself would have liked to have, or to have been during his early career as a schoolmaster—but with the addition of magical powers.166 White’s characteristic pacifism, love of nature and animals, and hatred of totalitarian society and technology twisted to destructive purposes are made clear by Merlyn’s tutelage as he turns Arthur into animals to teach him their values, and as he educates him in the shortcomings of chivalry. This training leads to Arthur’s solution, the harnessing of chivalric Might in the cause of Right. Yet this solution is eventually turned against him by the stubborn clannishness and rule-conscious envy of Morgause’s sons Agravain and Mordred, who cunningly twist to their advantage the opportunity given to them by the mutual attraction and human fallibility of Lancelot and Guinevere. Long before then, of course, Merlyn is no longer available, overcome by his own fatal infatuation with Nimuë. White’s anachronistic Merlyn displays all of his major roles; despite his experience of having lived in the “future”—especially the wartorn twentieth century—he instills in Arthur a belief in humanity’s perfectibility once people learn to put aside the urge for violent self-aggrandizement. This belief may be odd for the reputed son of a devil, yet it is also natural for a believer in the power of learning to help us comprehend and, perhaps, to accept the complex matrix of nature and nurture that determines our fates. It surfaces in Merlyn’s comic utterance to Arthur in explaining the inevitability of his own end: “There is a thing about Time and Space which the philosopher Einstein is going to find out. Some people call it Destiny”; and in his statement that “both of us are to come back” (The Witch in the Wood 152, 153). The trend towards series of novels in which Merlin is a major (if not the major) character became even stronger after mid-century. Among British authors, perhaps the most successful example is Mary Stewart’s best-selling Merlin trilogy The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), and The Last Enchant-ment (1979).167 Her Merlin

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is the love child of the Welsh princess Ninian and Aurelius Ambrosius, making him a potential heir to the throne—though he rejects it in favor of his cousin Arthur, Uther’s son. Like White, Stewart also develops an area largely ignored by premodern writers: the childhoods of Merlin and Arthur, which have recently become a major focus of authorial attention. Stewart’s series approaches Merlin’s legend from a predominantly realistic perspective, setting the story in the Dark Ages with historically correct detail and only one truly fantastic assumption: that Merlin can act as a channel for the supernatural power of what he calls “the God.” This nonsectarian divinity speaks prophecy through Merlin, whom he possesses at climactic moments, and he is the source of Merlin’s ability to make fire and see images in it of events happening elsewhere. Apart from this supernatural connection, Merlin succeeds through naturally acquired knowledge and training in music, engineering, medicine, and statecraft. Although not a warrior, he wins the occasional fight when pressed to defend himself. Stewart’s characters are also psychologically complex and realistically motivated, yet they are firmly based upon their legendary roots in Welsh tradition, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Malory. Merlin’s relationship with women is particularly interesting: he senses early, when a village girl tries to seduce him, that his Sight depends upon chastity, and he cannot always foresee women’s actions although he can rationally describe their thinking. This proves critical when he fails to foresee Morgause’s seduction of Arthur, when he is poisoned by her, and when he mistakes Nimuë as the reincarnation of his deceased male servant. Eventually he falls in love with her, and she with him; he thus willingly passes on to her his powers and knowledge, and he is entombed in his cave because he succumbs to narcolepsy instead of lust. He returns from it, as well, to find his active role in the kingdom’s affairs is no longer needed. Merlin’s identity can also be placed in a modern avatar: Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous (1955)168 portrays him as the publisher of a newspaper, The Camelot Chronicle, who is enamored with its Paris correspondent Nimue. A no less psychologically complicated but far less realistic Merlin than Stewart’s is created by Robert Nye. Merlin (1979)169 is a wickedly incisive and pornographic send-up of Merlin’s demonic inheritance and the “erotic nerve” motivating Arthurian characters. Like Stewart, Nye draws upon all medieval versions of the legend but in a decidedly nonrealistic way. He combines Freud and Jung by making the characters subject to their prurience and by making Merlin atavistically codependent with those desires and victim of his own anima, the female disguise he assumes to spy upon Igraine and Uther. In sum, twentieth-century British treatments of the mage reimagine his legend in a wide variety of realistic and fantastic guises, cumulatively emphasizing the figure’s paradigmatic shape-changing capabilities. In early-twentieth-century North America, the shadow of Tennyson lingered. Yet the eclecticism of Twain and Hovey foreshadowed inventive new approaches to the character of Merlin, as well. The two impulses joined in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s important narrative poem Merlin (1917), whose implicit commentary on World War I and the fading vision of Camelot serves as an effective coda to the Tennysonian world view.170 Sensing the decline of Arthur’s society, the mage retires to the forest

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of Broceliande, where he enjoys solace from the dark-ening world in Vivian’s company, but he also has feelings of guilt and futility. At the end, the ties binding him to Camelot prove stronger than his bond with Vivian. Robinson’s cultured prophet, counselor, and lover recognizes his own anachronism long before Arthur’s kingdom falls, realizing that his values can be preserved in retreat from the world, but only at the cost of losing their currency in that world. Yet when he returns, it is too late; he can only witness Camelot’s destruction and pass into a permanent exile. Robinson’s debt to Tennyson is also the occasion for much of the poem’s resonance, for he strategically adapts some of the Victorian poet’s imagery while altering characters in significant ways. The best example of this intertextuality is his treatment of Vivian, who is still snakelike and “spotted,” but also complex, wise, and much more sympathetic than Tennyson’s corrupt “sun-worshipper.” She represents the “modern woman,” and Merlin treats her as an equal; in turn, she respects and wants him for himself rather than out of any enmity for Arthur and Camelot. Consequently, Merlin is pulled between attractions for the active and contemplative lifestyles, and ultimately he is pulled apart by his inability to reconcile them. Post-World War I Arthurian literature in North America also continued to be impelled by fundamental tensions in what the legends and its characters stood for, even though it has produced fewer distinguished literary works than Britain. Merlin, who became the continent’s favorite Arthurian character, often mediates these tensions in typically American ways. One such tension, between romanticism and pragmatism (or, more generally, between illusion and reality), not only remains a central concern of Twain and Robinson, but even resides in the titles of John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) and of Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (1978).171 As Alan C. Lupack shows later in this volume, all four writers emphasize a practical mage, yet remain conscious of his limitations and the power of “dangerous idealism,” or, as Tennyson had put it, the ability of “one good custom” to “corrupt the world.” In accordance with this treatment, Steinbeck’s Merlin emphasizes to Arthur that “there is more to a king than a crown and far more to a knight than a sword” (57), but later he sadly acknowledges that he cannot prevent his own fate because emotion always triumphs over wisdom when the two are directed toward the same object with conflicting goals (122). Berger’s Merlin reprimands Uther in a similar way: “That which should distinguish a king from another man is neither sword nor virile member, but rather a moral superiority” (26). Yet he himself is chided by the Lady of the Lake for his “physical application of reason” and “childish sports with matter” (107). He fosters the idealism of the young (like Arthur), yet he must continually restrain their tendencies towards overreaction and grand gestures.172 Unlike Steinbeck’s mage, however, Berger’s is simultaneously atavistic and anachronistic, ultimately limited—somewhat like Hank Morgan—by his own practicality and his devotion to science and mechanics (even those of magic) as the means of solving human problems. He can manipulate external reality but cannot restrain the impulses of the heart or change human nature. Like White’s, Berger’s narrative often makes acid and penetrating interpretations of its sources. Perhaps this accounts for Merlin’s “unique sense of irony” (18); his pronouncements are

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sometimes tinged with the cynicism of his acquaintance the archbishop of Canterbury, in whose churchyard he places the sword in the stone.173 More romantic Merlins include the figure in James Branch Cabell’s Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig Leaves (1927); he regards chivalry and Arthur’s knights as amusing “toys,” allows Nimuë to ensnare him for a time, but eventually tires of her “childish prattling” and proceeds towards Antan, a mythical realm of all hearts’ desires.174 Cabell’s is a different sort of irony from Berger’s: his human characters, like Gerald Musgrave in All About Eve, learn to accept and even prefer their earthly limitations, for the legendary and mythical figures they meet are too overpowering and onedimensional to live with comfortably. Merlins with idealistic missions also populate formula fantasy fiction. They have become especially popular following the epochal success of J.R.R.Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Middle-Earth mythos, among whose chief characters is the wizard Gandalf. He is a Maia (a lesser angelic being that helped to inspire C.S.Lewis’s eldils and includes Gandalf ‘s colleague Radagast, rival Saruman, and enemy Sauron), but his roles are quite similar to Merlin’s in Arthurian romance. Many such works are discussed in the articles by Lupack and Raymond H.Thompson in this volume, and not all of the mages bearing Merlin’s name are positive models: some, as in Roger Zelazny’s short story “The Last Defender of Camelot” (1980), are dangerous fanatics.175 Given the modern fascination with the figure’s female entanglements, he can also become a central or peripheral genius in romances with sexual content, such as Christina Hamlett’s The Enchanter (1990) and Quinn Taylor Evans’s Merlin’s Legacy series about his daughters, who depart the fairy otherworld inhabited by the mage to encounter lovers and destinies in the human world of history.176 The name of Hamlett’s hero, Kyle Falconer, recalls the derivation of “Merlin” from a species of falcon; culminated by pregnancies, Evans’s plotlines optimistically suggest the continuing fertility of the legend as well as Merlin’s descendants. An entire subgenre of late-twentieth-century Arthurian feminist romances, which redevelop the legend from the perspectives of Arthurian fig-ures like Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, and Nimuë or Vivian, also finds Merlin indispensable.177 In these works, he is frequently the associate and consort of the Lady of the Lake, a priest of the Great Mother, and thus an atavism. The most popular and influential of these, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982), helped to establish another trend: the use of Merlin as a title rather than an individual, and therefore as representative of a role (as Bard of Britain and priestly guide to the mysteries of the mother goddess).178 Kevin, the deformed but inwardly noble second Merlin of her book, is sacrificed by Morgaine for attempting a reconciliation in the competition between matriarchal and Christian religions that is destabilizing Arthur’s kingdom. This competition eventually dooms Camelot and consigns otherworldly Avalon to the mists of history (until, one may infer, the recent esoteric revival of pagan British cultism that became one of Bradley’s sources for the novel). In all of these cases, the figure of Merlin problematizes the relationship between romanticism and pragmatism, mediating and often deliberately blurring the distinction between what is real and what is illusory.

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Popular fiction incorporating Arthurian characters like Merlin not only attests to the deep interest in cultural roots and identities evident in the works previously cited, but also seeks to renew literary formulas themselves by incorporating such materials. Clayton Rawson’s hard-boiled detective stories about “The Great Merlini,” a crimesolving illusionist and magic-shop proprietor whose godfather is P.T.Barnum, is, like Hamlett’s and Evans’s romances, a case in point.179 Deepak Chopra’s use of Merlin as the avatar of the human psyche in both fiction and New Age psychoanalytical guides to self-realization is another.180 The figure can also become a vehicle for an author’s personal exploration of Roman, British, and Irish cultures as well as legend, as in Jack Whyte’s A Dream of Eagles (also known as The Camulod Chronicles, 1992-present), an historical fantasy series that posits an enclave of Roman culture in southwestern Britain as Camelot.181 Whyte’s Merlyn is the blond, handsome son of a Welsh princess and a Roman legionnaire; raised with his Celto-Roman cousin, Uther, he becomes the colony’s war leader and ally of Uther’s Welsh tribes, and he fosters Uther’s son Arthur to be their successor before suffering disfigurement in battle and metamorphosis into the persona of sorcerer. The series is notable for many twists and innovations to the legend. For example, Merlyn has an identical (but not twin) brother named Ambrosius, and he survives two wives (neither of whom is named Nimuë or Vivian). His wizardry amalgamates curiosity, intelligence, learning, occasional prophetic dreams, and the deadly contents of a chest taken from two Egyptian sorcerer-assassins. In addition to portraying all of Merlin’s roles, Whyte’s mage moves from a Romano-Celtic hero to a seemingly atavistic and anachronistic figure, admired yet feared by all but a few close friends. Even more American than the complex interweaving of romanticism and pragmatism is the resonance of Arthurian legend and chivalry with “the six-gun mystique,” and the wilderness of which Merlin is an inhabitant with the frontier. The Lupacks point out that Steinbeck explicitly made this connection while writing concurrently about King Arthur and America. “In both legends Steinbeck recognizes a basic similarity, that ‘virtue does not arise out of reason or orderly process of law—it is imposed and maintained by violence.’”182 While the courtly knight and the gunslinging sheriff may both side with law and order, ensuring the safety of women and children (and respect for the social compact of the American Dream), they are only able to do so because they are Adamic ad-venturers using the same wits and skills as the outlaw. In both cases, they often are the outlaws, newly converted. So too, in wizardly respects, are many American Merlins, for the origin of the figure is fallen man and the providential project to redeem him. In H.Warner Munn’s fantasy novel Merlin’s Godson (1976),183 an atavistic Myrdhinn actually leads a group of Roman Britons to America after Arthur’s fall. There they carve out a kingdom among constantly warring Native American tribes, while the seer himself becomes immortalized as Quetzalcoatl. This “regeneration through violence” can be interpreted partly as a reformulation of medieval chivalry in which North America becomes Avalon and the “wild man” transforms into a civilized peacebringer. This process reacculturates the British wizard, with all his inner paradoxes and tensions, in

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a new continent and in the vision of North American writers reworking the legend for a North American audience. Most characteristic of North American Merlins in the twentieth century, however, is their diffusion throughout the culture, mirroring the pluralism and inventiveness of North American society itself. The mage is more than an inheritance of North American British (and French) roots: He is also an icon of shape-shifting creativity— both artistic and technological. This seems particularly apt where the Arthurian legend is employed as a literary structure and where Merlin is linked with media that combine art and technology. In Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot (1977),184 the film director and producer who initially seduces Lancelot Lamar’s wife Margot is named Bob Merlin. This avatar is a manipulative master of the cinematic illusion who possesses a corrupt taste for the erotic—suggesting that Hollywood, not Washington, D.C., is the United States’s real Camelot, and that what it chiefly purveys to the world is rationalized narcissistic desire. Simon Darcourt, Canadian novelist Robertson Davies’s Merlin avatar in The Lyre of Orpheus (1988),185 is a friend and advisor to Arthur Cornish, the chairman of the charitable Cornish Foundation. This foundation agrees to finance the completion and production of an unfinished opera by E.T.A.Hoffman, “Arthur of Britain, or the Magnanimous Cuckold,” with Darcourt providing a new libretto. The characters’ lives, however, start to intertwine with the opera’s plot, as Davies indicates that we cannot always be sure which one—life or art —imitates the other more. As a literary archetype, Merlin gives immediate structural significance to almost any commodity or artwork. Consequently, his reincarnation, revival from sleep or suspended animation, or transportation from the past become (even more than Arthur’s) common motifs to direct the audience’s reception. In Peter David’s slight but amusing Knight Life (1987, revised and expanded 2002),186 Merlin is reincarnated as a ten-year-old computer whiz who becomes Arthur’s campaign manager for a run at the New York City mayoralty. In Roger Zelazny’s second five-volume sequence of intricately plotted Amber novels,187 Merlin is the Berkeley-educated son of a prince of Amber and a shape-shifting princess of Chaos. The two realms exist at polar opposites in the continuum of alternate worlds that constitute “reality,” and the very name of the mage evokes his avatar’s ambiguous heritage and the complementary balance between order and chaos that he usually struggles to maintain. Perhaps ominously, the last novel ends with Merlin’s acceptance of the crown of Chaos, though the realm and its denizens are not evil but anarchic. Indeed, the rulers of the two realms appear to spend more time defending themselves against plots than governing. In today’s fastpaced consumerist society, the “instantaneous content” magically carried in the name of Merlin and directed at any combination of the figure’s accumulated functions is an efficient, as well as evocative, way of creating a text. It simultaneously connects the audience to cultural and historical roots, asserts or raises questions about its values, and captures attention by lifting the imagination out of the mundane universe and into one of shifting archetypal forms and forces. Zelazny’s authorial practice of developing novels from short stories signifies one more fashion in recent Arthurian fiction in English: the short-story anthology. Such

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collections usually include stories about Merlin; two devoted entirely to him are Jane Yolen’s single-author Merlin’s Booke (1986) and Mike Ashley’s large anthology The Merlin Chronicles: Magic and Adventure (1995).188 These portrayals are mostly (but by no means always) atavistic. As Ashley writes, “The very name conjures up images of magic and mystery…. We all love to dream, and in Merlin we have the forefather of all our dreams, the master of enchant-ments, the prophet and kingmaker” (1). The economy of an entire textual history residing in a name permits writers to build brief narratives on one selected role or aspect of the mage’s legend, and those of Merlin’s wizardry and relationships with women predominate. Some of these short stories are clever or affecting, others are only affected, but they all share the perennial Arthurian penchant for reworking the received traditions into new combinations with innovative twists. On the Continent, the figure of Merlin continued to surface periodically whenever authors desired to employ traditional medieval material to develop predominantly philosophical and ironic views of modern times, and this approach underwent a minor revival in the late 1970s and 1980s. Early in the twentieth century, Guillaume Apollinaire combined fin de siècle decadence with French symbolist literary experimentation in L’Enchanteur pourrissant. In this prose poem, the (literally) decaying corpse of the magician in its tomb is still able to converse with the Christmas Eve and spring processions of characters—both human and inhuman—who visit it. Apollinaire emphasizes Merlin’s atavis-tic infernal associations and potential Antichrist posture, employing parodies of scripture and an accompanying Onirocritique (Interpretation of Dreams) to link the enchanter’s career and moldering body with the surreal world of dreams and the unconscious, as well as the subject of male and female experience of love.189 French dramatist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau drew upon the dichotomy between dreamlike illusions and accurate perceptions of reality in his play Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde (The Knights of the Round Table, 1937).190 The work “contrasts the intoxicating effects of Merlin’s spells with the liberating effect of Galahad,”191 suggesting, on the autobiographical level, Cocteau’s personal struggle with opium addiction, and, on the thematic level, that Merlin is not only the Grail Quest’s initiator but also that he is the primary obstacle to spiritual enlightenment that the questers must overcome. His dual nature serves as a model for the power struggle between the conscious mind and its self-destructive, subconscious urges and desires. With the emergence of psychoanalysis early in the century, this relationship of the enchanter with dreams—and not merely as their interpreter, but as their atavistic source and as a dreamer himself in the cave of his own sleeping or subconscious mind—became especially significant to writers and critics throughout the twentieth century. Later in the century, five French novelists continued to explore Merlin’s roles as the mastermind of Camelot and the Grail quest. Théophile Briant’s Le Testament de Merlin (1975)192 places him “at the historical and spiritual confluence of druidism and Christianity.”193 He displaces both Arthur as the killer of Mordred and Bedivere as the disposer of Arthur’s sword; but, as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin, he also enables Arthur’s transportation to Avalon and retires to his forest home with a woman (in Gallic tradition, Broceliande and Viviane). Romain Weingarten’s Le Roman

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de la Table Ronde, ou le livre de Blaise (The Romance of the Round Table, or the Book of Blaise, 1983)194 revives the tradition and interlace technique of Blaise’s book; this narrates the history of Merlin and Arthur from the perspective of the mage’s tutor, and it is told in the first person rather than buried in reports of a manuscript compiled in the third person, as was the case in medieval romance. René Barjavel’s L’Enchanteur (1984)195 goes well beyond the updating of Weingarten’s Vulgate sources. His novel contrasts the mage’s high calling as master of the Grail quest with his innate imperfections, making us appreciate him not as a deus ex machina stereoptype—which he could easily become by virtue of his magical powers—but as a complex individual with an appreciation for play. In this work, the Grail originates as a healing clay cup used by Eve to collect Adam’s blood after her creation from his rib. Merlin is aware, however, that even as the cup represents humanity, he too is an Adam with his own Eve, Viviane, and his desire for her implicates him with the breaking of the cup at the original Fall. Therefore, despite his knowledge and power, he is unable to encompass the quest himself and must find someone else who can, tutoring Arthur and his chief knights (including Perceval) until finally Galahad succeeds. Barjavel is among the small group of contemporary authors (which includes T.H. White, Mary Stewart, and Thomas Berger) who successfully combine insightful innovation with careful adherence to medieval sources. Michel Rio’s brief Merlin (1989)196 is a valedictory narrative by the century-old mage himself, once again returning to the concept of the legend as “Merlin’s book,” surviving as a voice from the grave. And the last of these notable French writers, Philippe le Guillou, has parlayed a fascination with the Arthurian legend and spirit of place into two novels that invoke the Breton tradition of Merlin’s enclosure and then bring him back with renewed vigor.197 According to Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, “Arthurian figures and stories occur in the German-speaking countries more as metaphors for the failure of utopianism and for history’s inability to achieve lasting peace, freedom and progress, and as lasting patterns for the demonic power of love and sexuality.”198 They also follow the general twentieth-century prevalence of atavistic and anachronistic portrayals. Merlin continued as the favorite Arthurian character in German literature behind Parzival, Tristan, and Isolde, and as a more mythical counterpart of another famed magician in Germanic tradition, Faust. Whereas Faust generally represents human aspiration and overreaching, however, Merlin tends to represent human creativity and the unconscious; both of them signify these concepts in essentially masculine form, subject to seduction by female or anima figures. In twentieth-century German literature, this “psychodrama” has often become the focus of Merlin literature, as in Richard von Kralik’s minor play Merlin (1913) about Merlin’s relationship with Viviane, Arno Schmidt’s novel Zettels Traum (Bottom’s Dream, 1970), and Eckart Klessmann’s poem “Botschaften Merlins an Viviane” (Merlin’s Messages to Viviane, 1974).199 Eduard Stucken’s once-popular cycle of eight Grail dramas (1901–24), Der Gral: Ein dramatisches Epos (The Grail: A Dramatic Epic), contains two titled for the mage: Merlins Geburt (Merlin’s Birth, 1912) and Der Zauberer Merlin (The Wizard Merlin, 1924).200 Sensuous and hypnotic, but now dated,

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examples of the neoromantic German Jugendstil or fin de siècle aesthetic, Stucken’s plays treated all three thematic impulses described by Müller and Wunderlich. So, too, did Gerhard Hauptmann. The dualistic figure of the mage became an early focus for his unfinished novel Der neue Christophorus (The New St. Christopher), and Merlin was the original title for this work, begun in 1917 with initial publication of its first chapter, Merlins Geburt.201 Hauptmann’s work is influenced by Immerman’s mystical nationalism, and it develops the myth of a new Osiris-like wizard who is “conceived in death by an ancient ‘superman’ and born in a coffin. He is to be initiated into the great esotericism of the German nationality and of humanity by Pater Christophorus.”202 Hauptmann’s work conceives Merlin as a savior rather than Antichrist; however, German literature after the world wars and National Socialist (Nazi) era has been far more skeptical of utopian revivals. The postwar shift to an anti-utopian attitude was signaled by Wilhelm Kubie’s novel Mummenschanz auf Tintagel (Masquerade at Tintagel, 1937, 1946),203 in which Arthurian society and Merlin are unmistakably corrupt. Maria Christiane Benning’s Merlin der Zauberer und König Artus (Merlin the Magician and King Arthur, 1958), and especially Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler’s Merlin, oder das Wüste Land (Merlin, or the Wasteland, 1981), continue this ironic posture.204 As Ulrich Müller states later in this volume, the latter is the century’s major German contribution to Arthurian literature, and it has inspired numerous spin-off adaptations and compositions. A massive theatrical work employing international Arthurian sources from the Middle Ages to modern times, its multiple multimedia scenes require approximately twelve hours to stage: they unfold the legend from Merlin’s conception to Arthur’s tragic downfall, revealing how much the mage (and indeed, Arthur’s court) is his father’s son, despite his filial defiance. Like Berger’s mage, Dorst and Ehler’s is overly pragmatic, continually underestimating the undertow of eroticism and the urge to power that motivate humans against their best personal and collective interests. In this work, the fig-ure of Merlin merges with the figure of Faust as Promethean overreachers. Its postmodern style also echoes medieval tendencies to mix genres and incorporate anachronism, reflecting the creative worldly chaos that Merlin’s new civilization cannot fully control or account for. In the latter half of the twentieth century, German-speaking countries evinced considerable interest in translations from Arthurian literature in English, including retellings and studies; as in Britain and America, fantasy fiction and film have received most attention.205 The same is true for the Netherlands: there, the most distinctive Arthurian work of the twentieth century is the dark-humored Het zwevende schaakbord (The Floating Chessboard, 1917–18, 1922) by Louis Couperus, in which the mage is conversant with electricity, telephones, and airplanes as well as chess.206 The legend has been less popular, however, in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. In Italy, only Merlin’s ill-fated romance became the subject of a slight drama, Domenico Tumiati’s Merlino e Viviana (1927).207 In Spain, the focus was also on Merlin’s later years and Viviane, with two fine experimental novels by Benjamin Jarnés and Alvaro Cunqueiro.208 Both writers respond to the literary influence of Cervantes and the political constraints imposed by Franco’s dictatorship with the gentle irony of magical

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realism. Jarnés’s Castilian Viviana y Merlín (1936) is based upon the Baladro del sabio Merlín, but it significantly revises that work’s negative view of his relationship with Niniana. His intellectual Merlín, atavistically isolated in his sterile castle tower, is matched and ultimately both enthralled and redeemed by the domestic (but not domesticated) Viviana, who reunites him with the natural world outside of Arthur’s paternalistic castle. According to Barbara D.Miller, Viviana “personifies the undeniably traditional Jungian archetype of the positive anima” in contrast “to a Merlín embodying rigid logos.”209 Penetrating his tower, she pointedly challenges him, “Why don’t you try searching for your happiness in my arms, as in another time?”210 In this life-affirming sense, she is like the temptresses created by Quinet and Robinson. Cunqueiro’s very different story, Merlín y familia (Merlin and Company, 1955), is related with naïve humor and admiration by Merlín’s Sancho Panza-like former houseboy Felipe. After the end of Arthur’s reign, Merlín and Queen Ginebra (Guinevere) retire to the mage’s estate in Galicia, where he continues to be consulted on arcane matters. Felipe’s rose-colored memoir, recounted in his own later years as the local ferryman, is both anecdotal and anachronistic in style. It reveals a “private,” anachronistic Merlin, reminiscent of the sage at the end of the Vita Merlini, yet unlike any other in modern European literature: he has given up his grand plans for society, choosing instead to embrace the cultured but remote life of a country gentleman content with minor marvels and cu-riosities. Although not a staple of Spanish literature, the Merlins of these two Spanish works confirm a lasting continental interest in exploring the varieties of his character and tradition on the one hand, and on the other a nostalgia for the marvelous whose most fertile literary ground may be the Arthurian legend. Children’s Literature The romantic ideal of childhood and the development of the fairytale genre late in the eighteenth century, combined with the didactic purpose of teaching young people Christian morality and social responsibility to fit them for the adult world of work, led to the creation of Arthurian works written (and often illustrated) specifically for children in the nineteenth century. The figure of Merlin, combining mystery, marvel, and wisdom, adapted naturally to children’s literature through retellings and adaptations, original works, and, most recently, fictional re-creations of Merlin’s own childhood and youth. Most of this literature has been a product of the twentieth century, during which children’s literature has come into its own as a publishing market, in film as well as in print. Merlin is now by far the favorite Arthurian character for this literature.211 Though all of his functions are apparent in it, those of counselor and wizard have predominated, while that of lover has been suppressed until recently. Of the innumerable retellings and adaptations in English for children, nearly all have been based upon Thomas Malory.212 Therefore, they proscribe the mage’s role somewhat compared to other important models, like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works and the French Lancelot-Grail cycle. Yet in them, Merlin remains the “always good

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and wise”213 prophet and mentor of King Arthur and his knights, until he is shut away by Nimuë. Dean notes six characteristics of children’s retellings: (1) they are told in simpler language; (2) the plot is altered to emphasize clarity and action; (3) sections of the legend are often omitted; (4) new episodes may be added; (5) characters are unambiguously good or bad; and (6) erotic topics (though not physical violence) are avoided.214 The same characteristics also apply to most other Arthurian literature for youth, although changing social standards and the ubiquity of overt sexuality in latetwentieth-century media have considerably weakened the proscription against the last. Probably the most important retellings have been by Sidney Lanier (1880), Howard Pyle (1903–1910), and Rosemary Sutcliff (1959–1981).215 They also demonstrate the increasing tendency to depart from the legend as received from Malory in order to invent or incorporate alternative traditions. While Lanier’s is a relatively straightforward retelling that scrupulously avoids the erotic, Pyle’s approach is freer, like the advice that he gave aspiring artists painting from a model: “But above all, this is an opportunity to make a picture—a picture more than a copy!”216 Illustrations are important, too. Lanier’s second illustrator, N.C.Wyeth, produced vividly colored paintings that made the 1917 edition an American classic, and the wizard is as carefully defined by Pyle’s black-and-white illustrations as he is in words: a brooding black presence in full, sweeping robes and peaked cap, with a long bushy white beard, associated with books and crows, overseeing combats and pointing out marvels such as Excalibur; his Vivien looks dark, demure, and sly. Sutcliff draws upon other medieval sources, combining Malory with the kinder Vulgate tradition of Merlin’s end: her wizard follows Nimuë out of love, and, after he willingly passes on to her his powers, she puts him to sleep in a cave under a hawthorn’s roots. Both in retellings and other treatments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mage is frequently the spokesman for the chivalrous (and in America, overtly democratic and egalitarian) ideals to be inculcated in children. As in medieval Arthurian romances, Merlin encourages them to grow into their destinies and even counsels them against counterproductive deeds, but he rarely forces them to act contrary to their wills. This “model of moral knighthood,” as the Lupacks describe it, is based upon “the notion that a young person becomes a knight of the Round Table because of moral integrity rather than prowess or nobility of birth.”217 Always, the emphasis remains upon the child’s responsibility to grow up as an ethical, compassionate, and productive contributor to society. As the twentieth century went on, Merlin and Merlin-like avatars, such as Cadellin Silverbrow in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963),218 remained a source of wisdom and guidance, but with gradually increasing attention after mid-century to their faults and failures. Nor are they all-knowing, like the magus of medieval romance. T.H.White’s wizard is as typical in this regard as he is innovative in character: wise and insightful as a tutor, yet eccentric and unkempt in appearance, and occasionally bad-tempered, bumbling, and forgetful. White’s influence ensured that many subsequent portrayals of the mage followed in this pattern, which contributes to narrative suspense, allows the required scope for the young heroes’

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contributions, and even helps to account for his (usually temporary) defeat by Nimuë or Morgan le Fay. In Padraic Colum’s The Boy Apprenticed to a Magician (1920),219 Merlin’s skills are in disrepute because he is enchanted by Vivian, but he proves capable enough to help the young protagonist defeat the evil wizard Zabulun. In Peter Dickinson’s The Weathermonger (1968),220 he proves to be the immensely powerful “Necromancer” who has been awakened from sleep and drugged by a village pharmacist; so influenced, he isolates Britain by inducing a mass anti-machine hysteria. In Robert Newman’s Merlins Mistake (1970) and The Testing of Tertius (1973),221 he accidentally instills knowledge of the future in his apprentice Tertius, who with Brian of Caercorbin (and Brian’s girlfriend Lianor in the sequel) rescues the wizard from Nimuë and the sociopathic magician Urlik. And in Pamela F. Service’s Winter of Magic’s Return (1985) and Tomorrow’s Magic (1987),222 he is reincarnated as the teenaged outcast Earl Bedwas, who must rediscover his true identity, combat Morgan La Fay, reawaken the sleeping Arthur, and cope with his own awakening feelings for his friend Heather McKenna. Even where his judgment and transcendent abilities are never in question, as in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising novels (1965–77),223 Merlin needs the assistance of others to achieve his goals. In this sequence, he is one of the oldest and most powerful Old Ones of the Light, immortal beings locked with the Dark in a multidimensional manichaean struggle for power over the course of human history. Depending on the shape he adopts, this mysterious being appears at times as atavism, anachronism, and avatar. He assumes various guises, including Otherworld Lord and archaeologist Merriman Lyon, in order to enlist the aid of the three Drew children Simon, Barney, and Jane; the last Old One to be born into a human body, Will Stanton; and King Arthur’s son, raised in modern Wales as Bran Davies. Together, they thwart the Dark’s apocalyptic plots as they gather the magical talismans necessary to defeat them in the final battle for humankind’s destiny. In his valedictory address to the Drew children and Bran at the end of the sequence (just before he erases their memories of all the supernatural events that have transpired), Merlin makes it clear that the future is up to humankind’s exercise of free will—as indeed the eons-long supernatural struggle has already sufficiently demonstrated whenever a character must make the choice between good and evil. Much children’s literature employs Merlin merely as an instantly recognizable icon for hocus pocus or intellectual feats, as with Nevill Drury’s Merlin’s Book of Magick and Enchantment (1999), 224 a New Age primer to varieties of magic and neopagan mysticism. Such works are inevitable byproducts of the figure’s ubiquity in popular culture. Nevertheless, more intriguing is the recent interest in his youth. The overwhelming traditional emphasis on his benevolence, venerable age, and wise guidance has encouraged children to identify with the knights and ladies of Arthur’s court, or (in more recent fiction) child protagonists. Conversely, most children’s literature has bypassed the medieval tradition of Merlin’s own birth and childhood, beginning, like Malory, with King Arthur’s birth rather than Merlin’s. Both the manner of his engendering and the nature of his father have been regarded as unsuitable topics, leaving his appearance before Vortigern as the sole option. And

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literature before the twentieth century always portrays the young Merlin as a miniature adult who is born in the body of an infant but is fully developed both mentally and verbally, and whose physical maturation is essentially passed over. There is no modern sense of the mage as an individual undergoing a gradual process of biological and psychological maturation; his life away from the rulers of the Britons is glossed over. Merlin is always a master rather than an apprentice, and, even though in medieval romance he refers to Blaise as his “master,” their interactions are brief and consist mainly of Merlin instructing Blaise rather than the reverse. Recent writers of adult fiction like Mary Stewart and Stephen Lawhead have seen this gap as an opportunity and have sought to fill it by imagining adventures and a developmental process for the mage before he meets Vortigern—even apart from Arthurian times and legend. Because children are themselves the most frequent protagonists of modern children’s literature, the young Merlin has therefore become popular and been given the body, psychology, and insecurities of a boy—albeit a very talented and precocious one. This move applies both to the medieval boy, as in Stewart and Lawhead, and to contemporary or future reincarnations of the mage, as in Peter David’s and Pamela Service’s novels mentioned previously. Writers who have embroidered the atavistic imaginary space of Merlin’s youth include Robert San Souci in Young Merlin (1990) for young children; Pamela Service again in Wizard of Wind and Rock (1990), which retells the Vortigern story; and popular series by Jane Yolen for somewhat older children and by T.A.Barron for adolescents.225 Writing for an audience too young for the Round Table (but also for their parents, who are familiar with it), San Souci feels free to make up several of his mage’s adventures. Yolen and Barron, by contrast, invent entirely new, non-Arthurian histories for their fantasies: Yolen’s are set in medieval Britain, and Barron’s are set for the most part in Merlin’s native “in-between” land, an otherworldly island enshrouded by mist southwest of Britain called Fincayra. Yet they all emphasize the “fatherless” motif and wonder child role essential to the figure, as well as introduce variations on other motifs, roles, and legendary characters associated with Merlin’s legend—even, in Barron’s case, making allusions to the “future” career created for him by T.H.White. And all of them also foreground the initial isolation and estrangement of the character, focusing the plot on his consequent need to discover his identity and roots and to fulfil quests himself before reaching the stage of life when he will assign them to others. Significantly, he is no one’s apprentice, but he possesses innate capabilities that he himself must discover and master. As in adult fiction, much of the appeal is in the inventive redisposition of such familiar features. Visual and Performing Arts Merlin has always been one of the most popular Arthurian images in the arts, both as an incidental element in a larger scene and in his own right. According to The Arthurian Handbook, “Subject selection depended upon easy recognition” and a preference existed for “stories that could be summarized in a single scene,”226 not

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only in the low-literacy Middle Ages but even today; Merlin is the most singular and recognizable Arthurian character, participating in many such scenes. There is another reason, too, for his popularity in art. Muriel Whitaker perceptively identifies a recurrent Merlinian theme when she writes in her study of the Arthurian legends in art, “Perhaps he himself symbolizes the artist, whose insight provides him with power but whose sensitivity brings about his doom.”227 The scenes from Merlin’s legend that have been most frequently illustrated in visual art have been his conception, prophesying to Vortigern or other rulers, erection of Stonehenge, dictation to Blaise or other amanuenses, reception of the newborn Arthur, leading of Arthur to Excalibur, and ensorcelment by Nimuë, all of which represent complete stories. In addition, he is frequently depicted in the wild or with a book. These portrayals characteristically emphasize one (and occasionally more) of his seven roles: scenes in the woods stress his wildman aspect; conception and interview with Vortigern, his wonder-child origin; companionship with kings, his prophesying and counseling abilities; erection of Stonehenge and use of books, scrolls, and other magical paraphernalia, his bardic and wizardly functions; and the pairing with Nimuë, his lover’s end. Like other Arthurian subjects, images of Merlin have been recorded in a wide variety of pictorial media, including manuscript and book illustration, painting, tapestry, sculpture, photography, and stained glass.228 In “Seeing the Seer: Images of Merlin in the Middle Ages and Beyond,” Donald L.Hoffman discerns a pattern of development in Merlin iconography. For Hoffman, this pattern begins in medieval manuscript images of his begetting, with the incubus devil and his mother in bed, signifying the mage as “an uneasy reconciliation of opposites” and “a potentially destabilizing force.”229 The image is echoed in subsequent manuscript illuminations and printed woodcuts by similar “bedded bodies”230; not only Arthur’s parents, but also Tristan and Iseult and Lancelot and Guinevere consummate love relationships that destabilize their societies as effectively as demonic rape. The frontispiece in the second volume of Antoine Vérard’s Merlin of 1498, presented to King Henry VII, is the most striking; as Muriel Whitaker describes it, the illumination “demands attention not only by means of its subject, the bearded, horned devil’s engendering of Merlin on a naked, long haired, modest-looking woman, but also by its colours—a blue bedspread embroidered with golden roses, magenta bed curtains and canopy, vivid green shrubbery and blue sky seen through the window.”231 In many illuminations, Merlin’s physical features and shape changes also stress his distinctiveness: showing him as a dark, “dwarfish figure” in contrast to “tall, slender aristocrats”; as “a peasant with brown kirtle and club entering Camelot behind a herd of cattle and flock of sheep”; and as “a bearded old man with a walking stick and grey cloak,” who is also pictured astride a black horse, as a stag, and in a tall hat—forerunner of the conical wizard’s hat of popular iconography.232 Such images all stress Merlin’s shape-shifting singularity. One type of intercourse prefigures another in Hoffman’s pattern: that between Merlin and Blaise, in which the master becomes the student’s scribe and the complicated sequence of scribal authority is signified, extend from the text’s original authority (Merlin) to the illuminator and scribe of the manuscript itself “as the visible

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record of the silent speech of Merlin.”233 Also extended from this image of “visible speech” are the variants in which Merlin, often with scroll or book in hand, counsels Vortigern, Ambrosius and Uther, Arthur, and others.234 As Hoffman also notices, in medieval manuscript illumination the mage is almost always portrayed as a boy or young man; therefore, his speech is not predicated on age or experience but on supernatural insight. The presence of occasional Merlin images unrelated to speech drives this point home: In Vérard’s illustrations, he is also transformed into a stag in the forest, denoting his wizardly powers and wild-man affinities for nature.235 In the Renaissance, Merlin’s image ages “from boy wonder to bearded sorcerer, master of demons and angels,”236 and his seduction by Viviane becomes a more prominent feature of his pictorial imagery in the 1505 and 1510 editions of the Vulgate Merlin by Parisian printers Michel le Noir and Jehan le Trepperel’s widow. In the first, Merlin holds a crystal or stone, with his book in the background, while overlooking a battle between angels and devils at the perimeter of the frame, as well as a naked and a clothed couple: both the supernatural struggle between good and evil and the “battle between the sexes” are within his view. The latter positions a cleanshaven mage and Viviane on either side of a tree, clearly an Edenic reference, and possibly suggesting “that women are now more dangerous than demons.”237 So does the 1498 Caxton reissue of Le Morte Darthur, with Merlin creeping into the cave at the behest of a stern Nimuë.238 Other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century woodcuts represent the mage in a variety of postures. They include a boy dictating to scribes in front of his cavern tomb, and a pensive, monkish figure with writing implements and book of prophecies (inscribed “The Red Dragon”), sitting under a tree with an assortment of wild animals (including a unicorn and battling dragons) in the background.239 As Hoffman observes, “Merlin is now no longer the speaker of prophecy, but the writer of his own text” and “an unmediated authority”240; he has proceeded from dictation (oral culture), to reading, to writing. During this period, also, influence from engravings of St. Jerome and visual allegories of Saturnian Melancholy personified in the Renaissance magus—especially those by Albrecht Dürer —began to influence illustrations of Merlin.241 When Merlin fully regains popularity in the nineteenth century after his late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century decline, however, he does so as “the fading voice of a lost age that is held up as a mirror for modern times either to imitate (Tennyson) or criticize (Twain).”242 Tennyson’s Idylls of the King inspired a large group of artists and illustrators. Most were sympathetic to the poet’s moral vision, but a few, like Dan Beard, Twain’s illustrator for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, render homage in parody—he used Tennyson’s photograph of himself costumed as Merlin as his model for Twain’s nefarious enchanter. Tennyson himself was seldom satisfied with his illustrators, who included Gustave Doré (1868) and his ominous, landscape-dominated chiaroscuro engravings with a dour, barefoot, heavily robed and bearded Merlin. Like many other visualizations of the mage, Doré’s work was rooted in the late-eighteenth-century romantic style of Thomas Jones’s The Bard (1774), whose lonely figure in a desolate landscape with megalithic ruins is usually interpreted as Merlin. Tennyson’s favorite illustrator for the Idylls was Julia Margaret Cameron, whose carefully staged

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photographs of costumed models “represent the first step toward cinematic interpretations as the dominant visual medium for the modern legend.”243 Cameron’s Merlin was dressed like Doré’s and played by her husband Charles in two photographs with (probably) a “Lady Amateur” who posed as Vivian; the exposure representing his ensorcelment was imperiled by his barely suppressed giggling.244 Painters, especially those related to the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements of the late nineteenth century, were also moved by the Arthurian revival to create works representing the mage, most often together with Arthur. His erotic entanglement with Vivian, though too risqué for many Victorian artists to prefer, became nevertheless a common subject to illustrate. It was an obsession for Edward Burne-Jones, who portrayed the subject five times, beginning with an 1867 mural for the Oxford Union project initially organized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. William Riviere completed the project with three less sensational murals, one of which was “The Education of Arthur by Merlin,” based on Spenser rather than Malory, which garnished the mage with “his wand, hourglass, skull, illuminated manuscript and a prophetic parchment showing Excalibur in a clenched hand, a crown, a snake, and a crescent moon.”245 Burne-Jones returned to Merlin’s infatuation in a small 1861 gouache (with Rossetti’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, as model for Vivien), the famous large oil canvas The Beguiling of Merlin (1872–77, with his own mistress, Mary Zambaco, as model), the small circular gouache The Witches Tree (1882), and the small oil Merlin and Nimuë (1884). In Burne-Jones’s last four treatments, Vivian is foregrounded, larger and clearly more powerful than the helplessly ensorceled Merlin, who becomes, in the 1884 painting, nearly faceless.246 Modern illustrations of Merlin proliferate, such as Alan Lee’s fine drawing of Merlin in near-cruciform posture as a woodland shaman, robed in rags and feathered cloak, grasping a horned skull-surmounted staff and almost a part of the forest itself (1987). Merlin has been a subject of illustration not only in English-speaking countries, but also on the Continent, in art such as André Derain’s Gauguin-like woodcuts in a deluxe edition of Apollinaire’s L’enchanteur pourrisant (1909). This includes a nude Viviane dancing on the enchanter’s tumulus, which contains his slumping skeleton and a snake erect upon its coiled tail.247 Given the current popularity of the Arthurian legends, Merlin remains a frequent subject of contemporary painters like the Bretons Paul Dauce and Sophie Busson.248 And he has appeared not only pictorially, but also in other media like H.H.Armstead’s wooden bas-relief, sculpted for the Queen’s Robing Room in Westminster Palace, in which he keeps Arthur from tumbling over the side of the boat while reaching for Excalibur (1867).249 William Goscombe John cast a bronze Merlin teaching Arthur (1902). Stained-glass treatments that incorporate the mage include American master Charles}. Connick’s Malory windows in the Princeton University chapel (1931), which include Merlin holding the infant Arthur and rowing him to Excalibur, and Veronica Whall’s window with Merlin (Wisdom) in his cave observing the Lady of the Lake (Faith) for King Arthur’s Hall of Chivalry in Tintagel (1931).250 A series of Royal Worcester porcelain plates ordered by the British branch of the International Arthurian Society includes one of Merlin under an apple tree; collectable examples from popular

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culture could be multiplied indefinitely, such as the wooden Merlin incense smoker from Germany’s Steinbach company, and the Ken and Barbie doll set costumed as Merlin and Morgan le Fay from Mattel. The iconography of the mage has been influenced even more profoundly by decorative masques and architectural follies from the seventeenth century on, which have tended to exaggeration and whimsy. Only Merlin’s costume and one stage set remain of Inigo Jones’s drawings of lavish costumes and props for Ben Jonson’s masque The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers. In William D’Avenant’s Britannia Triumphans and Aaron Hill’s Merlin in Love, he carries a wand and wears absurdly lavish robes and a hat embroidered with astronomical signs. Edward Burne-Jones designed the set and Merlin’s costume for J.Comyns Carr’s enthusiastically received drama King Arthur, with incidental music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, but his dignified and cleanshaven mage in a “silver-grey tunic under a grey-blue cloak, and a close-fitting black cap” was replaced by a more fantastic “wizardly figure with long white hair and beard, wrapped mysteriously in a flowing cloak ‘like one of the old witches in Macbeth.’”251 In opera, music, dance and film—performance arts closely related to stage play and masque—the mage has almost always been treated as a fantastic figure. Two surviving thirteenth-century songs invoke Merlin’s authority: he debates a Jewish theologian about Christ’s divinity in the Cantigas de Santa Maria for Alfonso X; and Thibaut de Navarre’s “Dex es ausi li pelicans” (God Is Like the Pelican) refers to his prophecies. No doubt many other medieval ballads, cantari, and other songs about Merlin have been lost. His tutelage of Arthur, wizardly powers, and seduction by Viviane are the favorite features in such works as the masques mentioned earlier, and in John Dryden’s King Arthur, or the British Worthy, choreographed by Josiah Priest and most notable today for Henry Purcell’s music. Seventeenth-century French ballets often featured Merlin.252 While the E.T.A.Hoffmann opera fictionalized by Robertson Davies does not exist, the mage did become popular in opera around the turn of the twentieth century. He appears as the central figure of Isaac Albeniz’s Merlin (1900) with libretto by Francis Burdett Coutts, the only completed opera of an Arthurian trilogy, as well as in two operas in Germany: Karl Goldmark’s Merlin (1886, revised 1904) and Felix August Bernhard Draeseke’s Merlin (1903–1905, performed 1913). Like these, Henry Hadley’s Merlin and Vivian: A Lyric Drama (1903) focuses on his betrayal by a fairy in league with Morgan le Fay; later musical productions, like Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler’s Merlin oder das Wüste Land and Elmer Bernstein’s “magical musical” Merlin (1983), have featured other aspects of his legend. The wizard also appears in operas and other dramatic productions with music telling the whole Arthurian story, including D.G.Bridson and Benjamin Britten’s radio play King Arthur (1903), Richard Boughton’s cycle of Arthurian oratorios, Marianne Helwig and Benjamin Britten’s radio adaptation of T.H.White’s The Sword in the Stone (1939), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1927), and Timothy Porter’s folk opera for children The Marvels of Merlin (1981), with a dual plot involving Arthur’s origins and the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen. Youth operas for elementary and middle school or for community performance, often influenced by Twain or White, are also an occasion

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for Merlin’s appearance, as is instrumental and popular music like Dan Welcher’s suite The Visions of Merlin (1980), Rick Wakemans “Merlin the Magician” on his 1974 rock album Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, and Merlin: The Rock Opera (1999–2000), a massive Italian production by Victoria Heward and Fabio Zuffanti, based upon Geoffrey of Monmouth “with cleverly expanded roles for the Devil and Vivian.”253 It is perhaps in film, which became the most influential artistic medium of the twentieth century, that the figure of Merlin most fully melds high art and popular culture.254 The rapidly advancing technical capabilities of film making have allowed increasingly spectacular settings and special effects for Arthurian subjects, and it is tempting to suggest, like Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot, that the mage is better encompassed as a producer or director than as a character. Major films attempting the Arthurian legend have employed him in supporting rather than leading roles, with Walt Disney’s animated feature The Sword in the Stone (1963) and John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) giving him the most attention. Disney’s film employs an iconic image of the wizard drawn from artistic tradition and T.H.White’s own illustrations, with long white beard, voluminous robes, and tall conical hat embellished with astronomical symbols.255 It overcomes the technical difficulties of portraying magic through its medium of animation emphasizing the role of Merlin’s sometimes comically misdirected wizardry in the Wart’s (young Arthur’s) education, and including set-pieces eliminated from The Once and Future King like the magic duel with the cannibalistic Madame Mim. Excalibur featured advanced cinematography and cast a talented actor (Nicol Williamson) in the role of Merlin; this he played with a demonic rather than avuncular edge, like a shaman who is always seeing two realities superimposed upon the same world. Live action movies of the legend, particularly with Merlin as a character, often struggle against unintentional parody; one film that embraces it whole-heartedly is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which replaces Merlin with the totally ineffectual wizard Tim in a minor role. Merlin is inherently so remarkable that he also has the potential to overshadow other characters; for such reasons, perhaps, some Arthurian films like First Knight (1995) omit him altogether. As in other literature, this problem is also sidestepped when he becomes a model or inspiration for new avatars, like First Officer Spock and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Made-for-television movies have fewer inhibitions about developing the fig-ure of Merlin, perhaps because few have any pretension of doing more than entertaining a mass audience. Like major motion pictures, they take great liberties with the legend— although the BBC’s Merlin of the Crystal Cave (1991), in six thirty-minute episodes based on Mary Stewart’s novel, is faithful to its source. Despite sometimes interesting innovations in Merlin’s major roles and adventures, more recent television movies have wallowed in clichéd character development and overblown special effects. These include CBS’s forgettable Arthur the King, retitled Merlin and The Sword (1982, aired 1985), and Merlin: The Magic Begins (1997), the Seagull Productions pilot for a television series. More ambitious was Hallmark Entertainment’s Merlin mini-series (1998), which attempted to outdo Excalibur in refocusing the entire Arthurian legend around the mage’s lifelong rivalry with Queen Mab (a new Arthurian character based

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upon British fairy lore, she displaces Morgan le Fay as the primary villain). This, like TNTs The Mists of Avalon mini-series (2001), which follows its source with unusual faithfulness, is influenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley-style feminism and the New Age penchant for interpreting the legend as a battle between Christianity and the fertility-based Old Religion. Many modern television series have alluded to or incorporated Merlin, such as The New Twilight Zone’s “The Last Defender of Camelot” (1986), a filmed version of Roger Zelazny’s short story, and Dr. Who’s “Battlefield” (1989), which reveals that the time-traveling Doctor from the planet Gallifrey was once known as Merlin. One American series, Mr. Merlin (1981–82) on CBS, was even devoted to the mage in a modern incarnation as a sage garage owner and mechanic with a young apprentice. Merlin also makes appearances in many animated cartoons for children (even adults) using the premise of time travel or the model of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.256 And before television, there were radio programs such as Stanley Baird Reed’s Merlin, Maestro of Magic (1932) and Ben Aycrigg’s Merlin the Magician (1950). Whatever their merits, all of these productions are essentially reductive or derivative, proving his continuing appeal to the imagination while demanding little or no knowledge of the medieval tradition. They have had scant influence (as yet) upon the further development of Merlin’s legend. His name and long-established iconography gives an immediately recognizable shape to a continually expanding diversity of concepts and applications, making them more accessible to their users. One of the earliest examples of popular (and a forerunner of “performance”) art was William Kent’s “Merlin’s Cave” in the Royal Gardens at Richmond Palace in 1735.257 An eighteenth-century architectural folly combining Palladian and gothic features with a thatched roof, it housed wax figures of Merlin, his scribe, and others. The “Cave” immediately became the subject of satirical publications, and it started a vogue for Arthurian theatrical productions and even taverns and coffee houses named after the mage. In about 1783, an enterprising inventor named John Joseph Merlin set up “Merlin’s Museum” to house entertaining devices like “Merlin’s Mechanical Tea Table” and a wooden head that rolled its eyes and opened its mouth; he planned (but never built) an even more ambitious showcase to be called “Merlin’s Necromantic Cave,” and in 1798 he commissioned artisan John Milton to design a copper medallion of Merlin Ambrosius.258 Even today, wherever esoteric knowledge or advanced technologies apply, one is apt to find him: in the large, like the United Kingdom’s MERLIN (Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network) radio telescope composed of six computerconnected observatories; and in the vanishingly small, like Merlin neurofibromatosis two tumor suppressor protein in human biochemistry. Even the earliest capabilities for which he was famed in medieval times survive in contemporary form: pages 24– 25 of the British sensationalist Sun newspaper for January 2, 2002, contain “Merlin’s Magical 100-Day Horoscope,” advertised on page one with the words, “From the lost Book of Merlin… Romance! Prosperity! Good Health! And much more from history’s famous real-life WIZARD!” Although specific images of King Arthur’s mage are immensely varied, he is commonly identified with generic representations of the magician resembling that of Celestial Seasonings Mint Magic Tea: “The magician’s

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flowing robes, long white beard, and tall pointed hat evoke canonical post-Victorian representations of Merlin; and the golden tea cup that hovers below the enchanter’s down-turned palm (surrounded as it is by a palpable aura) might easily be read as a domesticated Grail.”259 Indeed, Merlin and his association with the Grail, denoting wisdom and spiritual enlightenment beyond normal human scope and the fulfilment of the highest human aspirations, has become a marketing touchstone. Commodities too numerous to mention attempt to capitalize upon some of his magic, and a few—like the “electronic wizard” Merlin music player, including “five ‘ingenious’ games of logic, strategy, skill, memory, and chance,” made by Parker Brothers—actually succeed.260 For the more playful or adventurous, board, role-playing, and computer games and simulations also include Merlin’s character: for example, in Merlin (Heritage USA, 1980), where he once more battles the evil Morgana le Fey, King Arthur Pendragon (Chaosium, Green Knight, 1985, 1988, 1993), Merlin’s Apprentice (Funhouse/Phillips Media CD-ROM, 1995), and Merlyn’s Castle (www.cyberspacestudios.com/ merlyn.html, 2001).261 In such games, the mage is seldom a character to be played himself, but rather the mastermind of the game’s imaginary and often manichaean universe, supporting the powers of good against evil. Merlin’s invocation in comic-book illustration brings this discussion of the arts and popular culture full circle. An early appearance is in Harold R. (Hal) Foster’s longlived and influential Prince Valiant, begun in 1937, where the prophet, seer, and wizard appears as an expected adjunct of King Arthur’s court; looking much like the sage of Doré and Pyle, he must usually be consulted in his tower apart from Camelot. In comics, he is treated much the same way as in film, television, and cartoons: an allusion to explain the origin of some magical talisman or device, a cameo or “guest” figure, a featured protagonist, and a subliminal influence on new creations like Mandrake the Magician or Dr. Strange. The range of his influence in comics is wide, but his role is predominantly that of wizard and his portrayal commonly anachronistic. He may provide Captain Britain with an enchanted amulet (in Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe’s Captain Britain, 1976); summon the demon Etrigan (in Jack Kirby’s The Demon, 1972); be reincarnated to advise a future Pendragon (Matt Wagner’s Mage, 1984); or be summoned from beneath Stonehenge to aid a reawakened Arthur and his company repel outer-space aliens led by Morgana and Mordred (Mike Barr and Brian Bolland’s maxi-series Camelot 3000, twelve issues, 1982–1985); he may even pursue his inborn lusts in the parodical, pornographic black-and-white Arthur Sex (eight issues, 1991). He is also a premise for, and subject of, comic books in his own right, like Doug Moench and John Buscema’s Merlin: The Quest of the King (1980), Mark Wayne Harris and Nicholas Koenig’s MerlinRealm in 3– D (1985), and the six-issue maxi-series Merlin (1990–91) and two-issue sequel (1992) by R.A.Jones and Rob Davis. In the first, the mage rescues Arthur and Guinevere from the devil and his son Beliar. In the second, Merlin Ambrose has freed himself from “eternal imprisonment” in Stonehenge, created MerlinRealm from the dying universe at the end of time, and fathered an heir named Seth Merlinson, who is introduced as the book’s “black magician” protagonist. Merlins eight issues attempt a dark-age historicity loosely based upon Geoffrey of Monmouth, but with Merlin

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himself fathering Ambrosius’s heir Uther Pendragon and negotiating a love-hate relationship with the Morgan-like enchantress Cinobar.262 Having so thoroughly entered western cultural consciousness, in any artistic medium Merlin endures as a seemingly chaotic, shape-shifting paradigm for the creative imagination—yet always bearing some relationship, however tenuous at times, to his well-established roles and functions. Scholarship The debate over Merlin’s historicity was begun very early, as was so much else, by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey did not invent the figure, but he transformed it, inventing much that Merlin said and did, or appropriating it from other literary contexts and sources. Moreover, he presents his fabulous history, translated from “a certain very ancient book written in the British language,” as factual. Yet he carefully refrains from distinguishing here between historical fact and a factual style. His introduction to The Prophecies of Merlin does not assert their truth, but rather accedes to the reported urging that he “publish” them. His explanation of Merlin’s engendering by an incubus, though supported by reference to Apuleius, is placed in the mouth of Vortigern’s wizard Maugantius, who has much to gain by this explanation. And The Life of Merlin, despite its attempt to demonstrate a connection between the Merlin who prophesied to Vortigern and the Merlin who fought at Arfderydd roughly a century later, is no less elusive regarding the figure’s historicity. As previously described, the first of many critics to remark on this elusive-ness was Giraldus Cambrensis, who differentiated between these two Merlins. Despite his apparent acceptance of both Merlins’ historicity, Giraldus remains highly skeptical of Geoffrey’s reliability as a source and of Merlin’s character as well. Subsequent chroniclers seem also to doubt the more lurid features of Geoffrey’s Merlin, and especially his prophecies, but they usually stop short of questioning that Merlin ever existed. They and their commentators, like John Trevisa and John Selden, generally wanted the legend to be true and thus were often disappointed by the failure of folk beliefs to measure up to reason and experience, as Wace had been when he visited the spring of Barenton and its marvelous stone, identified by the people of Brittany as one of Merlin’s haunts.263 What seems characteristic here is the implicit faith that, despite the fantastic embellishments that are apt to accrue to a character, it must nonetheless possess a euhemeristic kernel of historical truth. Despite the lack of any but subsequent literary evidence, most critics have now agreed with A.O.H.Jarman’s argument to accept at least the Caledonian tradition that can be traced to the figure of Lailoken or Myrddin, subsequently transferred to the eponymous tradition of a Welsh Carmarthen Merlin associated with Ambrosius. Yet the “Quest for Merlin” continues, as in Nikolai Tolstoy’s book of that name (1985) and Norma Lorre Goodrich’s methodologically dubious Merlin (1988).264 The two books reflect an old debate between the predominance of Celtic or Christian influences in the development of Arthurian romance and characterization.265 Tolstoy is certain that a Caledonian druid named Merlin actually

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existed, and reconstructs him not far from the site of Arfderydd, at Hart Fell in Dumfriesshire. He also seeks to authenticate Merlin’s reputed powers by reference to pre-Christian beliefs and shamanistic practices, as well as relatively late literary documents such as Guillaume le Clerc’s early-thirteenth-century Fergus.266 The Quest for Merlin does a more convincing job of summarizing the mythological and folkloric material than of demonstrating Merlin’s historicity. It continually veers between superheated visionary assertions and disarmingly common-sense disclaimers. On one page we have: “I found it not difficult to picture things as they must once have been. I saw the wild-eyed seer, clad in his mantle of feathers, seated on one of the rocks by the stream tumbling past in its stony channel…. As the spring gushed up from its hidden world of cthonic secrets, so the Otherworld found a momentary channel through the disembodied awen of the seer” (p. 69). On another: “In fact, of course, it must be confessed that we possess only a flotsam of assorted materials, and the more precise the reconstruction, the less likely, alas, is its accuracy” (p. 159). N.L.Goodrich could also have paid better attention to the second statement, but she locates King Arthur and his Merlin—not Tolstoy’s post-Arthurian shaman—in Scotland. However, there are difficulties with her theory, not the least of which are the accumulated conflicting literary traditions. In her words, “(1) There occurs more than one Merlin, (2) there is more than one perfectly logical geographical setting, (3) Merlin displays at least two different characters, careers, and personalities, and (4) the whole is dominated…by the French clergy and by Roman orthodoxy” (p. 20). One might think that such evidence weighs against a single historical original, especially since the admittedly circumstantial evidence for Tolstoy’s “minor poet” (as she calls him) is stronger than that for King Arthur’s mage. But Goodrich persists. Her argument sometimes descends to a purely speculative level typified by her crochety defense of Geoffrey’s veracity: “In my view, he was too fine a scholar to have been a liar. He was also named to a bishop’s see just before his death. Such a great honor is not bestowed on liars” (219). After trying out many possibilities, she still does not seem to know exactly who Merlin was, but settles finally, not upon a Scot, but upon the fifth-century Welsh bishop and saint, Dubricius. If the historicist arguments have been unsuccessful, perhaps it is because they are too reductive; as Eckhardt observes, Merlin is both “embedded…in” and “transcends historical time,” depending on the role he plays in Arthurian narratives.267 Consequently, the literary mode of criticism has been the one to dominate Merlin scholarship.268 Paradoxically, there is less for me to say here because the literature that scholars have studied is so broad and varied as to defy all but the most superficial summary. They have produced editions and bibliographies. They have developed comparative surveys, for which the nineteenth-century prototypes include the commentaries in Albert Schultz’s (as San Marte) Die Sagen von Merlin (The Legends of Merlin, 1853), Hersart de la Villemarqué’s previously mentioned Myrdhinn, or Merlin the Magician, His History, Works, and Influence, and William Edward Mead’s “Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin” (initially published 1865).269 They have also produced significant twentieth-century work on Merlin as part of general Arthurian studies—individually, like James Douglas Bruce’s The Evolution of Arthurian Romance

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(1922), and collaboratively, like Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (1959), edited by Roger Sherman Loomis. Until recently, such general studies have remained the primary source of information about Merlin’s treatment in periods of literary history. Book-length studies of Merlin alone have been rare, with attention to the mage usually focused in articles on individual authors, works, themes, or motifs; and for this reason some unpublished doctoral dissertations have been included in the Select Bibliography. The literary dimension of scholarship overlaps the historicist because historians must use it to make their case. However, the literary concern is ultimately about the ways in which the texts can (1) be established and (2) be interpreted as to how they portray the figure and convey his meaning. Merlin is simply more interesting and complex as a textual tradition and a multifaceted literary character than as a single, hypothetical individual. Most of Merlin’s critical history has, like the rest of medieval studies, been dominated by the traditional practices of philology, literary historical studies, and, from about the middle of the twentieth century until recently, by New Critical explications of text. However, scholars were often slow to appreciate medieval texts as sophisticated works of art. One of the most thorough, W.E.Mead in “Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin,” summarily condemned romancers: “They have not yet learned how to write a neat and well-balanced prose” (p. ccxlvii). His contempt for the literary style of the prose romance he edited extends to its characterization, as well: “We catch glimpses now and then of a background of mystery in the strange life of Merlin—most of all when we see the magic spell stealing upon him as gently as music breathes across a bank of violets—but even then we are not allowed to gaze into the depths of the great magician’s heart; and we close the book with the feeling that between us and the men and women of the romance is a great gulf fixed, which we must cross before we can know them as they are” (p. ccxlvi). Several unstated assumptions about the nature of narrative and the wellwrought tale are operating here, not least of which are the assumptions that good writing should be naturalistic when it is not being poetic, that good stories are internally coherent and consistent in both content and style, and that they should be mediated by omniscient narrators who take us into the minds of the characters, creating compelling psychological portraits. More recent scholarship on the art of medieval romance narrative, including the intricacies of interlace technique and emblematism that are being reinvented in nonlinear postmodern texts, has demonstrated Mead’s view to be as anachronistic in its own way as medieval paintings that give biblical events settings contemporary to the artist’s themselves—although he does at least recognize the “pastness” of the past. Yet many, if not most, readers still prefer such modernized versions of the Arthurian romances to their medieval counterparts—if only because they recognize the impossibility of fully entering an archaic consciousness and its nolonger-shared tacit understanding of the world. Paradoxically, such indeterminacy confers a license to reinterpret that many medieval and Renaissance authors also took for granted. The revived popularity of the legends during the past one hundred and fifty years has caused many critics to seek anatomies along the lines of chronology, major

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authors, or some combination of genre and mode. For example, Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer follow a chronological scheme, and Alan and Barbara Lupack a chronology keyed to authorial influence, genre, and popular culture. Christopher Dean divides twentieth-century Merlin works into eclectic categories. The first is the didactic mode, serving our need for heroes and meaning in an age of lessening faith and increasing “idolatry” (p. 161); in this mode Merlin is employed as teacher, as allusion or reference point, as independent character—often in a non-traditional occupation, as himself an exemplar of the writer’s message—and as a symbolic or allegorical figure (pp. 159–98). He also appears in retellings of the legend, children’s and young adults’ literature, and adult fantasy with the supernatural as a major premise (pp. 199–238), and in historical fiction, comedy, and treatments of his love affair (pp. 238–69). Finally, there is a special category for works that feature Merlin as the central rather than a secondary character. Comprehensive though it may be, Dean’s mixture of mode, genre, and theme is too eclectic to describe adequately the works from which he adduces it; consequently, it is a convenient presentation device for his study rather than a formal classification system. A more coherent effort influenced by the theoretical system of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has been made by Raymond H.Thompson in The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction (1985), which concentrates on works after 1950. Thompson classifies works as retellings (mostly for younger readers); historical fiction (set in either the early or late Middle Ages, and either realistic or romantic in orientation); science fiction, giving a rational and often technological explanation for Merlin’s magic; and fantasy, where magic is accepted as such (pp. 4–5). The last category has easily become the most prolific, and Thompson distinguishes between low fantasy, where magic remains an unexplainable intrusion upon the narrative world, and high fantasy, where it is consistent and explainable (p. 5). High fantasy in turn may be heroic, stressing achievement against the odds; ironic, exposing the gap between aspiration and achievement; or mythopoeic, expressing the eternal battle between supernatural forces of good and evil (p. 6). In Thompson’s scheme, like Dean’s, some works seem to belong in more than one category. Apart from critical methodology, certain other general shifts in interest do seem clear. For example, the strongest literary and scholarly fascination with Merlin has coincided with the historical periods of Great Britain’s greatest power and darkest moments—the Hundred Years War and Wars of the Roses, the Elizabethan and Victorian empire building, and the two World Wars—and in periods when our paradigms of science and reality itself are being redesigned, as they have since the 1960s. From the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, Merlin’s demonic patrimony and prophetic powers were the main focus of attention because they related to political and millennial concerns—not only in Britain, but also on the Continent. The process of exaggerated growth and degeneration that operates on all Arthurian characters affected Merlin, too, leading to his trivialization as a stage magician and horoscope-caster. The Romantic interest in folk tradition, an upsurge in antiquarian scholarship, and the renewed sense of Britain’s world cultural mission combined to revive Merlin scholarship, as well as Arthurian literature, during the

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nineteenth century. By the end of that century, however, Merlin’s psychology and relationship with women commanded increasing attention, reflecting profound changes in readership and literary techniques. In the twentieth century, Merlin was increasingly regarded as an icon of human concerns about technology and cognition as well as love and fate. In such ways, Merlin has come to personify human consciousness in contact with otherness in the environment, in people, and in history. Current critics often emphasize the dizzying multiplicity of the character’s roles and his educative function in literature, and critical approaches to him run the gamut of theoretical methodologies. His master trope in literary scholarship is no longer prophetic foresight—a highly ironic notion today—but shape shifting, through which (like his critics) he can still play the parts of both sage and fool. Merlin is, after all, a magician—the archetypal magician of English-speaking western culture. Therefore, the occult dimensions of his character, rooted in his begetting and his prophetic powers, and in the effects of pre-Christian cults and Christian asceticism on the medieval wild man motif, have fascinated critics from the very beginning. Merlin’s role as the chief historian of the Grail in the work of Robert de Boron and his continuators introduced these motifs to wider esoteric issues, and it led in turn to Merlin’s association with alchemy and other protosciences. However, the apocryphal tradition of Merlin as a druid may be laid at the door of early nineteenth-century Welsh antiquarians like William Owen-Pughe, Edward Davies, Algernon Herbert, and the druidical revival’s chief popularizer, Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams), rather than folk tradition per se.270 In the twentieth century, esoteric folklorists like Lewis Spence have perpetuated the druidical model, and occultists like Violet Firth, who wrote under the name of Dion Fortune, have even connected Merlin (as well as Morgan and Avalon) with the tradition of Atlantis.271 Today, a whole new generation of critics operates under the influence of a New Age esoteric revival that parallels and draws symbiotically (some might say parasitically) upon the Arthurian revival. One harbinger of the current revival has been the periodical Merlin, or Understanding, “dedicated to the propagation of a better understanding of the peoples of Earth, and those who are not of Earth.”272 Modernday, neopagan mystics subscribe to a different critical paradigm. The crucial difference is perhaps best signified by their preference for the term “wisdom” over “knowledge” since wisdom connotes a way of knowing that not only is experiential and intellectual, but that also transcends conventional science by discarding objectivity when it gets in the way of understanding. Their form of literary scholarship, in other words, is not the same as that of most academics, although academics have perhaps encouraged it through their own recent theoretical emphasis on the power of subjectivity to penetrate all discourse. Contemporary esoteric treatments of Merlin—like those of his most prolific advocates, John Matthews and musician-turned-guru R.J.Stewart—combine Jungian psychoanalysis, environmentalism, and feminism with more traditional occult staples in recreating Merlin as “the greatest inner-plane teacher we have ever seen in this land” (Matthews), and “a collective and individual image, merging with the ancestral Merlin or Merlins, who were living human beings” (Stewart).273 To esotericists,

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however, the existence of an actual Merlin or Merlins to be revered and even channeled is less significant than Merlin’s continual availability as what Joseph Campbell has described as the central metaphor of the hero’s quest: the transformation of human consciousness. This transformation is part of what the Grail has always signified, and it reifies Merlin as an identity active both inside and outside of history, implicit in all of his shifting powers and shapes. Finally, scholars should acknowledge the often-overlooked dimension of “tacit” criticism: the way in which all literary texts implicitly criticize their subjects. Whenever a choice is made of what to include or leave out, or of a context and means of presentation, or what artwork to use, this itself asserts a critical position on the subject. Thus artists, as well as scholars, “do” criticism; it is always inherent in their art. In this sense, all criticism of Merlin is metacriticism. Literary criticism of T.H.White’s Merlyn, for example, is a reification of his author’s conception of the figure as a benevolent but absent-minded, and quite literally anachronistic, tutor. But precisely because such literary texts practice tacit criticism that is reflexively enacted by reading, they also need scholars to excavate and comment upon that criticism, situating it in terms of Merlin’s legend—an ever-expanding work of many minds and hands. Fittingly, the tacit mode of reading the mage brings us back to where we started. For Merlin has, from the very beginning, been both master and victim of history, and a cocreator of the legend in which he plays such important roles. In both oral and written forms, he inscribes his own textual realities. Whether one or more Merlins actually existed or not, the mage has always been his own first and best scholar and critic. Both with and without the assistance of his emanuensis Blaise, Merlin comments upon the parts that everyone plays in the construction of Camelot and the history of the Grail, translating life into text and embroidering that text into a grand and transcendent vision that is rooted in our thirst for meaning, even in our most mundane concerns. The Contents of this Volume The seventeen essays that follow represent some of the varied approaches to scholarship on the figure of Merlin and discuss many of the most influential texts on his legend. Five have been commissioned especially for this volume, three of which are substantially revised and expanded versions of previously published essays by their authors. The remaining twelve are previously published essays or excerpts from book-length studies —some of them classics, and four of them new translations of work unavailable in English at the time of their commissioning. Information on where the essays were first published is included in the Select Bibliography. They have been chosen with a dual purpose. Part I: The Evolution of the Legend summarizes the major aspects of Merlin’s development as a character and powerful literary archetype in several western literary traditions, and it surveys a wide range of texts devoted to him in several languages. Part II: Major Motifs and Works explores the nuances of his deployment in particularly significant or influential literary and visual art texts.274

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They frequently invoke his primary roles and functions, and they may thus be read comparatively as well as individually. The first three essays investigate the origins and early history of Merlin’s major characteristics, from wild man to soothsayer, and from magician to lover. Chapter One is the third and most authoritative version of A.O.H. Jarman’s researches into Merlin’s Welsh origins.275 An editor and critic of the earliest Welsh Arthurian texts, Jarman has been in a unique position both to decipher the surviving literary artifacts based on language study and to reconstruct the transmission of the legend from the Scottish and English borderlands to Wales and Ireland, and thence to Geoffrey of Monmouth and other writers in Latin under Anglo-Norman patronage. His studies over more than forty years convincingly demonstrate that a late-sixth-century legend deriving from the battle of Arfderydd near Carlisle was relocated to southern Wales and developed an Irish analogue, giving rise to an eponymously named prophet and poet who became ranked with Taliesin as the greatest of Welsh bards. The second chapter is Victoria Guerin’s translation from the Introduction and Chapter Four of Paul Zumthor’s seminal University of Geneva dissertation on Merlin’s development—despite its importance, a work previously unavailable in English. His work references an extraordinarily wide range of sources from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and in some chapters he pursues the figure even into modern times. In this representative section, Zumthor builds upon an earlier generation of Arthurian scholars in order to emphasize the roles of prophet and wizard and how widespread the legend became in European literary history. He describes two “traditions” in the character’s development: the magician’s traits by which he came to be identified and described, and the prophetic theme that predominated through the Renaissance. For Zumthor, magic and prophecy are intertwined in the legend’s literary execution, and they are associated late in the Middle Ages with a parallel tradition concerning Virgil. They are also inextricably linked to the wise man’s relationship with women, and to the development of Morgan and Vivian that is influenced by medieval antifeminism. Guerin’s fluent translation also provides invaluable service to the scholar by verifying and fleshing out Zumthor’s exceptionally compact footnotes through research at the same libraries used by the author. Following the theme on which the second chapter ends is Anne Berthelot’s recent summation of the two women with whom Merlin loves and contends. Describing their textual origins and development as Jarman has Merlin’s, she shows how the motif of the fairy lover structures medieval views of male and female magic. It does so by balancing their roles as creatures of nature, by apportioning the reputation for sexual aggrandizement in varying ways among the mage and his mistresses and disciples, and by contrasting the Christian emphasis on the magic of prophetic words (and predominantly masculine literacy) with the pagan magic of acts to satisfy natural desires. Although Merlin hands on his magic to the women, he withholds his prophetic and scriptural abilities; this feature subordinates female magic to the predominant ideology of the romances, and it thereby “disenchants” both the women

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and the wizard whom the Lady of the Lake or her maiden removes from the Arthurian scene. The next three essays survey Merlin’s history in the literatures of Italy, Spain and Portugal, and Germany. In Chapter Four, Donald L.Hoffman shows that both the prophetic tradition established by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the wizardly functions of the mage in French romance were adapted to Italian politics, particularly the medieval court of Frederick II in Sicily and the Renaissance court of the Este family in Ferrara, becoming a voice of Italian unity and freedom from the oppression of petty lords. Barbara D.Miller’s chapter details the greater impact Merlin has had upon Iberian literature in adaptations of the prophecies, the Post-Vulgate romance view of the magician, the Spanish Golden Age fascination with questions of illusion and reality, and the modern reinterpretations of Merlin’s loves and reputed powers. Merlin did not serve the purposes of political dynasties in Spain as he had in Italy, but he has become instead a seer and enchanter whose tale at times connotes insurgency— both within the strictures of paternalistic secular authorities, and of a Catholic orthodoxy-through his infernal engendering and talents. Miller observes that his dualistic personality alternately serves obsessive chivalry and obsessive love. He becomes a figure who transcends established authority and who therefore threatens it as well as serving its needs, in addition to becoming a victim ultimately of his selfdesconstructing nature, best seen when he is paired with a woman. Chapter Six, by Ulrich Müller, describes how the figure of Merlin in the German-speaking nations has been particularly influenced by outside models—particularly from French literature during the Middle Ages, and from English and American literature in recent times— while developing a native tradition of interpreting Merlin in philosophical terms as a visionary authority on the natural processes prevailing in the life of individuals and nations as well as in the environment. Müller therefore interprets the primary roles of Merlin in German literature as wild man and seer, sage counselor and lover. To an even greater extent than in other European literatures, his function becomes personal enlightenment for the individual and utopian vision (though ultimately defeated) for society and its institutions. The last two chapters of Part I survey the mage’s legend in post-Enlightenment literature in English. Alan C.Lupack’s discussion of Merlin concentrates insights from his voluminous work on the Arthurian legend in the United States. By treating a series of popular and landmark texts, he demonstrates that “the Dream of Camelot” has merged with the American Dream, a skeptical but predominantly optimistic attitude toward releasing human potentialities, and reconciling the Garden with the Machine. To a greater extent than even Arthur and his knights, Merlin becomes acquainted with the Frontier (whether terrestrial or intellectual) and identified with the American Adam, whose quest for achievement often ends with a fall but proves admirable even in failure. He also becomes a spokesperson for American democratic values and meritocracy, in sometimes explicit criticism of Old-World aristocracy. And his image in America has also been liberated from Arthurian settings into a variety of shapes that do not always bear his name. In Chapter Eight, Raymond H.Thompson updates his own influential work on Merlin and extends the discussion

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to late-twentieth-century fiction from all of North America and Britain. He begins by noting that the mage is rarely a main character, but rather one who orchestrates the efforts of others, and that his powers tend to be similarly restricted in scope and degree. He is limited in physical terms by youth, age, or the dangers of wielding magic; in environmental ways by the opposition of powerful enemies, or the fallibility of the humans he aids; and in mental ways by withdrawal from the world, the belief that people must freely choose their own courses of action, or his own urge to wield power over others. His actions in modern fiction take place in terms of dualistic structures and polarities, such as the battle between good and evil, opposition from other sorcerers both male and female, or dichotomies from within himself, and for these reasons he has become a cyclical figure whose periodic return is assured. The first two essays in Part II address the archetypal role of Merlin in relation to the human unconscious. In Chapter Nine, the influential Indologist Heinrich Zimmer meditates upon the aspects of the mage’s character that are covalent with other wise men—not only in the Christianized West of the Middle Ages, but around the world. Friedhelm Rickert’s translation of Zimmer’s original published article in the German journal Corona helps us to see the mystical and mythological aspects both of Merlin’s character and of Zimmer’s own thinking, which influenced the noted comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. Later, Campbell himself translated and substantially rewrote Zimmer’s article, fitting it into his own unified mythological system and using Zimmer’s notes and conversational remarks for revision.276 The Corona article was chosen for this volume because it is so rare and because it has interesting differences from the revised publication. In it, Zimmer concentrates upon the French Vulgate romance cycle to describe the mage as a forest shaman and master of initiation who follows the pattern of other demigods by being “from the world of man and the realm of the supernatural powers.” His function is therefore to represent the transition between ages by advising and enabling culture heroes like Arthur and his knights, and in this sense he controls both the danger and its overcoming, maintaining the balance between light and dark. Even by meeting his end willingly, he maintains this eternal balance, embracing folly as well as wisdom, and passing “into the power which he constitutes himself.” There are clear parallels here between Merlin and other mystics, and to Campbell’s cyclical monomyth of the hero, in whose terms Merlin is both archetypal tester and a hero himself. Emma Jung, wife of psychoanalytic theorist Carl B.Jung, and her collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz have also developed Zimmer’s line of thought in terms of Jungian psychology. Comprising two of the five chapters devoted to Merlin at the end of their book The Grail Legend, Chapter Ten posits the figure of Merlin as an archetypal symbol of the fourth element in a “quaternity,” in which both the Holy Grail and Merlin as its personification and essence complete and restore the original unity of the Trinity itself. In psychological terms, then, Merlin becomes not only the shower of the Way, but its suprareligious content or avatar in nonverbal space. Thus he adopts the roles of archetypal wise old man—medicine man, prophet, and trickster —and personalizes the object of the alchemical experiment that merges the natural and supernatural, matter and mind. His duality becomes a symptom of his appearance

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in opposing or duplicated forms (including human/animal and animus/anima) that embody both destructive and redeeming forces. In the Jungian view, he opens up the unconscious in order to restore wholeness to psyche and society, and his own story enacts this process of renewal. The next five essays investigate portrayals of Merlin in major literary texts. In Chapter Eleven, Alexandre Micha, editor of the Vulgate Merlin and Lancelot,277 delineates the characteristics of Robert de Boron’s mage, the first major innovation in the character after Geoffrey. Miren Lacassagne’s translation from Micha’s study of the Merlin shows how Merlin’s engendering became not only marvelous but also diabolical, giving him the devil’s powers in the attempt to anticipate and forestall Christ’s second coming, and by means of divine intervention making him into a positive transfiguration of Jesus. After a comparison of the two figures, Micha takes up an important motif in Merlin’s legend: his sardonic laughter, the sign of his sen or “wisdom, intelligence, and psychological intuition” penetrating the everyday appearances to the truths hidden from ordinary human perception. His critique of Merlin’s capabilities and actions reveals a peremptory and self-indulgent streak in the mage, despite his high mission—a weakness that makes him dualistic in yet another sense, but one typical of medieval literature and its audience, whose expectations do not include internal consistency of characterization. Kate Cooper ‘s penetrating discussion of Merlin’s power in the Post-Vulgate Huth manuscript emphasizes the importance of speech and textuality in the character’s crafting of both prophecies and events narrated in the various books attributed to Blaise (which the Huth manuscript purports to be), to Uter and Pandragon, and to that master “book,” the Word of God inscribed upon phenomenal nature. Merlin is the child of two fathers: the devil and God. Cooper describes the process of writing overseen by Merlin as analogous to the discovery of paternity: beginning with paternal absence, and ending with the death or renunciation of the father and ascendancy of the son. Thus history becomes an identity-making process; it is also a figural translation of eternity, in which writing becomes history, “pure perception” is defined as the ability to know the absent past and future, and the “insufficiency” of the written word corresponds to that of human consciousness. By transcending these limitations and knowing what is absent, the ambivalent figure of Merlin conjoins history with eternity, chronicle with romance. Moving from French to English romance, Chapter Thirteen also begins with questions of textuality and paternity. Donald L.Hoffman’s second essay in this volume begins by noting Sir Thomas Malory’s erasure of Merlin’s nativity, which makes the mage a riddle answerable only by his behavior or by the knowledge other characters have of him. Hoffman maintains that Malory’s Merlin is tragic because, like the Greek Cassandra, he is most right when his council is ignored. His tragedy is existential, moreover, because he carries out his design knowing that its means are a mixture of good and evil and that it will ultimately fail. In the light of this foreknowledge, his shape shifting and trickster-like playfulness makes sense as “uncanny” but courageous responses to destiny. With his demise, magic in Malory becomes simpler and less disturbing; the need for love that ensnares even the seer is what disenchants as well as enchants Arthurian chivalry—in its beginnings as in its end. Edmund Spenser’s Merlin

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is also un-usually important despite his relatively small role. In Chapter Fourteen William Blackburn describes The Faerie Queene’s mage, adopted from Ariosto, as the quintessential artificer and prophet. Whereas Ariosto had portrayed a prophet, Spenser shifts attention to his powers of making—particularly those objects like the magic mirror and diamond shield that signify light, imagery, mutability, and thereby the artistic illusion. He reviews Merlin’s development in order to show how classical tradition added to the accreted qualities of the mage, contributing to a composite figure intentionally refashioned from inherited material. By making small changes in the figure, Spenser is an important illustration for its overall pattern of literary development. This theme of the artist is also at the center of the fifth major work, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, as explicated by Catherine Barnes Stevenson. Implicit in the Idylls from the beginning is the image of a great subcreator who falls prey to seduction in an anti-pastoral, and the theme of the highest brought low. Stevenson’s probing of Tennyson’s varied influences brings out his fascination with the prophetbard figure so strongly emphasized during the first half of the nineteenth century, and it shows the persistence of Romantic-era influence merging into the beginnings of a new psychological understanding of how even the greatest may be destroyed from within. In Stevenson’s view, Vivien is not Merlin’s destroyer but only the agent of his destruction, for he is doomed by his own sensibility, like rest of the court he serves. Yet the other Idylls also emphasize the constructive and consolatory power of his vision, affirming an ideal worth striving for, even as its creators inevitably fail to achieve it in perpetuity. Throughout the evolution of the Idylls, the figure of the great mage also changes subtly until the role of teacher joins those of prophet and bard at the core of Tennyson’s conception, embodying the poet’s own deepest convictions about his career and art in their personal and social contexts. In Chapter 16, Linda K.Hughes develops this critique of Tennyson’s Merlin as a visionary artist and describes how his work and the tradition of Merlin profoundly influenced late-nineteenth-century painting and illustration. In pictorial art, as in literature, the incremental revision of the figure portrays the artist’s shifting imaginative identification with the subject, as well as interpreting the literary text. The primary image of Merlin for these artists usually included Vivien, whether as lamia-like destroyer, externalization of the mage’s inner self, or symbiotic counterpart. Yet they lead from Merlin’s predominance over her in Doré’s illustrations, to his subjection in Burne-Jones and Beardsley. For Doré, the seer is a public figure; for Burne-Jones, he becomes (as does Vivien) intensely personal; and for Beardsley, eventually enigmatic and entirely withdrawn. In the last chapter, this inward progression of Merlin’s image and his absorption into nature become an image, not of destruction, but of renewal to Jean Markale. His view of Merlin is most of all as the embodiment of our engagement with the natural world and its processes, both seen and unseen, and the triumphant return to instinctual life. In this way, Markale cycles the discussion of the figure back to his origins, as a man of nature in Jarman’s essay beginning Part I, and of inner nature in Zimmer’s beginning Part II. As a druidical or shamanistic figure, he is master of both the life of plants and of animals, and so Markale revisits the early legends to reaffirm

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their relevance to contemporary thought and spiritual life at the close of one millennium and the start of another. Merlin may thus be understood as a cyclical figure who leads us back to our beginnings, through them, and forward to a future form of understanding that is not limited to either science or instinct but that remakes and comprehends them both in a spiral path, “the force” (in the words of Dylan Thomas) “that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Acknowledgments Scholarly projects are always collaborative, but one with a lengthy gestation and many contributors is especially so. As a result, I owe thanks to many more people than it is possible to mention, except (in the case of published writers) by referencing their work in the Notes and Select Bibliography. I owe particular thanks to Gary Kuris, for initiating the Arthurian Casebook series and early encouragement for this volume, Norris Lacy for near-saintly tact and expert, courteous guidance throughout the project, and my co-editor Raymond H. Thompson for contributing his invaluable knowledge, judgment, and editorial assistance to the entire volume beginning in May 2002, when a serious injury had temporarily incapacitated me. Special thanks are due also to the authors who wrote or substantially revised and updated (more than once) work especially for this volume: Donald L.Hoffmann, Barbara D.Miller, Ulrich Müller, Alan C.Lupack, and Raymond H.Thompson—and to Linda K.Hughes, who generously obtained permissions and contributed camera-ready reproductions of the illustrations that accompany her chapter. The commissioned translators of essays originally written in languages other than English deserve appreciation and thanks not only for their multilingual accomplishments, but in several instances also for their scholarly spadework in contributing or reconstructing textual notes: Friedhelm Rickert, Miren Lacassagne, Janina P.Traxler, and especially Victoria Guerin. All of these skilled people have been unfailingly patient and good-humored in preparing the chapters of this volume. Much of my work on the volume and its Introduction has been supported by a sabbatical and grants from the faculty and the School of Arts and Sciences at Northern Michigan University, for which I am grateful. I am indebted also to Mary Letts, Rose Rosina, and Monica Drusch for retyping or scanning previously published chapters; to Jason Harper and Geoffrey Hineman for preparing and proofing several chapters, and to the Center for Instructional Technology in Education at Northern Michigan University for computer-generating a raw index. Finally and most important of all, I cherish the sustained love and support of my wife Meg and our children Andrew and Katrina. Raymond H.Thompson expresses gratitude, as well, to his wife Hilary for her support of his editing duties and forbearance under the pressure of our deadlines. Notes Works that are cited in full in the Select Bibliography appear in these Notes in abbreviated form. Studies designated by an asterisk are included in this volume.

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1. One caveat is in order, however: Merlin’s development in medieval romance is largely confined to prose works. 2. The quotation is from Norris J.Lacy, Gen. Ed., Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Vulgate and PostVulgate in Translation, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993–96); Rupert Pickens, trans., Vol. I, p. 181, corresponding to H.Oskar Sommer, ed., The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1908–16); II, pp. 27–28. 3. One such treatment is Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), which completely excludes Merlin. Parke Godwin’s Firelord (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980) is one of several that come close, reducing him to an aspect of Arthur’s own psyche visible only to him on brief, albeit important, occasions. Several other twentiethcentury works of fiction and many neopagan writings consider “Merlin” to be a title rather than an individual’s proper name, as in “the Merlin [i.e., bard or prophet] of Britain.” For a discussion of attempts in the historical novel to rationalize Merlin’s powers, see Thompson, “Rationalizing the Irrational.” 4. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, Arthurian Handbook, p. 271. Many reasons contribute to the legend’s popularity; my emphasis in these opening comments is on the largely unconscious affinities that make it mythic and make its popularity difficult to explain adequately. 5. For the figure of King Arthur, see Edward Donald Kennedy, ed., King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1996), Volume I in this series. 6. For St. Kentigern, see A.P.Forbes, The Lives of S.Ninian and S.Kentigern (Edinburgh, 1874); K.H.Jackson, “The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern,” in N.K.Chadwick, ed., Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). For a Latin edition and commentary on the Lailoken fragments, see H.L.D.Ward, “Lailoken (or Merlin Silvester),” Romania 22 (1893), pp. 504–26; for a translation see Aubrey Galyon and Zacharias P.Thundy, trans., “Lailoken,” in Goodrich, ed., The Romance of Merlin, pp. 3–11. For both, see Winifred and John MacQueen, “Vita Merlin Silvestris,” Scottish Studies 29 (1989), pp. 77–93. 7. John K.Bollard, “Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition,” in Goodrich, ed., The Romance of Merlin, pp. 23–24, stanzas five and seven. 8. Ibid., pp. 53–54. The standard edition of the Triads is Rachel Bromwich, ed., Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1960). 9. For editions of Geoffrey’s works, see Julia Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth III: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989) and The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991); and Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern Burgerbibliothek, MS 568 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth II: The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988), and The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth V: The Gesta Regum Britanniae (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991). The standard English translation of the History and Prophecies is Lewis Thorpe, trans., The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). For the Life, see Basil Clarke, ed. and trans., Life of Merlin, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) and John Jay Parry, ed. and trans., The Vita Merlini, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 10.3 (August 1925), reprinted without notes in Goodrich, ed., The Romance of Merlin, pp. 71–98. One influential early discussion is “Excursus I: ‘Merlin in the Works of Geoffrey of Monmouth’” in H.Munro Chadwick and N.Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, Vol. 1 of The Ancient Literatures of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932, rpt. ed. 1968). An even more comprehensive treatment is J.S.P.Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). See, for example, Leslie Alcock, Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology A.D. 367–634 (London: Penguin, 1971), and Geoffrey Ashe, ed., The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (London: Praeger, 1968). Lewis Thorpe, trans., The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 192–93. The Latin edition is J.F.Dimock, ed., Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 8 vols. (London: Longman, 1861–91). Page references throughout are to Thorpe’s English translation. On this subject in the Life of Merlin, see Penelope B.R.Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 153–58. The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 171. Ibid., pp. 153–54. In addition to William of Newburgh and Giraldus Cambrensis, historians who explicitly attacked the accuracy of the History and its accounts of Arthur and Merlin included Ranulph Higden (trans. by John Trevisa in 1387) and Polydore Vergil (in 1512–13). Wace was edited by I.Arnold, 2 vols. (Paris: SATF, 1938–40); Layamon by G.L.Brook and R.F.Leslie, Early English Text Society 250, 277 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 1978). Both Wace and Layamon were translated by Eugène Mason in Arthurian Chronicles (London: Dent, 1912). See Jean Blacker-Knight, “Transformations of a Theme: The Depoliticization of the Arthurian World in the Roman de Brut” in The Arthurian Tradition: Essays in Convergence, ed. by Mary Flowers Braswell and John Bugge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), pp. 55–74, for the argument that Wace tailored his chronicle to an audience that had little interest in British politics or political prophecy. A Study of Merlin in English Literature, pp. 14, 15. Eckhardt, “Figure of Merlin,” pp. 22–23. These developments are also discussed in Dean, pp. 16–18. Editions are The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, 2 vols., ed. William Aldis Wright, Rolls Series 86 (London, 1887); The Story of England by Robert Manning of Brunne, A.D. 1338, 2 vols., ed. Frederick J.Furnivall, Rolls Series 87 (London, 1887); and The Chronicle of John Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Rivington, 1812). The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft in French Verse, from the Earliest Period to the Death of King Edward I, ed. Thomas Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1866); for Castleford, MS. Hist. 740, Niedersächsische- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany. Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 16. Eckhardt, “Figure of Merlin,” pp. 34–35. See Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 18. Eckhardt, “Figure of Merlin,” p. 31. The Prose Brut or Chronicle of England survives in many versions, both in French and English. See especially The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich Brie, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1906,1908). There are also more than sixty Welsh Bruts or translations of Geoffrey from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries; that their translators, too, have doubts is indicated by the statement in the Peniarth 44 manuscript that the prophecies have been omitted because “they are difficult for people to believe” (Brynley F. Roberts, “Geoffrey of Monmouth,” p. 113).

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26. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translation of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. C.Babington and J.R.Lumby, 9 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1865–86). See especially Trevisa, Book I, pp. 410–11, who considers the wild and superstitious Welsh to have been improved by the Saxon conquest. 27. Editions are Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. August Le Prévost and Léopold Delisle (Paris: Renouard, 1833–53); Michael J.Curley, “A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini,” Speculum 57 (1982), pp. 217–49; and Les légendes des matières de Rome, de France et de Bretagne dans le Pantheon de Godefroi de Viterbe (Paris, 1933). 28. In E.A.Kock, ed., Den Norsh-Isländska Skaldediktningen (Lund: Gleerups, 1949). 29. Anne Berthelot, ed., Les Prophesies de Merlin (Cologne: Bodmer, 1990); see also Lucy Allen Paton, ed., Les Prophecies de Merlin, 2 vols. (New York: Heath, 1926). 30. Ireneo Sanesi, ed. (Bergamo: Instituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1898). 31. The title is preserved in a thirteenth-century list of lais; see Modern Language Review 45 (1950), pp. 40–45. 32. See Aileen Ann Macdonald, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 29–31, and Pierre Le Gentil, “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval” in Loomis, ed., ALMA, pp. 252–53. Robert’s works are included in Merlin: Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1979); The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H.Oskar Sommer, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1908–16); and Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J.Lacy, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993–96). 33. Stephen Maddux, “The Fiction of the ‘Livre,’” p. 47. 34. Ibid., pp. 50, 53. 35. For his involvement in romantic and sexual relationships, see especially *Berthelot, and my “The Erotic Merlin.” 36. The Vulgate cycle Merlin romance is also called L’Estoire de Merlin, while its Post-Vulgate counterpart, originally attributed to Robert de Boron, is the Huth Merlin or Suite du Merlin. See the editions and translation cited in note 32. Studies include Jane E.Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Re-reading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985); Macdonald, The Figure of Merlin; and Fanni Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail: A Study of the Structure and Genesis of a Thirteenth Century French Prose Romance (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1966). 37. See Lewis Thorpe, “The Four Rough Drafts of Bauduin Butors,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 12 (1968), pp. 3–30; 13 (1969), pp. 49–64; 14 (1970), pp. 41–63; and Louis Fernand Flutre, “Le Roman de Pandragus et Libanor par Baudouin Butor,” Romania 94 (1973), pp. 57– 90. The Livre d’Artus is included in Sommer, The Vulgate Version; see also Frederick Whitehead and Roger Sherman Loomis, “The Livre d’Artus” in Loomis, ed., ALMA, pp. 336– 38. 38. See William Roach, ed., The Didot-Perceval (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941) and the French edition in Le Roman du Graal: Manuscrit de Modene, ed. Bernard Cerquiglini (Paris: Union Generale d’Editions, 1981). 39. The most recent editions are Le Roman de Silence, trans. F.Regina Psaki (New York: Garland, 1991) and Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues, 1992). Several recent articles have been devoted to Merlin’s role in this romance and its adaptation of the Grisandole episode from the Vulgate. 40. Johann Alton, ed. (Tübingen: Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 1884). 41. O.D.Macrae-Gibson, ed. 2 vols., EETS O.S. 268, 279 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1979).

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42. This model of ancient Indo-European ideology was developed by the comparative philologist Georges Dumézil, and is summarized from an anthropological perspective in C.Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). The three principles of this ideology are: (1) preservation of cosmic order; (2) physical prowess; and (3) corporeal sustenance. The first two clearly characterize the respective importance of Merlin and Arthur from their earliest appearances in literature, and together they and their allies establish a milieu in which the third can also flourish. 43. Henry Lovelich, Merlin: A Middle English Version of a French Romance, ed. Ernst A. Kock, 3 vols., EETS E.S. 93, 112, O.S. 185 (London: Oxford University Press, 1904, 1913, 1932); Merlin: or, The Early History of King Arthur; A Prose Romance, ed. Henry B.Wheatley, 4 vols. EETS O.S. 10, 21, 36, 112 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1865, 1866, 1869, 1899; rpt. in 2 vols., New York: Greenwood, 1969). 44. I am indebted to John Conlee for pointing out that Lovelich attempts to mitigate salacious scenes such as the tryst that Merlin arranges for the married King Ban with Agravadain’s daughter, Leodegan’s siring of multiple Gueneveres, and Arthur’s tryst with Morgause and first introduction to Guenevere. The author of the Prose Merlin presents these scenes without apology. Such episodes are relevant because they signal the uncourtly sexual undercurrent that Merlin inherits from his father and that compromises Arthur’s reign. 45. The best editions are: for William Caxton’s text, ed. William Matthews and James Spisak, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); for the Winchester text, The Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver; rev. ed. P.J.C.Field, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 46. Lacy et al., ed. New Arthurian Encydopedia, p. 295. 47. See Mary B.Speer, ed., “Le Roman des Sept Sages de Rome”: A Critical Edition of the Two Verse Redactions of a Twelfth-Century Romance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1989); Hans R. Runte, J.Keith Wikeley, and Anthony J.Farrell, The Seven Sages of Rome and the Book of Sindbad: An Analytical Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1984). 48. The emperor is not trying to erect a tower, but is ill or unable to leave Rome without losing his eyesight. The child asks him to dig a hole, revealing seven cauldrons that can be destroyed —reversing the king’s debility—by decapitating the seven false sages. In one Italian version, the Erasto (1542), it is even the king of England rather than the emperor whom the child advises. 49. Virgil is the central figure of a late medieval cluster of tales and fabliaux, paralleling in some of its situations and motifs the tales of Merlin as a counselor to heads of state, trickster, and amorous old man outwitted by a woman. See Domenico Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages (London: 1908; rpt. New York, 1929); also John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 10 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Both Virgil and Merlin are analogous and prior to Faust, whose legend arose in the sixteenth century. However, the critical differences between Merlin and the other two are that he is half-spirit while they only command spirits, and he creates an ideal king and “golden age” empire while they only celebrate or advise rulers who have arisen without their aid. Brief analyses of these and other magi from classical times through the nineteenth century may be found in E.M.Butler’s The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). See also* Zumthor. 50. Friedrich Panzer, ed., Merlin und Seifrid de Ardemont von Albrecht von Scharfenberg in der Bearbeitung Ulrich Füetrers (Tübingen: Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 1902). 51. See * Müller.

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52. Historie van den Grale und Boek van Merline, ed. Timothy Sodman (Cologne: Bhohlau, 1980); “Die münsterischen Fragmente von Lodewijks van Velthem Boec van coninc Arthur” Niederdeutsches Wort23 (1983), pp. 39–81. 53. Even more specifically, it is a prose translation of Wynkyn de Worde’s A lytle treatyse of ye byrth and the prophecye of Marlyn (1510); M.E.Kronenberg, ed., “Een onbekend volksboek van Merlijn (c. 1540),” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal- en Letterkunde 48 (1929), pp. 18–34. 54. See Il Novellino, ed. Guido Favati (Genoa: Rozzi, 1970). 55. The Spanish romance, along with the Suite du Merlin from which it stems and Malory’s “Tale of King Arthur,” in fact constitutes the primary evidence—in concert with several fragmentary manuscripts including the early-fourteenth-century prose La Estoria de Merlín (The History of Merlin) concerning Merlin’s birth and early years—whereby Fanni Bogdanow and others have reconstructed the Post-Vulgate narrative of Merlin. See especially Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail The only complete edition of the Vita di Merlino is La Historia di Merlino, 6 vols. (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1480). The classic edition of the Baladro is Pedro Bohígas, ed., El baladro del Sabio Merlín según el texto de la edición de Burgos de 1498, 2nd Ser., 2, 14, 15 (Barcelona: Selecciones Bibliófilas, 1957–62). 56. The 1535 edition of the El Baladro del Sabio Merlín con sus Profecias appends additional prophecies attributed to Merlin regarding Spanish history: Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, ed., El Baladro del Sabio Merlín, primera parte de la Demanda del Sancto Grial Libros de caballerías, Primera parte: Ciclo artúrico-Ciclo Carolingio, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 6 (Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1907), pp. 3–162. 57. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 144–45. 58. Rider, “The Fictional Margin,” pp. 3–4. 59. See especially E.M.Butler, The Myth of the Magus, and Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), on the development of the Renaissance magus from classical and medieval roots, as well as Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 60. Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, The Works of Michael Drayton, Vol. 4, ed. J.William Hebel (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1933; rpt. Blackwell, 1961). 61. See Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). 62. Editions are: for Stewart, ed. William D.Turnbull, 3 vols. (London: Rolls Series 6, 1858); for Fabyan, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811); and for Rastell, (London, 1811). 63. John Leland, “Robinson’s Assertion of King Arthure with the Latin Original of Leland,” in The Famous Historie of Chinon of England by Christopher Middleton, ed. William Edward Mead, EETS 165 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 86; qtd in Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 44. 64. Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 47. 65. For Ariosto, see the edition by Giuseppe Campari and Angelo Ottolini (Milan: Hoepli, 1926), and English translation by Barbara Reynolds, The Frenzy of Orlando: A Romantic Epic, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975–77); for Spenser, see A.C.Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queen: Annotated Edition, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2001). 66. See Orlando Innamorato di Matteo Maria Boiardo rifatto da Francesco Berni (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), and the translation by Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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67. Such magical artifacts, especially the looking glass (or crystal ball) and wall of brass, are Renaissance commonplaces, associated not only with Merlin, but also with Virgil, Friar Bacon, and Faust. 68. Berger, “The Structure of Merlin’s Chronicle,” p. 48. 69. The Obstinate Lady: A New Comedy (London, 1657). 70. Quoted in Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 68. 71. Ibid., pp. 47–48. 72. Originally printed in London by Robert Robinson; rpt. in Early English Classical Tragedies, ed. John W.Cunliffe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912). 73. See Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); The Dramatic Works of William D’Avenant, vol. 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). 74. John S. Farmer, ed., The Tudor Facsimile Texts 145 (Edinburgh 1910; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970). 75. In The Dramatic Works, vol. 6, ed. Montague Summers (London: Nonesuch, 1931–32). 76. Brad Walton, “Merlin and the Divine Machinery,” p. 47. 77. Printed in London by E.Curll. 78. Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books, 3rd ed. corrected (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1696); King Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Twelve Books (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, Jacob Tonson, 1697). 79. A good example is Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), where a masquer dressed as Merlin draws together Briton, Roman, Saxon, and Norman groups of dancers to honor Queen Elizabeth. 80. The first edition is impressively titled The Life of Merlin, Surnamed Ambrosius; His Prophecies and Predictions Interpreted, and Their Truths Made Good by Our English Annals: Being a Chronographical History of All the Kings and Memorable Passages of This Kingdom, from Brute to the Reign of King Charles (London, J.Okes, 1641; rpt. Carmarthen: J.Evans, 1812). 81. Prophetia Anglicana Merlini Ambrosii Britanni (Frankfurt, 1603). 82. These were Brightman’s Predictions and Prophecies and A Revelation of Mr. Brightmans Revelations, both published 1641. Thus Merlin gained a Protestant imprimatur. 83. For example, William Lilly, Englands Propheticall Merline, (London: John Partridge, 1644), and William Lilly, Merlinus Anglicus Junior: The English Merline Revived (London, 1644). Lilly cautiously supports the monarchy prior to Cromwell’s revolution, and argues for astrology as a learned and publicly licensed occupation. He also hedges by arguing against a strict interpretation of when prognosticated events will occur, because men cannot hope to forecast God’s intentions too precisely. After Lilly’s death in 1681, the series of almanacs was issued under Partridge’s name. 84. For a text, see The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957–68). 85. The first two editions published in London by J.Roberts are available in Tom Thumb and the Tragedy of Tragedies, ed. L.J.Morrissey, The Fountainwell Drama Texts 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 86. Theobald’s entertainment is named Merlin; or, The Devil of Stone-Henge (London: John Watts, 1734), with music by John Galliard; Hill’s play is in volume 1 of The Dramatic Works of Aaron Hill, 2 vols. (London: T.Lownds, 1760). 87. For a text, see Bell’s British Theatre, 34 vols. (1797), Vol. 22. 88. See Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 122. 89. Ibid., p. 150.

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90. Published in London by G.G.J. and J.Robinson. 91. Although, as adapted by François Girault, Merlin has a slightly larger role: see Girault’s The Tale of Gargantua and King Arthur, ed. Huntington Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), and Lacy, et al, New Arthurian Encyclopedia, pp. 176–77. 92. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 27th ed. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1976). 93. On the ambiguous rhetoric of reality in Cervantes, see, for example, Helena Percas de Ponseti, Cervantes y su concepto del arte (Madrid: Gredos, 1974), which reads the Montesinos episode on three levels: literal (as dream or hallucination), mythic-allegorical (as mystic vision revealing the powerlessness of chivalry in Quixote’s contemporary world), and psychological (as self-justification in the face of Quixote’s own repressed doubt and Sancho Panza’s rational skepticism). 94. See Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 214; Lacy, et al., New Arthurian Encydopedia, p. 163. 95. See Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 214; Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 139–41. 96. See Wieland’s Werke, ed. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert (Munich: Hanser, 1966). 97. For a text of this and a possibly related poem, “Der Zauberlehrling” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), see Goethe’s Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, Vols. 1 and 2 (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1948–60). 98. See Simpson, Camelot Regained, for a wealth of information about the legend in the arts during this period and in the late 1700s, including pp. 167–68 on the Merlin poems of the 1790s. Another indispensable reference for the subsequent period is Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur. Both usefully augment The Flower of Kings, James Douglas Merriman’s frequently cited work on the legend from the Renaissance through the Romantics. To these, add Alan and Barbara Tepa Lupack’s King Arthur in America. Arthurians are deeply indebted to all four surveys for their coverage of the nineteenth century (and, for Taylor and Brewer and the Lupacks, the twentieth). 99. For George Ellis, ed., see the 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811); Southey’s Malory edition bore the bombastic and eccentrically spelled title, The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of King Arthur: of His Noble Knyghtes of the Round Table, Theyr Merveyllous Enquestes and Aduentures, Thachyeuyng of the Sanc Greal; and in the End Le Morte Darthur, with the Dolorous Deth and Departyng out of this Worlde of Them Al, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). 100. Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 223. 101. On Roberts, Polwhele, and Hogg, see Simpson, Camelot Regained, pp. 63–64 and pp. 109– 10. For Costello, see Simpson, pp. 75 and 86–87. For Monmouthshire Merlin, see Simpson, p. 100. Simpson gives no publishing data for Roberts or Costello’s guidebook; Polwhele’s history was published (in three volumes) in Falmouth, and Hogg’s in Truro by E.Heard, and London by Longman, Rees, and Orme. (Costello’s A Summer amongst the Bocages and the Vines [1840] also refers to Merlin, translating a poem by Hersart de la Villemarqué into English and associating it with Cornwall). 102. Simpson, Camelot Regained, pp. 160, 168; Taylor and Brewer, The Return of King Arthur, pp. 36–37, 65. 103. See The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbyshire, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), Vol. 3, pp. 232–43. 104. The masque remained unpublished in its entirety, though fragments were printed by Amelia Heber in The Life of Reginald Heber, by his Widow, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1830). 105. In Poetical Works (London: Longman, 1813).

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106. Published in London by Murray, 1818. 107. The Misfortunes of Elphin was published in London by Hookham, 1829; the other two in Calidore and Miscellanea, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Dent, 1891). 108. Originally printed in four issues of Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, June 1823-August 1824, and revised as “Sir Launfal,” in Poems (London: Pickering, 1837). 109. Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 142. 110. Published as Gorlaye: or A Tale of the Olden Tyme (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1834). 111. Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 170. 112. Printed in two vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1848). 113. Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 111. 114. For confirmation and further examples, including Merlin’s bardic role as a companion of the mantic one, see ibid., pp. 95–108. 115. The Quest of the Sangraal: Chant the First (Exeter: Hawker, 1863); rpt. in The Cornish Ballads and Other Poems (Oxford: 1869), pp. 180–203. 116. Merlin and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1889). 117. See The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C.B.Tinker and H.F.Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), and The Complete Works of Charles Algernon Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and T.J.Wise, 20 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Russell and Russell, 1925– 27), Vol. 4. Merlin also appears in Swinburne’s The Tale of Balen (1896). 118. See Simpson, Camelot Regained, pp. 190–94. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, where Merlin has children they are always daughters; where Arthur has children they are (usually) sons. Part of this habit appears to be the stereotypical association of Merlin with the passive, feminine side of the human psyche and his increasingly popular involvement with great goddess figures; in contrast, Arthur represents the active, masculine aspect of the psyche. However, the intellectual Merlin is rarely a father—he is rather a symbolic “father figure” to Arthur—and Arthur’s children are nearly always illegitimate because the tradition of his and Guenevere’s childlessness is so well established. Other than Mordred, none of their children has become more than a pastiche. 119. Dean, A Study of Merlin, p. 140. 120. The publishing history is complex, as well. The trial edition of the earliest two idylls is Enid and Nimuë: The True and the False (London: Edward Moxon, 1857); the revised and expanded version, with Nimuë’s name changed to “Vivien,” is The True and the False: Four Idylls of the King (London: Edward Moxon, 1859), with many subsequent editions culminating in the Eversley edition of his works edited by Tennyson’s son Hallam (London: Macmillan, 1908). Accumulated revisions can be consulted in John Pfordresher, ed. A Variorum Edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (New York: Columbia University Press, 19 73). “Merlin and the Gleam” may be found in the Eversley edition and in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969). 121. Kaplan, “‘Woven Paces and Waving Hands,’” pp. 285–86. 122. King Arthur: A Drama in a Prologue and Four Acts (London: Macmillan, 1895). 123. See Dean, A Study of Merlin, for corroboration: “The significant movement in the treatment of Merlin in the nineteenth century is towards his humanization and Tennyson’s portrait is a major milestone along the road” (p. 151). This is one chief reason why Tennyson’s Merlin was so influential, inviting responses from writers as disparate as Mark Twain and Edwin Arlington Robinson. 124. Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 3. 125. Ibid., p. 4.

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126. Published as Merlin Together with Recollections of Edgar A.Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbot (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941). The play was occasioned by Edgar Allan Poe’s despondency at the cancellation of his engagement to Sarah Royster; Wilmer knew of the affair through Poe’s brother. 127. In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), Vol. 9. 128. Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 7. 129. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 152. 130. Published in The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (Boston: James R.Osgood, 1876). 131. Merlin: A Dramatic Poem (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1890). 132. For the text cited here and illustrations, see the volume edited with explanatory notes by Bernard L.Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). The first full publication was New York: Charles Webster, 1889. 133. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twains Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in A Connecticut Yankee (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), pp. 84–85. 134. Ibid., p. 96. 135. The Quest of Merlin and The Birth of Galahad in 1898 editions, The Marriage of Guenevere: A Tragedy in 1899, Taliesin: A Masque in 1900 (Boston: Small, Maynard); and The Holy Grail and Other Fragments by Richard Hovey: Being the Uncompleted Parts of the Arthurian Dramas, ed. Mrs. Richard Hovey (New York: Duffield, 1907). 136. The first collection was published in Paris by Didier; the two-volume Barzaz-Breiz was reprinted in Paris by Perrin, 1959. 137. See Donatien Laurent, Aux sources du Barzaz-Breiz: la mémoire d’un peuple (Dournenez: Ar Men, 1989). 138. “Exorcising Exclusion,” p. 138. 139. Published in 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Levy, 1860). 140. Reconstructing Camelot (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), p. 164. 141. Ibid., p. 165. 142. Jean Burgos, ed. (Paris: Minard, 1972). 143. See Sammlung von Memoiren und romantischen Dichtungen des Mittelalters aus altfranzösischen und deutschen Quellen, ed. L.Dieckmann (Paderborn, Munich, and Vienna: Schöningh, 1980). 144. In Tieck’s Schriften, Vol. 5 (Berlin: Reimer, 1828). 145. Lacy, et al., New Arthurian Encydopedia, p. 192. 146. Ibid. 147. In his Werke, ed. Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), Vol. 1. 148. For Heine, see Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), Vol. 1; for Heyse, Gesammelte Werke, 2nd Series (Stuttgart/Berlin, n.d.), Vol. 1; and for Kaufmann, Gedichte (1852). 149. See Lacy, et al. New Arthurian Encydopedia, p. 189. 150. Published in Leipzig by Klemm, 1832. See also Karl Immermann, Werke in fünf Bande, ed. Benno von Wiese (Wiesbaden, 1977), Vol. 5. 151. Published in London by Lane, revised from the trilogy King Arthur, 1897, and containing “Uther Pendragon,” “Merlin,” “Lancelot du Lake,” and “The Death of Lancelot.” 152. Taylor and Brewer, The Return of King Arthur, p. 210. 153. In Scenes and Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1929). 154. Williams himself was impelled to explain his intentions in “The Figure of Arthur,” an unfinished essay that was edited by C.S.Lewis, and complemented by Lewis’s own interpretation in Arthurian Torso (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). An excellent

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155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160.

161.

162.

163. 164.

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recent treatment of the poems in regard to their predominant Grail theme is Karl Heinz Göller, “From Logres to Carbonek: The Arthuriad of Charles Williams,” in The Grail: A Casebook, ed. Dhira B.Mahoney (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 465–505. Both the published volumes and the unpublished poems that might eventually have become a part of the Arthuriad are collected in Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, ed. David Llewellyn Dodds (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1991). Page references are to this edition. Anne Ridler, “Introduction,” The Image of the City and Other Essays by Charles Williams (London: 1958), p. 172; quoted in Dean, A Study of Merlin, pp. 191–92. Published in London by Macmillan. Published in London by the Oxford University Press. Merlin’s sleep and dreams become a common motif for other twentieth-century writers as well, such as Peter Dickinson. The first part was published as Merlin; or, The Return of King Arthur (London: Chapman and Hall, 1951); two additional parts in 1955 and 1959; the revised and completed poem in 1966 (London: Chapman and Hall); the citations are to the complete edition. The Island of the Mighty: A Play on a Traditional British Theme in Three Parts (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974); see also Javed Malik, “The Polarized Universe of The Island of the Mighty. The Dramaturgy of Arden and D’Arcy,” New Theatre Quarterly 5 (1986), pp. 38–53. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-ups (London: Lane, 1945). Lewis was also the first important commentator on Williams’s Arthurian work (besides Williams himself); see “Williams and the Arthuriad,” in Arthurian Torso. This was in a personal letter of December 21, 1959, preserved as Bodleian c/220/2, number 233, and cited in Donald E.Glover, C.S.Lewis: The Art of Enchantment (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 220, n. 32. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). The first was published first in New York by Simon and Schuster and then in London by the Bodley Head the following year (1933); the second in London by Cassell; and the third in London by Macdonald. A restored, complete version of Porius was published subsequently as Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages: A New Edition, ed. Wilbur T. Albrecht (Hamilton, N.Y.: Colgate University Press, 1994). Jeremy Hooker, in John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study (London: Enitharmon, 1979), considers all of Powys’s magus figures to be associated with Merlin, writing that Merlin exists in the fourth dimension for which all of Powys’ novels seek symbols and metaphors, and he controls the absolute power of the mind’s creative and destructive forces that derives from his total abnegation of power, from his total acceptance of life and death in nature and his consequent recognition of himself as part of the body of the Earth Mother. His passivity, potent as magic, is completely opposed to power as force in all its forms, whether spiritual or material. (p. 24)

165. The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Witch in the Wood (1939, later retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness), and The Ill-Made Knight (1940) were individually published in London by Collins and in New York by G.P.Putnam’s Sons. They were revised and collected with The Candle in the Wind (written 1940) as The Once and Future King with the same publishers. The Book of Merlyn (written 1941) furnished two episodes for this omnibus edition, but was not published itself until 1977 (Austin: University of Texas Press).

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166. A noteworthy example of White’s influence and Merlin’s adaptability is the current popularity of J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter, a Wart-like boy with exceptional magical talent. Merlin’s mature characteristics are distributed in her novels among a variety of tutors at Harry’s school, Hogwarts. Allusions to White also abound in recent fantasy fiction about Merlin, such as T.A.Barron’s Lost Years of Merlin series (see note 225), and in other media. 167. All three were published in London by Hodder and Stoughton and in New York by William Morrow. 168. Published in London by George Allen and Unwin. 169. Published in London by Hamish Hamilton and in New York by G.P.Putnam’s Sons. 170. Published in New York by Macmillan, and later in the Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1921). A major influence on Robinson was S.Humphreys Gurteen’s study of Tennyson and his sources, The Arthurian Epic (1895); see also Laurence Perrine, “The Sources of Robinson’s Merlin” American Literature 44 (May 1972), pp. 313–21, and “Tennyson and Robinson: Legalistic Moralism vs. Situation Ethics,” Colby Library Quarterly 8 (December 1968), pp. 416–34. 171. For Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, from the Winchester MSS. of Thomas Malory and Other Sources, ed. Chase Horton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Heinemann); for Berger, New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1978, and London: Magnum, 1979. 172. The Lupacks’ King Arthur in America gives several examples of Merlin’s interventions, such as casting a spell to rescue prostitutes at “the Nunnery of St. Paul’s” from burning (p. 254), interpreting these in the context of the “dangerous ideal” theme “which defines virtually all of the action” in the novel (p. 256). 173. For further commentary on this aspect of Berger’s mage, see Raymond H.Thompson, “The Comic Sage.” 174. Published in New York by McBride; Merlin also appears briefly in Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (New York: McBride, 1919), with much the same effect. 175. In The Last Defender of Camelot (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), pp. 271–94. An extension of this negative characterization into a stock character of science fiction with a parallel history is discussed in my “Lineage of Mad Scientists.” Many of these figures could be described as adaptations of Prometheus, Merlin, or Faust. 176. Hamlett’s novel features Kyle Falconer, a masterful avatar of Merlin as the romantic lead (New York: Evans, 1990); Evans’s series consists of Daughter of Fire, Daughter of the Mist, Daughter of Light, Shadows of Camelot, Dawn of Camelot, and Daughter of Camelot (NewYork: Zebra, 1996–99). 177. Notable British and American series centered upon female characters and narrators include those by Vera Chapman, Anne Eliot Crompton, Helen Hollick, Nancy McKenzie, Rosalind Miles, Sharan Newman, Fay Sampson, and Persia Woolley. 178. Published in New York by Knopf. Another instance of this strategy is British novelist Catherine Christian’s The Sword and the Flame: Variations on a Theme of Sir Thomas Malory (London: Macmillan, 1978), also printed as The Pendragon (New York: Knopf, 1979). 179. See The Complete Great Merlini, 5 vols. (Boston: Gregg, 1979). 180. For example, The Return of Merlin (New York: Harmony, 1995; fiction), and The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want (New York: Harmony, 1995; nonfiction). Chopra employs all of Merlin’s roles, but he exploits in particular the complementary archetypes of wonder child and wise old man. 181. To date, the series consists of The Skystone (1992), The Singing Sword (1993), The Eagles’ Brood (1994), The Saxon Shore (1995), The Fort at River’s Bend (1997), The Sorcerer: Metamorphosis

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182.

183.

184. 185. 186. 187.

188.

189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198.

199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205.

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(1997), and Uther (2000), all published in Toronto by Viking Penguin, and subsequently in New York by Tom Doherty Associates. Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 202, n. 10. This analysis of the American frontier mythology as heroic quest and initiation is developed in Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). New York: Ballantine; the book combines two novelettes: King of the World’s Edge (New York: Ace, 1966), written in 1939, and The Ship from Atlantis (New York: Ace, 1967). Merlin is a central figure of the first novelette. Published in New York by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Published in Toronto by Macmillan and in New York by Viking Penguin. Published in New York by Ace Fantasy; as in White, Merlin lives backwards in time (the reason for his youth in the twentieth century), and he even calls Arthur “Wart.” They are The Trumps of Doom, Blood of Amber, Sign of Chaos (New York: Arbor House, 1985– 87), Knight of Shadows, Prince of Chaos (New York: William Morrow, 1989,1991), and five uncollected short stories continuing the narrative after the last volume (1993–96)—only one of which, “The Shroudling and the Guisel,” is fully focused on Merlin. For Yolen, Merlin’s Booke: Thirteen Stories and Poems about the Arch-Mage (Minneapolis: Steel Dragon Press; New York: Ace Fantasy); for Ashley, The Merlin Chronicles: Magic and Adventure from the Age of Legend (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985). Ashley provides a brief introduction to the figure of Merlin and has edited four other Arthurian anthologies, whereas Yolen has edited one of her own and has contributed stories and poems to several others. See Louise Barton Forsyth, “Apollinaire’s Use of Arthurian Legend,” Esprit Créateur 12 (1972), pp. 26–36. In Œuvres completes de Jean Cocteau (Geneva: Marguerat, 1948), Vol. 6. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 144. Published in Nantes by Ballanger. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 145. Published in Paris by Albin Michel. Published in Paris by Denoël. Published in Paris by Seuil. Immortels: Merlin et Viviane, ill. Paul Dauce (La Gacilly: Artus, 1991); Livres des guerriers d’or (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Page 301 in “The Modern Reception of the Arthurian Legend,” The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages III, ed. W.H.Jackson and S.A.Ranawake (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 301–23. See also *Müller. See *Müller on this theme. Berlin: Weiss, 1924. In his Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans-Egon Hass et al. (Darmstadt, 1970); Vol. 10, 675–1115. Lacy, et al., New Arthurian Encydopedia, p. 224. See the revised edition, Linz and Vienna: Österreichischer Verlag für Bellelettristik und Wissenschaft, 1946. For Benning, see Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 191; Dorst and Ehler’s work was published by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. Müller and Wunderlich, “The Modern Reception of the Arthurian Legend,” pp. 313–14.

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206. Initially published in De Haagsche Post from October 1917 to June 1918, the novel is a continuation of the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein (Gawain) by Penninc and Pieter Vostaert from the mid-fourteenth century: De jeeste van Walewein en het schaakbord van Penninc en Pieter Vostaert, ed. G.A. van Es, 2 vols. (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1957). 207. Published in Milan by Fratelli Treves. 208. Benjamin Jarnés, Viviana y Merlín, ed. Rafael Conte (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994); Alvaro Cunqueiro, Merlín y familia (Barcelona: Destino, 1986), trans. Colin Smith as Merlin and Company (London: Dent, 1991). 209. Miller, “The Spanish ‘Vivens,’” p. 88. 210. Ibid., p. 89. 211. This Introduction regards children’s literature as written for children through middle school (grade eight or nine) or ages 13–14. Merlin is important enough in Arthurian children’s fiction to merit his own category: see Thompson, “From Inspiration to Warning.” 212. Dean lists many of these in A Study of Merlin, pp. 208–11. 213. Ibid., p. 209. 214. Ibid., pp. 208–209. 215. Lanier, The Boy’s King Arthur, illus. Alfred Kappes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1880); illus. N.C. Wyeth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917); Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1910); Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), Tristan and Iseult, The Light Beyond the Forest: Quest for the Holy Grail, The Sword and the Circle: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and The Road to Camlann (London: Bodley Head, 1971, 1979, 1981, 1981). The Lantern Bearers is an original novel rather than a retelling, however; Sutcliff also wrote for older readers the historical novel of Arthur, Sword at Sunset (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963). 216. The quote is from Henry C. Pitz, Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School (New York: Potter, 1975), p. 134. See also Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 81. 217. Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 75. 218. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (London: William Collins; New York: Franklin Watts, 1960; rev. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963); The Moon of Gomrath (London: William Collins, 1963). 219. Published in New York by Macmillan. 220. Published in London by Victor Gollancz. 221. Published in New York by Atheneum. 222. Published in New York by Atheneum. 223. Over Sea, Under Stone (London: Cape; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), Greenwitch, The Dark Is Rising, The Grey King, Silver on the Tree (New York: Athenaeum, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977). For critiques, see Raymond H.Thompson’s The Return from Avalon and his essay in this volume, and my “Magical Medievalism and the Fairy Tale in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence,” The Lion and the Unicorn 12.2 (December 1988), pp. 165–77. 224. Illus. Linda Garland (New York: Smithmark, 1999). 225. Robert San Souci, Young Merlin, illus. Daniel Horne (New York: Doubleday, 1990); Pamela F.Service, Wizard of Wind and Rock, illus. Laura Marshall (New York: Atheneum, 1990); Jane Yolen, Passager, Hobby, and Merlin (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996, 1996, 1997); T.A.Barron, The Lost Years of Merlin, The Seven Songs of Merlin, The Fires of Merlin, The Mirror of Merlin, and The Wings of Merlin (New York: Philomel, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000).

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226. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 199. 227. Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, p. 4. 228. Helpful sources of information about Merlin in the arts include Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, and Lacy, et al., New Arthurian Encyclopedia; Mancoff The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art, Appendices D and E of Simpson; Whitaker; and Christine Poulson and Roger Simpson, “Arthurian Legend in Fine and Applied Art.” 229. This primal scene appears in British Library Add. 10292, a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Vulgate Merlin, and Antoine Vérard’s 1498 printing of the same romance with handpainted illuminations, British Library C22C6. See Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” pp. 106, 122– 23. 230. Ibid., p. 106. 231. Whitaker, The Legend of King Arthur in Art, p. 160. 232. Ibid., pp. 46–47. These images are in British Library Add. 38117, Add. 10292, and the Bodleian’s Douce 178—all manuscripts of the Vulgate Merlin dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. 233. In British Library Add. 10292. See Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” pp. 107, 122. 234. Many examples survive, but perhaps one may here stand for all: British Library Cotton Claudius B VII, from about 1250, a manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophecies of Merlin, contains “a large drawing, tinted brown, green, and grey-blue, in which a youthful Merlin reads prophecies written on a long scroll to the enthroned King Vortigern. Both are placed under Early English arches, decorated with trefoils. A striped Corinthian pillar separates them. Beneath the floor, three semicircles show on either side of a pool the two dragons that bring down the king’s tower” (Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, p. 35). It goes without saying that medieval artists unselfconsciously practiced anachronism, representing characters and events in the settings and costume of their own time. 235. Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” p. 125. 236. Ibid., p. 110. 237. Ibid., pp. 111, 124–25. 238. Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, p. 167. 239. These are from La Vita di Merlino (Venice, 1539) and the well-known frontispiece to Thomas Heywood’s The Life of Merlin (London, 1641). See Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” pp. 128, 130. 240. Ibid., p. 113. 241. An instance of St. Jerome’s influence may be seen in Giulio Strozzi’s La Venetia Edificata (Venice, 1624): see Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” pp. 112, 129. Dürer’s impact was so profound that it virtually defined the magus, and it can still be detected in Howard Pyle’s book illustrations in the early 1900s (see Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 91), as well as the cloistered and occult surroundings (if not the female subjects) in the oil paintings The Lady of Shalott by W.Holman Hunt, 1886–1905, and Frederick Sandys’s Morgan-le-Fay, 1862. 242. Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” p. 114. 243. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 248. 244. See Hoffman, “Seeing the Seer,” p. 105, and Constance C.Relihan, “Vivian, Elaine, and the Model’s Gaze: Cameron’s Reading of the Idylls of the King,” in Popular Arthurian Traditions, ed. Sally K.Slocum (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1992), p. 112. 245. Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, p. 191.

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246. See, for example, *Linda K.Hughes, and “The Beguiling of Merlin,” Chapter 6 in Poulson, The Quest for the Grail. Many of these paintings and illustrations are discussed in Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. A good representative collection of Merlin book illustrations is also available at The Camelot Project on the Internet: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/ camelot/. 247. See Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, pp. 273–75. 248. Lacy and Thompson, eds., “Arthurian Literature, Art, and Film,” p. 237. 249. Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, p. 185. 250. Ibid., pp. 302–314. 251. Burne-Jones was not the only one to be disappointed by this outfit: Whitaker (The Legends of King Arthur in Art, pp. 153–54) is quoting Clement Scott’s review of the production in From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’: A Critical Record of First-Night Productions at the Lyceum Theatre from 1871 to 1895 (London: John McQueen, 1896), p. 375. 252. Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 255. 253. For more information about these and other compositions, see Lacy, Ashe, and Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 250–58; Lacy, et al., Arthurian Encydopedia, pp. 334–39; and Jerome V.Reel, Jr., “Sing a Song of Arthur,” pp. 123–37, and Dan Nastali, “Arthurian Pop: The Tradition in Twentieth-Century Popular Music,” pp. 138–68 (esp, pp. 148, 151), both in Elizabeth S.Sklar and Donald L.Hoffman, eds., King Arthur in Popular Culture. The quotation is from Nastali, p. 151. 254. For more information on Merlin in film and television, see Kevin J.Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana and King Arthur on Film; and Bert Olton, Arthurian Legends on Film and Television; and “Was That in the Vulgate? Arthurian Legend in TV Film and Series Episodes,” in Sklar and Hoffman, eds., King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 87–100. 255. Disney’s films and “Magic Kingdom” theme parks often employ this iconography; it is also present in the very name of moviemaker John Boorman’s production company, Merlin Films Group. 256. These include Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court (Chuck Jones Enterprises, 1977); the “Sir Gyro de Gearloose” episode of Duck Tales (Walt Disney, 1989), where he is known as “Moreloon”; and the Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders series for young girls (New Frontier Entertainment, 1995), where “Avalon is a magic kingdom controlled by Merlin ‘for the good of all’” (Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, pp. 325–26). For further examples, see Michael Salda’s bibliography on The Camelot Project website. 257. See Judith Colton, “Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline.” 258. Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 168. 259. Elizabeth S.Sklar, “Marketing Arthur,” p. 12. 260. Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, p. 282. For more examples, see Sklar, “Marketing Arthur,” pp. 9–23, and my “Merlin in the Public Domain,” pp. 219–32, both in Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture. 261. See Lupack and Lupack, King Arthur in America, pp. 282–83, and Peter Corless, “Knights of Imagination: Arthurian Games and Entertainments,” in Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 182–96. 262. For more information on comics, see Jason Tondro, “Camelot in Comics,” in Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 169–81; Alan H.Stewart, Camelot in Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics, ; and Michael Torregrossa’s bibliography on The Camelot Project website. 263. Described in Wace, Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. A.J.Holden, 3 vols. (Paris: SATF, 1970– 73). As the poet put it, “A fool I returned, a fool I went; a fool I went, a fool I returned!”

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264. Goodrich’s Merlin (New York: Franklin Watts, 1988) is part of her series that adopts what has been known as the “Northern Hypothesis” for the origins of a historical Arthur in the north of Britain rather than Wales, Cornwall, or Somerset—and not only for Arthur, but for the other major figures of the legend. Proponents of this hypothesis have included J.S. Stuart-Glennie (in Wheatley’s E.E.T.S. edition of the Middle English prose Merlin, Vol. 1), W.F.Skene, D.W.Nash, Rachel Bromwich, and Nora Chadwick, but it is still considered a minority view by most Arthurian scholars. See the special issue of Arthuriana on the subject: Volume 5, Number 3 (1995). N.L.Goodrich goes further than anyone, proposing that Lancelot and Guinevere, for example, were Pictish royalty. 265. For a brief summary and array of scholars on either side, see Marylyn Parins’s “Scholarship, Modern Arthurian” in Lacy, et al., New Arthurian Encyclopedia. However, neither Nikolai Tolstoy nor N.L.Goodrich makes an attempt to discuss this previous scholarship in any detail. Today, most scholars consider this debate over origins less as an “either/or” than as a “both/and” issue. 266. The Romance of Fergus, ed. Wilson Frescoln (Philadelphia: Allen, 1983). 267. Caroline Eckhardt, “Figure of Merlin,” pp. 22–23. 268. I have preferred the term “literary” to another obvious choice, “textual,” because it does not raise conflicting expectations among those whose background may be in traditional textual scholarship, whose orientation is primarily philological, or in current literary theory, in which the word “text” has the broadest possible meaning. Whatever the critical approach used—philology or linguistics, textual scholarship, close reading of both formalist and nonformalist varieties, psychology, ideology, or culture—the object of attention in this mode is some primary artistic text, usually a verbal narrative but sometimes a work in another medium such as painting or music. 269. For San Marte, Halle: Weisenhaus; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1979; for Villemarqué, pp. 33 and 84, n. 136. Mead’s essay was printed in Henry B.Wheatley’s edition of the Middle English Prose Merlin, Vol. 1. 270. See the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, ed. Owen Jones, Edward Williams, and William Owen Pughe (London: 1801–07); Pughe’s The Cambrian Biography: or Historical Notices of Celebrated Men among the Ancient Britons (1805); the wilder Davies’s Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London: J.Booth, 1809); and Herbert’s equally iconoclastic Britannia After the Romans, 2 vols. (London: H.G.Bohn, 1836–41). Much of this apocryphal material (especially that by Williams/Morgannwg) is currently being recycled by New Age pagans; see, for example, Douglas Monroe, The Lost Books of Merlyn: Druid Magic from the Age of Arthur (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1998). 271. See, for example, Spence, The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain (rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993); and Fortune, Avalon of the Heart (London: Muller, 1934; expanded as Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart, Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1986). 272. Quoted from Volume 14, number 10 (October 1969). 273. Matthews and Miranda Green, The Grail Seeker’s Companion (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986, p. 74); Stewart, The Way of Merlin: The Prophet, the Goddess and the Land (London: Aquarian, 1991, p. 13). Stewart has also written other books on Merlin, including a commentary on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophecies: The Prophetic Vision of Merlin (London: Arkana, 1986), and one on the Life of Merlin: The Mystic Life of Merlin (London: Arkana, 1986). See also the detailed occult pattern-making of Gareth Knight, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend: The Magical and Mystical Power Sources Within the Mysteries of Britain (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1983). For a more detailed discussion of the mage in neopagan esotericism, see my, “The New Age Mage.”

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274. Another volume could be devoted to Merlin in arts and popular culture, where he has had an enormous appeal over the centuries (touched upon in this Introduction), but so far definitive work devoted to the mage has been lacking in these areas. 275. Not counting his chapter on “The Welsh Myrddin Poems” in Loomis, ed., ALMA, the first two are The Legend of Merlin and “Early Stages in the Development of the Myrddin Legend.” 276. See the “Editor’s Foreword,” in Zimmer, The King and the Corpse, p. v. 277. Merlin: Roman du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz: 1979); Lancelot: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, 9 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1978–1983).

Select Bibliography

This bibliography does not list primary sources, nor does it include every title cited in the notes. Articles designated by an asterisk (*) are reprinted in this volume, some in translation or revised form as noted. Monographs are distinguished from periodicals by the abbreviation “p./pp.” where page numbers are included. General Bibliographies Arthuriana/The Camelot Project Bibliographies. . Barber, Elaine. The Arthurian Bibliography IV: 1993–1998. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. Brown, Paul A. “A Bibliography of Critical Arthurian Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 17.2 (June 1956) [continued annually until 23.2 (June 1963)]. ——, and John J.Parry. “The Arthurian Legends: Supplement to Northup and Parry’s Annotated Bibliography.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 49.2 (April 1950), 208–16. Mediavilla, Cindy Arthurian Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1999. Northup, Clark S., and John J.Parry. “The Arthurian Legends: Modern Retellings of the Old Stories: An Annotated Bibliography.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 43.2 (April 1944), 173–221. Palmer, Caroline. The Arthurian Bibliography: III. 1978–1992. Cambridge: Brewer, 1998. Parry, John J., ed. A Bibliography of Critical Arthurian Literature for the Years 1922–1929. New York: Modern Language Association, 1931. ——, and Paul A.Brown. “A Bibliography of Critical Arthurian Literature for the Year 1955.” Modern Language Quarterly 16.2 (June 1955). ——, and Margaret Schlauch. A Bibliography of Critical Arthurian Literature for the Years 1930–1935. New York: Modern Language Association, 1936. ——, and Margaret Schlauch. “A Bibliography of Critical Arthurian Literature for the Years 1936– 1939.” Modern Language Quarterly 1.2 (June 1940), 129–74. [Continued by Parry alone until 1955]. Pickford, C.E., and R.W.Last. The Arthurian Bibliography. 2 vols. Cambridge: Brewer, 1981, 1983. Poulson, Christine, and Roger Simpson. “Arthurian Legend in Fine and Applied Art of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Catalogue of Artists.” Arthurian Literature 9 (1989), 81–142; 11 (1992), 81–96. Reiss, Edmund, Louise Horner Reiss, and Beverly Taylor. Arthurian Legend and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Vol. 1, The Middle Ages. New York: Garland, 1984. Reynolds, William D. “Arthuriana: A Bibliography of Published Treatments of the Arthurian Legend, 1951–1983.” Studies in Medievalism 2 (Fall 1983), 89–106.

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General Studies and Reference Works Brinkley, Roberta Florence. Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932. Bruce, James Douglas. The Evolution of Arthurian Romance. From the Beginnings Down to the Year 1300. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928. The Camelot Project. The University of Rochestor. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/ cphome.stm Chadwick, H.Munro, and Nora Kershaw. The Growth of Literature, Vol 1: The Ancient Literatures of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Entwistle, William J.Arthurian Legend in the Literatures of the Spanish Peninsula. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1925; rpt. New York: Phaeton, 1975. Fletcher, Robert Huntington. The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, Especially Those of Great Britain and France. Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 10. Boston: Ginn, 1906; 2nd ed. Ed. Roger Sherman Loomis. New York: Franklin, 1966. Gardner, Edmund G. The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1930; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1971. Glencross, Michael. Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition. Cambridge: Brewer, 1995. Harty, Kevin J., ed. Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Revised ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. ——, ed. King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. Lacy, Norris J., Geoffrey Ashe, and Debra N.Mancoff. The Arthurian Handbook, Second Edition. New York: Garland, 1997. ——, Geoffrey Ashe, Sandra Ness Ihle, Marianne Kalinke, and Raymond H.Thompson, eds. The New Arthurian Encydopedia. New York: Garland, 1991. Expanded ed. 1996. (Referred to in the Notes as Lacy, et. al., New Arthurian Encyclopedia). ——, and Raymond H.Thompson, eds. “Arthurian Literature, Art, and Film, 1995–1999.” InArthurian Literature XVIII. Ed. Keith Busby. Cambridge: Brewer, 2001, pp. 193–255. Loomis, Roger Sherman, ed. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959. (Referred to in the Introduction and Notes as Loomis, ed., ALMA.) ——, and Laura Hibbard Loomis. Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. Lupack, Alan, and Barbara Tepa Lupack. King Arthur in America. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999. Mancoff, Debra N. The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland, 1990. Merriman, James Douglas. The Flower of Kings: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973. Nitze, William Albert. Arthurian Romance and Modern Poetry and Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Olton, Bert. Arthurian Legends on Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Poulson, Christine. The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840–1920. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999. Reid, Margaret J.C. The Arthurian Legend: Comparison of Treatment in Modern and Mediaeval Literature: A Study in the Literary Value of Myth and Legend. London: Methuen, 1938; rpt. 1970. Simpson, Roger. Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990. Sklar, Elizabeth S., and Donald L.Hoffman, eds. King Arthur in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.

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Slocum, Sally K., ed. Popular Arthurian Traditions. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1992. Starr, Nathan Comfort. The Arthurian Legend in English and American Literature, 1901–1953. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1954. Taylor, Beverly, and Elisabeth Brewer. The Return of King Arthur: British and American Literature since 1800. Cambridge: Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983. Thompson, Raymond H. The Return from Avalon: A Study of Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. Whitaker, Muriel. The Legends of King Arthur in Art. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990.

Critical Studies Ackerman, Robert W. “Henry Lovelich’s Merlin.” PMLA 67 (1952), 473–84. Adkins, Nelson F. “Emerson and the Bardic Tradition.” PMLA 63 (1948), 662–77. Adler, Thomas P. “The Uses of Knowledge in Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivian.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11 (1970), 1397–1403. Adolf, Helen. “The Esplumoir Merlin: A Study of its Cabalistic Sources.” Speculum 21 (April 1946), 173–93. Arbuckle, Nan. “That Hidden Strength: C.S.Lewis’ Merlin as Modern Grail.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 79–99. Baudry, Robert. “Et toujours, Merlin!…”In Traduction, transcription, adaptation au Môyen Age: Bien dire et bien aprandre 13 (1996), 149–78. Bell, Kimberly. “The Celtic Wild Man Tradition and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini: Madness or Contemptus Mundi?” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 14–26. Berger, Harry. “The Structure of Merlin’s Chronicle in The Faerie Queene III (iii).” Studies in English Literature 1500–19009 (1969), 39–51. Rpt. as “The Faerie Queene, Book III: A General Description” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A.C.Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), pp. 395–424. Berlioz, Jacques. “Un héros incontrôlable? Merlin dans la littérature des exempla du Môyen Age occidental.” Iris 21 (2001), 31–39. Berthelot, Anne. “Cartengles, Ferafus, Mingles et le Dragon de Babyloine: Les Variations du Bestiaire apocalyptique dans Les Prophecies de Merlin” In Findes Temps et Temps de la Fin dans I’univers medieval. Sénéfiance 33 (1993), 53–65. ——.”L’Héritage de Merlin.” In Buschinger and Spiewok, pp. 1–10. ——.”Merlin: du substrat celtique a la réalité politique du XIIIe siècle.” In Le héros dans le réalité, dans la légende et dans la littérature mediévale/Der Held in historischer Realität, in der Sage und in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. Ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok. Greifswald: Reineke, 1996. ——.”Merlin Magicien?” In Magie et illusion au Môyen Age. Sénéfiance. 42 (1999), pp. 51–64. *——. “Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake.” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 55–81. ——, “Reconstitution d’un archetype littéraire: Merlin correcteur de Chrétien.” InWhat Is Literature? 1100–1600: France 1100–1600. Ed. François Cornilliat, Ullrich Langer, and Douglas Kelly. Edward C.Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature 7. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1993, pp. 181–96. *Blackburn, William. “Spenser’s Merlin.” Renaissance and Reformation 4 (Fall 1980), 179–98. Blacker, Jean. “Where Wace Feared to Tread: Latin Commentaries on Merlin’s Prophecies in the Reign of Henry II.” Arthuriana 6.1 (Spring 1996), 36–52.

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Bloch, R.Howard. “Merlin and the Modes of Medieval Legal Meaning.” Archéologie du signe. Ed. Lucie Brind’Amour and Eugène Vance. Toronto: Pontifical Inst. of Medieval Studies, 1983, pp. 127–44. ——.”Le rire de Merlin.” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises 37 (May 1985), 7– 21. Bloom, Harold. “Bacchus and Merlin: The Dialectic of Romantic Poetry in America.” The Southern Review 7 (1971), 140–75. Bogdanow, Fanni. “The Spanish Baladro and the Conte du Brait” Romania 83 (1962), 383–99. ——.“The Suite du Merlin and The Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal” In Loomis, ALMA, pp. 325–35. Bonavides, Enrique M. “El baladro de Merlín.” In Palabra e imagen en la Edad Media. Ed. Aurelio González, Lillian von der Walde, and Conçeption Company. Mexico City: Univ. Naçional Autonoma de Mexico, 1995, pp. 247–56. Bonney, William W. “Torpor and Tropology in Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and Vivian.’” Victorian Poetry 23. 4 (Winter 1985), 351–67. Brown, Arthur Charles Lewis. “The Esplumoir and Viviane.” Speculum 20 (1945), 426–32. Brugger, Ernst. “L’Enserrement Merlin: Studien zur Merlinsage.” Zeitschrift für romische Philologie 29 (1906), 56–140; 30 (1906), 169–239; 31 (1907), 239–81; 33 (1908), 145–94; 34 (1909), 99–150; 35 (1910), 1–55. Brugger-Hackett, Silvia. Merlin in der europäischen Literatur des Mittelalters. Stuttgart: Helfant, 1992. Bugge, John. “Merlin and the Movies in Walker Percy’s Lancelot” Studies in Medievalism 2.4 (Fall 1983), 39–55. Buschinger, Danielle. “Le Personnage de Merlin dans le Buch der Abenteuer d’Ulrich Fuetrer.” In Buschinger and Spiewok, Zauberer und Hexen, pp. 19–25. ——, and Wolfgang Spiewok, ed. Zauberer und Hexen in der Kultur des Mittelalters. Greifswald: Reinecke, 1994. Cameron, Kenneth Walter. “The Potent Song in Emerson’s Merlin Poems.” Philological Quarterly 32. 1 (1953), 22–28. Carpenter, Dwayne E. “A Sorcerer Defends the Virgin: Merlin in the Cantigas de Santa Maria” Bulletin of the Cantigueiros de Santa Maria, 5 (1993), 5–24. Cawsey, K. “Merlin’s Magical Writing and the Written Word in Le Morte Darthur and the English Prose Merlin.” Arthuriana 11.3 (2001), 89–102. Cerutty, Dorothea. “Validation and Variation in the Tradition of Merlin: From Celtic Legend to Medieval Romance.” Diss., University of Melbourne, 1991. Crist, Larry S. “Les Livres de Merlin.” Mélanges offerts a Pierre Jonin. Sénéfiance 7 (1979), 197–210. Clarke, Basil, ed. and trans. Life of Merlin (Vita Merlini). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973. Colton, Judith. “Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda.” Eighteenth Century Studies 10 (Fall 1976), 1–20. *Cooper, Kate. “Merlin Romancier: Prophecy, Paternity, and Poetics in the Huth Merlin” Romanic Review 77.1 (1986), 1–24. Cox, Don Richard. “The Vision of Robinson’s Merlin.” Colby Library Quarterly 10.8 (December 1974), 495–504. Curley, Michael J. “Animal Symbolism in the Prophecies of Merlin.” In Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy. Ed. Willen Clark and Meradith McMunn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. ——. Geoffrey of Monmouth. TEAS 509. New York: Twayne, 1994. ——.“Gerallt Gymro a Siôn o Gernyw fel cyfieithwyr Proffwydoliaetnau Myrddin.” Llên Cymru 15 (1984–86), 22–33.

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Dalrymple, Roger.” ‘Evele knowen ye Merlyne, in certayne’: Henry Lovelich’s Merlin” Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation. Ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellowes, and Morgan Dickson. Cambridge: Brewer, 2000, pp. 155–67. D’Amours, Guy. “Merlin et le Tao.” Dalhousie French Studies 36 (Summer 1996), 3–18. Danielsson, Brór. “The Birth of a Legend: The Origin and Early Development of the Merlin Legend.”In Studies in English Philology: Linguistics and Literature Presented to Alarik Rynell Ed. Mats Ryden and Lennart A. Björk. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1978, pp. 21–35. Davies, Margaret. “‘Feinte’ and ‘Figure.’”Dalhousie French Studies 4 (October 1982), 79–97. Davis, William A., Jr. “Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and Vivien’ and Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming.’” Colby Library Quarterly 20.4 (December 1984), 212–16. Davis, W.R. “Merlin and Mary: An Unusual Alliance.” Romance Notes 14.1 (1972), 207–12. Dean, Christopher. A Study of Merlin in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present Day: The Devil’s Son. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992. Dobin, Howard. Merlins Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Domina, Lyle. “Fate, Tragedy and Pessimism in Robinson’s Merlin” Colby Library Quarterly 4 (1969), 471–78. Dominik, Mark. William Shakespeare and the Birth of Merlin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1985. Doob, Penelope. Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Eckhardt, Caroline D. “The Figure of Merlin in Middle English Chronicles.” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 21–40. ——. The Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth-Century English Commentary. Speculum Anniversary Monographs 8. Cambridge: Medieval Institute, 1982. Elbert, Monika. “From Merlin to Faust: Emerson’s Democratization of the ‘Heroic Mind.’” In Spivack, Merlin versus Faust, pp. 113–37. Elliott, Philip L. “Merlin and His Demon in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes.’” Furman Studies 25.1 (1976), 59– 64. Engel, Manfred. “Frührealismus und romantisches Erbe: Mythos, Traum und Märchen bei Karl Immermann.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 114.2 (1995), 199–218. Ensor, Allison R. “The Magic of Fol-de-Rol: Mark Twain’s Merlin.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 51–63. ——.“Mark Twain’s Yankee and the Prophet of Baal.” American Literary Realism 14.1 (Spring 1981), 38–42. Evans, Gwyneth. “Three Modern Views of Merlin.” Mythlore 16.4 (Summer 1990), 17–22. Eysteinsson, J.S. “The Relationship of Merlínusspá and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 14 (1953–1955), 95–112. Finoli, Anna Maria. “Merlino.” Studi di Letteratura Francese 13 (1987), 7–16. Fleissner, Robert F. “Merlin Reclad: Shapeshifting and Shakespeare Unregistered.” Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000), 555–66. ——.“The Misattribution of The Birth of Merlin to Shakespeare.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73.2 (1979), 248–52. Ford, Patrick K. “The Death of Merlin in the Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd.” Viator 7 (1976), 379–90. Forman, Edward. “Merlin at the Comédie-Française 1685–1693.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 10 (1988), 182–90. Foulon, Charles. “Enchanted Forests in Arthurian Romance.” Trans. Camilla Hay Gillies. Yorkshire Celtic Studies 2 (1930), 20–29.

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Fowler, David C. “The Quest of Balin and the Mark of Cain.” Interpretations 15.2 (Spring 1984), 70– 74. Fries, Maureen. “The Rationalization of the Arthurian ‘Matter’ in T.H.White and Mary Stewart.” Philological Quarterly 56 (1977), 258–65. Frongia, Terri. “Good Wizard/Bad Wizard: Merlin and Faust Archetypes in Contemporary Children’s Literature.” In Spivack, Merlin versus Faust, pp. 65–93. ——.“Merlin’s Fathers: The Sacred and the Profane.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 18.3 (Fall 1993), 120–25. Fujita, Shu. “Gerard de Nerval et l’enchanteur Merlin.” Iris 21 (2001), 163–72. Gaster, M. “The Legend of Merlin.” Folklore 16 (1905), 407–27. Gilman, Owen W., Jr. “Merlin: E.A.Robinson’s Debt to Emerson.” Colby Library Quarterly 21.3 (September 1985), 134–41. Gollnick, James. “The Merlin Archetype and the Transformation of the Self.” Studies in Religion 19.3 (1990), 319–29. ——.“Merlin as Psychological Symbol: A Jungian View.” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 111–31. ——, ed. Comparative Studies in Merlin from the Vedas to C.G.Jung. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1991. Goode, Okeh. “Acceptance and Assertion in Merlin and Faust.” In Spivack, Merlin versus Faust, pp. 19–39. Goodrich, Peter H. “The Alchemical Merlin.” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 91–110. ——.“The Erotic Merlin.” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 94–115. ——..“The Lineage of Mad Scientists: Anti-Types of Merlin.” In Dionysius in Literature: Essays in Literary Madness. Ed. Branimir M. Rieger. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1994, pp. 71–88. ——.“Merlin: The Figure of the Wizard in English Fiction.” Diss., University of Michigan, 1983. ——.“Merlin in the Public Domain.” In Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 219– 32. ——.“Modern Merlins: An Aerial Survey.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 175–97. ——.“The New Age Mage: Merlin as Contemporary Occult Icon.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5.1 (1992), 42–73. ——, ed. The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology. New York: Garland, 1991. [With critical introductions.] Goslee, David F. “Lost in the Siege Perilous: The Merlin of Tenyson’s Idylls.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 35–50. Gray, J.Martin. “Arthurian Invention in Merlin and Vivien” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2.1 (1972), 36. Greco, Gina L. “Dream, Vision, and Prophecy: Sacred Historiography in the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin” Diss., Princeton University, 1992. Greene, Wendy Tibbetts. “Malory’s Merlin: An Ambiguous Magician?” Arthurian Interpretations 1.2 (1987), 56–63. Griffiths, M.E. Early Vaticination in Welsh with English Parallels. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1937. Grinsell, L.V. “The Legendary History and Folklore of Stonehenge.” Folklore 87 (1976), 5–20. Gutiérrez, Santiago. Merlín e a súa historia. Vigo: Xerais, 1997. Haight, Gordon S. “Tennyson’s Merlin.” Studies in Philology 44.3 (July 1947), 549–66. Hand, Sophie. “Fusing the Biblical and the Arthurian: A Study of Robert de Boron’s Poetic Craft in the Joseph d’Arimathie and the Merlin” Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992. Hanks, D.Thomas, Jr. “T.H.White’s Merlyn: More Than Malory Made Him.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 101–20. Harding, Carol E. Merlin and Legendary Romance. New York: Garland, 1988.

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Harland, Catherine R. “Interpretation and Rumor in Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and Vivien.’” Victorian Poetry 35.1 (Spring 1997), 57–69. Harvey, Karen J. “The Trouble about Merlin: The Theme of Enchantment in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes.’” Keats-Shelley Journal 34 (1985), 83–94. Hemmi, Yoko. “Merlin in Celtic Tradition.” Iris 21 (2001), 23–30. Herman, Harold J. “The Women in Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy.” Interpretations 15.2 (Spring 1984), 101–14. *Hoffman, Donald L. “Malory’s Tragic Merlin.” Arthurian Interpretations 1.2 (Summer 1991), 15– 31. ——.“Mark’s Merlin: Magic vs. Technology in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” In Slocum, Popular Arthurian Traditions, pp. 46–55. *——. “Merlin in Italy.” Philological Quarterly 70.1 (Summer 1991), 261–75. [Provides the basis for Chapter 4 in this volume.] ——“Seeing the Seer: Images of Merlin in the Middle Ages and Beyond.” In Word and Image in Arthurian Literature. Ed. Keith Busby. New York and London: Garland, 1996, pp. 105–31. ——. “Was Merlin a Ghibelline? Arthurian Propaganda at the Court of Frederick II.” InCulture and the King: Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend. Ed. Martin B. Schichtman and James P.Carley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 113–28. Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Nymue, the Chief Lady of the Lake, in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur” In Arthurian Women: A Casebook. Ed. Thelma S.Fenster. New York: Garland, 1996, pp. 171–90. Hopper, Stanley R. “‘Le cri de Merlin!’ or Interpretation and the Metalogical.” yearbook of Comparative Criticism 4 (1977), 9–35. *Hughes, Linda K. “Illusion and Relation: Merlin as Image of the Artist in Tennyson, Doré, BurneJones, and Beardsley.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 1–33. ——.“Text and Subtext in Merlin and the Gleam!” Victorian Poetry 23.2 (Summer 1985), 161–68. Ihring, Peter. “Merlin chroniqueur: L’historiographie prophétique du magicien breton dans l’Orlando furioso” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 21 (1997), 435–49. ——.“Merlin und die literarische Sinnbildung: Zur erzählstrukturellen Funktion prophetischer Rede in der Artusdichtung zwischen Mittelalter und Renaissance.” In Erzählstrukturen der Artusliteratur: Forschungsgeschichte und neue Ansätze. Ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel and Peter Ihring. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999, pp. 47–65. Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone. “A Further Note on Suibhne Geilt and Merlin.” Eigse 7 (1953), 112– 16. ——“”The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern.” Studies in the Early British Church. Ed. Nora K.Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Jansen Jaech, Sharon L. “‘The Marvels of Merlin’ and the Authority of Tradition.” In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History VIII. Ed. J.A.S.Evans and R.W.Unger. New York: AMS, 1986, pp. 35–73. Jarman, A.O.H. “The Arthurian Allusions in the Book of Aneirin.” Studia Celtica 24–25 (1989–90), 15–25. ——.“Cerdd Ysgolan.” Ysgrifau Beirniadol 10 (1977), 50–78. ——.“Early Stages in the Development of the Myrddin Legend.” In Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd: Studies in Old Welsh Poetry, cyflwynedig i Syr Idris Foster. Ed. Rachel Bromwich and R. Brinley Jones. Cardiff: University Press, 1978, pp. 326–49. ——. The Legend of Merlin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1970. *——. “The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy.” The Arthur of the Welsh. Ed. Rachel Bromwich, A.O.H.Jarman, Brynley F.Roberts. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991, pp. 117–45.

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——, “A Note on the Possible Welsh Derivation of Viviane.” Gallica: Essays Presented to J. Heywood Thomas. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969, pp. 1–12. ——. “A oedd Myrddin yn fardd hanesyddol.” Studia Celtica 10–11 (1975–76), 182–97. ——. “The Welsh Myrddin Poems.” In ALMA, pp. 20–30. Jones, Thomas. “The Story of Merlin and the Five Dreams of Gwenddyd in the Chronicle of Elis Gruffyd.” Etudes Celtiques 8 (1959), 320–21. * Jung, Emma, and Marie-Louise von Franz. Die Graalslegende in psychologischer Sicht. Zurich and Stuttgart: Rascher, 1960. Trans. Andrea Dykes as The Grail Legend. 2nd ed. New York: Putnam’s, 1970; repr. Boston: Sigo, 1986. [Chapters 21–22 (pages 357–78) are reprinted in this volume.] Jurich, Marilyn. “Mithraic Aspects of Merlin in Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave.” In The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Donald E.Morse, Marshall B.Tymn, and Bertha Csilla. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992, pp. 91–101. Kaplan, Fred. “‘Woven Paces and Waving Hands’: Tennyson’s Merlin as Fallen Artist.” Victorian Poetry 7.4 (Winter 1969), 285–98. Kellman, Martin. T.H.White and the Matter of Britain: A Literary Overview. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1988. ——.“T.H.White’s Merlyn: A Flawed Prophet.” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 55– 61. Kellogg, Judith L. “The Dynamics of Dumbing: The Case of Merlin.” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (June 1993), 57–72. Kemper, Viktor Robert. “Middle English Merlin Legends: A Scientific Definition, Classification, and Catalog.” Diss., Miami University of Ohio, 1983. Kimball, Arthur Samuel. “Merlin’s Miscreation and the Repetition Compulsion in Malory’s Morte Darthur” Literature and Psychology 25 (1975), 27–33. King, Roma A., Jr. “Charles Williams’ Merlin: Worker in Time of the Images of Eternity.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 65–77. Knapp, Gerhard P. “Grenzgang zwischen Mythos, Utopie und Geschichte: Tankred Dorsts Merlin und sein Verhältnis zur literarischen Tradition.” In Literarische Tradition heute: Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur in ihrem Verhältnis zur Tradition. Ed. Gerd Labroisse and Gerhard P.Knapp. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988, pp. 225–60. ——.“Teufelssohn, Prophet und Gefangener in Liebesgrüften: Notizen zu Immermans Merlin und der romantischen Stofftradition.” In Festschrift für Herbert Kolb zu seinem 65. Ed. Klaus Matzel and Hans-Gert Roloff, with Barbara Haupt and Hilkert Weddige. Bern: Lang, 1989, pp. 340– 60. Knight, Gareth. “Merlin and the Grail.” In At the Table of the Grail: Magic and the Use of Imag-ination. Ed. John Matthews. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 159–73. Knight, Stephen. “The Men of the North: British Southern Scotland and Its Heritage.” Australian Celtic Journal 2 (l989), 3–10. Koji, Watanabe. “Merlin and Sarutahiko.” Iris 21 (2001), 67–77. Krappe, Alexander H. “L’Enserrement de Merlin.” Romania 60 (1934), 79–85. ——.“La naissance de Merlin.” Romania 59 (1933), 12–23. Kuckartz, Wilfried. Merlin, Mythos und Gegenwart. Essen: Verlag de Blave Evle, 2002. Ladden, Arlene. “The Figure of Merlin in the Vita Merlini and the Estoire dou Graal.” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 7 (1984), 11–17. ——.“Malory’s Merlin.” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 9 (1986), 9–17.

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Laurent, Donatien. “La gwerz de Skolan et la légende de Merlin.” Ethnologie Française 1.3–4 (1971), 19–54. Lea, A.E. “Lleu Wyllt: The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi and Welsh Stories of Myrddin.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 25.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1997), 35–47. Lecouteux, Claude. “Merlin: Elements d’étude stratigraphique.” Iris 21 (2001), 9–22. Lendo Fuentes, Rosalba. “Las Transformaciones del personaje de Merlin.” In Voces de la Edad Media. Ed. Conçeption Company, Aurelio González, Lillian von der Walde, and Conçeption Abellan. Mexico City: Univ. Naçional Autonoma de Mexico, 1993, pp. 169–78. Leube, Eberhard. “Guillaume Apollinaire: Merlin et la vielle femme.” In Die moderne franzöische Lyrik: Interpretationen. Ed. Walter Pabst. Berlin: Schmidt, 1976, pp. 79–96. Le Saux, Françoise H.M. “Exorcising Exclusion: The Figure of Merlin in Hersart de la Villemarqué’s Barzaz Breiz” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 43–54. ——.“Layamon’s Welsh Sources.” English Studies 67.5 (October 1986), 385–93. Libby, B.L. “The Dual Nature of Merlin in the Morte Darthur” Medieval Perspectives 16 (2001), 63–73. Littleton, C.Scott, and Linda A.Malcor, “Some Notes on Merlin.” Arthuriana 5.3 (Fall 1995), 87–95. Loomis, Roger Sherman. “The Esplumeor Merlin Again.” Bulletin Bibliographique de la Société Internationale Arthurienne 9 (1957), 79–83. Lot, Ferdinand. “Etudes sur Merlin.” Annales de Bretagne 15 (1900), 325–47, 505–37. Lupack, Alan C. “The Americanization of Merlin.” Avalon to Camelot 2.4 (1987), 13–16. ——.“The Merlin Allusions in Billy Budd” Studies in Short Fiction 19.3 (Summer 1982), 277–78. *——. “Merlin in America.” Arthurian Interpretations 1.1 (Fall 1986), 64–74. [Provides the basis for Chapter 7 in this volume.] Macdonald, Aileen Ann. The Figure of Merlin in Thirteenth Century French Romance. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990. MacQueen, Winifred, and John MacQueen. “Vita Merlini Silvestris.” Scottish Studies 29 (1989), 77– 93. Maddux, Stephen. “The Fiction of the ‘Livre’ in Robert de Boron’s Merlin” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 5 (1985), 41–56. Malcor, Linda. “Merlin and the Pendragon: King Arthur’s Draconarius” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 3–13. Mancoff, Debra N. “Seduction in the Gallery: The Beguiling of Merlin and the Critics of Edward Burne-Jones.” Avalon to Camelot 1.4 (Summer 1985), 28–30. *Markale, Jean. Merlin l’enchanteur, ou, l’éternelle quête magique. Paris: Retz, 1981. [Translation of pages 175–95 are reprinted in this volume.] Marx, Jean. “Le sort de l’âme de Merlin mis en cause par l’évocation de son caractère.” In Mélanges offerts a René Crozet a l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire. 2 vols. Ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou. Poitiers: Société d’Etudes Médiévales, 1966, II, pp. 981–83. Matheson, Lister. “The Arthurian Stories of Lambeth Palace Library MS 84.” In Arthurian Literature V. Ed. Richard Barber. Cambridge: Brewer, 1985, pp. 70–91. Mead, W.E. “Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin.” In Merlin, or the Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance. 4 vols. H.B.Wheatley and W.E.Mead, eds. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899; rpt. in 2 vols., New York: Greenwood, 1969, Vol. I, v—cclxvi. Meehan, Bernard. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecies of Merlin: New Manuscript Evidence.” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 28 (1978), 37–46. Mérida Jiménez, Rafael M. “Merlín católico.” Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura 79 (1999), 179–212. *Micha, Alexandre. Etude sur le “Merlin” de Robert de Boron. Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard, 1980. [Translation of pages 178–90 are reprinted in this volume.]

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Miller, Barbara D. “‘Cinemagicians’: Movie Merlins of the 1980’s and 1990’s.” King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema. Ed. Kevin J.Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999, pp. 141– 66. ——.“The Matter of Merlín: Manifestations of the Enchanter and El baladro del sabio Merlín.” Diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1996. ——“.The Spanish ‘Viviens’ of El baladro del sabio Merlín and Benjamin Jarnés’s Viviana y Merlín: From Femme Fatale to Femme Vitale.” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 82–93. Millican, Charles Bowie. Spenser and the Table Round: A Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser’s Use of the Arthurian Legend. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932. Moorman, Charles. Arthurian Triptych: Mythic Materials in Charles Williams, C.S.Lewis, and T.S.Eliot Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Moranski, Karen R. “The Prophetie Merlini, Animal Symbolism, and the Development of Political Prophecy in Late Medieval England and Scotland.” Arthuriana 8.4 (Winter 1998), 58–68. Morris, Rosemary. “Uther and Igraine: A Study in Uncourtly Love.” In Arthurian Literature IV. Ed. Richard Barber. Woodbridge: Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985, pp. 70–92. Muller, Brigitte. “Alchimie et necromancie dans ‘Merlin et la vieille femme’ de Guillaume Apollinaire.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 5 (1979), 33–41. Nagano, Akiko. “Merlin et Seimei Abe.” Iris 21 (2001), 87–95. Nellis, Marilyn K. “Anachronistic Humor in Two Arthurian Romances of Education: To the Chapel Perilous and The Sword in the Stone” Studi Medievali 2.4 (1983), 57–77. Newhauser, Richard. “The Merlini Allegoria in English.” English Literary History 10.1 (1980), 121–32. Nitze, William Albert. “The Esplumoir Merlin.” Speculum 18 (1943), 69–79. Northup, Clark S. “King Arthur, the Christ, and Some Others.” In Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber. Ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B.Ruud. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929, pp. 309–19. Ó Riain, Pádraig. “A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man.” Eigse 14.3 (Summer 1972), 179– 206. Owenbey, Egbert Sydnor. Merlin and Arthur: A Study of Merlin’s Character and Function in the Romances Dealing with the Early Life of Arthur. Birmingham: University of AlabamaBirmingham, 1933. Parry, John Jay. “Celtic Tradition and the Vita Merlini.” Philological Quarterly 4 (1925), 193–207. ——, ed. and trans. The Vita Merlini. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 10.3 (August 1925), 243–380. Paton, Lucy Allen. “Notes on Merlin in the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffey of Monmouth.” Modern Philology 41 (1943), 88–95. ——.“The Story of Grisandole: A Study in the Legend of Merlin.” PMLA 22 (1907), 234–76. ——. Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance. Boston, 1903. 2nd ed. New York: Franklin, 1960. Patterson, Mark. “The Origins of John Cowper Powys’s Myrddin Wyllt.” The Powys Review 8.1 (1990), 3–15. Payen, J.-C. “L’Art du récit dans le Merlin de Robert de Boron, le Didot Percival et le Perlesvaus” Romance Philology 17 (1964), 570–85. Peacock, John. “Jonson and Jones Collaborate on Prince Henry’s Barriers” Word and Image 3 (1987), 172–94. Perrine, Laurence. “The Sources of Robinson’s Merlin” American Literature 44 (1972), 313–21. ——.“Tennyson and Robinson: Legalistic Moralism vs. Situation Ethics.” Colby Library Quarterly 8 (December 1968), 416–34.

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Pickford, Cedric E. “Guillaume Apollinaire et Merlin.” In Mélange de littérature française moderne offerts a Garnet Rees par ses collègues et amis. Ed. Cedric E.Pickford. Paris: Minard: 1980, pp. 251–60. Pressman, Richard S. “A Connecticut Yankee in Merlin’s Cave: The Role of Contradiction in Twain’s Novel.” American Literary Realism 16.1 (Spring 1983), 58–72. Rider, Jeff. “The Fictional Margin: The Merlin of the Brut” Modern Philology 87 (1989), 1–12. Roberts, Brynley F. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd.” In The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature. Ed. Rachel Bromwich, A.O.H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991, pp. 97– 116. Roche-Mahdi, Sarah. “A Reappraisal of the Role of Merlin in the Roman de Silence” Arthuriana 12.1 (Spring 2002), 6–21. Roland, Veronique. “Folio liminaire et reception du texte: Les manuscripts parisiens du Merlin en prose.” Bulletin Bibliographique de la Société Internationale Arthurienne 43 (1991), 257–69. Rosenberg, Samuel N. “Merlin in Medieval French Lyric Poetry.” Quondam et Futurus 1.4 (Winter 1991), 1–8. Rutledge, Amelia A. “Merlin’s Laughter: The Enigmatic Pedagogue.” Avalon to Camelot 2.4 (1987), 24–27. Salus, Peter H. “Merlin and Myth.” American Journal of Semiotics 7.4 (1990), 131–47. Schiavinato, Cristina. “Merlino e la figura femminile: Il rapporto tra Merlino e le donne nelle opere di Geoffrey of Monmouth.” Prospero 1 (1994), 133–43. Schmidt, Klaus M. “Die verschmähte Merlin: Mögliche Gründe für die mangelnde MerlinRezeption in Deutschland.” In Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters in europäischen Kontext. Ed. Rolf Bräuer. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1998, pp. 61–83. Sherwood, Merriam. “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction.” Studies in Philology 44 (October 1947), 567–92. Shimizu, Aya. “The Way of Merlin.” Symposium. Ed. S.Ishi. Tokyo, 1990, pp. 119–27. Shinoda, Chiwaki. “Sarutahiko a la lumière de Merlin.” Iris 21 (2001), 79–86. Shwartz, Susan Martha. “The Prophecies of Merlin and Medieval Political Propaganda in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Henry VII.” Diss., Harvard University, 1977. Sklar, Elizabeth S. “Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend.” In Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 9–23. Smith, Ronald M. “King Lear and the Merlin Tradition.” Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1946), 153– 74. Snider, Clifton. “Merlin in Victorian Poetry: A Jungian Analysis.” Victorian Newsletter 72 (Fall 1987), 51–54. Sommer, Oskar H.Messire Robert de Borron und der verfasser des Didot-Perceval Halle: Niemayer, 1908. Spivack, Charlotte. “Merlin Redivivus: The Celtic Wizard in Modern Literature.” The Centennial Review 22 (1978), 164–79. ——. Merlins Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987. ——, ed. Merlin versus Faust: Contending Archetypes in Western Culture. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992. Starr, Nathan Comfort. “The Transformation of Merlin.” Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969, pp. 106–19. Stern, Karen. “The Middle English Prose Merlin” In The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose in Memory of Cedric E.Pickford. Ed. Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern, and Kenneth Varty. Cambridge: Brewer, 1986, pp. 112–22. *Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. “Druids, Bards, and Tennyson’s Merlin.” Victorian Newsletter 57 (1980), 14–23.

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Stewart, R.J. The Mystic Life of Merlin. London and New York: Arkana, 1986. ——. The Prophetic Vision of Merlin: Prediction, Psychic Transformation, and the Foundation of the Grail Legends in an Ancient Set of Visionary Verses. London and New York: Arkana, 1986. ——. The Way of Merlin: The Prophet, the Goddess and the Land. London: Aquarian, 1991. Stock, Lorraine Kochanske. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Cultural Primitivism and the Depiction of Merlin as a Wild Man in the Roman de Silence” Arthuriana 12.1 (Spring 2002), 22– 36. Sutton, Anne F., and Livia Visser-Fuchs. “The Dark Dragon of the Normans: A Creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stephen of Rouen, and Merlin Silvester.” Quondam et Futurus 2.2 (Summer 1992), 1–19. Tatlock, J.S.P. “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini.” Speculum 18 (July 1943), 265–87. ——. The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Historia Regum Britanniae” and Its Early Vernacular Versions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Taylor, F.Sherwood. “The Argument of Morien and Merlin.” Chymia: Annual Studies in the History of Chemistry 1 (1948), 23–35. Thomas, Neil. “The Celtic Wild Man Tradition and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini: Madness or Contemptus Mundi?” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 27–42. Thompson, Raymond H. “The Comic Sage: Merlin in Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 143–53. *——.“The Enchanter Awakes: Merlin in Modern Fantasy.” Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Carl B.Yoke and Donald Hassler. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 13. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985, pp. 49–56. [Extensively revised and expanded for this volume.] ——.“From Inspiration to Warning: The Changing Role of the Arthurian Legend in Fiction for Younger Readers.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 76.3 (Autumn 1994), 237–47. ——. “‘Muse on P mirrour…’: The Challenge of the Outlandish Stranger in the English Arthurian Verse Romances.” Folklore 87 (1977), 201–208. ——. “The Perils of Good Advice: The Effect of the Wise Counsellor upon the Conduct of Gawain in Arthurian Literature.” Folklore 90 (1979), 71–76. ——. “Rationalizing the Irrational: Merlin and His Prophecies in the Modern Historical Novel.” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), 116–26. Thompson, W.R. “Broceliande: E.A.Robinson’s Palace of Art.” New England Quarterly 43 (June 1970), 231–49. Thorpe, Lewis. “Merlin’s Sardonic Laughter.” In Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages in Honor of Frederick Whitehead. Ed. W.Rothwell, W.R.J.Barron, David Blamires, Lewis Thorpe, T.B.W.Reid. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973, pp. 323–39. ——.“Orderic Vitalis and the Prophetiae Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth.” Bulletin Bibliographique de la Société Internationale Arthurienne 29 (1977), 191–208. Thundy, Zacharias P. “Merlin in the Indo-European Tradition.” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 79–90. Tolstoy, Nikolai. The Quest for Merlin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Torregrossa, Michael A. “Merlin at the Multiplex: A Filmography of Merlin in Arthurian Film, Television and Videocassette 1920–1998.” Film and History CD-ROM Annual 1999. ——.“Merlin Goes to the Movies: The Changing Role of Merlin in Cinema Arthuriana.” Film and History 29.3–4 (1999), 54–65.

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Traister, Barbara. Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Tucker, Herbert F., Jr. “Tennyson and the Measure of Doom.” PMLA 98.1 (January 1983), 8–20. Vazsonyi, Nicholas. “Deflated Hybris-Uncertain Telos: The Humbling of Faust and the Revival of Merlin.” In Spivack, Merlin versus Faust, pp. 41–64. Vade, Yves. “Merlin, 1’oiseau et le merlin.” Iris 21 (2001), 41–56. ——.“Merlin dans la littérature moderne: Lecture littéraire et lecture anthropologique.” Textes et Langages 4 (1980), 99–111. Verelst, Philippe, and Véronique George. “Merlin, Personnage fantastique, merveilleux et de science-fiction: A propos de L’Enchanteur de René Barjavel.” In Plaist vos oïr bone cançon vallant? Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts a François Suard. Ed. Dominique Boutet, Marie-Madeleine Castellani, Françoise Ferrand, and Aimé Petit. 2 vols. Lille: Édition du Conseil, 1999, pp. 947–61. Vermette, Rosalie. “An Unrecorded Fragment of Richard d’Irlande’s Prophecies de Merlin” Romance Philology 34.3 (February 1981), 277–92. Villemarqué, Theodore Hersart. Myrdhinn; ou, L’enchanteur Merlin. Paris: Didier, 1862. Walter, Philippe, Jean-Charles Berther, Christine Bord, and Nathalie Stalmans, eds. Le Devin maudit: Merlin, Lailoken, Suibhne. Grenoble: Ellug, 1999. Walton, Brad. “Merlin and the Divine Machinery of Dryden’s King Arthur” In Gollnick, Comparative Studies in Merlin, pp. 41–52. Watson, Jeanie. “Mary Stewart’s Merlin: Word of Power.” In Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 155–74. ——, and Maureen Fries, eds. The Figure of Merlin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1989. Weedon, Margaret. “Bickerstaff Bit; Or, Merlinus Fallax.” Swift Studies 2 (1987), 97–106. Weidenhammer, Dirk. Prometheus und Merlin: zur mythischen Lebensbewältigung bei Edgar Quinet. Frankfurt, Bern: Lang, 1982. Weiss, Adelaide Marie. Merlin in German Literature. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1933. Williams, Mary C. “Merlin and the Prince: The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers.” Renaissance Drama n. s. 8 (1977), 221–30. Wulf, Charlotte A.T. “Merlin’s Mother in the Chronicles.” In On Arthurian Women: Essays in Honor of Maureen Fries. Ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst. Dallas: Scriptorium, 200l, pp. 259–70. Yanagawa, Hidetoshi. “Merlin dans l’imaginaire Breton depuis le XIXe siècle.” Iris 21 (2001), 173– 83. *Zimmer, Heinrich. “Merlin.” Corona 9 (1939), 133–55. Rev. and trans. in The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil. 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Joseph Campbell. Bollingen Series 11. New York: Pantheon, 1956. [New translation, with notes, of the original article is reprinted in this volume.] Ziolkowski, Jan. “The Nature of Prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini” In Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Ed. James L.Kugel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 151–62. Zumthor, Paul. “Merlin dans le Lancelot-Graal. Etude thématique.” In Romans du Graal au 12e et 13e siècles. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956, pp. 149–64. *——. Merlin le Prophète. Lausanne: Payot, 1943; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973. [Translation of pages 5–6 and 215–42 are reprinted in this volume.]

PART I Evolution of the Legend

CHAPTER 1 The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy A.O.H.JARMAN

Though linked together in the Middle Ages, the legend of Merlin and the Welsh prophetic tradition were originally distinct and separate. Similarly, despite the inclusion of the legend in the Arthurian complex in the twelfth century, no such association existed at any earlier period. It was in his Historia Regum Britanniae, completed c. 1138, that Geoffrey of Monmouth transformed the legendary Welsh seer Myrddin into the internationally famous Merlin, wizard as well as vaticinator, who played a crucial role in bringing about the conception of Arthur and was prominent in later Arthurian story. Thus, both the Merlin legend and its associated prophecies may be divided into pre-Geoffrey and post-Geoffrey phases, with the proviso that manifestations of the first phase often continued after Geoffrey’s lifetime and uninfluenced by him. The legend of Myrddin, as found in early Welsh verse, embodied the primitive motif of the Wild Man of the Woods. The roots of the theme extended back in time as far as the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian tale of Rishyasninga, which included legends of hairy anchorites or hermits leading solitary lives in the desert.1 A notable example of a Wild Man was Nebuchadnezzar who, driven from the society of men as a punishment for his arrogance and pride, “did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.”2 A religious or penitential ingredient was usually present in the early Asiatic as well as the later European tales embodying the theme, and this was also a feature of the legends of wild men found in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There was, however, no direct link between the tales preserved in Celtic sources and those found in eastern or Asiatic countries. We do not possess a prose version of the Myrddin legend in Middle Welsh, but a general idea of its content may be deduced from a number of allusions found in half a dozen medieval poems. Combined with supplementary material from the Scottish and Irish versions of the tale these make possible a feasible reconstruction both of its main outline and probable development, though many details remain obscure. The poems are (1) Yr Afallennau (“The Appletrees”); (2) Yr Oianau (“The Greetings”); (3) Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin (“The Dialogue of Myrddin and Taliesin”); (4) Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer (“The Conversation of Myrddin and his Sister Gwenddydd”); (5) Gwasgargerdd Fyrddin yn y Bedd (“The Diffused Song of Myrddin in

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the Grave”); and (6) Peirian Faban (“Commanding Youth”). Texts of the first three are found in the Black Book of Carmarthen, written c. 1250, and of the remaining three in manuscripts dating from the two succeeding centuries. All the poems contain matter which is older, and in many cases considerably older, than the dates of the written texts.3 The content of these poems may be divided into (a) passages of a legendary character, and (b) prophecies. Though purporting to be almost entirely uttered by Myrddin himself, the legendary matter which they include is undoubtedly older than the prophetic. The proportion of legend and prophecy, respectively, found in each stanza and each poem is variable. Thus, in Yr Afallennau some fifty lines are devoted to the legend and thirty-eight to prophecy, while in Yr Oianau only about eighty out of two hundred and thirty lines contain legendary matter. In Yr Afallennau three consecutive stanzas, totalling thirty-one lines, are completely free of vaticination and may legitimately be regarded as the oldest existing document of the Myrddin legend. The Black Book text of the poem consists of ten stanzas, each commencing with an address to the “sweet-apple tree” which Myrddin describes as growing “in a glade,” or “on a river-bank,” or “hidden in the forest of Celyddon.” He declares that, after the fall of his former suzerain Gwenddolau in the Battle of Arfderydd, he has suffered hardship for fifty years, “wandering with madness and madmen” in the Caledonian wilds. We gather that he himself lost his reason in the battle and joined the company of the gwyllon or “wild men,” but that previously he had been a warrior of note, wearing a torque of gold. In one stanza, after stating that the apple-tree’s “peculiar power hides it from the lords of Rhydderch,” he appears to be living in fear of persecution from that quarter. He then mentions a certain Gwasawg, describing him as a “supporter of Rhydderch,” who had been “angered” by some obscure event and to whom he (i.e. Myrddin) is “hateful.” Gwasawg’s function in the story is unclear, but it seems permissible to speculate that Rhydderch had been the enemy leader who defeated both Gwenddolau and Myrddin at the Battle of Arfderydd. A further complication is added by Myrddin’s expression of regret that his end had not come before he became guilty of the death of the son of Gwenddydd. He further complains that Gwenddydd, whom the Cyfoesi names as his sister, “does not now love or greet” him. In Yr Afallennau a moral dimension is thus present, perhaps associated with the cause of the fateful battle and Myrddin’s subsequent and possibly retributive suffering. At the end of the three exclusively legendary stanzas he utters the prayer of the penitent that, “having endured sickness and grief in the Forest of Celyddon,” he be “received into bliss by the Lord of Hosts.”4 Yr Oianau is probably a later poem than Yr AFallennau. Each of its twentyfive stanzas commences with a greeting to the “little pig” which was Myrddin’s companion in the forest. A similar greeting occurring in a stanza of Yr AFallennau may initially have suggested a formulaic model for the later poem. Myrddin seeks to imbue the pigling with his own feelings, uttering dire warnings that in their wild state both face the same perils. Thus, the pigling is advised to burrow its lair “in a hidden place in the woodlands” and to avoid morning drowsiness lest it be obliged to flee before the trained hunting-dogs of Rhydderch. The latter, to whose name the epithet Hael (the

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“Generous”) is here, as elsewhere, attached, was clearly considered to be the oppressor of both wild man and wild beast. A touch of humour is sometimes apparent, as when Myrddin avers that his companion is “a rude bed-fellow” with “sharp claws.” A bitter reference to Rhydderch, however, contrasts his life of opulent feasting with the hardships endured by Myrddin among the snows and forest wolves. A stanza mourning Myrddin’s former overlord Gwenddolau, now lying “still beneath the brown earth,” declares that in his day he was the “chief of the kings of the North, the greatest in generosity.” The Cyfoesi is a poem of some hundred and thirty stanzas composed mainly in the three-line englyn metre. It consists principally of a series of consecutive prophecies, uttered by Myrddin in alternate stanzas responding to questions by his sister Gwenddydd, which span British and Welsh history for a period of six or seven hundred years from the late sixth century onwards. Various sections of the poem are probably of varying dates, but no part of it can be older than the commencement of the englyn tradition, which first comes to light in the ninth century. A number of allusions to the matter of the Myrddin legend and its background occur among the prophecies. The early northern kings Rhydderch Hael, Morgant Fawr and Urien are mentioned, and two stanzas refer to the “slaying of Gwenddolau in the bloodshedding of Arfderydd.” Myrddin describes himself as “bitter” or “wrathful” in consequence of that battle, and asserts that his “reason has gone with the wild men of the mountain.” In some particulars the legendary content of the poem differs from that of Yr Afallennau and Yr Oianau. Although Gwenddydd appears to refer to an estrangement between herself and her brother, she now shows concern for his wellbeing, both physical and spiritual, and addresses him in terms of respect and honour. In the third stanza she describes him as “my Llallogan Fyrddin, sage, prophet,” and a little later as “my renowned Llallawg, noble in the hosts.”5 One stanza refers to Myrddin as the “son of Morfryn,” while another mentions the “whelps” (i.e. sons, progeny) of Morfryn. Two stanzas appear to contain the names of these whelps, who must be presumed to have been Myrddin’s brothers: Morgenau, Morial, Morien, Mordaf. The possible significance of these names is considered below. The bulk of the Gwasgargerdd consists of prophecies but at its commencement Myrddin, purporting to speak “in the grave” and again described as the “son of Morfryn,” asserts that formerly he drank wine in the presence of “lords powerful in war.” There are also obscure references to Gwasawg, Gwenddydd and “the wild men of the mountain.” As Myrddin’s death had been contemplated at the end of Y Cyfoesi, the Gwasgargerdd may be regarded as a sequel to that poem, particularly as it immediately succeeds it in the Red Book of Hergest. Peirian Faban is a vaticinatory poem found in a fifteenth-century copy and gives prominence to the name of the Scottish Dalriadic king Aedán Mac Gabráin (Aeddan ap Gafran), who was a contemporary of Rhydderch Hael and is believed to have enjoyed close relations with the British kingdom of Strathclyde. It also mentions Myrddin ap Morfryn, Gwenddolau, Rhydderch, Gwasawg, and Gwenddydd. The contents of the Ymddiddan set it somewhat apart from the other five poems. It may be conjecturally dated c. 1100, if not earlier, and contains two distinct parts. Of

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its total of thirty-eight lines the first twenty-two treat of a subject unconnected with the Myrddin legend, namely a tradition of a battle fought by the men of Dyfed against an invading host led by Maelgwn (presumably Maelgwn Gwynedd, though this is not stated) at some time during the first half of the sixth century. In their alternate comments on the battle Myrddin seems to be speaking for the men of Dyfed and Taliesin for Maelgwn and his followers. Myrddin names heroes, attested in Dyfed tradition, with whom Maelgwn, who is believed to have died c. 547, was probably contemporary. In its twenty-third line, however, the poem turns from the affairs of Dyfed to those of northern Britain and refers to the Battle of Arfderydd, recorded in the Annales Cambriae under 573. Lines 23–34 appear to envisage the event as occurring in the future and mention traditional north-British figures such as Cynfelyn and the “sons of Eliffer.” We thus have the incongruity that Myrddin, speaking in Dyfed before 547, is made to utter a prophetic description of the northern battle, fought a generation later, at which according to his legend he himself became mad and acquired prophetic powers. He does not, however, refer to his own mental state or mention Rhydderch, Gwenddolau, Gwenddydd, Gwasawg, the apple-tree or the pigling. The legendary content of the poem is thus tenuous, but in its two final couplets Myrddin asserts that at the Battle of Arfderydd sevenscore men of rank “lapsed into madness” and perished in the forest of Celyddon. Here he uses a verb in the past tense to record the event.6 Though we lack a medieval prose version of the Myrddin legend, there are indications in the Welsh Triads that the Battle of Arfderydd was the subject of a saga, whether oral or written, in which Myrddin’s overlord Gwenddolau figured prominently. The Triads contain brief synopses, albeit sometimes quite detailed and circumstantial, of episodes in tales which have not been preserved in a more expanded form. Thus, the triad of the Three Faithful War-Bands tells us that the war-band of Gwenddolau “continued the struggle at Arfderydd for a fortnight and a month after their lord was slain.” This statement is clearly sympathetic towards Gwenddolau but another triad, that of the Three Men who Performed the Three Fortunate Assassinations, is hostile. It asserts that “Gall son of Dysgyfdawd slew the two birds of Gwenddolau, and there was a yoke of gold on them; they ate two corpses of the Cymry for their dinner, and two for their supper.” The significance of the reference to the “Cymry” in this triad is difficult to assess, particularly as Gwenddolau’s protégé, Myrddin, had by the Middle Ages come to be regarded as the prophet of the Cymry. Whether or not Gwenddolau was originally an historical person, the triad shows him as a central figure in a bizarre tale which has been lost. Another event connected with the Battle of Arfderydd is recounted in some detail in the triad of the Three Horses which Carried the Three Horse-Burdens. This states that “Cornan [or Corvan], horse of the sons of Eliffer, bore Gwrgi and Peredur on its back, and Dunawd the Stout and Cynfelyn the Leprous to look upon the battle-fog [of the host of] Gwenddolau [in] Arfderydd; and no one overtook it save Dinogad son of Cynan Garwyn upon Swift Eager Roan, and he incurred dishonour on account of that until today.” The narrative background of this scenario eludes us, but all the characters named belonged to northern Britain with the exception of Dinogad son of Cynan, ruler of Powys. Yet another triad lists the Battle

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of Arfderydd as one of the Three Futile Battles owing to its having been fought “on account of the lark’s nest”; it adds the explanation that the description “futile” referred to the “barren” or “worthless” causes of the battles. It has been conjectured that the reference to the “lark’s nest” reflected a tradition of a sixth-century dispute concerning the possession of Caerlaverock (“Lark’s Fort”) some twenty miles west of the probable site of Arfderydd to the north of Carlisle (cf. below, p. 112). It is to be noted, however, that the tale of Myrddin and his madness in the Caledonian forest is nowhere mentioned in the Triads. There can be no doubt that at one time there existed a considerable saga concerning the Battle of Arfderydd, in which Myrddin can be presumed to have participated. At some stage the material associated with him must have separated from the main body of the saga and developed as an independent tale which, however, was not recorded in the Triads.7 The Scottish versions of the tale of the wild man dovetail well with that of Myrddin and add considerably to our knowledge of the legend. A passage in the twelfthcentury Life of St. Kentigern by Joceline of Furness records the presence at the court of King “Rederech” (Rhydderch) of a certain homo fatuus named Laloecen or Laloicen who, on the death of the saint, correctly prophesied the deaths within the year of the king himself as well as another of the great ones of the land. This Laloecen appears again in two longer tales preserved in a fifteenth-century copy which probably derived from an earlier twelfth-century Life of St. Kentigern than that by Joceline. Here Laloecen’s name takes the form Lailoken (or Lailochen) and the tales may be called respectively Lailoken and Kentigern and Lailoken and Meldred. In the first, and longer, of the two Lailoken is portrayed not as a court fool or jester, as in Joceline’s Life, but as a naked, hairy madman whom Kentigern met while praying in a lonely wood. Though completely destitute, the madman was said by some to have been Merlin (Merlynus), “an extraordinary prophet of the British,” but this, the narrator adds, “is not certain.” On being questioned by Kentigern, Lailoken accepted responsibility for his sad condition, stating that he had been “the cause of the slaughter of all the dead who fell in the battle…which took place in the plain lying between Lidel and Carwannok.” At that battle the heavens above him opened and a voice from above spoke to him thus: “Lailoken, Lailoken, because you alone are responsible for the blood of all these dead men, you alone will bear the punishment for the misdeeds of all. For you will be given over to the angels of Satan, and until the day of your death you will have communion with the creatures of the wood.” He then beheld a vision in the sky, amid “a brightness too great for human senses to endure,” consisting of “numberless martial battalions in the heaven like flashing lightning, holding in their hands fiery lances and glittering spears which they shook most fiercely” at him. Thereupon he was seized by an evil spirit and driven to the forest. Having told his story to the saint, Lailoken leapt from his presence and fled to the deepest woods. He later appeared again on several occasions uttering obscure prophecies, to which however little or no credence was given. Then one day he interrupted the celebration of mass by Kentigern demanding that he be given the viaticum, as on that day he was destined to die a threefold death. On being questioned, he explained that this would come about through cudgelling, piercing, and drowning. After some hesitation the saint acceded to his demand and

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gave him the Sacrament. Later that day he was attacked by certain shepherds of King Meldred, who beat him to death. Simultaneously his body fell into the River Tweed, where it was pierced by a sharp stake and his head was immersed in the water. Thus the prophecy of a threefold death was fulfilled. After receiving the Sacrament, Lailoken had also prophesied the deaths within the year of “the most outstanding king of Britain, and the most holy of bishops, and the most noble of lords.” This corresponds closely, though not in every particular, to Laloecen’s prophecy in Joceline’s Life of the saint.8 Lailoken and Meldred is a tale about an event which antedated the madman’s final meeting with the saint by several years. Lailoken had been captured by King Meldred and held in his fort of Dunmeller. One day, seeing the queen entering the court with a leaf on her head, he laughed loudly, but refused to explain his laughter unless promised his freedom. He also prophesied that he would die a threefold death and requested burial “not far from the spot where Pausayl burn falls into the River Tweed,” adding that when the confluence of the two rivers came up to his tomb at that spot “the marshal of the British race will defeat the foreign race.” After receiving a promise of liberty he informed the king that the queen had committed adultery in the garden and that the leaf, caught up by her shawl, had betrayed her. The murder of Lailoken, described in detail in the other tale, is here presented as an act of revenge plotted by the queen. The mad prophet was buried at the place of his choice “some thirty miles from the city of Glasgow.” The statement at the beginning of Lailoken and Kentigern that Lailoken was said by some to be Merlin was no doubt associated with the activities of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as will be seen below. It has been argued that the Lailoken tales had at one time been a part of the “Herbertian” Life of St Kentigern, so called owing to its having been written at the instance of Herbert, Bishop of Glasgow (1147–64). The reference to Merlin was probably added to the text at a later date, though the composition of the Life may be presumed to have postdated the publication of Geoffrey’s Historia (c. 1138) by a brief period. Joceline’s new Life, which is dated c. 1180, is without the reference.9 It has, however, been shown that Joceline “watered down” the legendary material concerning Lailoken and used it in a much truncated form, shorn of its primitive “wildness,” and somewhat mutilated the prophecy of the threefold death by making Laloecen utter it after, and not before, the death of Kentigern.10 There can be no doubt of the ultimate identity of the Lailoken of the Scottish sources and the Myrddin of the Welsh poems. It is equally clear that each had existed separately and independently in Scottish and Welsh tradition respectively for several centuries before their relationship was perceived in the post-Geoffrey period. The historical and geographical setting of the Welsh legends of Arfderydd and Myrddin was exclusively northern and it must be assumed that these tales migrated to Wales together with much other early material at some time between the sixth century and the Middle Ages. During these centuries the tales also continued to be transmitted and to develop in the territory of their origin. The Welsh poems admittedly lack some of the features of the Scottish legend. These include the heavenly vision, the voice which spoke to Lailoken, the association

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with a saint, the tale of the queen’s adultery and the prophecy of the threefold death. King Meldred’s name does not occur in the poems (or in any other known source). On the other hand, Gwenddolau, Gwasawg and Gwenddydd are absent from the Scottish legend and, unlike Myrddin, Lailoken does not address the apple-tree or the pigling, nor does he contrast his abject condition in the forest with his former status as a warrior of note. However, both Myrddin and Lailoken are wild men of the woods who belong to the same historical and geographical milieu, and suffer loss of reason in battle. Both are burdened with moral guilt and both Laloecen in Joceline’s narrative and Myrddin in the poems have associations, albeit greatly differing, with Rhydderch, the sixth-century ruler of Strathclyde whose historicity is confirmed by an allusion to him in the near-contemporary Life of St. Columba by Adomnán.11 Thename Lailoken has a parallel Welsh form Llallogan which, as we have seen, is coupled in the Cyfoesi with the name “Myrddin” and must have migrated to Wales with the tale from the North. And as a consequence of their mental derangement both Lailoken and Myrddin possess the power of prophecy. In his Itinerarium Kambriae Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223) stated that Merlin lost his reason when, having taken up his position in battle, he saw a monstrous sight in the heavens above him and fled to spend the rest of his life in the forest.12 In part this compensates for the absence of the heavenly vision from the other Welsh sources, but it must be remembered that Giraldus was a man of wide-ranging cultural contacts and we cannot be sure that a Welsh source lay behind the statement. It certainly did not derive from the Welsh poems as we know them. The identity of the Welsh Arfderydd with the site of the battle at which Lailoken was said to have lost his reason was convincingly demonstrated by W.F.Skene in 1865/6, when he was able to show that Arfderydd could safely be located at Arthuret, near Longtown, some eight miles north of Carlisle in the “plain lying between Lidel and Carwannok.” The second of these two names, alternatively Carwanolow, he identified with the modern Carwinley, which he very plausibly derived from Caer Wenddolau, “Gwenddolau’s fort.”13 The causes of the Battle of Arfderydd, so famous in later Welsh tradition, can only be a matter of speculation. Skene regarded it as an encounter between “advancing Christianity and the departing paganism,” represented respectively by Rhydderch and Gwenddolau, but this view is not now thought to be well based. It is, however, undeniable that both Joceline’s Life of St. Kentigern and the very much earlier Life of St. Columba depict Rhydderch as a ruler well disposed to the Church and the saints, and that the first stanza of Yr Oianau refers to “Rhydderch Hael protector of the Faith.” This last description may well reflect an early tradition preserved in Wales. The Welsh poems do not at any point specifically state that Rhydderch fought at the Battle of Arfderydd, but they certainly give the impression that he was the victor by registering Myrddin’s subsequent fear of him and his men. Skene’s argument that the pagan interest in the battle was represented by Gwenddolau was based mainly on allusions in the Triads, particularly that to his man-devouring birds.14 A thirteenth-century copy of the Annales Cambriae states that the Battle of Arfderydd was fought “between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell (and) Merlin became mad.”15 These statements,

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however, are later additions to the original entry, which merely read bellum armterid (“the Battle of Arfderydd”) under the year 573. The references to Gwenddolau and Merlin are confirmed by the Welsh poems Yr Afallennau, Yr Oianau and the Cyfoesi, but these sources do not mention the “sons of Eliffer.” According to early genealogies the “sons” bore the names Gwrgi and Peredur, and the oldest text of the Annales Cambriae records their deaths in 580. As we have seen, the triad of the Three Horse-burdens tells us that both were borne on their horse’s back to witness the battle-fog (or “steaming”) of Gwenddolau’s host at Arfderydd, and Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin asserts in a rhetorical passage that, not two, but “the seven sons of Eliffer…will not avoid seven spears in their seven battle-sections” during the encounter. These may be the sources of the entry in the late text of the Annales Cambriae concerning the Battle of Arfderydd, but as historical evidence they must be disregarded. In 1975 Dr. Molly Miller interpreted the situation leading to the battle as a conflict among members of the Coeling (i.e. descendants of Coel Hen), resulting in the overthrow of Gwenddolau by his enemies, who included Gwrgi and Peredur.16 It is unfortunate, however, that the interpretation leans heavily on sources such as the Triads, which are legendary rather than historical in character. The allusions to Rhydderch in the poems are also saga material, but as he was a descendant of Dyfnwal Hen, and thus not a member of the Coeling, he has no place in Dr. Miller’s scenario. Dr. Miller was not prepared to accept the Welsh Myrddin poems as a continuation of the Lailoken tradition, but her argument must fail in view of the indisputable correspondence between the forms Lailoken and Llallogan and Skene’s success in locating Arfderydd at Arthuret. Modern lexicographers have assigned meanings such as “friend” or “twin brother” to llallogan and llallawg, supposing them to be based on llall, “other.” Basil Clarke, however, has suggested that a clue to the meaning of “Lailoken” may possibly be found in the name of a Gaulish village known as Laliacensis after the family of Lollius Urbicus, for three years Governor of Britain (139–42), who was associated in particular with the “pacification” of the North and the building of the Antonine Wall. A Romano-British estate settlement perpetuating his name could have provided the basis for the Cumbric form Lailoken, and the Welsh Llallogan. It is conceivable, Clarke argues, that a person bearing this name fled from the field of Arfderydd and was therefore the “Merlin-original.” Such a person might even have been a follower or retainer of Gwenddolau (if we accept the latter’s historicity), and in due course his memory could have attracted to itself the additional legendary matter found in the Lailoken tales and the Welsh poems. All these possibilities are, of course, purely speculative.17 Versions of the Wild Man legend in medieval Irish literature offer numerous parallels to those in the Welsh and Scottish sources. The Irish wild man was known as gelt and his condition as geltacht. These words correspond in meaning to gwyllt, “wild; mad,” in Myrddin Wyllt and gwylleith, “madness,” in Yr Afallennau. An account of the gelt is found in the Irish Mirabilia in the thirteenth-century Old Norse text, Kongs Skuggsjo or Speculum Regale. This states that when battle is joined between two hosts:

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It happens…that cowardly men run wild and lose their wits from the dread and fear which seize them. And then they run into a wood away from other men, and live there like wild beasts, and shun the meeting of men like wild beasts. And it is said of these men that when they have lived in the woods in that condition for twenty years, then feathers grow on their bodies as on birds, whereby their bodies are protected against frost and cold, but the feathers are not so large that they may fly like birds. Yet their swiftness is said to be so great that other men cannot approach them, and greyhounds just as little as men. For these men run along the trees almost as swiftly as monkeys or squirrels.18 It will be noted that the passage gives cowardice or fear in battle as the cause of the gelt’s flight to the forest, rather than a heavenly vision and an imputation of guilt, as in the tale of Lailoken. The Welsh poems do not specify the cause of Myrddin’s madness, though they make him admit his responsibility for the death of the son of Gwenddydd and dwell on his distress at the fall of his for-mer lord Gwenddolau. Swiftness of movement is not attributed to Myrddin, but that it was originally a feature of the Welsh tradition is suggested by a passage in the Gorchan of Cynfelyn, a poem preserved in the Book of Aneirin, which states that “long-striding horses galloped…swift as the movement of the wild men [gwyllion] over the grassy plain.”19 Lailoken also, after he had received the blessing of Kentigern, is said to have “rushed away like a wild goat breaking out of the hunter’s noose and happily seeking the undergrowth of the wilderness.”20 Myrddin and Lailoken have no feathers to protect them against the cold. Admittedly, Lailoken is “hairy,” but Myrddin, enduring snow up to his hips and icicles in his hair, complains that his cloak is thin and insufficient.21 The outstanding gelt in Irish literature was Suibhne, son of Colman Cuar, a legendary Ulster kinglet whose story is found as part of a cycle of tales concerning Domnall son of Aed, High King of Ireland. Two tales, “The Feast of Dún na nGéd” and “The Battle of Moira” (Mag Ráth), give us a fictional account of the causes and events of the historical Battle of Moira, fought in 637 near Lurgan in Co. Down.22 These tales relate that Congal Claen, King of Ulster, had rebelled against the High King but was defeated by him, and that Suibhne, a vassal of Congal, became mad during the battle and fled to the forest. A separate tale, “The Frenzy of Suibhne” (Buile Shuibhne), tells in circumstantial detail of this occurrence and Suibhne’s subsequent career.23 The Battle of Moira clearly corresponds to that of Arfderydd in the Welsh legend, and the relationship of Suibhne to Congal and Domnall, respectively, resembles that of Myrddin to Gwenddolau and Rhydderch in the Welsh poems. The story of Suibhne was not originally a part of the saga of Moira, but an added subsidiary theme which later developed as a separate tale. It has already been suggested that a similar relationship existed between the legend of Myrddin and the more widely-embracing saga of Arfderydd. Originally separate, the legend was probably incorporated in the saga before hiving off again as a distinct tale (cf. p. 109). At a feast given by Domnall, Congal Claen considered himself to have been grossly insulted when a silver dish and goose-egg placed before him suddenly changed into a wooden dish and a hen-egg. The incident was one of the contributory causes of the

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Battle of Moira (Mag Ráth) and recalls the Welsh triad of the Three Futile Battles, thus designated owing to the “futile” causes for which they were fought (cf. p. 109). The text of the Buile Shuibhne, in its present form, has been dated to the twelfth century, but references to the tradition of Suibhne occur in the ninth, if not earlier.24 The tale records that before the Battle of Moira, having thrown St. Ronán’s psalter into a lake, Suibhne had slain one of the saint’s clerics and cast a spear against the saint himself. In response to these outrages Ronán uttered a curse against Suibhne, predicting that he would die by a spear. The incident of the psalter invites comparison with a poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen in which a certain Ysgolan asserts that he has “drowned a gift book “presumably Church property, for which he has been condemned to severe penance.25 The slaying of the cleric is closely paralleled by the deeds of homicide admitted by Lailoken and Myrddin. The Buile Shuibhne gives a colourful account of Suibhne’s derangement, which it attributes ultimately to “Ronán’s curse.” As its immediate cause, however, it mentions “three mighty shouts” uttered by the opposing armies: Now, when Suibhne heard these great cries together with their sounds and reverberations in the clouds of Heaven and in the vault of the firmament, he looked up, whereupon turbulence, and darkness, and fury, and giddiness, and frenzy, and flight, unsteadiness, restlessness, and unquiet filled him, likewise disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached. His fingers were palsied, his feet trembled, his heart beat quick, his senses were overcome, his sight was distorted, his weapons fell naked from his hands, so that through Ronan’s curse he went, like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility.26 Though Suibhne is said to have “looked up,” it will be noted that there is no mention here of a heavenly vision. The omission may, or may not, be attributable to a lacuna in the text. A much expanded fourteenth-century version of the “Battle of Moira,” however, asserts that: huge flickering horrible aerial phantoms rose up, so that they were in cursed, commingled crowds tormenting him; and in dense, rustling, clamorous, leftturning hordes, without ceasing; and in dismal, regular, aerial, stormshrieking, hovering, fiend-like hosts constantly in motion, shrieking and howling as they hovered about them [i.e. about both armies] in every direction… so that from the uproar of the battle, the frantic pranks of the demons and the clashing of arms,…the noble Suibhne was filled and intoxicated with tremor, horror, panic, dismay, fickleness, unsteadiness, fear, flightiness, giddiness, terror and imbecility; so that there was not a joint of a member of him from head to foot which was not converted into a confused, shaking mass, from the effect of fear, and the panic of dismay.27

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It is further stated that Suibhne’s “very soul fluttered with hallucination and with many and various phantasms.” Whether these spectres, or “demons,” are to be understood as emanating from Suibhne’s inner self, or were external to him as in the Lailoken legend, is not completely clear. This recension of the tale is described by Dillon as “a late romance composed from earlier sources,” but it must remain doubtful whether Suibhne’s “phantasms” were the product of the fourteenth-century writer’s imagination, or had their basis in earlier tradition. In his madness Suibhne acquired the power of levitation and, having fled from the battle, settled on the branches of a yew-tree. Subsequently he wandered throughout Ireland, but spent much of his time thus perched on trees. When in this position on one occasion, he was surrounded by Domnall and his men, the victors of Moira, who endeavoured to persuade him to descend. Not wishing, however, to be captured by his former enemy, he “ascended from the tree towards the rainclouds of the firmament” and fled. The incident may be used to elucidate the passage in the fifth stanza of Yr Afallennau, which asserts that the “peculiar power” of Myrddin’s appletree “hides it from the men of Rhydderch” and adds that there was “a crowd by its trunk, a host around it,” for whom “it would be a treasure.”28 As other references in the poem describe the apple-tree as “hidden in the forest of Celyddon,” we may reasonably conclude that it possessed a quality of invisibility which it was able to impart to Myrddin. There are no indications that the Welsh wild men were capable of levitation, apart perhaps from the implied suggestion in the reference to the swiftness of their movement in the Gorchan of Cynfelyn (p. 126). Invisibility, as an attribute of the apple-tree, and a protection for Myrddin, could have replaced the power of levitation, if the latter had existed as an early feature of the legend but had afterwards been lost. It is clear, however, that the correspondence in detail between Suibhne on his yew-tree and Myrddin on his apple-tree, both encircled by their former enemies, is an indication of a close relationship between the Irish and Welsh forms of the legend at a not too early date. Suibhne spent many years wandering throughout Ireland and uttering nature poems, which comprise much of the Buile Shuibhne. Once or twice he was captured, regained his sanity, and re-established relations with his wife Eorann, who had been cohabiting with Guaire, a successor to Suibhne in his former kingdom. His mental powers failed him again, however, and he returned to the wilds. Later he received the protection of St. Moling, who gave him the Sacrament, and whose role at the end of the story resembles that of Kentigern in the tale of Lailoken. Then, following on Ronán’s curse and fulfilling his prediction, Moling’s herdsman, suspecting Suibhne of adultery with his wife, speared him to death. A curious episode in Suibhne’s career of wandering was a visit which he made to the “land of the Britons.”29 After passing the king’s fortress he came to a great wood, where he encountered another madman, similar to himself, lamenting and wailing. The British madman explained that he was known as Fer Caille (“Man of the Woods”) but added that his name was Alladhán. He also expressed fear of being seized by men of the king’s household and enquired whether Suibhne was one of them. After receiving a reassurance on this score, he described himself as “the son of a landholder”

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and stated that he had lost his reason in a battle when “two kings were contending for the sovereignty of this country.” He attributed his derangement to his own action in putting geasa (“taboos”) on each member of his side prohibiting them from coming to the battle “except they were clothed in silk, so that they might be conspicuous beyond all for pomp and pride.” The hosts, however, gave “three shouts of malediction” against Alladhán, which sent him fleeing. Suibhne related how the curse of Ronán had driven him to madness at the Battle of Moira, and the two became friends and lived together for a year. Then Alladhán announced that the end of his life had come and foretold his imminent death by drowning. Suibhne also prophesied the manner of his own death, whereupon he returned to Ireland and Alladhán was drowned as he had predicted. It would be a plausible comment that this is the record of a meeting between Suibhne and Lailoken, particularly if the length of the period separating the reputed dates of the Battles of Arfderydd (573) and Moira (637) be disregarded. According to Clarke, Suibhne met Alladhán near Dumbarton.30 This was the site of the fortress of Rhydderch Hael, and the fear expressed by Alladhán of his capture by men of the king’s household closely resembles Myrddin’s reference in Yr Afallennau to the followers of Rhydderch who have encircled his apple-tree. The name Alladhán has been explained as “possibly a derivative of allaidh, wild,” and therefore roughly equivalent in meaning to ge(i)It and gwyllt, but Professor Carney has expressed the view that “the name rests ultimately upon that of Lailoken (Llallogan).”31 This suggestion is also made by Clarke, with the further point that Alladhán’s description of himself as “the son of a landholder” may be linked to the possible connection between Lailoken and Lollius Urbicus.32 The reason given by Alladhán for his flight from the battle differs from the causes of madness in the cases of Suibhne, Lailoken and Myrddin, and lacks both the heavenly vision and the moral dimension. Alladhán prophesies the time and manner of his own death, as does Lailoken, and the element of drowning is common to the deaths of both. There can be little doubt that the Alladhán episode in the Buile Shuibhne is a reflex of the tale of the north-British wild man. According to Carney the entire theme of Suibhne’s madness was borrowed by the Irish from northern Britain in the eighth century,33 but Jackson has favoured the contrary view that the borrowing was by the British from the Goidels of Scottish Dál Riada.34 The theme of the wild man may have existed independently in both Irish and British/Welsh tradition from early times but, as has been noted, the similarities between the various tales are evidence of a close relationship in the historical period rather than of totally separate development in each individual country at a remoter date. On balance, the correspondences between the Alladhán incident and the north-British and Welsh forms of the legend would appear to weigh in favour of the view that the Irish were the borrowers. We come now to the intervention of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the development of the Merlin legend. Geoffrey (1090/1100–1155), who lived through the entire first half of the twelfth century,35 is believed to have belonged to a Norman/Breton community settled at Monmouth, but by 1129 was in Oxford where he composed his Historia.36 It has also been conjectured that he spent some time in south-eastern Wales in association with the see of Llandaf.37 In 1152 he was consecrated Bishop of St.

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Asaph but probably did not visit his bish-opric, which at that time was subject to Welsh rather than Norman domination. In his Historia he purported to give an account of the history of the Britons from the time of Brutus, over a thousand years BC, to that of the last “British” king, Cadwaladr, in the seventh century AD. A section towards the end of the work on the reign and conquests of Arthur in the early sixth century brings the history to a climax and constitutes one of the fundamental documents of the Arthurian legend. Shortly before the Arthurian section Geoffrey told the story of Vortigern, the midfifth-century British king who, having fled from the Saxons to the fast-ness of Snowdon, gave orders for the building of a fortress or tower. Whatever the masons built during one day, however, disappeared into the earth by the next. Vortigern’s magicians advised him that the tower’s foundations could only be rendered secure if a fatherless youth were found and slain, and his blood sprinkled on the stones. Such a youth, named Merlin (Merlinus), was discovered at Carmarthen (Kaermerdin). His mother was the daughter of a king of Dyfed (Demetia) who, living with the nuns at a local convent, had been impregnated by an incubus demon. He was thus a “fatherless” youth who qualified for the role of sacrificial victim demanded by the magicians. He was also a “wonder-child,” the offspring of an earthly mother and a superhuman father, and his powers were manifested when he was brought to Vortigern’s court. There he confounded the magicians by showing that the subsidence was caused by an underground pool at the bottom of which were two stone vessels, each containing a dragon, one white and one red. The two fought each other with varying fortunes and Merlin, whose name is here given as Ambrosius Merlinus, explained that they respectively represented the Saxon and British peoples. He then uttered a long series of obscure prophecies which, under the title Prophetiae Merlini, enjoyed a considerable vogue as a work of literature in its own right during the later centuries of the Middle Ages, and which had been separately circulated some three years before the publication of the Historia.38 This tale was not the product of Geoffrey’s own imagination but had been lifted bodily by him from the ninth-century collection of early British and Welsh saga material and semi-historical traditions known as the Historia Brittonum.39 Geoffrey reproduced the essentials of the tale but told it in his own words, with contractions and expansions of his source-material here and there, including the prophecies added at the end. He made two changes in the story itself, however, which gave it a completely new orientation. According to the Historia Brittonum the fatherless youth was called Ambrosius, a name which recalls that of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a British ruler contemporary with Vortigern. It has been argued that the two were respectively leaders of pro-Roman and anti-Roman factions among the Britons, and that the story of the confounding of the king’s magicians by the youth preserves a memory of the conflict between them.40 Geoffrey, however, twice referred to the youth as Ambrosius Merlinus, and once as Merlinus qui et Ambrosius dicebatur,41 but more usually simply as Merlinus. There was no warrant for this in his source, but henceforth the central figure in the story of Vortigern’s tower would invariably be known as “Merlin,” albeit with the addition of “Ambrosius” on occasions. The second change made by Geoffrey

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concerned the place where the youth was found. According to the Historia Brittonum this occurred in Glywysing, that is Glamorgan, but in Geoffrey’s narrative the discovery was made in the town “called Carmarthen” (Caer Merddin, “Merddin’s Fort”). Geoffrey no doubt intended the link between the town’s name and that of the youth to be understood in an onomastic sense: that is the town’s name commemorated its most famous erstwhile inhabitant.42 As will be argued below, the linkage between the fort of Carmarthen and a certain Merddin/Myrddin, celebrated locally as a sage or vaticinator, had probably existed since early times, but to Geoffrey belongs the credit of creating a new literary character by identifying the youth Ambrosius of the Historia Brittonum with the reputed eponym of Carmarthen, whose name he wrote in the Latin form Merlin (us).43 Through the incident of the white and red dragons Ambrosius was also associated with the genesis of the Welsh tradition of political prophecy. Before the end of the tale he drove Vortigern from the site of his fortress and possessed it for himself; his memory is still perpetuated at Dinas Emrys (“Ambrosius’s Fort”), near Beddgelert in Eryri (Snowdonia), where these events were supposed to have taken place. In Geoffrey’s “History,” also, Merlin foretold that Vortigern would be destroyed by his enemies, and this came to pass. He later removed the stones of Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain, interpreted the appearance of a comet as heralding the coming of King Arthur, and played a leading part in bringing about the king’s conception. These events were additions by Geoffrey to the content of the Merlin legend and bore no relation to the tale of Myrddin the wild man. Merlin played no further part in Geoffrey’s story, but the Historia provided a framework for the development of the legend in French romance, culminating in the seer’s infatuation for Viviane and his imprisonment in the Forest of Broceliande.44 Geoffrey’s interest in Merlin continued after the completion of his Historia, as was made manifest in his second work, entitled Vita Merlini, a poem of 1529 lines in Latin hexameters, which may be dated c. 1150.45 This presented a portrait of Merlin which was totally at variance with that in the Historia. Geoffrey, however, insisted on the identity of the Merlin of both works, claiming that in the Vita the prophet lived on to another age. Critics have generally treated the portrait as light and fanciful in character, though an American scholar has recently described the poem as “profoundly religious.”46 Neil Wright also sees it as “more complex and difficult” than the Historia, in that it “adds elements of Latin astronomical and philosophical learning…to a rich blend of Celtic legend and pseudo-history.”47 Basically, however, Geoffrey portrayed Merlin in the Vita, not as the wonder-child who possessed himself of Vortigern’s court, but according to Welsh tradition as a silvester homo or “man of the woods.” The poem opens with the statement that Merlin was renowned both as a prophet and as King of the Demetae or southern Welsh. Together with Peredurus, King of the northern Welsh, and Rodarchus, King of the Cumbrians, he engaged in war against Guennolous, King of Scotland. During the fighting three of his brothers were killed and in his grief he became mad and fled to the forest. There, with a wolf for a companion, he subsisted on roots, grass and fruits, and was sustained by nineteen apple-trees. When winter with its hardships came he was discovered by an emissary of his sister Ganieda, who was married to King Rodarchus. The emissary sang to him

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of the sadness of Ganieda as well as of his beautiful wife Guendoloena at his absence, and succeeded in bringing his mind back to normality and leading him to Rodarchus’s court. At court Merlin expressed a desire to return to the forest of “Calidon” but he was kept chained in order to prevent him from doing so. One day, when Queen Ganieda appeared in the hall with a leaf hanging from her hair, Merlin laughed but refused to give the reason for his laughter unless granted his liberty. Ultimately he revealed that the queen had lain with a lover in the undergrowth where a leaf had been caught in her loosened hair. Denying the accusation, Ganieda was able to discredit her brother by the ruse of inducing him to prophesy three apparently different deaths for a youth brought before him in various disguises. Merlin, however, was now allowed to leave the court, and before going he intimated to his wife that in his absence she would be free to remarry, provided her new spouse kept far away from him. He also promised to attend the wedding in person, and when, years later, a marriage ceremony was arranged, he made his appearance sitting astride a stag. But on seeing the new bridegroom he wrenched the stag’s horns from its head and hurled them at his rival, killing him instantly. He then attempted to escape but was captured and brought again to the court. Later, however, he was permitted to return to the woods and provided with a house for his use in the winter, as well as a hall with seventy doors and seventy windows and as many secretaries to record his prophecies. There his sister would often visit him and see to his needs. When Rodarchus died, she resolved to leave the court and live in the forest with her brother. At this point Merlin was visited by Telgesinus (Taliesin) who delivered a long discourse concerning the Creation, the World and various natural phenomena. This included the first account in literature of the bearing of the wounded Arthur to the Celtic Otherworld to be healed by Morgen. Telgesinus further suggested that Arthur should now be invited to return to lead the Britons to victory and peace, but Merlin replied that the time for the restoration of the ancient liberties was not yet. This would come about after many years through an alliance of the Scots and Welsh, Cornishmen and Bretons led by Conanus of Brittany and Cadwaladrus of Wales. When it was announced that a fountain of pure water had burst forth at the foot of a nearby mountain, Merlin drank of it and his reason was restored. Reviewing his mental condition during his madness, he described it as follows: “I was taken out of my true self, I was as a spirit and knew the history of people long past and could foretell the future. I knew then the secrets of nature, bird flight, star wanderings and the way fish glide.”48 Another madman suddenly appeared, and he too was cured by drinking of the pure spring. Merlin recognized him as Maeldinus, a companion of his youth, who had suffered mental derangement through eating poisoned apples which had been intended for Merlin himself by a former mistress. The four, Merlin, Telgesinus, Maeldinus and Ganieda, then decided to spend the rest of their lives together in the forest. There is no further mention of Guendoloena. The Merlin of this poem is clearly the same person as the Myrddin of the Welsh texts. Both are wild men of the woods who have lost their reason in a bat-tle fought in northern Britain and live subsequently in the forest of Calidon or Celyddon. Both

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converse with the famous poet and reputed vaticinator Taliesin. Themes connected with apples and apple-trees occur in both the Welsh poems and the Vita, and Myrddin’s pigling is matched by Merlin’s wolf companion. The names Guennolous, Rodarchus and Ganieda are plainly Latinizations of Gwenddolau, Rhydderch and Gwenddydd. Ganieda is sister to the wild man in the Vita as is Gwenddydd in the Cyfoesi, and the close relationship between brother and sister described in the Vita may be presumed, judging from references in Yr Afallennau, to resemble that existing in earlier and happier days between Myrddin and Gwenddydd. Merlin’s three brothers, who fell in battle, may well be derived from the “three men of note” who, according to the Ymddiddan, were slain in the battle fought in Dyfed. In Yr Afallennau Myrddin is fearful of Rhydderch and his “lords,” while in the Vita Merlin is held captive by Rodarchus. In Yr Afallennau, too, Myrddin recalls that when he was “in his right mind” he was accompanied at the foot of the apple-tree by “a fair wanton maiden, one slender and queenly,” who with some plausibility may be identified with Merlin’s erstwhile but discarded mistress. Peredur is not named in the Welsh poems, but in the Vita Peredurus is Prince of northern Wales. He was, however, one of the sons of Eliffer, who are mentioned in the Ymddiddan. And, as we have seen, one of the Triads names him in connection with the Battle of Arfderydd which, according to a text of the Annales Cambriae, was fought between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio. The points of contact between the Vita and the Lailoken tales are less numerous. They consist of the common portraits of Merlin and Lailoken as wild men, the motif of the threefold death, and the incident of the leaf in the queen’s hair. In the two tales the motif of the threefold death refers to Lailoken’s own demise, whereas in the Vita it is used in the story of the boy brought before Merlin in various disguises.49 There are also two similarities between the Vita and the Buile Shuibhne. Both Merlin and Suibhne are induced to return to the life of the court, whence however they flee again to the wilds; both are married, and each of their wives acquires another partner or spouse after her husband’s loss of sanity. There are, of course, many differences. In the Welsh poems Myrddin claims to have been a vassal of Gwenddolau, but in the Vita Merlinus is King of the Demetae and engages in hostilities against Guennolous. Rodarchus is not his enemy but his ally. The original roles of Myrddin, Gwenddolau and Rhydderch have therefore been reversed in the Vita. In the Latin poem, too, Ganieda is Rodarchus’s wife, but there is no suggestion of such a relationship between Gwenddydd and Rhydderch in the Welsh poems. Merlin’s wife Guendoloena is found only in the Vita. The tales of the wild man’s capture and return to the forest and of the queen’s adultery, as well as the theme of the threefold death, do not occur in the poems. The slaying of the new bridegroom at Guendoloena’s wedding and the house built for Merlin in the forest are only found in the Vita, while the subjects discussed at great length by Merlinus and Telgesinus bear no relation to those briefly mentioned by Myrddin and Taliesin in the Ymddiddan. The name Maeldinus (which may be based on the Irish Mael Duin50) is absent from the other sources. Myrddin and Lailoken do not regain their sanity, as

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does Merlin, but the appearance of another madman at the end of the Vita recalls the gwyllon mentioned in the Welsh poems as Myrddin’s companions in the forest. It is, however, in the difference between Geoffrey’s two portraits of Merlin, respectively those in the Historia and the Vita Merlini, that we must look for the crux in the development of the legend. Though the Vita was written about a dozen years after the Historia, it was the Merlin of the earlier work that became the famous wizard and seer of international romance. When he was working on the Historia, in the years preceding its publication c. 1138, Geoffrey’s acquaintance with the legend was clearly slight and merely amounted to an awareness of a belief at Carmarthen in an eponymous founder-figure named Merddin/Myrddin who was credited with being the author of prophecies relating to the future of the Brythonic and Welsh peoples. At this stage he probably did not know of any narrative told of Myrddin. He was using the earlier Historia Brittonum as a source for the “history” which he was writing, and in retelling the story of Vortigern’s tower took the liberty, for reasons best known to himself, of making the two changes in the narrative which we have noted. It would probably be safe to surmise that Myrddin’s local fame at Carmarthen as a vaticinator fired his imagination and suggested to him the possibility of enriching the tale of Vortigern’s tower by identifying the prophet with the boy Ambrosius. At some time subsequent to 1138, however, Geoffrey must have learnt more about the Myrddin of legend and realized that the account given of him in the Historia was contrary to popular tradition. His interest in the vaticinator was in no way diminished, but apparently enhanced, by the new information which he acquired, for he set about composing a new “life” of Merlin which shows indebtedness both to the Welsh poems and the Lailoken tales. In the Vita, rather than admit to any previous error, Geoffrey presented Merlin’s career as one which had lasted from his childhood in the reign of Vortigern in the mid fifth century to the age of the “Men of the North,” Rhydderch, Gwenddolau and Peredur, in the late sixth. This strained even medieval credulity, however, and the view developed that there had in fact been two Merlins. In his Itinerarium Kambriae, the record of his journey through Wales in 1188, Giraldus Cambrensis distinguished clearly between Merlinus Ambrosius and Merlinus Celidonius or Silvester. The first was the Merlin of Geoffrey’s Historia and became known to the Welsh as Myrddin Emrys. The other, Giraldus averred, was called Celidonius, from the Celidonia silua in which he prophesied, and Silvester owing to the forest life (siluestrem uitam) which he led. The latter title is no doubt an approximate rendering of the Welsh Myrddin Wyllt. We do not know whether Giraldus knew the Vita Merlini, but his mention of the heavenly vision shows that a source other than the Welsh poems (as we possess them) was available to him. It is probable that he knew of the contents of the poems, for both in his Itinerarium and in his incomplete work on prophecies, De Vaticiniis, he referred to his discovery at Nefyn in Llŷ n in 1188 of an old and revered manuscript of the prophecies of Merlinus Silvester, adding that men conversant with the “British” tongue helped him to translate them.51 The medieval Welsh tradition of prophecy sprang from memories of the struggle of the Britons and the English for supremacy in the fifth and sixth centuries. Gildas, writing of the coming of the Saxons sustained by favourable “omens and auguries,”

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cited a prophecy that “they would live for three hundred years in the land towards which their prows were directed.”52 More specifically, however, the roots of later Welsh prophecy are to be associated with the tradition of the struggle of the red and white dragons recorded in the Historia Brittonum. In that work the boy Ambrosius tells Vortigern that the white dragon represents “the people who have seized many peoples and countries in Britain, and will reach almost from sea to sea; but later our people will arise, and valiantly throw the English people across the sea.”53 For centuries this aspiration persisted among the Welsh, although its fulfilment could hardly have seemed feasible after the failure of the attempts to reconquer parts of the North by Cadwallon in 634 and Cadafael in 655. The creation of a confederacy of the Welsh and Irish, the men of Strathclyde, Cornwall and Brittany, and the Norsemen of Dublin, with the aim of driving the invaders from Britain, was both advocated and prophesied in the poem Armes Prydein (“The Prophecy of Britain”), composed c. 930, which refers twice to Vortigern, though not to the tale of the fatherless boy, and in one line mentions Myrddin.54 The names Cynan and Cadwaladr (Geoffrey’s Conanus and Cadualadrus) figure in it as those of the expected leaders of the resistance to the Saxons. The return as deliverers of these shadowy princes from early times was frequently foretold in vaticinatory poems, and they are linked together in Yr Afallennau and Yr Oianau. Geoffrey was clearly aware of this ingredient in the Welsh tradition, and a reference made by him to fluuium Perironis in the Prophetiae Merlini suggests that he knew of the prophecy relating to Aber Peryddon ascribed to Myrddin in Armes Prydein.55 On the whole, however, what Geoffrey received from Welsh tradition was a general concept of the nature and purpose of vaticination, rather than specific prophecies related to particular events. He then deployed the concept with the aid of the inexhaustible resources of his imagination, and thus made his vast individual contribution to this curious genre of medieval literature.56 One feature of the Merlin legend, which may have puzzled Geoffrey himself, was the duality in the prevailing concepts of Merlin. At times he was a prophet, at others a wild man of the woods, and frequently both simultaneously. Rooted in “Caerfyrddin,” the “fortress of Myrddin,” and of local royal ancestry according to Geoffrey, he later functioned both as a wild man and a prophet in the Caledonian forest of northern Britain. Though Geoffrey’s Historia places the commencement of his career in the reign of Vortigern, in the Vita Merlini he is made to survive the death of Rhydderch, which a late source (Joceline’s Life of St. Kentigern, cf. p. 6) records as having occurred in 612.57 Giraldus resolved the difficulty with the aid of the doctrine of the two Merlins, and this view prevailed for many centuries. The problem, however, was too complex for such a comparatively simple explanation to be adequate, and it was not until 1868 that a hypothesis capable of leading to a credible elucidation was proposed. In that year the French Celtic scholar D’Arbois de Jubainville explained Merddin/ Myrddin as a personal name evolved from the place-name Caerfyrddin.58 An identical view, independently arrived at, was expressed with more corroborative etymological detail, by Egerton Phillimore in 1890.59 De Jubainville’s derivation of the name Merddin/Myrddin from the Brythonic Moridunon (for which he gave the Latinate forms

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Maridunum, Moridunum), meaning “Sea-fort,” was sound and is endorsed by later philologists.60 For speakers of Brythonic, he further argued, the meanings of the two elements in the name were clear, but after Mori-dunon had become the Welsh Merddin or Myr-ddin this ceased to be the case, and the word Caer, identical in meaning with-ddin, was then prefixed to the name. This was a pleonasm and de Jubainville compared the French habit of referring to “la ville de Verdun.” Once the name Caerfyrddin had been established, the etymologists of the time began asking the question, “Who was this Myrddin?” and in due course folk imagination fashioned an eponymous founder-figure out of the place-name. The development was probably facilitated by the existence of a number of early place-names such as Caer Aranrhod, Caer Gai, Caer Garadog, Caer Dathal, etc., in which Caer was combined with a personal name, often legendary or mythical. As a parallel instance of a personal name derived from a placename, de Jubainville cited Port from Portus, described by Plummer in 1899 as a mere abstraction from Portsmouth, which really means the “mouth of the Port or harbour.”61 This instance is perhaps not certain,62 but there can be no doubt, as was pointed out by Phillimore, that the personal names Efrawg and Lleon in the Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s Historia were abstracted from the place-names Caer Efrawg (York) and Caer Lleon (Chester), which were respectively based on Eburacum (“place of the cow-parsnip”) and (Castra) Legionum (“Fort of the Legions”).63 In the Welsh romance of Peredur, Efrawg is the name of the hero’s father. A comparable AngloSaxon example was the creation of the personal name Hrof from the common noun hrof, “roof,” to explain the place-name Hrofaescaestrae (Rochester).64 It is therefore reasonable to conclude that by the end of the sixth century, but possibly later, popular speculation at Carmarthen had created an eponym who, however, would at first have been an obscure figure with no legend attached to his name. In that age such a person would inevitably have been credited with prophetic powers, and we have seen that the tenth-century Armes Prydein ascribes a prophecy to Myrddin. The Armes was probably a Dyfed poem, and in the somewhat later Ymddiddan Myrddin speaks for Dyfed. In the latter poem also there is a reference to the Battle of Arfderydd and Myrddin mentions the gwyllon of Coed Celyddon. This indicates the attachment of saga material concerned with the northern wild man to the prophet of Dyfed. At some time between the sixth century and the eleventh, the legend of Lailoken must have migrated to Wales, where it took root in Dyfed, and the name “Myrddin” replaced that of “Lailoken.” The details of the process of transmission are hidden from us, but the name-substitution was doubtless facilitated by the fact that both Lailoken and Myrddin were credited with prophetic powers. We can only guess at the date of the migration of the legend, but the ninth century is generally considered to have been the period when the saga of Llywarch Hen and his sons came from the North to Powys, where it took verse form in the englyn metre. We have seen that in the Cyfoesi, which also is a series of englynion, Gwenddydd applies the name Llallogan Fyrddin to her brother. Llallogan and Llallawg were the Welsh forms of the Cumbric Lailoken (or Laloecen) and Lailak, and the linking of the name with that of Myrddin is the clearest evidence of the identification of the northern wild man with the eponymous seer of Carmarthen. The names Llallogan and Myrddin do not appear in

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Yr Afallennau or Yr Oianau, which are in any case speeches in the first person, but in these poems the northern background has been firmly wedded to prophecies which are mostly concerned with places and events in Wales. In the Ymddiddan, on the other hand, the fusion of the northern and Welsh traditions is uneasy and incomplete. Here, as has already been noted, Myrddin is made to foretell the battle at which he himself would lose his reason and acquire the ability to prophesy. Saga concerning Lailoken/Llallogan probably came to Wales in two stages. The first, perhaps oral, may be conjecturally dated in the ninth or tenth century. It would have provided material for the central core of Yr Afallennau and the earliest section of the Cyfoesi, and various prophecies were subsequently added to the original nuclei of these poems.65 The second stage perhaps coincided with the first half of the twelfth century, when written Latin sources linking Lailoken with St. Kentigern reached Wales from the North, and it has been suggested that they came to Geoffrey’s notice during the, possibly protracted, preliminaries to his elevation to the see of St. Asaph.66 While scholars are unanimous in rejecting Joceline’s claim that Kentigern was the founder of the see, it is possible that a story to this effect may have existed there in the twelfth century.67 Geoffrey could therefore have learnt of Lailoken shortly after, if not simultaneously with, his acquirement of fuller knowledge of the Welsh legend of Myrddin. He drew on both sources to write the Vita Merlini. In conclusion, we may here note two other derivations which have been proposed for the name Myrddin. Nikolai Tolstoy has given some qualified support to Rhŷ s’s suggestion that it could be based on *Moridunios, meaning “man of the sea-fort,” understanding -dunios as possibly a dual reflection of both *dunon, “fort,” and *donios, “man.”68 Even granting such a possibility, if the sea-fort in question was Carmarthen, the personal name would have been assimilated easily to that of the fort. Professor Eric Hamp has explained the name as a reflex of British *moriji:n- (? meaning “one of the sea”).69 Here again, assimilation to the place-name would probably have occurred. If either of these derivations is correct, however, the existence of the personal name could well have contributed to the creation of an eponymous founderfigure associated with the town. The possibility becomes the more intriguing if we consider it in conjunction with the references in the Cyfoesi to Myrddin’s father Morfryn, and his “brothers” Morgenau, Morial, Mordaf and Morien. In three, if not four, of these names, the syllable Mor- represents mawr, “great,” but in Morien it is from môr, “sea.” This Morien is named in a probably interpolated passage in Y Gododdin, which credits him with having “defended the fair song of Myrddin.”70 These tantalizingly brief allusions bristle with problems. Do the names reflect an early association, perhaps mythological, with the sea? The poet of the Cyfoesi may have understood Mor- in all these names as môr, “sea,” and may even have divined that this was the significance of Myr- in Myrddin. Would it be profitable to ask why the “Seaborn” (Morien) should have defended the fair song of ‘Sea-fort’ or “Sea-man” (Myrddin) the son of “Sea-hill” (Morfryn)? We would doubtless be on firmer ground pondering Jackson’s suggestion that the phrase “Myrddin’s fair song” simply meant the tradition of Welsh poetry.71 More particularly, this should perhaps be understood

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as the tradition of prophetic poetry rooted in the legend which has been the subject of this chapter. Throughout this discussion Myrddin/Merlin has been treated as a legendary character, but it may be noted that since the Middle Ages there has existed a widespread belief that in fact he was an historical poet contemporary with Taliesin, Aneirin and Llywarch Hen. During the present century a number of Welsh scholars have upheld the view that he was either a panegyrist or a vaticinator, though admitting that not one of his poems has survived. However, Sir Ifor Williams, who made significant contributions to our understanding of the legend, was uncertain, and in 1933 his verdict was that “for the moment, we will just fail Myrddin” as a “candidate for sixth-century honours.” The case for the historical Myrddin is based on the apparent strength of the medieval tradition concerning him, according to which he was almost the co-equal of Taliesin as a vaticinator. Arguments against his historicity include the absence of his name both from the list of early Welsh poets added to the Historia Brittonum (which mentions Taliesin and Aneirin), and from northern and Scottish tradition in general (apart from post-Geoffrey forms such as Merlynus, cf. p. 6). Moreover, unlike Taliesin and Aneirin, no known works are now ascribed to Myrddin. Due weight should also be attached to the clear connection between the name Myrddin and the place-name Caerfyrddin, and to the feasibility of the hypothetical reconstruction of the development of the legend outlined above.72 Notes Reprinted with permission from The Arthur of the Welsh, eds. Rachel Bromwich; A.O.H.Jarman, Brynley F.Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 117– 45. 1. N.K.Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Harmondsworth, 1960); C.A.Williams, the “Oriental Affinities of the Legend of the Hairy Anchorite,” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 10 (1925), 189–242; 11 (1926), 429–510; cf. idem, “The German Legends of the Hairy Anchorite,” ibid., 18 (1935), 429–510. Cf. also D.A.Wells, The Wild Man from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein. An Inaugural Lecture, The Queen’s University, Belfast, 1925. 2. Daniel. 31–3. 3. For the texts see LlDC 1–2 (Ymddiddan), 26–8 (Afallennau), 29–35 (Oianau); RBP, 1–4 (Cyfoesi), 5 (Gwasgargerdd); Cy, 7 (1885), 151–4 (Gwasgargerdd); B, 4 (1928), 114–21 (Cyfoesi); and see now J.Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry (Cambridge, 1990), 291–4, 121–5 (Afallennau), 125–9 (Oianau); ibid., 14 (1951), 104–6 (Peirian Faban). 4. For my translation of the legendary passages in the Ymddiddan, Afallennau and Oianau, see Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin (London, 1985), 251–5. Cf. also VM235; ALMA 21–2, 28. 5. For Llallogan, Llallawg see below. 6. See my edition of the poem, YMTh, for further details of its contents. 7. See TYP nos. 29, 44, 84 for the texts of the triads cited, and for further details see Ast.H 338–9. The question of Caerlaverock and the “lark’s nest” is discussed by N.K. Chadwick,

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

The British Heroic Age (Cardiff, 1976), 99; K.H.Jackson, “O achaws Nyth yr Ychedydd,” YB, 10 (1977), 45–50; VM 160. The Life of St. Kentigern was edited by A.P Forbes in Lives of S.Ninian and S.Kentigern (Edinburgh, 1874). For a detailed analysis of its probable sources, see K.H.Jackson, “The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern,” in N.K.Chadwick (ed.), Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge, 1958), 273–357. The Latin texts of the two Lailoken tales were printed by H.L.D.Ward in “Lailoken (or Merlin Silvester),” Romania, 22 (1893), 504–26, and English translations published in VM 227–34. Forbes, op. cit., 118, 241. For the date of composition see Jackson, “Sources,” 274. Jackson, “Sources,” 329–30. A.O. and M.O.Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba (Edinburgh, 1961), 238–9; VM 213. J.F.Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera (London, 1868), vi, 133. Cf. also Lewis Thorpe, The journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (Harmondsworth, 1978), 192; H.M. and N.K.Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, i (Cambridge, 1932; 1968), 112; VM38. “Notice of the Site of the Battle of Ardderyd or Arderyth,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 6 (1866), 91–8; also quoted extensively in Forbes, op. cit, 360–6, and Nikolai Tolstoy, op. cit, 50–2. Skene’s Ardderyd is a misreading of the medieval Arderydd, earlier Arfderydd. In the twelfth to fourteenth centuries the name Arthuret appears as Artureth, Arturet, Artured, and medieval forms of Carwinley are Karwindelhou, Karwendelowe, Kaerwyndlo, Carwendlow, etc. Cf. ALMA 27. Skene also mistakenly took mygedorth in the triad of the Three Horse-burdens to mean “sacred fire,” a pagan concept. Bellum armterid (inter filios Elifer et Guendoleu filium Keidiau; in quo bello Gwendoleu cecidit; Merlinus insanus effectus est), J.Williams (Ab Ithel), Annales Cambriae (Rolls, 1860), 5; J.Morris, Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals (London and Chichester, 1980), 85. See M.Miller, “The Commanders at Arthuret,” Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 75 (1975), 96–118. See VM 160, 195. The short form Lailok occurs in Lailoken and Meldred, see VM232. For Lollius Urbicus see Peter Salway, Roman Britain (Oxford, 1984), 193–4, and cf. the reference in ibid., 513, to the third-century legionary Tiberius Flavius Virilis who acquired a British wife, Lollia Bodecca. Salway comments that her “first name suggests that she came from a native family that first received the Roman citizenship during Lollius Urbicus’ governership.” Ériu, 4 (1910), 11. A.O.H.Jarman, Aneirin: Y Gododdin (The Welsh Classics, Llandysul, 1988), 72. VM 231. LlDC 17.87–8, 213; Tolstoy, op. cit., 254–5. Edited and translated by J.O’Donovan, The Banquet of Dún na nGédh and the Battle of Mag Rath (Dublin, 1848). For further editions of the texts see ALMA 27. In The Cycles of the Kings (Oxford, 1946), Myles Dillon published comprehensive summaries of the tales. Edited and translated by J.G.O’Keeffe, Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne) Being The Adventures of Suibhne Geilt, A Middle-Irish Romance (London, 1913). For a summary see Dillon, op. cit, 68–74, and idem, Early Irish Literature (Chicago, 1948), 94–100. Further bibliographical references are given in R.Bromwich, Medieval Celtic Literature, A Select Bibliography (Toronto, 1974), 44; and TYP 469–74. Dillon, The Cycles of the Kings, 68; O’Keeffe, op. cit., xvi-xviii.

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25. LlDC 25.8–9; YB, 10 (1977), 55, 73. In his article, “La gwerz de Skolan et la légende de Merlin,” Ethnologie française, 1, 3–4, 19–54, Donatien Laurent treats the Ysgolan poem as a part of, or as closely related to, the Merlin cycle of poems. 26. Buile Shuibhne, 15. 27. O’Donovan, op. cit, 231–3; B, 9 (1937), 12–13. 28. LlDC 16.36–8; Tolstoy, op. cit., 252. 29. Buile Shuibhne, 100–5. 30. VM 24. 31. Éigse, 6 (1950), 101. 32. VM 195. Clarke, however, thinks that Lailoken was assimilated to allaidh by the Irish writer of the Buile Shuibhne c. 1200, who may have seen both Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini and the Lailoken material at Glasgow. 33. Éigse, 6 (1950), 100. Reprinted as Ch. 4 of James Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (DIAS 1955), 129–164. 34. “The Motive of the Threefold Death in the Story of Suibhne Geilt,” in J. Ryan (ed.), Essays and Studies presented to Eoin Macneill (Dublin, 1940), 550. 35. VM26; Meic Stephens (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (Oxford, 1986), 212. 36. After a detailed examination of the evidence, Neil Wright concludes in his edition of the Bern Burgerbibliothek MS 568, HRB xvi, that “Geoffrey began work on the Historia at some time before 1135 and that it was completed in 1138.” It appears that the title by which the work is now known was first used in the edition of Commelin (Heidelberg, 1587), see ibid., xii. 37. VM 31–2. 38. HRB xi; VM19. For the text of the tale of Vortigern’s Tower see Wright, 71–3; translation in HRB (T) 166–9. 39. For the ascription of the Historia Brittonum to “Nennius,” until recently “taken for granted,” see the article by David N.Dumville, ‘“Nennius’ and the Historia Brittonum” SC, 10/11 (1975/1976), 78–95, which concludes with the statement that “we must admit to ignorance of the name of its ninth-century author.” 40. See N.Lukman in Classica et Mediaevalia, Revue Danoise de Philologie et d’Histoire, 6 (1944), 98– 9; LlC, 2 (1952–3), 126. Cf. Salway, Roman Britain, p. 468, where it is stated that Ambrosius “may or may not be the same as” Ambrosius Aurelianus, for whom also see ibid., 483. 41. HRB 73. 42. For Geoffrey’s words see HRB 71, cum in urbem que Kaermerdin uocata fuit uenissent, cf. the medieval Welsh translation in BD, 101, A guedy dyuot deu o’r kennadeu hynny hyt y dinas a elwit guedy hynny Caer Uyrdin, and HRB (T) 167, “They came to a town which was afterwards called Kaermerdin.” 43. Geoffrey rendered the dd sound in Merddin (i.e. the th sound in English the) as/rather than d, possibly in order to avoid an association with the French merde. 44. For summaries see ALMA 319–24; A.O.H.Jarman, The Legend of Merlin (Cardiff, 1976), 6– 8; idem, “The Legend of Merlin and its Association with Carmarthen,” The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, 22 (1986), 16. 45. For the text with facing translation see VM 52–135, and for earlier editions see ibid., 45–7. On Geoffrey’s authorship of the poem, on which doubts have been cast in the past, and its probable date, see ibid., 36–42, and cf. HRB xx. 46. Penelope B.R.Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (Yale and London, 1974), 153. 47. HRB xx.

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48. VM 115. 49. For this motif cf. K.H.Jackson, “The Motive of the Threefold Death in the Story of Suibhne Geilt,” in J.Ryan (ed.), op. cit., 535–50. 50. VM 197. 51. For Geoffrey’s two portraits of Merlin see H.M. and N.K.Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 123–32, “Merlin in the Works of Geoffrey of Monmouth.” Cf. the suggestion by Clarke, VM31–2, that the fuller knowledge of Welsh tradition displayed by Geoffrey in the Vita Merlini may be derived from residence in south-eastern Wales after 1139. For the references by Giraldus to Merlin see the Chadwicks, op. cit., 111–12, 129–30, and Thorpe, The journey through Wales, 183, 192–3, 280, and index 319. 52. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (London and Chichester, 1978), 26; Hugh Williams, Gildas, Part I (Cymmrodorion Record Series, No. 3, 1899), 55. 53. Morris, Nennius, 31; David N.Dumville, The Historia Brittonum, 3. The Vatican Recension (Cambridge, 1985), 94. The latter text adds the words unde antea uenerant. 54. See AP. 55. AP xxxiv-xl; HRB 77. 56. The Welsh tradition of prophecy is a large subject into which much critical and interpretative research is still required, and considerations of space have inevitably reduced the above discussion to the merest sketch. For comprehensive general surveys see M.E. Griffiths, Early Vaticinatory Material in Welsh with English Parallels (Cardiff, 1937); R.Wallis Evans, “Prophetic Poetry,” ch. 13, 278–97, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ii, ed. by A.O.H.Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes (Swansea, 1979); Glanmor Williams, Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales (Cardiff, 1979), ch. 3, 71–86, “Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in Medieval and Tudor Wales.” The vaticinations in Yr Afallennau and Yr Oianau are discussed on 346–51 of A.O.H.Jarman, “Llyfr Du Caefyrddin; The Black Book of Carmarthen,” PBA, 71 (1985), 333–56. For the Prophetia Merlini of John of Cornwall, composed c. 1143–4, see Michael J.Curley, “A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s ‘Prophetia Merlini,’” Speculum, 57 (1982), 217–49; idem, “Gerallt Gymro a Siôn o Gernyw fel Cyfieithwyr Proffwydoliaethau Myrddin,” LlC, 15 (1984–6), 23–33. See also P.Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète (Lausanne, 1943) for Merlin’s prophecies in medieval literature in general. 57. TYP 320, 504. 58. “Merlin Est-il un Personnage Réel?, ou Les Origines de la Légende de Merlin,” Revue des questions historiques, (1868), 559–68. De Jubainville attributed “l’idée première du present travail” to Paulin Paris; the phrase is probably to be understood as meaning that the idea was suggested to him verbally or in written (but not printed) form. 59. Cy., 11 (1890), 46–8. 60. J.Morris Jones, A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative (Oxford, 1913), 189; Ifor Williams, Breuddwyd Maxen (Bangor, 1922), 27. Cf. Jackson, LHEB 225, and D.Ellis Evans, Gaulish Personal Names (Oxford, 1967), 232 for Moridunon. 61. C.Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford, 1899), ii, 13. 62. See Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1971), 20; cf. SC, 10/11 (1975/6), 196; ibid., 18/19 (1983/4), 17, 27. 63. Geoffrey is here referring to Carlisle. For Lleon he gives Leil, but has Ebraucus for Efrawg, stating that the latter “condidit urbem quam de nomine suo uocauit Kaer Ebrauc, id est ciuitas Ebrauci.” See HRB 17–18; Brynley F.Roberts in B, 25 (1973), 282; H.Lewis BD 24, 25, 216; Glenys Goetinck, Historia Peredur vab Efrawc (Cardiff, 1976), 71; I. Williams, Enwau Lleoedd (Lerpwl, 1945), 50; Jackson, LHEB 39. 64. L.Alcock, Arthur’s Britain, History and Archaeology AD 367–634 (London, 1971), 194.

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65. For the dates of the latest prophecies in the Black Book of Carmarthen poems see LlDC xxixxxxiii. 66. VM 42, 193. 67. Jackson, “Sources,” 317. 68. SC, 18/19 (1983/4), 17. [Editor’s note: The asterisks denote a linguistically reconstructed form of the word, for which there is no surviving textual record.] 69. Hamp’s words are: “If we make allowance for confusion with the place name Caer Fyrddin (Carmarthen) perhaps we may see in Morydd, Merddin the pair *morij-: *moriji:n-”; see Werner Winter (ed.), Evidence for Laryngeals (The Hague, 1965), 229, n. 7. 70. Jarman, Aneirin: Y Gododdin, 30. 71. K.H.Jackson, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh, 1969; reprinted 1978), 133. Jackson makes the equation “Welsh poetry=Celtic civilization.” 72. The case for the historical Merlin is argued by Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin; idem, “Merlinus Redivivus,” SC, 18/19 (1983/4), 11–29; R. Bromwich. “Y Cynfeirdd a’r Traddodiad Cymraeg,” B, 22 (1966), 30–7, cf. also the 2nd ed. of TYP, 559–60. I have discussed the arguments in some detail in “A Oedd Myrddin yn Fardd Hanesyddol?” SC, 10/ 11 (1975/6), 182–97. For Sir Ifor William’s views see BWP 123, 125.

Abbreviations ALMA AP Ast.H. B BD BWP Cy. DIAS HRB HRB (T) LHEB LlC LlDC PBA

Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R.S.Loomis (Oxford, 1959). Armes Prydein: ‘The Prophecy of Britain’, ed. Ifor Williams. English edition translated by Rachel Bromwich, DIAS Medieval and Modern Welsh Series VI (Dublin, 1972, 1982). Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd, ed. Rachel Bromwich and R. Brinley Jones (Cardiff, 1978). Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies. Brut Dingestow, ed. Henry Lewis (Cardiff, 1942). The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry: Studies by Sir Ifor Williams, ed. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff, 1972, 1980, repr. 1990). Y Cymmrodor. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies Historia Regum Britanniae, I: Bern Burgerbibliothek MS 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge, 1984). Historia Regum Britanniae, trans. Lewis Thorpe, The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966). Kenneth Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953). Llên Cymru. Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, ed. A.O.H.Jarman (Cardiff, 1982). Proceedings of the British Academy.

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RBP SC TYP VM YB YMTh

The Poetry from the Red Book of Hergest, ed. J.G.Evans (Llanbedrog, 1911). Studia Celtica. Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff, 1961, 1978, 1991). The Life of Merlin (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini), ed. and trans. Basil Clarke (Cardiff, 1971). Ysgrifau Beirniadol, ed. J.E.Caerwyn Williams (Denbigh, 1965- ). Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin, ed. A.O.H.Jarman (Cardiff, 1967).

CHAPTER 2 Merlin: Prophet and Magician PAUL ZUMTHOR Translated by Victoria Guerin

In his synthesis of contemporary studies on Arthurian tradition, J.D.Bruce gives an overview of the principal manifestations of the Merlin “legend” in literature.1 He emphasizes the fact that according to many scholars, among them Ward, Phillimore, Brugger, Jeanroy and Lot, Merlin should no longer be seen as representing a true Celtic tradition, but rather as the purely literary creation of clerks who consciously selected and reworked their source materials, most of them unknown. Such, at least, is the case of the texts studied here: the Welsh poems, the Historia Regum Britanniae, the Vita Merlini, Robert de Boron’s romance and its prose continuations—in short, not all the works that popularized the name of Merlin, but only those classified as narrative literature. But there are other works which offer critics far clearer sources, yet to which Bruce makes only two brief references: On Geoffrey’s so-called Libellus Merlini and the numerous prophecies which were modelled after it in the Middle Ages, see San Marte, Die Sagen von Merlin… and Rupert Taylor, Political Prophecy…. There is…a thirteenth century French prose work entitled Les Prophecies de Merlin, which, notwithstanding its title, is very different from the Libellus Merlini.2 During the forty years or so that followed the composition of Geoffrey’s Latin poem, the fame of Merlin was spread far and wide not only by Geoffrey’s own writings, but by derivatives from those writings—especially by extensions of Merlin’s prophecies….3 In studying the Merlin legend, it may be somewhat unwise to neglect the entire body of prophetic literature which was circulating under his name. Although the nineteenth-century critics who first concerned themselves with Merlin, among them Francisque Michel and San Marte, knew only a portion of the texts now available in print or in summary, they were not guilty of this error. Unfortunately, however, their conclusions are compromised by faulty criticism and major factual errors. Since that time, criticism has become specialized and has concentrated on the Arthurian legends while completely ignoring the Prophécies de Merlin.4 We can nevertheless assume a priori that a simultaneous study of the Merlin of romance and the supposed author of the prophecies would shed new light on the problem, and lead to a more

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complete picture of the figure and development of Merlin. Thus, it might be possible to determine with a greater degree of probability, if not the precise source of each element of the legend, at least the logic of its progressive development in literature. From a historical perspective, then, there are two traditions. We will call the first of these, not the legend, but the fable, of Merlin; i.e., the set of descriptive traits used to describe the character and his actions. The second might be termed the prophet theme: that is, in the final analysis, a simple literary motif, passed from one historiographer or polemicist to another. Its extremely vague content might be reduced to the following: there are political prophecies attributed to a certain Merlin which, since they have not been codified, allow for the continuous composition of others of their kind that may in turn be attributed to him. The two traditions are contemporaneous in the sense that they have a common chronological origin, but one of them, the theme, began immediately to develop vigorously (whereas the other remained dormant for half a century) and has, moreover, remained throughout history by far the more active of the two. Not only did this theme of Merlin the prophet develop in its own right; it also provided a kind of transfusion of vigorous sap which awakened and gave life to the fable tradition that flourished briefly, then died out at a time when the theme, which had continued to develop, was still active. From this external perspective, we might describe the process by means of imagery: let us imagine a work, of historical nature and ancient origin, which has broad popularity at a certain period but of whose author almost nothing is known. This work is admired and commented upon, it inspires criticism, the author’s reputation grows, forgers attribute their own works to him, and a poet produces a romantic version of his life story. This general scenario describes the case of Merlin in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but, unknown to the people of the time, the whole structure is based on a falsehood since the original work itself was the product of an impostor and the supposed author never existed. The Prophet and the Magician A. Merlin the Magician Even scholars who, like Ernst Brugger, do not reject the idea of a Welsh Merlin tradition prior to Geoffrey of Monmouth, do not accept the idea that Merlin might have been represented as other than a prophet: as a poet, perhaps. Geoffrey is allegedly the first to have attributed magical powers to him. The countless authors who, until late into the modern period, were interested in Merlin only as a means to an end (to support an argument or to elucidate history) had no use for this graft onto the main tree and, in fact, the polemical and historiographic works (with the exception, of course, of translations or adaptations of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Papstprophezeiungen5) know Merlin only as a prophet. If the early romance writers had wished merely to include in their works a well-known figure of the period, it would be reasonable to suppose that they, too, would have remained

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indifferent to, or even ignorant of, the only two magical acts attributed to Merlin in the chronicles. In fact, however, the romance Merlin is derived entirely from Robert de Boron, who, through his theological speculations, had systematically incorporated the Historia Regum Britanniae, as history, into his romance.6 The Historia had provided him with an image of Merlin slightly different from that of the vast majority of the European public at that time (1180–1200), that of a prophet who shared certain characteristics and powers with well-known magicians of history or epic. This tended to produce a slight error of perspective in the transposition of the tale, a tendency to excess which resulted in the introduction of a protean quality in passages of the fabliau type. The eminent nobility of the prophet, moreover, remained unchanged, primarily because of the work’s symbolism, which prevented the reader from losing sight of the fact that this Merlin and the well-known prophet were one and the same. But the meaning of this symbolism was not understood and, as early as L’Estoire de Merlin, the first Merlin romance written after the works of Robert de Boron, the entire tale was reduced to the most ordinary type of chronicle: knightly adventures are debased, prophecy tends to become merely a literary device, and Merlin becomes something akin to the Round Table’s lawmaker. The magician motif undergoes a similar evolution: it appears with growing frequency and becomes increasingly facile, while the already too-numerous prophecies, devoid of all dramatic interest, are further multiplied and are no longer accompanied by miracles. A theme which, in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth or Robert de Boron, appeared only occasionally and was used with caution, becomes inexhaustible and insipid, just another element of romance verbiage. Nevertheless—and it is this which is worthy of attention—the magician theme, whatever its subsequent development, is still subordinate to, and derivative of, that of the prophet in the works written during the earliest generations of the prose romance. This is the great creative period of the genre, when the former contributes to the latter and aids in its development and elaboration: Merlin is a magician only because he is a prophet, and his prophecy greatly benefits from his magic. The heyday of these romances is precisely the period during which the ideas of sorcerer and magician were slowly developing in clerical consciousness. It appears, in fact, that it was at this time that general attention began to be brought to bear on the humble phenomena of sorcery, which had previously been despised, and that people began to perceive intimations of an order of events and forces that were heavy with mystery and called for study or condemnation.7 Even as, from 1200 on, Church councils were issuing increasingly specific denunciations of magi and incantatores, literary authors began to take an interest in them and to feel their way toward a new theme. As early as the twelfth century, there was a slow but sure infiltration of this “magical” theme into the romance world. On the basis of certain generally-known facts—not, of course, in the light of an as-yet-nonexistent critical science, but borne along by the general cultural current—a certain type of magician developed. He had, in truth, nothing in common with true sorcerers and village magicians who depended for their existence on a stock of traditions that was difficult to control, or with the mages of Paracelsus’ and Cornelius Agrippa’s time. This is a fiction made up of pure

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fantasy,8 as imprecise as the still-amateur contemporary theoreticians’ notion of prestigiator. This individual astonishes and deceives his peers by illusions which cannot always be termed diabolic. He knows the powers of stones, but also causes the appearance of simulacra and ghosts. He is master of an art, but an undefined one; marvelous acts alone are enough to depict him.9 As yet, there is no set image of the figure of Merlin; thus, there is no question of portraying him as the conscious agent of dark powers, the master of a mysterious alchemy, or the keeper of grimoires filled with codified spells. As a prophet, like all those of romance literature, he belongs to a type known to Christians familiar with the most basic elements of medieval culture, and it is this which makes him worthy of attention.10 His secondary nature awakens no intellectual interest in the medieval reader and author, who have no frame of reference in which to situate him. The door had nonetheless been opened on newer paths. It was inevitable that the magician theme would increasingly, and almost imperceptibly, be used for its own sake until it lost any connection with that of the prophet. This tendency begins to appear in minor works from the mid-thirteenth century on, gaining impetus in the late Middle Ages and continuing to develop thereafter. By the early nineteenth century, the prophet theme had survived in its purest form in one form of popular literature,11 while in another genre, closer to true poetry and partial heir to the medieval romances, it appears to have been wholly replaced by the theme of the magician or so-called enchanter. 1. In L’Estoire de Merlin, Le Livre d’Artus, the Huth Merlin, the prose Tristan, and their successors, acts of magic express the power of prophecy: a. Merlin magically constructs the very instrument of his prophecy. The banner which he gives Arthur in L’Estoire de Merlin, although made of bronze and of impressive size, can easily be handled by a single man: “si ne sot onques nus ou merlins le prinst” (and no one knew where Merlin had gotten it).12 It constitutes a prophecy in images: the dragon “senefioit li rois artus…. Et la flambe quil ietoit par mi la goule hors senefioit la grant martire de gent & la grant ochision qui fu faite al tans le roy artu. Et la keue qui estoit toute tortice senefie la grant traison de sa gent…” (signified King Arthur…. And the flames that it breathed signified the great suffering of the people and the slaughter in the time of King Arthur. And its twisted tail signifies the great treason that his people committed…).13 b. In the pseudo-historiographic romances (L’Estoire de Merlin, Le Livre d’Artus), Merlin, who prophesies Arthur’s reign, his wars, and his victories, is called upon to act as the king’s friend, counselor and protector (first degree of the prophetic function). But since he himself does not bear arms in these countless battles, a way must be found to involve him in actual combat through his superhuman powers. This is readily accomplished. He provides Arthur with powerful assistance, terrible for the king’s enemies: a miracle (second degree of prophecy). In each major battle, he brings about the final victory by raising a sudden whirlwind of sand and dust which flattens the tents of the enemy camp, blinding animals and people, while a ball of fire

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crosses the sky. On other occasions, the dragon of his banner begins to breathe real fire, lighting up the countryside and throwing the enemy ranks into confusion. Yet again, as the need arises, Merlin casts a marvelous flame from atop a tower; looses a horn blast with no visible source, allowing Arthur’s army to regroup; produces a flood which inundates the battlefield; or causes the gates of a city to open of their own accord. In the Huth Merlin, while fighting against an unknown knight, Arthur breaks his sword (he has not yet received Excalibur) and is unhorsed; his opponent is on the point of victory when Merlin appears and magically puts the adversary to sleep. In the only account of a battle found in this romance, Merlin, who has failed to convince King Lot to withdraw from the war, casts a spell that freezes the unfortunate king in his tracks until the hour of terce, allowing Arthur time to prepare for the battle.14 This is only the first stage of the magician theme, which is as yet only that of the prophet of war. c. The prophet of chivalry theme appears in the romances in the form of occasional prophecies and prophetic inscriptions; even the location of some adventures bears Merlin’s name. In the prose Lancelot, Gawain and his companions leave court, “si vienent a vne piere qui a non li perons merlin” (and come to a rock which is called Merlin’s Rock).15 In the prose Tristan, this rock is the site of a battle between Lancelot and Tristan. The author seems to attach great importance to the event since the name of the rock is repeatedly mentioned: when Tristan informs Lancelot of his choice of rendezvous, then repeats the information; when he is said to go to the rock, located a league and a half from Camelot, for the battle; when Palomedes apologizes for not having attended; and when the event is recalled after the fact.16 This battle between the two heroes at Merlin’s Rock will be developed as an independent romance theme. In the Huth Merlin, the rock is identified with the tomb of the Irish knight, and Merlin sets a prophetic inscription there.17 The theme was taken up around 1290 by Heinrich von Freiburg in his continuation of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. It is the subject of an Italian poem from the same period which Pio Rajna published in I Cantari di Carduino,18 and, in Sir Thomas Malory’s works, one of Merlin’s prophecies is devoted to it.19 During the same time period, Merlin’s Rock is also used as the site of a wide variety of other adventures. In Girard d’Amiens’ Escanor, A la fontaine eusse esté que l’en dist le Perron Merlin; car maint chevalier de haut lin i a on trové maintes fois plain d’orgueil et de granz boffois, et aventures merveilleuses, bones et bien cavalereuses.20 They would have gone to the spring which is called Merlin’s Rock; for many high-born knights

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have often been found there full of pride and great arrogance, and marvelous adventures, worthy and most chivalrous. It also appears in a large number of texts, even including a life of Louis III of Bourbon. In La tavola ritonda, we read that setting up such rocks was one of Merlin’s main activities: Merlin himself describes how he established the Round Table and a certain Rock of the Lion’s Spring.21 Later, we learn that he set up six main rocks: in Léonois, Cornwall, Logres, the Val Périlleux, the Val Obscur (where Lancelot and Tristan will later fight), and North Wales. Each of them is associated with a particular prophecy concerning the adventures which will take place there. In Bojardo, Angelica vows to give herself to whomever defeats her brother: nel verde prato, alla fonte del pino dove si dice al Petron di Merlino.22 in the green meadow, at the spring near the pine at the place which is called Merlin’s Rock. and, in the Dittamondo, Fazio degli Uberti lists Merlin’s Rock among the marvelsof England described in chivalric romance.23 The Rock is thus a material condition of prophecy which situates it spatially. It would appear that a simple motif like that of Méraugis de Portlesguez was taken up by the prose Lancelot, where a misunderstood word resulted in the creation of a new romance theme under the influence, and in extension, of the use of prophetic inscriptions. These inscriptions, in turn, led the authors to the place where they were located and caused them to identify that site, which had taken on an independent identity, with that of the initial source.24 d. Once this process had begun, nothing could stop the romance writers’ imagination. The adventure in question might be more than a mere battle; it might become a test designed to eliminate unworthy knights from the Grail Quest. As such, it required a marvelous setting. En ceste terre a vne tor que on apele le tor merlin et la dedens sont les plus grans merueilles du monde fors cheles del graal. Si si vont assaier li cheualier de cest pais et li estrange aussi, ne nus ni est encore ales qui retornes en soit. Car tot y muerent ou ils sont retenu…ne nus ne set lestre de laiens, fors ytant que deuant la porte a lentree a sus vne tombe lettres escriptes qui dient: la deuant que lancelot viengne cha ne remandront lez merueilles de laiens.25 In that land, there is a tower which is called Merlin’s Tower. And within it are the greatest marvels in the world, except those of the Grail. And the knights of this land, and foreign knights as well, go there to attempt the adventure, and no one who has gone there has ever returned. For they all die

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there, or else they are kept prisoner…and no one knows what happens there, except that before the entrance door there are letters written on a tomb which read: “The marvels of this place shall never end until Lancelot comes here.” Thus, the motif of Merlin’s Rock was developed in the prose Lancelot, which in itself inspired later romances and firmly established the name of the Rock and Merlin’s dual powers, in the tradition of Robert de Boron, as both prophet of the chosen knight and magician. This naturally led writers to explain the existence of the place itself by the prophetic inscription, since both bear Merlin’s name. The text does not specify the nature of these marvels, which are, in any case, enchantments, nor does it state that Merlin is responsible for them, but the name, Merlin’s Tower, implies that this is so. The Huth Merlin, moreover, is more specific: Merlin transforms Balaain’s tomb into an enchanted bed which causes anyone who lies in it to lose his mind and memory; this enchantment is later ended by Lancelot. Then, since the tomb is located on an island, Merlin builds an iron bridge, only six inches wide, which only the bravest knights can cross.26 Quant il ot che fait et encore assés d’autres mierveilles que je ne puis mie chi raconter, car il n’est ne lieus ne tans, il s’en est parti et dist a cheus dou chastiel qu’il voloit que ceste ille soit apielee l’isle Merlin.27 When he had done this and many other marvels which I cannot tell here, for it is neither the place nor the time, he left and told the people of the castle that he wanted this island to be called Merlin’s Island. The prophet is thus credited with constructing (by magic) the very instrument of the adventure through which the prophecy will be fulfilled. e. In some cases, it is this instrument itself which bears his name. In the prose Lancelot, Gawain recounts his adventures: En cel isle, fet misire Gawain, trouai io lo lit Merlin. En chelui lit ne se couche nus tant soit bons cheualers ne poissanz quil ne perde lo sen & tou[t] son memoire & tant quil i gise & si tost cum il en est hors si reuent en son sen & en sa uertu cum deuant.28 “On that island,” said Sir Gawain, “I found Merlin’s Bed. No one, however good and strong a knight, lies in that bed without losing his mind and his memory for as long as he lies there, and as soon as he leaves it he recovers his reason and strength as before.” This is one of the marvels which the Huth Merlin associates with Merlin’s Island. In Malory’s text, Merlin builds a bed which causes anyone who lies in it to go mad.29 The progressive development of the original motif has taken us a long way from the theme of the prophet, yet the link has not been broken; there is still a connection with the Quest which had been foretold.

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f. Other marvels are related to the prophet theme. In Le Livre d’Artus, the adventure of the Isle Tornoiant describes the Turning Island, a metallic mass which floats on the ocean, held in place by a magnetic force. Long ago, a duke of Scotland who had attacked King Uther so hated Merlin for having aided the king that Merlin retaliated by carrying off his five-year-old daughter and abandoning her on this island. He built a bridge leading to it, but made it as sharp as a razor blade and declared that the enchantment would be broken only by a king, Uther’s son, who would be accompanied by the best knight in the world.30 In L’Estoire de Merlin, Merlin, seeing that King Ban is in love with Agravadain’s daughter but is too timid to approach her, enchants them both so that they lie together without realizing it; this act results in the conception of Hector des Mares, later famous for his adventures in the prose Lancelot and La Queste del saint Graal.31 In the prose Tristan, a monk informs the hero that the prophet Merlin once placed a marvelous stone, the bloc pleurant (weeping stone), in a monastery and carved on it an inscription announcing that it would be taken away by Tristan.32 In the Huth Merlin, after defeating thirteen crowned kings, Arthur orders statues of them, each bowing before a statue of Arthur and holding a candle, to be set atop a tower. Merlin magically causes these candles to burn without being consumed or extinguished until the day when the dolorous stroke is struck.33 In another place, he orders a sword to be made and sets it in a block of marble; on the sword he writes: “Chis qui premiers essaiera ceste espee oster de chi premiers en sera navrés” (He who first tries to remove this sword shall be the first to be wounded by it). In the marble are carved the words: “Ja ceste espee ne sera de chi ostee fors par la main le millour chevalier…de tous, car 11 li meskerroit” (If any but the best knight…in the world tries to remove this sword, it shall go ill with him).34 Merlin then sets the sword and stone afloat on a river to arrive in Camelot on the very day of Galaad’s appearance at court. (Indeed, it is with this adventure that La Queste del saint Graal begins.) 2. At a later period, the two themes are, generally speaking, no longer connected: In two passages of the prose Tristan, the author seems to have lost sight of the prophet theme and to have allowed himself to explore that of the magician for its own sake, out of a simple love of wonders: he mentions the marvelous vessel, la nef de joie (the ship of joy), which Merlin made for the King of Northumberland. Elsewhere, Galaad stills a moving block into which Merlin had conjured the devil.35 This example and the Laide Semblance (Hideous Appearance) adventure in Le Livre d’Artus are the only instances in romance texts where Merlin has power over demons.36 Nonetheless , throughout the prose Tristan, Merlin isthe prophetpar excellence. This is also the Claris et Laris, where Merlin,Arthur’s prophet and protector, builds a castle on on a rock and later fills it withgreat treasures.37 Later, in texts more distant from the early romance source in time, space or the development of literary genres, the picturesque magician theme expands and completely takes over the character of Merlin. The following is a list of texts from which the prophet theme is wholly absent.

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a. The first stage in the process is the breakdown of the romance tradition; thus, Le Chevalier au Deux Espees associates Merlin only with Uther’s metamorphosis38; Le Roman du Hen retains only his building of Stonehenge39; and Giovanni Villani, summarizing one of the various prose versions of Robert de Boron’s Merlin as if it were a mere chronicle, borrows both themes but makes no connection between them: In questi tempi, circa gli anni di Cristo 470, regnando in Constantinopoli Leone imperadore di Roma, nelle Grande Brettagna, che ora Inghilterra è chiamata, nacque Merlino profeta (dissesi d’una vergine con concetto ovvero operazione di demonio), il quale fece in quel paese molte maraviglie per negromanzia, e ordinò la Tavola Ritonda di cava-lieri erranti….40 At this time, around the year of our lord 470, when Emperor Leo of Rome reigned in Constantinople, Merlin the prophet, who did many marvelous things in that land by magic, was born in Great Britain, which is now called England (of a virgin, they say, through the plot or work of the devil), and he established the Round Table of knights errant…. In a curious passage in La Fiorita d’Italia, the chronicler, d’Armannino, gives as actual history (instead of the Historia Regum Britanniae) a summary of the Lancelot-Grail tradition, including a reference to Merlin: In questo tempo fu Merlino, il quale fu cristiano, a cui Uter volea grande bene, et per suo consiglio sempre se reggieva…. Merlino alora disse a Uter ch’egli farebbe a certe costellazioni una tavola ritonda con LXXII sedie…et fece fare legge che per prodezza di persona ogni querela vincere si potessi…. Questo [the empty seat] riserbò Merlino per uno ch’egli sapea.41 At this time lived Merlin, who was a Christian, to whom Uther showed great favor and whose advice he always followed…. Then Merlin said to Uther that, under certain constellations, he would make a round table with 72 seats…. And he had it made the law that all quarrels must be settled by combat This [the empty seat] Merlin reserved for one whose identity only he knew. The facts of the tale are hardly changed, but the prophet theme has disappeared. In a fabliau tentatively dated late thirteenth century and entitled Merlin-Merlot or Merlin et l’ânier, the magician appears as a superior power able to change the course of events with a word.42 He gives in turn riches, honor and power to a poor peasant with a large family, whose grief-stricken groans he hears in the woods. To each new gift he attaches a condition: the peasant must follow the commandments of God and the Church and practice the virtues. But the higher his rise on the social scale, the more demanding and disdainful of his benefactor the peasant becomes and the more he scorns Merlin’s advice, abandoning himself to a scandalous existence. At last, Merlin becomes angry and reduces him to his former poverty. Here, the magician is inspired by the motives most often attributed to the prophet: he acts only out of kindness and friendship and in God’s name. This text is clearly a variant of the theme of the

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invisible Merlin who speaks to men after his death, here applied to a basic fabliau, but no trace of prophecy remains. Merlin appears as a wise man in an amusing short tale by Malespini: three women find a jewel and quarrel over which of them should have it. Merlin says that it should go to the woman who plays the best trick on her husband.43 In this tale, which was translated into Spanish by Tirso de Molina and into French by d‘Orville, only the Merlin of riddles and jokes remains. In Chester’s Arthurian tale, Love’s Martyr, Merlin appears only in the episode of Uther’s love affair with Ygraine.44 In Pope’s Satires, Merlin is mentioned as a magician and later as a prophet; the two themes no longer have anything in common.45 An operetta, performed in Paris in 1717 under the name Le monde renversé and in Vienna in 1758 to music by Gluck with the title, L’lle de Merlin, presents Merlin, as the “Master of the World Upside-Down,” a debonair wise man who makes peace between rivals and gives his blessing to lovers.46 b. The magician theme is found in its pure form in late texts, most of which postdate the Middle Ages. In an anonymous late medieval English chronicle, Merlin, “clerk” of the British King Dunvallo, builds the cities of Stonehenge and Marlborough for him.47 The Siege of Carlaverock alludes briefly to Merlin, speaking only of his “spells.”48 La nef de joie, mentioned in the prose Tristan, reappears in one of Dante’s sonnets in the Canzoniere, “Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io…”;49 Merlin is not named but is referred to as “il buon incantatore” (the good enchanter).50 There is a similar reference in Il mare amoroso.51 In Johann von Würzburg’s Wilhelm von Österreich, Merlin, a magician born of a devil, imprisons Queen Crispin within walls of air and, with her father’s help, builds two metal dragons which cannot be melted.52 A poem in praise of Verona by Domenico Bordigallo credits Merlin with the construction of the arenas in that city, although popular tradition attributed them to King Theodoric.53 In Orlando innamorato, Merlin is said to have built three magical springs: the water of the first has the power to destroy love in the heart of anyone who drinks from it; the second causes the drinker to fall in love; and the third makes it impossible ever to love again.54 Fitzmaurice-Kelly mentions a lost Spanish comedy, Los encantos de Merlin, which he attributes to Andrés Rey de Artieda (1549–1613).55 In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Merlin raises a wall of brass around Carmarthen; when the Lady of the Lake interrupts him, he calls a thousand demons and orders them to complete the task.56 According to Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion (1612), Merlin built a wall of brass around Carmarthen and raised the slabs of Stonehenge.57 In Dryden’s King Arthur and the opera which Giffard based on it in 1736, Merlin is merely the sorcerer in a kind of fairy tale.58 In Venetia edificata, by Giulio Strozzi, Merlin is the inventor of the telescope.59 In Tieck’s Phantasus, Merlin makes for Uther Pendragon the seven-league boots later used by Tom Thumb.60 In Jacques du Vergier’s rhymed tale, L’Anneau de Merlin, Merlin gives the aged and senile King Woltiger a magical ring with the aid of which he can have his will of a young nymph. The author also lists the marvels which had made Merlin famous: he had the power to call up storms at will, produce torrents of blood, summon ghosts, move mountains, halt the sun in its path, draw down the moon toward the earth, and dry the sea or command it to flood a kingdom.61

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It should be noted that in the majority of these texts, Merlin appears only episodically; the authors use him as a mere device, having him play his magical tricks at one point or another in the text without attempting to draw a complete character portrait. Thus, behind each of these episodes there lies, so to speak, present and intact, the entire previous tradition of which the prophet theme was the raison d’être and the basic focus. If Merlin’s identity as a famous prophet is relegated to the shadows, at least it is not denied. These writers have no thought of presenting Merlin’s “marvels” as instruments of prophecy, but there is no irreconcilable opposition between the two aspects of the character. Not until the romantic period will attempts be made to reconstruct the entire myth of Merlin around the single theme of the magician. The two themes also exist in symbiosis, following the thirteenth-century tradition (the magician theme grafted to, and nourished by, that of the prophet), in several narrative works of the Renaissance and even of a more recent period.62 The original meaning of the theme has not yet been lost: the Italian Spagna describes a fountain decorated with enchanted marble statues which strike endless hammer blows. An inscription states that they will cease only when the best knight in the world, Roland, arrives,63 and the text adds, “Merlin la fece edificar per arte” (Merlin had it built by magic).64 Merlin thus builds the instrument of his own prophecy. In Orlando Furioso, Marfisa, Ruggiero, and several companions sit down at a table by a fountain: Era una dele fonti di Merlino, de le quattro di Francia da lui fatte.65 It was one of Merlin’s fountains, [one] of the four in France made by him. It is magnificently ornamented with images which Merlin himself sculpted and whose symbolic tableaux constitute a prophecy concerning various political problems of the period (Maximilian, Charles V, Henry VIII, the court of Rome).66 Bradamante sees a room containing prophetic paintings representing the wars which the French will wage in Italy; the idea is attributed to Merlin profeta (Merlin the prophet),67 who, calling demons to his aid with a grimoire dipped in Lake Averna, had them paint the pictures. This is an interesting text for several reasons: even transferred to another cycle, Merlin remains Arthur’s prophet par excellence. In this return to the motif of political prophecies concerning Italy, Arthur’s Merlin is the same as that of the Joachimites; as the son of a demon, he has the power to command them. In Les grandes et inestimables chroniques du grand et énorme Géant Gargantua (1532),68 Rabelais gives Merlin the same role, that of the hero’s protective prophet/magician, as does Arthurian romance: Merlin warns Arthur of the outbreak of war and, at the king’s request, promises to help him. He transports himself to a high mountain in India and commands an ampoule filled with Lancelot’s blood, Guenevere’s nail parings, and the bones of two whales to be brought to him. From these materials, he magically creates two giants and soon informs them that they have conceived a son, Gargantua, who will defend them against all their enemies. Various adventures follow. When Gargantua’s parents die for want of a purgative, Merlin comes in search of

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their son, makes him a club, and carries him off to Arthur’s court, borne by a cloud. There are wars, in which Gargantua is victorious; the giant enters the king’s service and Merlin accompanies him on all his adventures. Beneath the text’s buf-foonery lie the principal characteristics of Merlin as he appears in L’Estoire de Merlin: occasional prophecies and marvels are attributed to him, he is responsible for the birth of the future hero, and is thereafter associated with him. When Don Quixote descends into the cave of Montesinos, he finds a multitude of figures who have been enchanted and forced to remain there, some for several centuries, the victims of various magicians and, in particular, of “that French enchanter, Merlin.” Quixote learns that this same Merlin made several predictions concerning him.69 In The Birth of Merlin (1662), a dramatic play erroneously attributed to Shakespeare, Merlin’s mother is raped by a demon in the forest.70 On the witches’ sabbath, when the devil himself is present, Lucina foretells the child’s future: In honor of this child, the Fates shall bring all their assisting powers of knowledge, Arts, learning, and wisdom, all the hidden parts of all admiring Prophecy, to foresee the event of times to come. His art shall stand a wall of brass to guard the Brittain land.71 In act IV, scene 5, Merlin foretells Anglo-Saxon history until the establishment of the heptarchy.72 In act V, scene 1, he calls up his father, the devil, and imprisons him in a rock; in scene 2, he reveals to Uther the images of his successors. In Richard Blackmore’s epic poem, King Arthur (1695), Merlin is a Breton magician who defects and is preparing to help the Saxon, Octa. Suddenly, a warmth divine his spirits did invade, and once a sorcerer a Prophet made.73 He is thus compelled, despite himself, to prophesy the victory of those against whom he had intended to fight. 3. To conclude and illustrate this rapid presentation of Merlin the magician, we must describe a final development: Merlin’s association with Virgil.74 Independently of school texts on the Aeneid itself, a popular legend of Virgil had grown up in Italy.75 There was already an old belief, the result of a faulty interpretation of the eclogue to Pollio, that Virgil had prophesied the coming of Christ. An eleventh-century mystery play placed him among the Old Testament prophets; his foretelling of Christ’s birth makes him a Christian before the fact. Representative art continued to spread this legend. Virgil was initially said to have prophesied the coming of Christ and, later, other predictions were attributed to him:

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Come ogni gran sapiente, Virgilio è astrologo, o come dicevano, as-tronomo, e della osservazione degli astri può conoscere fatti et avveni-menti lontani per ispazio o per tempo.76 Like all great men, Virgil is an astrologer or, as they used to say, an astronomer, and from his observations of the stars he gains knowledge of deeds and events far distant in space or time. A thirteenth-century didactic work, Virgilii Cordubiensis philosophia, was published under Virgil’s name and identified him as a philosopher from Cordoba, capital of the occult sciences. Moreover, in the late twelfth century, Neopolitan folklore included a complete legend of Virgil the magician, crediting him with marvels and a wide range of enchantments: a bronze fly which, placed on the gate of a city, kept the real flies away; a bronze archer facing a volcano and thereby preventing it from erupting; a bronze horse which protected real horses from certain spells; public baths in Pozzuoli; and so on. The legend developed and extended to Rome, and even beyond. Hélinand de Froidmont and Alexander Neckham took it up, and Virgil entered romance literature where he appeared in countless texts. Wolfram von Eschenbach makes him the ancestor of Klinshor; in Cléomadés he himself is an enchanter; he appears in Renard le Contrefait and the Gesta Romanorum. It will later be explained that one day, having found some devils imprisoned in a bottle, he had freed them on condition that they teach him magic. According to other sources, he had the devils show him a grimoire containing the entire art of magic. He became very knowledgeable and founded a school of magic in Rome. The evolution of this legend and that of the Merlin theme took place along parallel lines: Virgil

Merlin

a) Historical figure Prophet of Christ Subject of a) Considered a historical figure Prophet of the school texts Breton Hope77 Subject of commentaries by A forgery is attributed to him Historiographers Various prophecies subsequent to the Historia Regum Britanniae b) Performs various marvels, considered an b) Various marvels, magician enchanter Adaptation of Robert de Boron’s prophet Becomes a figure of romance and fabliau theme Founds a school of magic Teacher of magic (see below)

These general similarities caused the two legends to meet and join here and there in the mass of literary production: Virgil appears in the ninth tale of the English version of the Roman des Sept Sages, Merlin the magician in the eleventh.78 The author credits Virgil with the creation of a magical mirror in which the movements of enemy troops may be viewed from afar.79 The same marvel is attributed to him by the Gesta Romanorum, the sixteenth-century English prose romance Virgilius, and Gower.80 Spenser credits Merlin with making “a glassy globe which showed the approach of enemies and discovered treason ,”81 and Virgil is said to have erected in Rome a statue

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whose mouth was open in such a way that those called upon to prove their chastity or conjugal fidelity could place a hand inside while swearing an oath. If they lied, the mouth would close and they would lose the hand. The Novella del Geloso, preserved in the library at Perugia, attributes this marvel to Merlin.82 The subtitle of Virgilius indicates that the magician accomplished his marvelous deeds “through the help of devils of hell,” a late development of a theme which has its equivalent in the Merlin legend: in Orlando Furioso, canto 33, Merlin has the devils paint pictures to illustrate his prophecies, and in Spenser, he has them finish building the walls of Carmarthen. Buonamente Aliprando’s Cronica de Mantua increases the resemblance between the two figures.83 After recounting the legendary history of Virgil, the author adds a final chapter: Come Virgilio, essendo in Napoli, mandò a Roma per Milino,84 suo discepolo che gli portasse da Roma un libro de negromanzia (How Virgil, while in Naples, sent a message to Rome that Merlin, his disciple, should bring him a book of magic from Rome). Merlin is Virgil’s disciple: Quel tempo si monstra che avesse Virgilio uno discepolo valente che Milino per nome si chiamasse.85 At that time it seems that Virgil had a worthy disciple who was called Merlin. After entrusting Merlin with this errand, Virgil forbids him to open the book en route. But the temptation is too great; he opens and reads it. A host of demonic spirits emerge, attack him, and ply him with questions: “What do you want? What do you want?” To rid himself of them, Merlin orders them to cover the road with salt all the way from Rome to Naples. With them thus occupied, he can continue his journey. In Aliprando, the comparison between Merlin and Virgil centers on the idea of the grimoire and the summoning of spirits, an idea which represents a late stage in the evolution of the legends of both figures—and it is precisely at this point that they meet.86 By introducing the idea of the grimoire and the summoning of devils, Aliprando completes with great precision the figure of Merlin as a real, rather than a literary, magician. The tradition of Virgil as magician in no way damaged the poet’s reputation or hindered the study of his art and thought. Similarly, the literary extension of the theme of Merlin the magician did not prevent the continued existence of that of Merlin the prophet. Both Virgil and Merlin (the analogy is a typical one) are examples of the way in which, to the medieval mind, the secondary character of the magician, far from covering and ultimately (as would be the case in our own time) devaluing or even destroying their primary and principal nature as poet and prophet, merely draws attention to it and, in a sense, increases their fame by projecting several images in response to the desires of different audiences. Masters such as Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, and Albert the Great were also the subjects of legends and, eventually, came to be known as magicians. The term “Merlin legend” might be reserved for the

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magician theme since the legend developed in popular fable or romance as a vestige of clerical admiration, paralleling and strengthening the image of the magician, but leaving it essentially unchanged. The elements of these legends are generally borrowed from a stock of folklore, in itself worthy of study, but the unconscious psychological cause of their formation is probably a certain need for the absolute in the realm of science, a need to know that there is one wise man, poet, prophet or doctor who is worthy of admiration because he knows the world’s deepest secrets. B. Merlin the Wise Man It is clear, then, that a new personality of Merlin, more complex than the first (that of the Historia Regum Britanniae and Robert de Boron) is emerging: Merlin as wise man, one of the most knowledgeable beings that the world has known. He has a profound knowledge of all things, stripped of the veils which hide from us their inner nature and prevent us from acting on them as we wish (hence his power as magician), and of spatial and temporal conditions (hence his powers of second sight and prophecy). This knowledge of which Merlin is a master (expressed, admittedly, by a somewhat unorthodox literature with no basis in the field of occult knowledge) is an ideal of which the late Middle Ages dreamed, a perfect union and an image of the Absolute in the knowledge and mastery of nature.87 It is the goal of the alchemist, the astrologer and, it might in a sense be added, the saint.88 Merlin is thus the model of the perfect alchemist and astrologer,89 a model which Comparetti calls “il mago” (the magician):90 Il tipo del mago, sì ovvio in que’ romanzi, sorgente poco finamente poetica invero, ma pure speciosa ed efficace in tempi di tanta credulità, di awenimenti fantastici, sovrumani e sorprendenti. È chiaro che ogni mago è un sapiente; non però ogni sapiente è mago; i due tipi esistono distinti e indipendenti uno dall’altro. Il mago è propriamente un ac-crescitivo del gran sapiente, in certo senso è anche un peggiorativo, come caratteristica morale; v’ha però un’idea intermedia secondo la quale la magia in certi limiti e con certi mezzi appare cosa lecita e di ragione puramente scientifica.91 The image of the magician, so clear in those romances, was indeed a somewhat unpoetic figure, but one that was still plausible and effective at a time when people were so willing to believe in fantastic, superhuman and amazing events. It is clear that every magician is a wise man, but not every wise man is a magician; the two types are distinct and independent of each other. The magician is, properly speaking, a superlative example of the great wise man; and, in a certain sense, he is also a negative example in terms of moral qualities. However, there is an intermediate idea according to which magic, within certain limits and by certain means, appears legitimate and purely scientific in nature. This last sentence describes Merlin’s situation.

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In the Huth Merlin, Merlin encounters two enchanters and, by cursing them, causes their instant death from a wave of sulphurous gas. He then proclaims his own greatness: “Je le ferai ainsi pour chou que li preudomme…me soient tiesmoing que j’ai esté li plus sages de nigromanchie de tous cheus qui onques fuissent ou roiame de Logres…. Je voel que elle soit après ma mort tiesmoing et demoustranche de men grant savoir.” Et il respondent adont: “Certes, Sire, bien mousterra apertement que vous soiiés li plus sages des sages “92 “I shall do this so that worthy men…may witness that I have been the wisest magician of all those who have ever lived in the kingdom of Logres I wish this to be a witness to, and demonstration of, my great wisdom after my death.” And they answered then: “Indeed, Lord, this will clearly show that you are the wisest of the wise” This act publicly demonstrates that Merlin is the enemy of sorcerers, those who cast evil spells, and practitioners of black magic.93 The following is a typical example: the romances, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and the prose Tristan call Merlin only “le prophète” (the prophet), “le devin” (the theologian) or “le sage” (the wise man); on the other hand, on the four occasions when his enemies insult him, they deliberately call him an “enchanter.” In L’Estoire de Merlin, the rebellious kings learn that Merlin has won the help of Ban and Bohor for Arthur. Angry, they swear to fight anyway: “jamais ne seront lie deuant ce qu’il seront vengie del roy artu & de son enchanteor par qui il ont rechu icel damage” (they will never be happy until they have been avenged on King Arthur and his enchanter, through whom they have suffered this harm).94 During a battle in Le Livre d’Artus, Merlin tries in vain to rally the dissidents: “si ne li respondirent un seul mot encois le clamoient enchanteor. & Merlins lor disoit qu’il ne li chaloit de quanque il li disoient” (They did not speak a single word in reply, but called him enchanter. And Merlin told them that he did not care what they said to him).95 Later, “li rois Vriens fu fel & corrociez si le clama enchanteor. & Merlins qui nul home ne redouta li dist que se nestoit por lamor de ses amis mar le se pensast” (King Uriens was violent and angry, and called him enchanter. And Merlin, who feared no man, told him that if it were not for his love of Uriens’ friends, the king would regret his words).96 In the Huth Merlin, the rebellious barons scorn Merlin, saying, “Or a bien li enchanteres parlé” (Now the enchanter has spoken well).97 Like fairies, all enchanters are antipathetic, cruel and perverse figures, at least in the prose romances. In no way could Merlin be one of them; his mission to the chivalric world (that is, the existence of the prophet theme) precludes it.98 Merlin is a teacher of magic. He appears in the principal romances as a kind of dispenser of the “scientific” secrets of which he is the keeper (as prophet, moreover, he plays an analogous role for Blaise, whose book he dictates). The most famous magicians of Arthurian literature are said to be his students, but since they themselves are not the prophet they remain, for all their knowledge, dark and evil beings. Merlin uses his magic to benefit others through his prophecies, whereas they use it

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irrationally to satisfy their cruelty or their vices. In the prose Lancelot, Merlin is Morgan’s teacher; in L’Estoire de Merlin and the Huth Merlin, that of Morgan, Vivian,99 and Guinebaut100; and in the prose Tristan, that of Morgan and Mabon. These texts do not, in fact, make Merlin a teacher of magic per se; instead, they use the terms enchantements and, above all, nigremance. Godefroy simply translates this word as “nécromancie” (necromancy). It would seem, however, that it should be translated as “the art of free and fantastic manipulation of natural forces (but without the intervention of the demonic).”101 Merlin is, then, a magician only by analogy. His true strength is, rather, the knowledge of “les choses que li haus maistres a establies a sa volonté. Et bien sachiés que nus hom vivans ne le vous savroit a dire fors moi seulement” (the things which the high master [God] has established according to his will. And be assured that no living man except myself could tell them to you).102 In speaking of these extraordinary gifts, our romance writers most often use the words sens and art; it is to the former (the words “tout le sens qui des di-ables peut venir” [all the knowledge which can come from the devils] appear repeatedly) that Merlin owes the latter. Moreover, the word sens is used elsewhere to refer to his gift of prophecy. These two terms persist in later literature, where they come to define the figure of Merlin. After the belle époque of French romance, they are found in Italy in Il Cantari dei Cantari: “…di Merlino e d’ogni suoi incanti/che ordinò co la sua maligni’ arte” (…of Merlin and all his spells/which he cast with his evil art).103 “Le sens de Merlin” (Merlin’s wisdom) becomes proverbial for the greatest scientific knowledge.104 Merlin had become part of the repertoire of popular knowledge and was referred to as a source of wisdom: Morawsky quotes a proverb which reads, “Veritez est, 90 vos conte Merlin,/bons est li plet dont l’en loe la fin” (It is true, as Merlin tells you,/that all’s well that ends well).105 A similar reference is found in La Fontaine’s fable of the frog and the rat: “Tel, comme dit Merlin, cuide engeigner autrui,/qui souvent s’engeigne soi-même” (As Merlin says, he who thinks to deceive others/often deceives himself).106 The origin of this saying is the prose version of Robert de Boron’s Merlin (at the beginning of L’Estoire de Merlin): “Et Merlins li dist: ensi avint il de plusors qui quident engignier autrui, si engignent aus misme” (And Merlin said to him: “Thus it happens that many who think to deceive others deceive themselves”).107 These words survived longer than the rest of the text; they appear in a short work, published in Paris in 1528, which contains synopses of various Merlin romances: “Ainsi advient il de plusieurs; car telz cuident engigner ung autre qui s’engignent eulx mesmes” (So it is with many people; for there are those who think to deceive others but deceive themselves).108 It is easy to see how the theme of the magician fed and enriched that of the prophet and gave it a broader audience; prophecy came to be synonymous with wisdom itself.109 Steffens cites other proverbs, Le sens de Samson and Le sens d’Hippocrate. Merlin has company…. Elsewhere, the three figures are found together: Li saiges Merlins et Sances fortins,

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et dont Ypocras, cil saiges tuit III 110 Merlin the wise and Samson the strong, and Lord Hippocrates, all three of these sages Samson is out of place in this group. The inclusion of Hippocrates is more striking since he is both a scientific authority, like Merlin, and the subject of almost slapstick tales, like Virgil. 1. The Wise Man and Women Among the adventures commonly attributed to Virgil is one in which he falls in love with the Emperor of Rome’s daughter. Hypocritically, she pretends to love him in return and proposes a nocturnal meeting. She drops a basket on a cord from her window, Virgil enters the basket, and she begins to raise it but stops halfway, leaving him hanging. The next morning, the townsfolk find the wise man suspended ridiculously in the basket. A scandal ensues. The emperor wishes to punish Virgil, but he escapes and devises a terrible vengeance. He magically extinguishes all the fires in the city and, when the people beg him to relight them, orders the emperor’s daughter to be exposed naked on a scaffold and each citizen to light a torch between her thighs to symbolize the fire of lust. A thirteenth-century text attributes the same adventure to Antipater. Le Grand Saint Graal includes a long episode whose hero is Hippocrates. The story of the basket is repeated, but the wise man takes a different revenge: he makes the guilty woman drink a potion which causes her to give herself to a hideous dwarf. While they are in the throes of passion, Hippocrates brings in the emperor and the entire court, who laugh loudly at the spectacle. The young lady is forced to marry the dwarf and to wash dishes for a living. Later, Hippocrates marries a woman who hates him so much that she tries to poison him. He makes a marvelous cup which renders harmless the poison poured into it, but his wife breaks it. One day, they see a sow in heat passing by, and Hippocrates declares that anyone who ate its head would die. His wife sees her chance, has the animal secretly killed, and serves Hippocrates its head. Although he is dying, he does not hate his guilty wife, but rather, with admirable generosity, blames himself: Mervelle, fet li rois, puis oïr; elle vous ait empoisouneit et si ne la poiez hair? Tous li mondes la heit et doit haïr et vous l’ameis; moult aveis millor cuer envers ley qu’elle n’ait envers vous; et c’est costume de femme.111 “Amazing,” said the king; “she has poisoned you and yet you cannot hate her? Everyone hates her, and ought to hate her, and you love her; you are far kinder to her than she is to you, and that is woman’s way.”

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Hippocrates dies, and on his tomb is written: “chi gist Ypocras li souverains des fisiens qui par l’engin de sa femme rechut mort” (here lies Hippocrates, greatest of physicians, who died because of his wife’s deceit).112 The fabliau, Henri d’Andeli’s Le Conte d’Aristote, tells the well-known story of Aristotle’s humiliation by a prostitute to the point of playing at horses with her like a child or an idiot. This story has also been attributed to Virgil.113 These texts (each of them copied or borrowed from by a whole body of literature) are supplemented by the memory of biblical tales: Adam, who was “deceived” by Eve, sinned and was driven from Paradise; Samson and Delilah; Solomon in his dotage. All of these stories share the following themes: a) Women weave a vast web around the wise man. They represent the insidious influence of vice over the power of the mind. b) The wise man’s heart is his only weakness: he succumbs to love and, with childlike sincerity, leaves himself defenseless. The woman, on the contrary, feels only horror for the man who loves her. She makes cold-blooded use of her charm and, through a ruse, succeeds in enslaving, humiliating and killing her lover. c) The wise man’s greatness and, indeed, his moral nobility triumph in the end, either through the exacting of a terrible vengeance or by the interjection of the author’s own opinion. The image of the wise man as he appears in legend would be incomplete without this type of romantic adventure, which is an integral part of the tradition. This is an example of the antifeminist theme which was ubiquitous in medieval bourgeois and satiric literature, and consisted of a few endlessly-repeated commonplaces of vulgar psychology: femme est fete por decevoir; mençonge fet devenir voir et voir fet devenir mençonge. quant el viaut l’ome decevoir plus l’en deçoit et plus l’afole tot solemant par sa parole que on ne feroit par angina….114 woman is made for deceit; she turns lies into truth and the truth into lies. when she wishes to deceive man, she deceives and maddens him more by her words alone than could be done by cleverness…. Are other examples needed? The wise man theme intervenes. Par lor engin sont decëu,

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li Sage dès le tens Abel. Par femme fu Adam decëu, et Virgile moqué en fu, David en fist faulz jugement et Salemon faulx testament, Ypocras en fu enerbé, Sanson le fort deshonnoré; femme chevaucha Aristote: il n’est rien que femme n’assote.115 (Women), by their schemes, have deceived Wise men since the time of Abel. Adam was deceived by a woman And Virgil was ridiculed by one; Because of a woman David gave an unjust command And Solomon made a false testament. Hippocrates was poisoned by a woman; Samson the strong was dishonored; Aristotle rode on a woman’s back: Women make fools of everyone. Merlin the prophet’s turn would come. From its beginnings with the Vita Merlini and the works of Robert de Boron, his legend showed traces of the general antifeminist theme.116 Moreover, once the prophet theme had evolved to the point of blending with that of the wise man, it was natural for this seed to grow and be incorporated into a traditional tale. In reality, the romances attribute two love stories to Merlin, one a rudimentary form of the other. 2. Morgan In the Vita Merlini, Morgan is one of nine fairies who live on the Insula Pomorum (Isle of Apples), where she wields greater authority than her sisters. The Roman de Troie marks her first appearance in vernacular literature, where she is a fairy whose principal characteristic is lust, and who casts a spell over even the evilest of men and especially over those whom she loves or who love her.117 In the prose Lancelot, she creates the enchanted Val Sans Retour (Valley of No Return) for one of her lovers: anyone who enters is imprisoned within walls of air and can never leave.118 The author had the idea of making Merlin, the greatest of wise men, the inventer of the science of magic: “Elle savoit molt d’encantemens et de carins que Merlins li avoit apris” (She knew many spells and charms which Merlin had taught her).119 The origin of Merlin’s “art” is thus given a wholly satisfactory explanation. But Morgan puts it to evil use, and how can the prophet be made even indirectly responsible for her crimes? Some attenuating circumstance must be found. Thus, it is only because Merlin loves her that, like Samson before him, he reveals his secrets: Guenevere discovers Morgan in the arms of the latter’s lover, Guiomar, and threatens to make him leave the king’s court. Frightened, he vows to renounce his love.

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Quant morgue uit que il lot laissie, si en ot tel doel que elle senfui et emporta tant de richoise comme elle pot avoir. Et tant chevaulcha amont et aval quele trova merlin que elle amoit par amors. Et il li moustra quanque elle sauoit dencantement.120 When Morgan learned that he had left her, she was so unhappy that she ran away, taking with her all the wealth that she could carry. And she rode up and down until she found Merlin, whom she loved passionately. And he taught her all her magic. This is the oldest text to mention love in connection with the prophet. It marks the first stage in the development of the typical adventure of the wise man who falls in love. In L’Estoire de Merlin, only one sentence refers to this tradition: & en ce quil seiournerent en la uille sacointa morgain de merlin qui moult estoit boine clergesse & ele li fu si priuee et tant li ala enuiron quele sot quil fu & que maintes merueilles li aprinst dastrenomie et dingremance & ele les detint moult bien.121 and while they were staying in that town, Morgan met Merlin. She was very learned, and she got to know him so well and was with him so much that she discovered who he was, and he taught her many marvels of astronomy and magic, which she remembered very well. This echoes the statement in the prose Lancelot that love begins with mere acointance (meeting).122 In Le Livre d’Artus, Merlin leaves Master Hélye to visit Morgan and remains with her for a long time. She lives in the company of two ladies, to whom she is teaching fine “geux” (games); ladies and maidens from all around come to pay her homage “por son grant sens” (because of her great knowledge), “qui puis apristrent enuiron luj maintes granz merueilles que Merlin li auoit aprises” (and later they learned from her many marvelous things that Merlin had taught her). For that reason, she is called Morgue la Fée (Morgan the Fairy).123 In the Huth Merlin, the tale is virtually complete. Morgan, having heard of Merlin’s wisdom, decides to meet him and learn from him: “et quant il le voit de si grant biauté, il l’enama moult durement et li dist: ‘Dame, pour coi le vous celeroie-je? Vous ne me vaurrés chose requerre que je ne fesisse a mon pooir’” (and when he saw how beautiful she was, he fell passionately in love with her and said to her: “Lady, why should I hide it from you? Whatever you might ask of me, I would try to do it”).124 She says that she would like to learn so many spells that she would be the wisest woman in the world. Merlin complies: little instruction is needed, for she is amazingly intelligent and subtle. Then: quant elle ot tant apris d’art d’ingremanchie comme il li plot, elle cacha d’entour lui Merlin, pour chou que elle s’aperchut bien que il I’amoit de fole

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amour, et li dist que elle le feroit honnir se repairoit plus entour li. Il en ot duel moult grant, mais mal ne voult faire pour chou que il moult amoit le roi Artu, si s’en fui d’entour li au plus tost qu’il pot.125 when she had learned as much magic as she chose, she drove Merlin away because she realized that he loved her passionately, and she told him that she would shame him if he continued to follow her. This caused him great sorrow, but because he greatly loved King Arthur, he did not want to do any harm and fled from her as quickly as he could. Later, Morgan’s theft of Excalibur’s enchanted scabbard is reported to Arthur. For love of her, Merlin warns her and promises to help her escape; to save her, he even lies to Arthur, the only such example in the entire literary tradition.126 This adventure is too brief for all the traditional characters to be portrayed in the detail that we might prefer. But at the same time, the romance writers invented another, similar, story with greater depth, which became a permanent and integral part of the Merlin “legend.”127 3. Vivian Or dist chi li contes que la damoisele qui lanselot emporta el lac es-toit vne fee. A chelui tans estoit apelees fees toutes icheles qui sauoient denchantement. & moult en estoit a chelui tans en la grant bertaigne plus quen autres terres. Eles sauoient che dist li contes des brethes es-toires & les forches des paroles & des pieres & des erbes, par quoi eles estoient tenues en ioueneche & en biaute & en si grant riqueche com eles deuisoient. Et tout fu establi au tans merlin le prophete as englois qui sot toute la sapience qui des dyables puet deschendre, & por che fu il tant redoutes des bertons & tant honores que tout lapeloient lor saint prophete. Et tout la menue gent lapeloient lor dieu. Chele damoisele dont li contes parole sauoit par merlin quanques ele sauoit de nigremanche. Et le sauoit par grant voisdie.128 Now the tale tells that the maiden who carried Lancelot into the lake was a fairy. At that time, all women who knew magic were called fairies, and there were more of them in Great Britain than in other countries. And the tale tells that they knew the powers of words, stones, and plants, which they used to remain young and beautiful and as wealthy as they wished. And all this knowledge came from the time of Merlin, the prophet of the English, who knew all the wisdom of the devils, and was therefore so feared and respected by the British that everyone called him their holy prophet, and all the common folk called him their god. This maiden of whom the tale speaks had learned all her magic from Merlin, and she was very skilled at it. An imaginative summary of Robert de Boron’s romance follows: Merlin’s father was a devil of a common variety, particularly deceitful and lustful, while his mother was a foreign girl who, ever since she was very young, had said that she did not wish to marry because she would be unable to bear the sight of her husband. Thus, only the

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devil could satisfy her: she could touch him and feel that he was beautiful, but could not see him since, as everyone knows, devils have no bodies, and if they borrow one for a time, they make it out of air. The child is born five months later;129 he is not baptized and is later brought before Uther Pendragon. After Uther’s adventure with Ygerne, “si sen ala merlins conuerser es forces parfondes & anchienes. Il fu de la nature son peie dechevans & desloiaus, & sot quanques cuers pooit sauoir de toute peruerse science” (and Merlin went to live in the depths of ancient forests. He had inherited his father’s deceitful and treacherous nature, and he knew all that there was to know about black magic).130 At that time, there lived in Less Britain (Brittany) a maiden by the name of Nymenche.131 Merlin fell in love with her and followed her everywhere: “& chele se desfendi moult bien a li, car moult estoit sage & courtoise” (and she utterly refused him, for she was very wise and well-bred).132 One day, he told her that he was Merlin the wise man. “Ele li dist que ele feroit quankes il vaudroit mais que li ensegnast une partie de son grant sens” (She told him that she would do whatever he wanted if he taught her some of his great wisdom).133 For love of her, he promised to do so. She asked how to enclose a place by magic so that no one could ever enter or leave it again, and how to make a person sleep forever. Merlin was surprised by these questions. She told him that she wanted to imprison her father, who would kill her if he knew that Merlin loved her. Merlin then shared his knowledge with her. The very next night, Nymenche cast a spell on her own body, so that no one could ever have sexual relations with her, and another on Merlin, so that he dreamed of possessing his beloved: Sile decheuoit ensi pour che quil estoit morteus en vne partie. Mais se il fust del tout deables ele ne le peust decheuoir. Car deables ne puet dormir. Et en la fin sot ele tant par merlin quele lengigna et le seela tout en dormant en vne cave dedens la perilleuse forest de darnantes qui marchist a la meir de cornouaille & al roialme de soreillois.134 Ileuc remeist en teil maniere. Car onques puis par nului ne fu seus ne par nul homme veus qui noveles en seust dire. Chele qui lendormi & seela si fu chele damoisele qui lancelot porta dedens le lac.135 It was because he was partly human that she was able to deceive him in this way. But if he had been wholly a devil, she could not have deceived him, for devils do not sleep. And in the end, she learned so much from Merlin that she tricked him and imprisoned him, fast asleep, in a cave located in the perilous forest of Darnantes, which borders on the Cornish seacoast and the kingdom of Soreillois. He is still sleeping there, for no one has ever seen or heard from him since. The maiden who put him to sleep and imprisoned him was the one who carried Lancelot into the lake.

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This episode is a late interpolation in the prose Lancelot.136 It is to the author’s credit that he was the first to invent the Merlin-Viviane affair, and later romances borrowed from his work. Notes Translated from Paul Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète (Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), pp. 5–6 and 215–42. Bibliographical references have been incorporated into the Notes and English translations have been added by the translator. 1. J.D.Bruce, The Evolution of the Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck; and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1923), vol. l, pp. 129– 51. 2. Bruce, vol. l, p.134n. 3. Bruce, vol. 1, pp. 143–44. 4. The only attempt at a systematic study of the prophecies’ historical development is Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). However, Taylor’s perspective is equally arbitrary in that it wholly ignores Arthurian romance. 5. Herbert Grundmann, “Die Pabstprophezeiungen des Mittelalters,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 19 (1929), 77. 6. At a period prior to the composition of the great cycles, Wauchier de Denain attributes to Merlin a “marvel” whose idea he borrowed from the Historia Regum Britanniae, perhaps through the intermediary of Robert de Boron (whose influence is recognizable in the fact that Merlin provides the means of identifying the chosen knight): the column built by Merlin is the fulfillment of a prophecy. 7. Cf. Robert-Léon Wagner, “Sorcier” et “magicien” contribution a l’histoire du vocabulaire de la magie (Paris: Droz, 1939), pp. 49–50, 112, and 117. 8. Wagner, p. 63. 9. Wagner, p. 75. 10. Wagner, pp. 71–72. 11. From the late seventeenth century on, we find the degenerated products of the prophetic genre, including horoscopes, ephemeredes and almanacs. In 1723, 1753 and 1761, an almanac known as Merlinus Liberatus was published in London. It was reissued in 1819 and published regularly thereafter until 1864. The Philosophical Merlin, a system of horoscopes, was published in London in 1822, and a similar work, Urania, edited by “Merlinus Anglicus,” in 1825. See William Edward Mead’s Introduction to Merlin; or, the Early History of King Arthur, ed. Henry B.Wheatley (London: K.Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd. for the Early English Text Society, vol. 1 [EETS vol. 10], 1899), p. lxxx. Mead also mentions the following additional almanacs, without giving their dates: Merlin’s Almanack and Prognostications, Merlins Prognostications, The Madmerry Merlin, and The Royal Merlin (Meade, loc. cit). This is another example, in a field limited to parody, of the basic idea that Merlin is the possessor of secret knowledge of the future which has been revealed only to him. 12. L’Estoire de Merlin, in H.Oskar Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1908–1916), vol. 2, p. 93.

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13. L’Estoire de Merlin, pp. 264–65. This was a common genre: a prophecy concerning the popes, attributed to Joachim of Fiore, is composed of thirty symbolic drawings. Cf. Grundmann, “Die Papstprophezeiungen des Mittelalters,” 78. 14. Le Livre d’Artus, in Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, vol. 1, p. 256. 15. Prose Lancelot (Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, vol. 3), p. 275; emphasis added. This may originally have been none other than the rock which Méraugis de Portlesguez, in a loose adaptation of the Didot-Perceval or its source, calls l’Esplumeor Merlin (Raoul de Houdenc, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Mathias Friedwagner [Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1897], vol. 1, vv. 1330 ff.). It is possible that the word esplumeor (mews) was not understood and that only the idea of a rock was retained. On the custom of selecting a fountain, rock, etc., as a place of battle, see Huizinga, Le Déclin du Moyen-Age, trans. J.Bastin (Paris: Payot, 1932), p. 98. 16. Eilert Löseth, Le roman en prose de Tristan, le roman de Palamède et la compilation de Rusticien de Pise: analyse critique d’après les manuscrits. Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, fasc. 82 (Paris: E.Bouillon, 1891), paras. 196, 197, 200, 202, 203, 229, 384 and 492. 17. Merlin, roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, publié avec la mise en prose du poème de Merlin de Robert de Boron d’après le manuscrit appartenant a M.Alfred H.Huth, ed. Gaston Paris (Paris: Firmin Didot et cie., 1886), vol. 1, p. 231. 18. Pio Rajna, “I Cantari di Carduino, guintovi quello di Tristano e Lancielotto quando combattero al Petrone di Merlino.” Sceltà di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal sècolo XIII al XVII 135 (Bologna: G.Romagnoli, 1873). 19. Sir Thomas Malory, The Morte Darthur: The Original Edition of William Caxton, ed. H.Oskar Sommer (London: D.Nutt, 1889), book 2, chapter 8 (vol. 1, p. 84). 20. Girard d’Amiens, Der Roman von Escanor, ed. Henri Michelant (Tübingen: Litterarischer verein in Stuttgart, 1886), p. 342, ll. 12981–87. In general, medieval authors situate Merlin’s Rock beside a spring. 21. La tavola ritonda o l’istoria di Tristano, ed. Filippo Luigi Polidori (Bologna: Presso Gaetano Romagnoli, 1864–65), vol. 1, pp. 45ff. 22. Matteo Maria Bojardo, Orlando Innamorato, ed. Francesco Foffano (Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1906–1907), book 1, canto 1, stanza 27 (vol. 1, p. 10). 23. Fazio degli Uberti, Il dittamondo (Venice: Giuseppe Antonelli, 1835), book 4, ch. 23. 24. The prose Lancelot alludes vaguely to another place: during their travels, “mesire Yvains avoit laissié le jour devant Mordret au castel Merlin sain et haitié” (vol. 5, p. 309; The day before, Sir Yvain had left Mordred safe and sound at Merlin’s Castle). This may be another mistaken reference to the esplumoir mentioned in Méraugis de Portlesguez. 25. Prose Lancelot, vol. 4, p. 288. In the Livre d’Artus, a maiden announces to Gawain that on the following day, he will find an adventure in front of Merlin’s Tower. 26. Huth Merlin, vol. 2, pp. 57–60. 27. Huth Merlin, vol. 2, p. 60. 28. Prose Lancelot, vol. 5, p. 332; emphasis added. 29. Malory, book 2, chapter 19 (vol. 1, p. 99). 30. Le Livre d’Artus, pp. 301–02. 31. L’Estoire de Merlin, p. 406. 32. Prose Tristan, para. 295a. 33. Huth Merlin, vol. 1, pp. 263–64. 34. Huth Merlin, vol. 2, p. 59. 35. Prose Tristan, paras. 324 and 292a. 36. In The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, Sir Walter Scott mentions a prophecy attributed to Waldhave: one night, the prophet heard a voice which summoned him to rise and prepare to

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

defend himself. He saw a herd of wild animals pursued by a savage, hairy and hardly human creature whom he attacked and knocked down. This creature identified himself: it was Merlin, who then made an obscure prophecy. This descriptive theme is certainly borrowed from medieval romance, perhaps with contamination from the Vita Merlini tradition. (Cited in Sir Walter Scott, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott [Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838], vol. l, pp. 254–55). Claris et Laris, ed. Johann Alton (Tübingen: Litterarischer verein in Stuttgart, 1884), 1. 4160. Li Chevaliers as Deus Espees, ed. Wendelin Foerster (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1877), 11. 12181– 87; cf. Ernst Brugger, “L’Enserrement Merlin, Studien zur Merlinsage,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 31 (1907), 239. Cited in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Galfridi de Monemuta: Vita Merlini, ed. Francisque Michel and Thomas Wright (Paris: Firmin Didot et cie., 1837), p. lxxxv. Giovanni Villani, Croniche di Giovanni, Matteo e Filippo Villani (Trieste: Sezione Letterario artistica del Lloyd Austriaco, 1858), book 2, chapter 4 (vol. 2, p. 31). Cited by M.A.Bruce-Whyte, Histoire des langues romanes (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1841), vol. 3, pp. 224–25. Achille Jubinal, Nouveau recueil de contes, dits, fabliaux et autres pièces inédites des XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Edouard Pannier,1839–1842),vol. l, p.128; Le Grand d’Aussy gives another version of the same tale. Cited in Ireneo Sanesi’s introduction to Paolino Pieri, La Storia di Merlino, ed. Ireneo Sanesi (Bergamo: Instituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1898), p. xxx. Chester, Loves Martyr (pub. 1601). Cited in Mead’s Introduction to Merlin; or, the Early History of King Arthur, p. lxxiv. Alexander Pope, Satires and Epistles, ed. Mark Pattison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), nos. 3, 1. 152, and 5, l. 132. Summarized by Max Arend in Gluck: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), pp. 172–73. Cited in Adelaide Marie Weiss, Merlin in German Literature: A Study of the Merlin Legend in German Literaure from Mediaeval Beginnings to the End of Romanticism. The Catholic University of America Studies in German 3 (Washington: The Catholic University of America, 1933), pp. 52–55. An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1935 [EETS vol. 196]), p. 58. The Siege of Carlaverock, ed. Nicholas Harris Nicholas (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1828), p. 54, cited by Michel and Wright, p. lxxxvii. Dante Alighieri, La vita nuova e il canzoniere di Dante Allighieri, ed. Giuliani da Giambattista (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1868), sonnet 1, p. 171. Romano Guarnieri comments on this sonnet in “Commento a tre sonetti,” in Mélanges de philologie offerts a Jean-Jacques Salverda de Grave (Groningue, The Hague, and Batavia: Société anonyme d’éditions J.B.Wolters, 1933), pp. 142–47. Ernesto Monaci, Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli (Città del Castello: S.Lapi, 1912), p. 324. Cf. Edmund Garatt Gardner, “Arthurian material in the Mare Amoroso,” Modern Language Review, 20 (1925), 331. Summarized in Weiss, pp. 40–48. Sanesi, p. xxxiv. Orlando Innamorato, book I, canto iii, stanza 34; book I, canto iii, stanza 38; and book II, canto xv, stanza 26.

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55. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, A History of Spanish Literature (London: William Heinemann, 1898), p. 174. 56. William Henry Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (New York: Macmillan, 1906), p. 89. 57. Mead, p. lxxv. 58. Mead, pp. lxxvi and lxxvii. 59. Sanesi, p. xvii. 60. Ludwig Tieck, Leben und Thaten des kleinen Thomas, gennant Daümchen; cited in Weiss, p. 81. 61. Jacques du Vergier, Contes et nouvelles (Paris: Urbain Coustellier, 1727), vol. 1, pp. 288–300; cited in Weiss, p. 81. 62. These are closely inspired by medieval romance; significantly, however, such later works in which the magician theme appears in a pure form have no direct romance parallels. 63. With two exceptions, Giraud de Cabrareira’s Cabra juglar (see Mead, p. li, and Michel and Wright, p. lxxi) and a German translation of a sixteenth-century epic, Morgant der Riese (ed. Albert Bachman [Tübingen: Litterarischer verein in Stuttgart, 1890], p. 306), the Merlin of literature remains, until the fifteenth century, an Arthurian figure closely attached to the world of Arthur, Lancelot, Perceval, and Tristan as a legacy, so to speak, of the Historia Regum Britanniae. In the vast rewritings and syntheses of the entire body of French narrative literature that were written in Italy during the early Renaissance, Merlin found himself transported to the Charlemagne cycle. This was an innovation analogous, at less than two centuries’ remove and in another literary genre, to that of the Joachimite Minors who adapted British political prophecy to their own polemics. In both cases, it was Merlin’s prophetic quality that made him useful; if he had been no more than a magician, it would have been easy to find his analogue in any of the cycles. As a prophet, he was unique, all the more so in that he possessed a semblance of existence and a genuine historic reputation which made him comparable to the principal heroes of the Charlemagne cycle. 64. Pio Rajna, Le fonti dell’Orlando Furioso (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1876; 2nd ed. 1900), p. 334. 65. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Santorre Debenedetti (Bari: Giusseppi Laterza & Figli, 1928), canto 26, stanza 30. 66. Ariosto, canto 26, stanzas 30–38. 67. Ariosto, canto 33, stanza 9: “Artur, ch’impresa ancor senza consiglio/del profeta Merlin non fece mai…” (Arthur, who never began any undertaking without consulting the prophet Merlin…). 68. Cited in Theodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, Myrdhinn, ou L’enchanteur Merlin, son histoire, ses oeuvres, son influence (Paris: Didier et cie., 1862), pp. 373–96. 69. Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rodríguez Marín (Madrid: Ediciones de la Lectura, 1911), vol. 6, p. 94. 70. The Birth of Merlin, in Pseudo-Shakespearian Plays, ed. Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1883–1888; 5 vols. in 1), vol. 4. 71. The Birth of Merlin, act III, scene 3. 72. [This is a reference to the seven kingdoms said to have been founded by the Angles and Saxons in Britain during the seventh and eighth centuries. V.G.] 73. Cited in Mead, pp. lxxvi-lxxvii. 74. See Brugger, “L’Enserrement Merlin, Studien zur Merlinsage” (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 30 [1906], 205). 75. See Domenico Pietro Antonio Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1872, 2nd. ed. 1896; rev. ed. Giorgio Pasquali, 1937–41), vol. 2, pp. 5–18. 76. Comparetti, vol. 2, p. 14.

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77. [The Breton Hope is the belief that Arthur will return one day to save Britain in her hour of greatest need. V.G.] 78. The Seven Sages of Rome (Southern Version), ed. Karl Brunner (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1933 [EETS vol. 191]). The fourth tale includes Hippocrates. The eleventh tale borrows from the Historia Regum Britanniae: Herod, emperor of Rome, goes blind whenever he leaves his palace. His wise men are unable to tell him why, but say that a child born without a father could reveal the truth. The entire scene of the discovery of the child is reproduced from the Historia. Merlin announces to Herod that a cauldron of boiling water is hidden beneath his bed; in it, seven demons, the wise men themselves, are fighting. The cauldron is removed and the seven impostors put to death. Merlin then becomes the emperor’s chief wise man. In the majority of legendary texts, it is Virgil who holds this position, but he is supplanted here by Merlin. On the ninth tale, see Alexander Haggerty Krappe, “Studies on the Seven Sages of Rome, IX: Virgilius,” Archivum Romanicum, 16 (1932), 271–82. 79. Popular legend attributed a similar marvel to Roger Bacon. According to Chaucer, such a mirror was given to Genghis Khan by the king of Arabia. 80. Cf. Schofield, p. 88. 81. Schofield, p. 89. [Zumthor is mistaken on the composition of the globe; I have substituted Schofield’s text. V.G.] 82. Sanesi, p. xxxvi. 83. It was written in 1414, earlier than the above-mentioned works. 84. This form alternates with Melino. 85. Cited in Comparetti, vol. 2, p. 239; see also vol. 2, p. 142. 86. Similarly, Girolamo Folengo published his macaronic poems under the pseudonym of Merlino Coccaio, which was a pun on Virgilius Maro since cocai and maron were synonyms in his patois (see below, n. 108). 87. The Prose Lancelot (vol. 4, p. 2) speaks of the city of Oxford, “que Merlins apela le gue des Bos, la ou il dist que toute sapience descendroit” (which Merlin called the ford of oxen, where all wisdom would descend). Merlin becomes the source of the famous university’s glory. Similarly, in John Rous, Historia regum Angliae (ed. Thomas Hearne, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1745], p. 23), King Bladud founds Staunford University, of which it is said that “his noble clerks, as Merlion doth sey,/had scholars fell of great habilite.” La Coudrette, The Romans of Parthenay, or of Lusignen; Otherwise Known as the Tale of Melusine (ed. Walter William Skeat [London: N.Trübner and Co. for the Early English Text Society; EETS orig. ser. vol. 22], 1. 5973), tells of a prophet so famed in Aragon that everyone came to hear him, “…which fomtyme was clerke Merlyne unto.” Two Italian texts published by R.Ortiz (“La Materia epica di ciclo classico nella lirica italiana delle origini,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 85 [1925], 59–60) also refer to Merlin. A sonnet by Monte Andrea reads, “Ki di me conosciente è, a rasgione/più ch’Aristotel senno a lui comsento,/o che ‘n Merlino o che ‘n Salamone” (Whoever is truly knowledgeable about me,/I grant that he has more wisdom than Aristotle,/or that can be found either in Merlin or in Solomon); Schiatta di messer Albizzo: “Eo nom sono Aristotol nè Platone/nè de Merlino non ò lo’ntendimento,/ nè lo saver non ò di Salomone” (I am not Aristotle or Plato,/nor do I have Merlin’s knowledge/or Solomon’s wisdom). 88. The idea that sainthood is this supreme knowledge may be the cause of the many implausible tales of miracles in medieval saints’ lives and other tales which demonstrate the saint’s power over wild animals or demons.

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89. His diabolic origin gives this type its ultimate perfection. It was a common idea that profound knowledge of the secrets of nature was possible only through some acquaintance with the devil. As late as the sixteenth century, Faust and Paracelsus were accused of black magic. But Merlin is not only the devil’s son, but also a good man, a messenger of God on earth. This divine vocation is perhaps the field of knowledge’s equivalent of sainthood. 90. We shall call him the wise man, as do our medieval romances. 91. Comparetti, vol. 2, pp. 13–14. 92. Huth Merlin, vol. 2, p. 158. 93. See the condemnation of Vortigern’s sorcerers in the Historia Regum Britanniae and the works of Robert de Boron. 94. L’Estoire de Merlin, p. 109; emphasis added. 95. Le Livre d’Artus, p. 15; emphasis added. 96. Le Livre d’Artus, p. 25; emphasis added. 97. [Unable to trace; emphasis added. V.G.] 98. To my knowledge, only three texts represent Merlin as an infernal and cursed sorcerer. The first is an interpolation in the Prose Lancelot which will be examined later. The second is a curious passage in Jocelyn’s Vie de saint Patrice: “Quidam maleficus Melinus dictus, instar Simonis Magi se Deum asserens, ac aethera volatu diabolico repetens, precibus [Patricii] e sublimi corruit praecipitatus, confractusque interiit” (While a certain evil person known as Merlin, who, like Simon Magus, claimed to be a prophet, was returning to earth after a demonic flight, he was cast to the ground and broken to bits as a result of Patrick’s prayers). The scene takes place on the Isle of Man. This text presents a problem: since Jocelyn’s work was written in the late twelfth century, it is difficult to attribute it to a romance source. Moreover, the name of Merlinus-Melinus does not appear in any earlier Irish text. We must go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, either directly (Merlin’s madness and life as a wild man in the Vita Merlini) or indirectly, through some lost text like the Lailoken fragments published by Ward (the mad wild man Lailoken-Merlin’s meeting with Saint Kentigern and his tragic death). (H.L.D. Ward, “Lailoken or Merlin Sylvester,” Romania, 22 [1893], 504.) But this would require moving back the date of composition of these latter texts, or their models, to the second half of the twelfth century. The third example is found in Don Bélianis: “El mismo Merlin dixo: Sabete, ó Principe Griego, que yo soy el mas maldito hombre que en el mundo hubo; yo soy hijo del diablo, y en saber sobrepujo a todos los nacidos: solianme llamar en tiempo del Rey Artús el sabio Merlin” (That same Merlin said: “Know, Greek prince, that I am the most cursed man who has ever lived. I am the son of the devil, and in wisdom I surpass all those ever born: in the time of King Arthur they called me Merlin the Wise”; Don Bélianis, book 3, chapter 21; cited in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Galfridi de Monemuta: Vita Merlini, ed. Michel and Wright, p. lxxii). The Sirventese del Maestro di tuttio l’arti combines the two points of view: “Di Merlino sapiria tractare/[che] fece bene et male” (They speak of the wisdom of Merlin/(who) did both good and evil; “Il Cantare dei Cantari e il serventese del Maestro di tutte l’Arti [Fortsetzung],” ed. Pio Rajna, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 5 [1881], 40). 99. In L’Estoire de Merlin, Vivian is identified with the prose Lancelot’s Lady of the Lake. 100. Unlike Merlin’s other students, Guinebaut is a sympathetic character. Even before becoming Merlin’s student, he was a great clerk, greater even than Blaise. 101. Cf. Wagner, pp. 78 and 141. 102. Huth Merlin, vol. 2, p. 131. 103. “Il Cantare dei Cantari,” in Rajna, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 5 (1881), 43; emphasis added.

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104. Cf. Thibaut de Champagne, Les chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, ed. A.Wallensköld (Paris: Champion [SATF], 1925), chanson VIn.; and Perrin d’Angicourt, Die Lieder des Trouvères Perrin von Angicourt, ed. Georg Steffens (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1905), p. 138. 105. Proverbes français antérieurs au XVe siècle, ed. Joseph de Morawsky (Paris: Champion [CFMA], 1925), no. 286, from a manuscript entitled, Ci sont li proverbe que dit li vilains. 106. Jean de la Fontaine, La Grenouille et le Rat, in Oeuvres de Jean de la Fontaine, ed. Henri Régnier (Paris: Hachette, 1883–1892), vol. 1, pp. 307–08. 107. [Unable to trace; however, Régnier cites a similar passage, which he attributes to a sixteenthcentury Merlin text in the Bibliothèque Nationale (La Fontaine, vol. 1, p. 307n.). V.G.] 108. Cited in La Fontaine, vol. 1, p. 307n. These words appear in translation in Girolamo Folengo (pseud. Merlini Coccalii), Macaronea, X: “Vidimus experti quod quisquis fall-ere cercat / Deceptum tandem se cernit tempore quoquo;” (Teofilo Folengo [Venice, 1613], p. 228; cited in La Fontaine, vol. 1, p. 307n.); this led to the mistaken belief that the Merlin referred to by La Fontaine was Folengo. 109. Another, almost proverbial (though less significant), use of Merlin’s name is found in the expression “au temps de Merlin” (in Merlin’s day), meaning “long, long ago,” which appears in a number of romances, including Erec et Enide (Erec und Enide), ed. Wendelin Foerster [Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1909], 1. 6693), Le Roman de L’Escoufle, ed. H.Michelant and P.Meyer (Paris: Firmin Didot et cie. [SATF], 1894), 1. 1434, and Eustache Deschamps, Le Lay de Vaillanche, in Deschamps, Oeuvres, ed. le Marquis de Queux de Saint Hilaire (Paris: Firmin Didot et cie. [SATF], 1878), 1.241 (vol. 2, p. 222). 110. Perrin d’Angicourt, Die Lieder des Trouvères P. von Angicourt, p. 138. 111. Le Saint Graal; ou, Le Joseph d’Arimathie, ed. Eugène Hucher (Le Mans: Monnoyer and Paris, 1875–78), vol. 3, p. 66n. (text of MS 2455). 112. Le Saint Graal, vol. 3, p. 28. 113. Several famous figures of the Arthurian world are also the victims of feminine wiles: in the prose Lancelot, Arthur is seduced and imprisoned by Camille, and Lancelot is taken prisoner by Morgan. In the prose Tristan, Grysinde, jealous of her lover, the enchanter Mabon, imprisons him in a tower which he cannot leave without going blind. In the Huth Merlin, Morgan, seeking to kill Arthur, steals his sword, Excalibur, and casts a spell on the king; he sets out one evening in a marvelous boat and wakes the next morning to find himself in prison. 114. Cited by Brugger, “L’Enserrement Merlin,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 30 (1906), 202. 115. Cited by Brugger, “L’Enserrement Merlin,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 30 (1906), 203. 116. In Wauchier de Denain, vv. 34, 251 ff., the girl who tells Perceval where the enchanted column came from also says that she is the daughter of one of Merlin’s mistresses. There is no reason to assume that this is in any way a traditional story. 117. La Mort Artu lists David, Absalom, Solomon, Hector, Achilles, Paris and Tristan as famous victims of women. 118. Prose Lancelot, vol. 4, p. 116. 119. This theme has been discussed above. 120. Prose Lancelot, vol. 4, p. 124. 121. L’Estoire de Merlin, vol. 2, p. 254. 122. Elsewhere in the prose cycle, in the story of Grisandole, Merlin delivers an antifemi-nist diatribe which is closely related to the theme of the wise man who is “engigné” (deceived); here, the wise man is Julius Caesar, who never suspects his wife’s deceit. Merlin’s style is

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123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

that of the satirists: “…feme sont maint preudomme houni & decheu & mainte ville arsse & destruite & mainte terre essilie…. Tu meismes pues bien apercheuoir que par feme sont maint homme houni Ne iamais tant comme li siekles durera ne feront senpierir non et tout che lor auendra par pechie de luxure ki est en els & dont eles sont esprises. Car feme est de tel nature ke quant ele a le millor segnor de tout le monde si quide ele auoir le pior. & ce lor uient de la grant fragilite ki est en aus” (L’Estoire de Merlin, p. 289; Many honorable men are shamed and deceived, and many cities are ruined and destroyed, and many lands are wasted You yourself can clearly see that many men are shamed by women…. But as long as the world lasts, women will only cause trouble, and this is because of the sin of lust which is in them and which they love. For it is woman’s nature that if she has the best husband in the world, she thinks she has the worst. And this is because of women’s great weakness). Le Livre d’Artus, pp. 163–64. Huth Merlin, vol. 1, p. 266. Huth Merlin, loc. cit. Huth Merlin., vol. 2, p. 271. Chronologically, the two adventures developed as follows: the Morgan story, which was part of the original prose Lancelot tradition, must have been invented first. Later, an interpolator introduced the Vivian story, which, in a sense, elaborates on the earlier version, into the same romance. Subsequent romance writers included both of them in the prose Lancelot, emphasizing the second without adding to or totally eliminating the first. Prose Lancelot, vol. 3, p. 19. [The text actually states the maiden became pregnant five months after she began to sleep with the devil. V.G.] Prose Lancelot, vol. 3, p. 21. There are great variations in Vivian’s name, which appears variously as Vivienne, Nivienne, Niniane, Mimenne or Mymenche. It may be derived from that of Diana, who is mentioned in several of these romances, or it may be the feminine form of Vivian, a man’s name. Prose Lancelot, vol. 3, p. 21. Prose Lancelot, loc. cit. Brugger argues that the name Darnantes is derived from Douarnenez, placing the adventure in Brittany. It is remarkable that although the Historia Regum Britanniae explicitly associates Merlin only with Wales, the French romances place him only in Northumberland—possibly through the influence of the Vita Merlini—or, as here, in Brittany—perhaps because of the literary tradition which associates that land with everything magical. Prose Lancelot, vol. 3, pp. 21–22. See Bruce, The Evolution of the Arthurian Romance, vol. 1, p. 150, and Brugger, “L’Enserrement Merlin,” Zeitschrift für romische Philologie, 30 (1906), 175, and 31 (1907), 276.

CHAPTER 3 Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake ANNE BERTHELOT

Merlin first appears on the narrative scene as a child: the puer senex who reveals to Vortigernus what causes his tower to fall, and then prophesies the future of Great Britain, with the fighting dragons as a starting point. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, for instance, as well as in the French prose Merlin or the Middle-English Of Arthour and of Merlin, he is the fatherless child, born of the devil according to some versions, of a special kind of “demon” according to others, but basically he acts as a revealing device, a prophet whose defining characteristic is his youth. The “merveille” of Merlin is, precisely, that he is a child with the wisdom of an old man, and the various texts insist on the discrepancy between Merlin’s high level of competence and his apparent youth. Merlin is the one character related to the Arthurian legend who seems to have the least chance of getting involved in any kind of romantic relationship, or any relationship with a woman, his mother excepted. But, things are not so simple. From the very beginning, the motives associated with Merlin suggest a difficult relationship between his character and any feminine figure whose identity is not better established than his own. Indeed, Merlin is frequently given the role of the more or less supernatural creature which can only be imprisoned by a woman, preferably a virgin. This pattern underlies the unicorn story, and it is not superfluous to mention the resemblance between Merlin, the devil’s son, and the strange animal haunting Arthur’s kingdom, the Beste Glatissant. At least one manuscript of the prose Tristan depicts the circumstances leading to the Beste Glatissant’s birth, and this episode justifies the claim made a few years ago,1 that Merlin is the Beste’s (half-) brother—since both are born of the devil. In most texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, this analogy is not so explicit; but, whenever Merlin appears in his capacity as “Wild Man” there is also a “prophecy” about him, foretelling that he will never be captured unless by a woman. We possess four versions of this episode: the most complete rendition takes place in the Suite-Vulgate, rather late in Merlin’s career. Interrupting his activities as counselor to Arthur, prophet dictating past and future events to Blaise, and “ami” to Niniane of Brittany, Merlin departs for Rome, where he intends to interpret the emperor’s dream and to reveal the empress’s villainy. He first manifests himself in the form of a white stag, and as such predicts that the emperor’s dream will only be explained by a Wild Man living in the forest. All the knights enter the quest for this elusive Wild Man, but the only one to succeed is the young Grisandole, who is in fact

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the maiden Avenable, obliged to disguise herself to escape her family’s enemies. Brought to the emperor, Merlin2 explains why he laughed several times on the way, and tells the truth about Avenable-Grisandole. He then disappears, leaving behind an inscription bearing testimony to his presence. Quite clearly, this episode has nothing to do with the main corpus of Arthurian tales; this impression is confirmed by the fact that the same story, sometimes verbatim, is told as the final episode of the verse thirteenth-century Roman de Silence. In Silence, the eponymous heroine has been raised as a boy by her rich parents, because women were prohibited by the king from inheriting. She becomes a knight and a fine warrior, but she spurns the queen’s proposals, and consequently the queen accuses Silence of attempting to rape her. Since the king (who is definitely not Arthur3) is loath to have the bright young knight put to death, he imposes on Silence an impossible quest: he must find and capture Merlin. This is impossible because, as the queen explains, nobody but a woman will ever be able to accomplish this feat: Merlins ert petis enfes donques; 11 fist la tor al roi ester, et donc n’i volt plus arester. Mais il dist donc, ains qu’en alast et que la tor adevalast, qu’il seroit encor si salvages et si fuitils par ces boscages, ja n’estroit pris, n’ensi n’ensi —c’est verité que jo vos di— se ne fust par engien de feme. (Roche-Mahdi, vv. 5794–5802) [Merlin was a little child then; he arranged for the king’s tower to stand, but did not want to remain. But he said, before he went and the tower fell down, that he would be so wild and so elusive through the woods that nobody would ever take him, in any manner,—I am telling you the truth—if it was not through a woman’s wiles.4] Since, of course, Silence is a woman, Merlin is captured easily, and his revelations pave the way to a happy ending. The Roman de Silence and the Grisandole episode offer a rather developed version of the “capture of Merlin” motif. Not so the Middle English romance Of Arthour and of Merlin, where the story belongs to the series of three exempla demonstrating the child Merlin’s powers to Vertigier’s messengers. Even less so the Middle-High German Rheinische Merlin, a fragment that presents Merlin’s story as a kind of hagiographic narrative. There the motif is so much changed as to be almost impossible to recognize. It has baffled critics for a long time, but it shows the pattern we have noticed in other texts: Merlin’s death, or capture, is brought about by a woman. If there is a merlinesque tradition encompassing this motif, it is carefully repressed in

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the first works connecting the “Merlin matter” with the Arthurian legend: e.g., Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae or the prose Merlin. In this last text, the “demonstrations” of Merlin’s talents to the royal messengers contain only two such episodes, instead of the expected three; the missing one is precisely the one about “the woman dressed as a man who is able to capture Merlin.” In the Vita Merlini,5 on the other hand, Merlin, a warrior-king who went mad after seeing his men killed in battle and flew to the forests, to live there like an animal, is once again involved with women, having left behind him a wife and a sister. Their names—Ganieda and Guendoloena—are similar. The second vanishes from the narrative after one episode only, while the former one plays a regularly increasing role until the end of the story. Some critics suggest that these two women are one feminine character, the mythical consort of Merlin as homo sylvestris, or Wild Man. Both women manifest a deep sorrow because of Merlin’s departure from the court— the human, average, world. While Guendoloena cries and laments, Ganieda, Merlin’s sister, points out to her brother how unfair he is to his wife: he obliges her to live as a widow, although he is still alive, and she has no hope of ever getting another husband. Merlin then agrees to let Guendoloena marry again if she wishes it—as long as he does not see her new husband. He even promises to bring her a wedding gift, as if to demonstrate his perfect good will. Guendoloena enters indeed another engagement, which Merlin learns about by looking in the stars. However, when he arrives at Guendoloena’s house, riding a wild stag and driving a herd of wild animals, the husband-to-be attracts the madman’s attention by his laugh. In so doing, apparently, he places himself under the geas earlier mentioned by Merlin, and Merlin, once again raving mad, kills him by hurling the stag’s antlers at him and smashing his skull. Nothing more is said about Guendoloena, left doubly a widow. On the other hand, Merlin’s sister, Ganieda, remains on the scene. Indeed, she becomes more and more important as the story unfolds, and in the end, she is not only the companion, the parèdre of Merlin, as seen in old religious systems where gods and goddesses together constitute a bisexual force working through sexual energy. She is also a prophetess; she replaces her brother when he regains his sanity and consequently loses his prophetic gift. Ganieda/Guendoloena6 cannot of course be considered as a variant of the Lady of the Lake, but she is the prototype of the feminine figure whose presence runs parallel to Merlin’s story, belying the current image of the puer senex free from any such entanglement. Actually, there are many women, named or not, in the Vita Merlini: Maelduinus, the madman who drinks of Merlin’s newly discovered healing fountain, has a woman, an ex-lover intent on revenge, to thank for his years of madness and for the death of his companions who were poisoned by a traitorous gift of apples. Just before that, Taliesin and Merlin indulge in reminiscences about Avalon, the “Insula Pomorum” of old, where nine sisters deal in life and death and will bring Arthur back to health. One of these is called Morgen, according to tradition, but her sisters’ names are exercises in doubling, variations on this one and only figure, whom one can trace back to the enigmatic Welsh poems attributed to Merlin himself: the “Swan maiden” lingering

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under an apple-tree which seems to be her totem in Yr Afallenau, or the ‘Gwendydd’ of Yr Oianau. Myrddin, indeed, is not a solitary character, for all his exile in the deepest woods. The Vita Merlini features a singularly inhabited forest, where Taliesin, Maelduin, and Ganieda join Merlin to build the kernel of some strange community devoted to science. They study the movement of stars in a very sophisticated observatory, where each window is manned by an astrologer or a scribe. The prose Merlin, struggling to transform a polymorphic figure7 into a Christian prophet of the Grail, imbues its character with the same resistance, to put it mildly, to femininity demonstrated by Alain le Gros. (Alain is heir to the Grail at the end of the Joseph, and the only one among twelve brothers to refuse marriage and paternity.) But soon the old pattern comes back. If the child Merlin is apparently sexless, his conception and birth happen according to a recurring structure: the devil’s son is born thanks to the same kind of masquerade as Arthur, or as Mordret. The astonishing resemblance between these three episodes casts doubts on Uter’s love for Ygerne, and it suggests that the young Arthur is at best no better than an old “lecheor” playing a nasty trick on his vassal’s wife, and at worst a “demon equipedes,” a devil.8 As if these scenes were not enough, the Merlin proper and the beginning of the Suite-Vulgate are saturated with stories of seduction, adultery, and bastard children. They inform the exempla Merlin tells to his various audiences. They taint the purest relationship, when the whore who is Merlin’s aunt suggests that Merlin is Blaise’s child, that there is “fole amor” between a fair penitent and his confessor. They tax credulity when the “conte” tells us that both King Leodegan of Carmelide and King Nantres each have taken their “seneschal’s” wife as mistress and have fathered children on them, and then compounded their sin with a lack of delicacy in giving the legitimate offspring the same name as the bastard one (Guenievre and the False Guenievre, Yvain and Yvain l’Avoutre, or the Bastard). In fact, considering how bluntly the text’s “refoulé” expresses the truth behind Merlin and Arthur’s less than virginal conceptions, it is not surprising that the later romances renounce edifying and virtuous visions of Merlin—as does the prose Perceval, for instance—and allow old patterns to come back under new accouterments. In such cases as the Suite-Vulgate, the Suite-Post-Vulgate, and the Prophesies de Merlin, two feminine characters are more or less constantly associated with Merlin, although under various guises. Morgue, or Morgan, is the first character to be consistently related to Merlin in most thirteenth-century romances, although circumstances may vary considerably. It may be that a lustful Merlin seduces an (almost) innocent Morgue, thus pushing her to her déchéance (downfall). Or Morgue may appear as an ambitious and unscrupulous bitch ready to seduce an old tottering Merlin in order to gain the wisdom he alone can dispense. Both characters get involved in other relationships. Apart from her numerous unnamed lovers, Morgue has at least two serious affairs, with Accolon in the Suite-Post-Vulgate, and with Guiomar in the Suite-Vulgate.9 As for Merlin, of course, his involvement with Morgue is just a dress rehearsal for his true love for the Lady of the Lake, Niviène, Niniane, Viviane, Nimuë. It is easy to suggest that both characters were but one at the beginning, when the Myrddin tradition merged with other

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motifs: the fairy lover, who more often than not embodies the link of a seer, or prophet, with the Other World of gods and goddesses.10 When Christian tenets enter the scene and mix with old patterns, it may have been expedient to split this figure in two: the good fairy, and the bad, or the devilish, magician. However, the direct heir to Gwendydd or Ganieda seems to have been Morgue, and there remains indisputably a deep bond between her and Merlin. In the Suite-Post-Vulgate for instance, Merlin rushes in to warn Morgue of Arthur’s wrath, even though their affair is long since finished. Morgue then begs Merlin’s help without doubting that she will get it: is it because he still loves her, as the text states, or because they are “natural allies” at a deeper level? On the other hand, the late Prophesies de Merlin insists on the symmetry of both relationships, first between Morgue and Merlin, then between the Lady of the Lake and Merlin. Morgue’s behavior may be interpreted as the attitude of a jealous woman, who tries to exact revenge on her rival, and to create misunderstandings between her ex-lover and her rival, and who constantly complains about being betrayed. Of course, in the Prophesies de Merlin, Morgue is not the only one who is complaining about that: her three “colleagues,” who have also slept with Merlin to obtain his teachings, feel betrayed because he did not give them all his secrets. Their resentment focuses on the Lady of the Lake, who did get everything she bargained for, and did not even pay the price for it: “Cest art ne vous aprist pas Mierlins [the Lady of Avalon says], car il le me jura sour sains la nuit qu’il enporta mon pucelage.”—“Adont en sui jou decheüe,” fait Morghe. “Car ançois que mes cors li fust abandounes, il me proumist que il m’aprendroit tout 9011 qu’il savoit.”—“A la Dame del Lac vous en poes piercevoir se vous iestes deceüe ou non.” (Berthelot, p. 343, fol. 170R) [“Merlin did not teach you this enchantment, for he swore to me (he would only teach it to me) during the night when he took my virginity”—“Well then, I have been deceived,” Morgue said. “For before I gave my body to him, he promised me that he would teach me everything he knew.”—“When you consider the Lady of the Lake, you can see, indeed, how much you have been deceived!”]11 Morgue, through her bonds with Avalon, is, or should be, the Lady of the Lake. Niniane-Niviène is nothing but an upstart magician related not to the Celtic goddess of the sea, youth and immortality, but to Diana the Huntress, another type of goddess who looks a little like an intruder. Diana looks like a displaced piece of mythology, imported from Brittany together with a number of other motifs and characters, that is close enough to the original pattern to fit in, but still does not belong. NinianeNiviène displaces Morgue, and forces her to assume a negative role, while she confiscates to her profit the notion of a “good fairy” euhemerized as a beneficent magician. Accordingly, the Morgue and Niniane-Niviène characters do fluctuate together: when the latter is perceived as a model of “sagesse, bonté, beauté,” Morgue

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is blackened to the point where she is compared to a devil, being “black” and hideous as are the devils.12 On the whole, Morgue is a more stable character, especially in her relationship with Merlin, than is the Lady of the Lake. This does not mean, however, that her case is not complex. When she is first mentioned in the prose Merlin, she has nothing to do with Merlin as a character: she is just one of the daughters of the Duke of Cornwall, the youngest and a “bastard,” though the text does not say by whom—the Duke, or Ygerne/Ygraine. Since she is too young to be married off to some king to ensure a global peace when Uterpendragon marries the widowed Duchess, she is put to school, where she supposedly learns the arcane art of “nigremance.” In fact, Morgue owes her name of “la fee,” “the fairy”13 to her special knowledge—since, as everybody knows and as both the Merlin and the Lancelot insist on repeating, fairies are just the name poor naive people give to women who know more than most. Some versions give a few more details concerning Morgue: she is very beautiful, at least when she is young. Later, however, when she has commerce with the devil(s), she loses all her beauty, and from then on must use illusions in order to seduce her numerous lovers.14 This information is not quite coherent: on one hand, her “arts” are presented as perfectly natural, the result of a superior education, but on the other hand, she is apparently dabbling in black magic (although medieval texts do not differentiate clearly black and white magic). However, unless one decides that dealing with the devil(s) refers to Morgue’s relationship with Merlin as “son of the devil” this vision of Morgue goes along very nicely without referring to the prophet-magician. Nothing, in fact, prepares the reader for the sudden attraction that develops between Merlin and Morgue in the Premiers faits du roi Arthur, or the SuiteVulgate. Indeed, Arthur’s half-sister enters the narrative rather suddenly, and Merlin becomes immediately interested in her. Very little is said about this affair: she is willing to learn, and he agrees to teach her; the depth of their involvement is not alluded to, and eventually they each go their own way, apparently without bad feelings. Morgue then engages in an affair with a young handsome knight related to Queen Guenevere, who angrily puts an end to the whole thing, so earning Morgue’s hatred. Meanwhile, Merlin meets Niniane, and forgets Morgue completely. The version of the SuiteVulgate offered by the Livre d’Artus depicts much later a reprise of this “affair,” when Merlin finds in Morgue’s arms some comfort for his “amie’s” betrayal.15 In both versions, however, Morgue’s depiction is not really negative: in the Livre d’Artus she even appears as a much more pleasant character than Niniane, whose behavior toward Merlin has not, in this text, the excuse of his being thoroughly evil. Whenever Niniane, or the Lady of the Lake, has an “ami” whom she prefers to Merlin, her “moral” position is rather weakened, since her disgust for the enchanter does not stem from her virtue, but from her love for another: humain, trop humain…. In any case, Morgue does not matter very much in the Suite-Vulgate, and her relationship with Merlin is neither very lasting nor very important. Things are somewhat different in the Suite-Post-Vulgate, once called SuiteHuth from the name of the manuscript’s owner. This dark and pessimistic text takes a very negative view of Merlin, especially in his dealings with women, and also of Morgue,

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shown from the beginning as an evil sorceress conversing with all kinds of devils in order to acquire a forbidden knowledge of the black arts. According to this perspective, Morgue’s relationship to Merlin is just a way among others to win some more power, as she does customarily with “authentic” demons. It is stated that, while Merlin is “in love” with Morgue, she just tolerates him and is interested only in his teachings: Et quant Morgain sot que Merlins avoit che fait par enchantement, elle s’apensa que elle s’acointeroit de lui et aprenderoit tant de son sens que elle porroit faire par tout ou elle vaurroit partie de sa volenté. Lors s’acointa de Merlin et li pria que il li apresist de che qu’il savoit par couvent que elle feroit pour lui canques il li oseroit requerre. Et quant il le voit de si grant biauté, il l’enama moult durement…[…] Quant elle ot tant apris d’art d’ingromanchie comme il li plot, elle cacha d’entour lui Merlin pour chou que elle s’aperchut bien que il l’amoit de fole amour…(Roussineau, §§, 156– 57) [And when Morgue discovered that Merlin had done that by enchantment, she decided to get acquainted with him and to learn so much from his wisdom that she would always be able to accomplish most of her will in any situation. She then became acquainted with Merlin and begged him to teach her what he knew, under the condition that she would do for him anything he would dare to ask. And when he saw her great beauty, he started to love her greatly… […] When she had learnt as much black magic as she wanted, she cast off Merlin from her company, for she knew quite well that he loved her dishonestly.] Although the Suite-Post-Vulgate shows no compunction in blackening Morgue’s character, it remains unclear whether or not Merlin succeeds in sleeping with Morgue. At this point, indeed, the connection between magical teachings and physical possession is not explicit: Merlin deals naturally in “black magic,” because he is a devil’s son, and Morgue is ready to pay any price for the knowledge she craves. The tacit understanding is that Merlin, an evil “lecheor” who wants to rob every woman he happens to meet of her virginity, has no other chance of seducing his would-be victims than by offering to teach them magic.16 Contrary to the SuiteVulgate, the Suite-Post-Vulgate does not take into account Merlin’s ability to change his own appearance at will: this trick allows the Suite-Vulgate character to introduce himself to Niniane as an elegant and handsome youth, but one of the many objections Niviène harbors against her unwelcome suitor is his age and unprepossessing looks. Morgue does not seem to be put out by such details; in any case, her own beauty is entirely artificial, since she has lost it while consorting with the devil: it is understandable she does not demand from Merlin what she herself does not possess. The “affair” between Arthur’s sister and Merlin comes to an early end, before Morgue decides to have Arthur killed and replaced by her lover Accolon. From Morgue’s point of view, her affair with Merlin is only a prerequisite allowing her to

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attain her goal—revenge against Arthur. It may seem somehow fitting, from a structural point of view, that the only other magician at Merlin’s level of expertise tries to destroy the king he has “created.” 17 And yet, even here things are more complex than they seem: although Merlin has repeatedly interfered with the normal course of events to protect the young king, the prophet-magician does not even try to prevent Morgue’s treachery.18 More than that: he actually helps Morgue to escape when Arthur, who has been told that Morgue has taken for herself—and her lover—the precious scabbard of his sword, rides angrily to court, intent on killing his sister. At first, he only means to warn her of what he has foreseen thanks to his gifts: Mais Merlins, qui par ses agais et par son enchantement savoit canques li rois avoit dit au chevalier, quant il vit que li rois venoit si aïrés au chastiel, il sot qu’il ochirroit erramment Morgain se elle ne s’estoit erramment destornee. Il amoit moult Morgain, tout fust il ensi que elle l’en eüst cachié d’entour li. Si vint a li grant oirre et li dist: “Vous estes morte et hounie!” (Roussineau, §162) [But Merlin, who knew everything the king had told the knight thanks to his enchantment and his wiles, understood, when he saw how the king was coming to the castle, that he would kill Morgue if she did not get out of his way immediately. He loved Morgue very much, although she had driven him away from her. So, he made haste and came to her, saying: “You are dead and ruined!”] And yet, after Morgue has humiliated herself before him (she kneels in front of him and begs for mercy), he agrees to play an instrumental part in deflecting Arthur’s anger. Far from being the master of the game, he plays the role Morgue designs for him, as if she were the more powerful of the two. He tells Arthur the pretty tale imagined by Morgue, and the king reconciles himself with his sister, whom he believes innocent. Merlin states unequivocally why he is ready to act in such a way, although his main goal remains Arthur’s protection: “Et Merlin dist que tout chou fera il bien pour l’amour de li” (Roussineau, ibid.). [And Merlin said that he would do all that for her love.] It is the last time that Merlin manifests such feelings for Morgue. Soon, the Damsel Huntress comes to Camaalot, and the prophet-magician becomes so passionately enamored with her that he accepts the cruelest fate at her hands. This episode is important because it reveals inconsistencies in the treatment of both Merlin and Morgue. It suggests that perhaps Merlin is evil in the SuitePost-Vulgate at least in part because he does not love wisely, while Morgue is evil from the beginning, and corrupts the prophet more than she is corrupted by him. In fact, all these fluctuations show how complex the relationship between Morgue and Merlin is in its different versions: a fortior, the case of Niniane, or the Lady of the Lake, is still more complicated. The first text to associate Merlin with this manifold character, the Lady of the Lake, is probably the Lancelot. Let us not try at this point to determine whether the noncyclic version, as was edited by E.Kennedy, has preceded the cyclic version as it

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appears in A.Micha’s edition. The “hero” Lancelot is supposed to be raised by a supernatural creature, linked in one way or another with water, and especially a lake: in other words, a “mermaid.”19 But the “chronicles” of King Arthur’s court must not be confused with “fairy tales,” or with the Breton “lais” as retold by Marie de France. Consequently, one has to euhemerize as much as possible the ambiguous characters of “faes,” among them of course Morgue, but also to some extent the Lady of the Lake. We have seen already what happens to Morgue; the same solution may be used with respect to the Lady of the Lake: her lake is not a lake, but a mirage that conveniently hides her manor from King Claudas’s curiosity. And this enchantment has been produced by means of magic, that is to say, a quite respectable “art,” almost bordering on “science,” and a very rational explanation of nature’s wonders. Whereas Morgue has learned this science in a monastery (of all places the most improbable), the Lady of the Lake has had a master. In both cases, this science puts some distance between the dark side of magic dealings and supernatural phenomena, and the characters who get to practice them. Magical science displaces responsibility—from the lady’s nature to her education, from Nature to Nourreture (Nurture). Morgue has enjoyed a mixed reputation in past texts: respected, but feared as a rather ominous figure; she is not one of the foremost characters in the story, even though her role as the enemy of all Arthur and his knights stand for grows larger towards the end of the Vulgate-Cycle. The Lady of the Lake does not have such an important part to play either, but since she acts as substitute mother and protector to Lancelot, she must be above any suspicion. Accordingly, if she has learned magic, it has to be “white” magic. The easiest way to ensure this positive vision of the Lady would be to make her master as innocent as herself, but two obstacles arise. On the one hand, Merlin, the only available figure of a magician inside the Arthurian corpus, is known as the devil’s son; besides, his story contains a number of allusions to a conflict between himself and a feminine character. On the other hand, Merlin is not around during King Arthur’s reign: according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and everyone else, he disappears after engineering Arthur’s conception. In the oldest texts, this is due to the fact that he has outlived his utility, Arthur being considered the legitimate son of Uter and Ygerne. But the prose Merlin, possibly conceived of as part of a greater cycle in which the Lancelot also takes place, offers a different image. Merlin is alive and very much involved in the kingdom’s business as late as a few weeks before Arthur’s election through the means of the sword in the stone. Since he is no longer around at the beginning of the Lancelot, a few words of explanation are required. The Lady of the Lake acts as his successor, so she is the best candidate to dispose of him. This has the double advantage of eliminating a character prone to claim too much attention,20 and of cutting off the Lady’s acquaintance with a dubious figure. Accordingly, Merlin’s role in the Lady of the Lake’s life and “professional” education is summarized at the beginning of the Lancelot in a way which underlines the complete innocence and worthiness of the young damsel and blackens as much as possible her mentor. The Lancelot must introduce considerable changes to the canonical story of Merlin’s birth; most manuscripts substitute a wanton and vain

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young lady for the faithful and obedient mother of the future prophet. This lady is not seduced by the devil; it is in fact her own desire and her refusal to accept the common law for women, which gives the devil an opportunity to come to her and ultimately to make her pregnant: Apres che ne demoura mie granment que uns deables de tel maniere comme je vous ai dit vint a la damoisele en son lit par nuit. Si li com-mencha a proier moult durement et li promist que ja ne le verroit a nul jour. Ele li demanda qui il estoit. “Je sui,” fait il, “uns homs d’estraigne terre, et pour chou que vous n’aves cure d’omme que vous puissies veoir, pour che vieng je a vous, car autresi ne poroie je veoir nule feme a qui je jeüse.” La damoisele le tasta, si senti que il avoit le cors moult gent et moult bien fait par samblant […]; si l’enama et fist outreement sa volentei et mout le chela bien a sa meire et a autrui. Quant ele ot ceste vie menee dusques a .V. mois, si engrossa…(Micha, vol. VII, Ch. 6) [It did not last long after this event that a devil, of the kind I told you about, came to the damsel in her bed during the night. He began to ask her for her love and promised her that she would never see him. She asked who he was: “I am a foreigner,” he said, “and because you do not care for a man whom you can see, I have come to you: indeed, I could not stand to see a woman to whom I would make love.” The damsel felt him and found he had apparently a handsome body; then she started loving him, and did whatever he wanted, all the while hiding it very well from her mother and from anybody else. When she had behaved so for five months, she became pregnant…] Not only is the child not baptized in this version, but his name is chosen by the devil; moreover, there is no connection between this Merlin and the Grail, no sense of a mission imparted to a “prophet.” Merlin is a very gifted sorcerer, and through him Uter the bad king tricks unfairly the duchess of Cornwall and causes the death of her good husband. Once this is accomplished, Merlin is apparently free to indulge his every whim, and he comes to the virtuous future Lady of the Lake in the hope of seducing her. The text does not suggest any deep “feeling” in this relationship. There are a few details that may bear testimony to another, older or different, version of the story. When the girl, with a prudence which could be read as slyness, asks her suitor who he is, Merlin tells her the truth—a characteristic not usually demonstrated by devils, more prone to lies and deceptions.21 And when she demands to be taught a charm, the use of which is quite obviously contrary to Merlin’s interests, the text admits that he complies because of his great love for her: “Et chil qui tant l’amoit comme cors morteus puet chose amer li otria a aprendre quanques ele deviseroit de bouche” (Micha, ibid.). [And he, who loved her as much as anybody mortal can love, accepted to teach her all that she would ask from him.] The Lady of the Lake eventually “puts Merlin to sleep”; it is not clear whether he is dead, or just sleeping until Doomsday, as Arthur is supposed to do. Nevertheless, the Lady’s success is not the victory of good over evil. Rather, it is due to the one redeeming

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defect of Merlin, the detail that shows he is but a devil’s son, not a devil himself: he can sleep.22 Since Merlin’s story is not important here, one does not linger on this troubling discrepancy between “facts” and their representation. Then this rather long excursus, intended to account for the magical proficiency of Niniene, comes to its end, and the story returns to the Lady of the Lake and her protégé Lancelot. The Lancelot has need of a “white” and innocent, if also wise and talented, Lady of the Lake—even if that means blackening Merlin. The depiction of the Lady as a good Christian woman who just happens to know more than most people23 cannot show her as a bloodthirsty hellion, coldly murdering a man because he wants to take her virginity. On the contrary, the Suite-Post-Vulgate of the Merlin, as an element of a partly lost Post-Vulgate Cycle, had probably no use for the Lady of the Lake as a fostermother of Lancelot and protector to Arthur’s court. Consequently, it can offer a much cruder version of the story, one which still contains a number of archaic elements suggesting that the Merlin-Niviène contest has its roots in a mythological pattern of gendered oppositions. Niviène, the Damsel Huntress, who is cast as Merlin’s victim and eventual killer in this dark retelling of the story, is clearly related to a goddess Diana-archetype. Indeed, the place where Niviène has her would-be lover build her a manor is called “Lac Diane,” and the story of a drastically euhemerized Diana first gives the Damsel an inkling of the manner in which to get rid of Merlin. Niviène’s genealogy is given with more precision than the Lady of the Lake’s in the Lancelot.24 Still, her connection to the numerous Ladies of the Lake in this version of the legend is not quite clear. Above all, she is a huntress and a fierce maiden who does not wish to be conquered by a man. Her reaction when faced with the very concrete reality of Merlin’s desire is pure panic and aversion: La damoisele estoit moult sage de son aage, si s’aperchut bien que cil l’amoit. Si en fu molt espoentee, car elle avoit paour que cil ne la honesist par son enchantement ou que cil ne geüst a li en son dormant.. Quant elle oï qu’il venroit avoec li, elle en fu trop dolante, car elle ne haoit riens autant coume lui… Ne il n’estoit riens el monde que elle haïst si mortelment que elle faisoit Merlin pour chou que elle savoit bien que il baoit a son pucelage… (Roussineau, §§ 315, 319, 329) [The damsel was very wise for such a young woman; she perceived very well that he loved her. She was terrified by it, because she feared he would dishonor her by enchantment, or he would make love to her while she was asleep… When she heard that he would accompany her, she was very sorry about it, because there was nothing she hated so much as she did him… And there was nothing in the world that she hated as much as Merlin, for she knew quite well that he wanted to rob her of her virginity…] The fact that Merlin is a devil’s son and the fact that he wants to sleep with her are equally important or rather equivalent: it is because he wants to sleep with her that Merlin is a devil’s son. The whole idea of sexual intercourse is devilish in the eyes of

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this virgin who, contrary to other “Ladies of the Lake” involved with Merlin, has no “ami” of her own. Her analogue, the fallen Diana who first conceived of the stone “bath-tub” in which to put a soon-to-be discarded lover, has indeed an “ami,” Faunus; and she is killed by the new one, Felix, horrified to see how the lady commits coldblooded murder against his rival. Niviène demonstrates no such weakness; in fact, her attraction to the baby Lancelot, which precedes her abduction of the child in the Lancelot, suggests that she renounces sex in favor of motherly love, and thus will get herself a baby without having to endure the normal preliminaries.25 Even in this text, however, Merlin is not univocally presented as a wicked devil: he refuses to tell Arthur where his incestuous child will be born, preferring to save his own soul rather than the kingdom; and his love for Niviène, although tainted, is nevertheless sincere.26 On the other hand, Diana, Niviène’s prototype, is judged severely, and ultimately condemned for her cruelty by the very person who should benefit from it. This ambiguity is understandable: Merlin seems to have quickly become a very popular character—at least as a prophet. For the next several centuries, he is associated with every current prophecy, especially those of a political nature. All would-be prophets will start defining themselves with regard to Merlin.27 When quoting Merlin’s authority, or when masquerading as a “new Merlin,” people do not wish to quote or to impersonate an evil “devil’s son” condemned for his “lecherie” and put to death by the woman he had been trying to seduce. Moreover, the “samildanach”28 character of the “two Merlins,” as Giraldus Cambrensis so lightly puts it, is difficult to reconcile with the narrowness of an unequivocal status as “devil’s son.” Originally, it is quite probable that Merlinus Ambrosius and Merlinus Caledonius are unrelated figures. They have, however, one thing in common: they are very flexible, indeterminate enough to attract easily any number of older motifs from other tales. A very orthodox “devil’s son” cannot evince such flexibility: his interventions have to be negative, or at least suspicious. Consequently, as a narrative device, his usefulness is necessarily limited. Besides, in order to insure a pleasant image of the Lady of the Lake, the story of her relationship to Merlin must be rearranged, somewhat softened, and made more “courtly correct,” which most manuscripts of the Suite-Vulgate try to do. In these, as we have seen, the meeting with Morgue is quickly glossed over, as if nothing untoward happened. There is no enduring hatred between Arthur’s half-sister and Arthur’s counselor, and certainly no allusion to Merlin’s distasteful proclivities. On the other hand, the story of Guinebaut, a “clerc” who is also a “brother” to Bohort de Gaunes,29 offers a kind of idyllic dress rehearsal to the tale of Merlin’s entanglement with Niniane. This deceptively simple story tells the tale of a young magician who happens to meet a radiant fairy in the forest. After a few questions and reciprocal promises, he agrees to stay with her in her enchanted clearing, renouncing the human world for her sake. This story has no narrative function in the general economy of the Suite-Vulgate; Guinebaut appears at first as a foil to Merlin. While the three kings (Arthur, Ban, and Bohort) may just stand in awe of the prophet-magician, Guinebaut is able to speak with him, even to discuss “professional” matters. Apart from this minor role—and indeed Guinebaut is summarily dismissed from the story after a

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pleasant evening of conversation—, there is no basis for his later reappearance in the episode of the lady in the forest, entirely organized in his favor. One may just read this episode as an introduction to the story of Merlin and Niniane, a variant which receives a happy ending30 that unfolds in accordance with the rules of this type of tale. For after all, what is the Merlin-Niniane story, but a retelling of the old “fairy tale” in which a mortal man meets a fairy, falls in love with her, and departs with her to “Avalon,” either immediately or after some time spent between worlds? It is only because Merlin is not an ordinary man, but another kind of supernatural creature, a “fae” in his own right, that this pattern is somewhat disrupted, and the story undergoes wide-ranging and utterly disturbing changes. The future Lady of the Lake in the SuiteVulgate is almost as clearly a euhemerized goddess as the Damsel Huntress Niviène in the Suite-Post-Vulgate: her father is the goddess Diana’s godson.31This strange god mother gives her beloved Dionas a strange birthday gift: she announces to the moderately happy father that his daughter will be loved by the wisest man in the world.32 Nevertheless, raised as a courtly damsel, Niniane is still very young when she first meets Merlin, “disguised” as a young minstrel whose master has taught him a few magic charms. She agrees to give him her love “sauve s’onour” (while keeping her honor) in exchange for his teaching her his marvelous secrets. Admittedly, there is a brief foreshadowing of disaster, when Niniane asks Merlin about his talents, and he answers he knows the future: “Et de celes choses qui sont a avenir, fait la pucele, en saves vous riens?”—“Certes, oil, ma douce amie,” fait il, “une grant partie.”—“Dieu merci,” fait la pucele. “Que ales vous donc querant? Certes, bien vous em porries atant sousfrir se vostre plaisirs i estoit.” (Premiers faits du roi Arthur, Bonn Ms., fol. 218a) [“And about the things which are to come,” asks the girl, “do you know anything?”—“Yes, my sweet lady,” he answers, “most of it”—“God’s mercy,” said the girl, “then what are you looking for? Certainly, you could keep yourself out of it if you wanted it!”] Niniane’s answer seems to suggest she already knows she will deceive the prophetenchanter before the end and is surprised Merlin does not choose to avoid a fate he clearly foresees. But on the whole, the magician and the fairy seem to get along rather well; the texts do not refer again to any disguise on Merlin’s side, while faithfully mentioning every visit of his to his lady whenever he acts as a messenger between Britain and Brittany or detours to inform Blaise of recent events. It is often suggested that Niniane is indeed very intent on learning everything, and grows very impatient when Merlin delays too long between two visits, but contrary to the Suite-Post-Vulgate, these manuscripts do not comment on the damsel’s hatred towards Merlin. With the notable exception of the Livre d’Artus the various versions of the Suite-Vulgate do nothing to blacken the future Lady of the Lake or to foretell a tragic ending to the Merlin-Niniane story.

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In fact, the relationship develops peacefully, until the time when Merlin rather abruptly declares to both Arthur and Blaise that “it is the last time,” and he will not come back from his next visit to his “amie.” The king and the scribe are somewhat upset, but more out of egoism than out of care for Merlin. The “last enchantment” is depicted in a soft manner, especially compared with the tale of violence and deep cruelty told by the Suite-Post-Vulgate. We are given to see a pretty, courtly scene, Merlin asleep on Niniane’s lap in a meadow under a blooming hawthorn; but for the warnings of Merlin himself, this idyll would look quite peaceful. Even these warnings are gentler, imbued with a kind of melancholy feeling. After finishing her enchantment, the results of which are not immediately apparent, Niniane comes back to Merlin and again puts his head on her lap, instead of flying off as Niviène does, only too happy to be at long last rid of the devil’s son: Et quant la damoisele senti qu’il dormoit, si se leva tout belement et fist un cerne de sa guimple tot entor le buisson et tout entour Merlin, si commencha sez enchantemens; et puis s’ala seoir deles lui, et li mist son chief en son giron et le tint illuec tant qu’il s’esvilla. (Sommer, p. 484) [And when the damsel felt that he was asleep, she got up softly and made a circle with her veil around the shrub and around Merlin, and she started her enchantments; then she went and sat down near him, and put his head on her lap; and she held him so until he woke up.] Merlin’s reaction, when he wakes up and finds himself a prisoner in a beautiful and comfortable castle, which he alone, apparently, can see, is quite in accordance with his previous melancholy: Et il regarda entour lui et li fust avis qu’il fust en la plus bele tour del monde, et se trouva couchié en la plus bele couche ou il eust onques geü. Er lors dist a la damoisele. “Dame, deceü m’aves se vous ne demoures avec moi quar nus n’ en a pooir, fors vous, de ceste tour desfaire.” Et elle li dist: “Biaus dous amis, jou y serai souvent et m’i tendres entre vos bras et jou vous. Si feres desoremais tout a vostre plaisir.” Et elle li tint moult bien convent, quar poi fu de jours ne de nuis que elle ne fust avec lui…(Sommer, ibid.) [He looked around: it seemed to him that he was in the most beautiful tower in the world, lying on the most beautiful bed that he had ever used. Then he said to the damsel: “Lady, you have deceived me, if you do not remain here with me; for nobody, except yourself, has the power to destroy this tower.” And she answered: “Sweet friend, I shall be here often, and you will hold me in your arms, and I will hold you in mine. From now on, indeed, you will do with me as you please.” And she kept her word very well, for there were few nights or days when she was not with him…] The conclusion of the episode is as near a happy ending as one could imagine, given both the necessity of shutting Merlin out of the narrative, and the old patterns of

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conflict between the prophet-magician and a feminine figure. True enough, Merlin explains to Gauvain that nobody will ever see him again, and that he will not even be heard by anyone after Gauvain himself. This, however, is what happens in the prose Perceval, with the curious device of the so-called “esplumeoir Merlin.” The same pattern is even present, to a lesser extent, in the Vita Merlini, where Merlin, although he has recovered his sanity, renounces life among mankind and loses his prophetic voice in his sister Ganieda’s favor. In any case, Merlin is not dead, and Niniane’s “amie” goes on spending most of her time with him in the privacy of their castle. One may see her cavalier treatment of her lover as just a precautionary measure, since she gives herself without any reservation to Merlin—once she is sure he will not escape her, and maybe, as his avatar in the Prophesies de Merlin, run away to seduce another woman. This anxiety is understandable if one follows the lead of later texts, bearing testimony to a tradition according to which Merlin is none other than a “séducteur a toutes mains,” to reuse Molière’s formula concerning Don Juan. It seems for instance a well established fact in the Prophesies de Merlin that every damsel who wishes to learn some magic has but to come and offer herself to Merlin. Supposedly, in this narrative, the “wisest man in the world” has gathered around himself a kind of school in supernatural arts, mainly prophecy and (black) magic. All the clerics interested in these matters have come to live near Merlin and his privileged scribe, Master Antoine, who has succeeded Blaise. Of course, this unorthodox “school” is in any case open only to men. In fact, it is original and subversive on Merlin’s part to teach women—even if the salary he requires for that has nothing to recommend itself! Indeed, even in the Prophesies things are not so clear-cut as they would seem at first. One may place in opposition two secondary characters who figure briefly in this romance. The first is the beautiful and virtuous “damsel of Wales” who, wishing to learn magic, comes to visit Merlin, ready to give herself to him as payment for his teachings, and is sent back home by the prophet after he told her she would marry the king of Ireland in two weeks and bear his son. She is a virgin, of course, and she has a rather high opinion of herself: after thinking about it, she comes to the conclusion that her beauty will be best used to acquire some knowledge, rather than marrying some lord. However, Merlin refuses her, because his prophetic gift has shown him her glorious fate; the text insists that Merlin could have slept with the young woman if he had wished it before telling her of this marriage with the king of Ireland. The fact that he does not do so is a decisive proof of his own virtue: he is not a “lecheor,” but an honorable prophet, respecting moral and social hierarchies. On the other hand, the second damsel is seen partly as a victim, partly as a vile seductress: she, too, comes to Merlin, offering her body in exchange for his teachings. He agrees to the bargain. She learns much. Merlin foresees that upon her return home she will use her new science to meddle in politics, and will get herself killed. When she bids him farewell, he warns her to be prudent, but as soon as she has left, he tells Master Antoine what will happen. Antoine is upset; he chides Merlin for being a wicked and luxurious man who seduces innocent virgins. However, he also deplores the fact that this weakness of Merlin is so well known that numerous

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maidens seek out the prophet precisely with this intention, willingly exchanging sex for forbidden science. In the first case, Merlin’s restraint is proclaimed by the narrative voice; in the second it is only the character of Antoine who casts aspersions on the prophet’s behavior. Merlin himself meekly accepts this harsh judgment. He does not try to reject the accusation; on the contrary, he admits his faults and he even announces that his own death will be a direct consequence of them. One of these women whom he cannot resist seducing will cause his destruction, and he is unable to save himself despite his foreknowledge of his fate. This is a very moral conclusion: sin brings its own punishment. Whatever power belongs to Merlin, his propensities will cause him to be lost. There is something missing in this equation, however: Merlin is conscious of his destiny, but he does not feel any remorse for his sins. He is not penitent: he tries to use his prophetic gift to avoid his fate, instead of repenting his faults and changing his ways. Although he does not attempt to defend himself against Antoine’s chastising, his reasoning appears strangely corrupt: since he has seen that a “blanche serpente” (in other words, a virgin) will put him to death, he takes great care to teach magic only to women with whom he has first slept, so that he is sure they are not “blanches” anymore. Instead of avoiding a recurrence of sin in the hope of saving his life, he compounds his previous error by deliberately engaging in more sin. From a Christian point of view, Merlin’s reasoning is extraordinary: the only way of atoning for lust is to renounce it entirely. Merlin, on the contrary, decides to seek safety in numbers and to avoid the perils of lust by becoming more and more lustful. There is another perspective from which Merlin’s responsibility is reduced, since he sleeps with women in order to protect himself before teaching them the magic that will make them potentially dangerous rivals. When, for any reason, he is not going to teach a would-be pupil, he then renounces sex with her. Merlin never goes out of his way to seduce women: they come willingly to him, and they do not seem to object to the tacit agreement of exchanging magic for maidenhood. Even the Lady of the Lake, who, in this romance, decides to “entomb” Merlin because he is ruining her reputation by claiming everywhere he has lain with her, admits the good qualities of Merlin and regrets the necessity of “killing” him. In fact, it seems that she is still vacillating and could forget her plans, if the “desloiaus” Morgue did not place additional pressure on her by pretending, as she does, that Merlin indeed has seduced the Lady, as he had seduced Morgue herself. This version allows the Lady of the Lake to retain a positive character, although she puts an end to Merlin’s career thanks to the figure of Morgue, deliberately blackened in the Prophesiesi. Merlin’s soul is—probably—saved,33 and his “amie,” despite her deception of the best prophet in the world, remains herself not only the best but also the most honorable magician in Arthur’s kingdom. In a sense, the Prophesies accomplishes a real “tour-de-force”: integrating to the “modern” Arthurian story the oldest motifs linked to the Merlin figure, and depicting both Merlin and his feminine counterpart as rather positive characters. However, the Suite-Vulgate goes one step further still, by removing Merlin from the narrative without ruining his reputation or really killing him. Besides, Morgue as depicted in the common version of the Suite-

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Vulgate is also a quite nuancé character, beautiful and intelligent, but maybe too “luxurious,” and not overscrupulous about the way she acquires knowledge. And yet, this compromise of trying to represent all three protagonists as positive characters remains fragile, as becomes apparent through the distortion inflicted on this scenario by the Livre d’Artus.34 In this text, Morgue is certainly a victim, at least to some extent: conversely, Niniane is depicted as a rather negative figure. Merlin, who has already had an affair with Morgue, falls in love with the future Lady of the Lake, as told in the first part of the Suite-Vulgate; but this Niniane is closer to the Niviène of the Suite-Post-Vulgate or to Malory’s Nimue. Contrary to Niviène, however, she is not very close to the goddess Diana prototype. She loathes her suitor, not because he is a devil’s son or because she is afraid of sex and wants to keep her virginity, but because she has an “ami” whom she loves better than Merlin. The prophet-magician knows the truth, although he is unable to escape the influence of his “amie.” However, after the disastrous end of her affair with Guiomar, Morgue takes refuge in an isolated manor, and from the midst of her solitude, hopes for her former lover Merlin to return. He indeed comes, and they both find comfort in each other’s company.35 From this point on, Merlin starts distancing himself from Niniane: Et Merlins qui sot tot son corage et qui par maintes foiz li avoit son servise pramis vint a lui et la reconforta; et ele en fist molt grant joie et demora o lui lonc tans. Et au sejor que il fist avec lui li aprist tant de ce que ele li demanda qu il n’estoit femme nee que plus en seüst; neïs Niniane s’amie ne sot gaires plus. Et par le solaz que il trova en Morgant comença il auques a esloingner Niniane, car ja nule foiz n’i alast des puis que il ot acointiee Morgant fors lors que force d’amors li faisoit venir, et quant Niniane le conjuroit quant il demoroit. (Sommer, pp. 135–36) [And Merlin, who knew all her thoughts and had often promised to serve her, came to her and comforted her; and she was very happy, and remained with him a long time. During his stay, he taught her so much from what she asked him that no mortal woman knew more than her: even Niniane, his love, did not know much more. In fact, because of the comfort he found in Morgue, he started distancing himself from Niniane: he never went to see her after becoming acquainted with Morgue except when love forced him to go; and then when Niniane enchanted him, he stayed.] Since the Livre d’Artus does not contain the story of Merlin’s eventual vanishing, one does not know what version it chooses. The main thing, however, is this: the Livre d’Artus takes into account the unpalatable fact that the feminine figure supposed to relate to Merlin is not, originally, a positive one. More precisely, it acknowledges that the fight for power which can be read in Merlin’s displacement as a powerful magician and protector of Britain (let alone Arthur) is peculiarly emblazoned by the disastrous ending of most renditions of the “Merlin-and-the Lady of the Lake” story. It is interesting to notice that Niniane, Niviène, and the others are not yet Ladies of the Lake when they know Merlin; only the Lancelot states unequivocally that both

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characters are the same. On the other hand, there seems to be a certain amount of confusion between the Lady of the Lake—a usually unnamed character—and the Lady of Avalon, equally nameless. Technically, one may argue that Morgue, or Morgen, has the greater right to the latter title.36 In any case, this confusion may be the ground for the sudden proliferation of Merlin’s discarded mistresses in the Prophesies. Indeed, if Morgue, the Lady of Avalon, and even the Queen of Norgales are in fact but one character, we are once again presented with the evidence of only two love affairs of Merlin: one with Morgue, and one with Niniane. Whether these two are different figures, or variations upon one prototype, is maybe not so important. One might suggest that originally there was just one feminine consort of Merlin-Myrddin, as alluded to in Yr Afallenau. She separates into two distinct characters: Ganieda and Guendoloena in the Vita Merlini; Morgan and somebody else, generically speaking “the Lady of the Lake,” in most romance versions. Even if in some cases a balance may be reached, and the relationship does not always mean Merlin’s doom, the gap between feminine and masculine principles does remain rather wide. In fact, it shows in a somewhat dilatory manner how a “scientific,” masculine conception of magic and the supernatural is repressed in favor of a feminine one. Modern French tends to associate “magiciens et sorcières,” without being overly conscious of the gendered bias implied by this selective vocabulary. When one looks closely at medieval French literature, one discovers quickly that Merlin is the only male magician who figures prominently. There are a few others, like Eliavres in the First Continuation to the Tale of the Grail, or the unnamed court-enchanter who arranges for “adventures” to happen at Arthur’s court in the Roman de Jaufré.37 Merlin, however, is the only one given an important function in the various narratives; he actually outlives his utility as first conceived of in the Historia regum Britanniae, where Geoffrey has him disappearing from the story after he has helped Arthur’s conception. Even the prose Merlin has tried to “reform” the hybrid figure inherited from another tradition by suppressing his feminine involvements and limiting him to his role as prophet of the Grail. In the Suites, however, the battle between two opposite conceptions rages: on one hand, a relatively open world, albeit officially Christian, which tolerates the presence of the supernatural, the Other World mostly represented by the “faes”; on the other hand, a rigorously Christian world, where the Word of God is spoken only through male voices. The “faes” embody a number of anomalies with regard to the rational, orthodox world of men; they are, more often than not, feminine figures,38 and they do possess a kind of monopoly on magic, or in other words, on anything resembling the satisfaction of natural desires through unnatural means. Opposing these creatures with a man, or at least a male character, means jeopardizing the only area of female power in the romances. It justifies the hostility between Merlin and his various “amies” and disciples. Feminine magic versus masculine “art de nigremance” is not the only thing at stake in the Merlin texts. There is also an opposition between a classical idea of “magic,” channeled mainly through prophecies as featured by the Old Testament, and a “modern,” pagan, magic, which relies upon acts instead of words. Merlin’s way of

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influencing the world around him has generally to do with his prophetic gift. What makes him different is that he knows the future, and is ready to share this knowledge with a few privileged characters whose decisions have a considerable impact. Merlin does not practice magic very often. He is, more than anything else, a prophet, and his deepest and most constant worry is to ensure that his predictions, or his teachings, are written down. He does not write himself (unlike Niniane, for instance); but he dictates, generally to Blaise, sometimes to other scribes, a number of books: the Book of the Grail, the Book of Arthur, the Book of Prophecies, etc…. In the Suite-PostVulgate, he is the one who arranges the future transmission of the adventures, by appointing a college of scribes. This is his great talent, his real specificity; he may play the role of a counselor, or even of a strategist, to King Uter or King Arthur. However, as the Lady of the Lake admits in the Prophesies after “intombing” him, Merlin’s loss entails a drastic reduction of the amount of wisdom in the world—as well as a great damage for herself: “…Mais bien voel que un et autrele sacent ke jou aurai un grant damage en chou ke Mierlins est pierdus. Car de tout ce que jou ne pooie savoir par mes ars, il m’en faisoit sage…”39 (Berthelot, p. 99, fol. 34R) [“Indeed, I want that everybody know it: the fact of Merlin’s loss will cause me a great damage. For he explained to me all that I could not learn through my own arts.”] And yet, while Merlin eventually transmits his magic to his women students, and first of all to the Lady of the Lake, he never passes on his prophetic gift or his scriptural abilities. Blaise, Antoine, and a few others, are but scribes; they write only what the prophet-magician tells them. Conversely, while Ganieda in the Vita Merlini inherits her brother’s prophetic gift when he, back to sanity, stops ipso facto being a prophet, no disciple of Merlin, neither Morgue (anywhere), nor Niniane (in the Suite-Vulgate), nor Niviène (in the Suite-Post-Vulgate), nor the Lady of the Lake (in the Lancelot or the Prophesies), acquires anything like her master’s ability in foretelling future events. They are able to interpret dreams and visions, at least in some versions, but they are not granted any prophetic trances. In other words, the Merlin corpus of romances eventually eliminates a very embarrassing character, whose very versatility threatens the on-going narrative, and at the same time tailors the feminine power of magic in order to render it subservient to the dominant ideology. The Lady of the Lake, incarnation of an old Nemesis for the merlinesque prototype of the wise Wild Man, is used to undermine Merlin’s importance in the romances. At the same time, she provides the stories with an alternate solution, far less dangerous and far easier to handle: a tame magician, an euhemerized figure whose knowledge and wisdom have been acquired through quite normal means. The Lady of the Lake, like Morgue, is a “femme savante,” mistakenly considered as a fairy by naive people—or readers? The age of magic is coming to an end, the age of science is beginning: that is quite meekly admitted by the Lady herself, when she confesses to her foster-son Bohort she does not understand a “merveille” built by a “clerc”:

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Et quant la Dame del Lac voit cele mierveille, ele fu moult dure-ment esbahie. Car bien s’apierchiut erranment ke illuec n’avoit point d’encantement, ains estoit fait par soutillité et par engien. Et quant Boors i fust venus, il s’apareille de la bataille. Mais la Dame del Lac le saisi er-ranment au frain et l’aresta illuec, et li dist: “Biax fius, se vous vous metes entr’iaus, vous estes mors; car vous ne saves pas ke çou est.”40 (Berthelot, p. 318, fol. 155V) [And when the Lady of the Lake saw this wonder, she was very much astonished. For she understood quite well that there was no enchantment in it, but it was done through the agency of a clever technique. And when Bors arrived, he prepared himself for a fight. But the Lady of the Lake took his reins and stopped him immediately: “My son,” she said, “if you try to attack them, you are dead; for you have no idea what it is.”] Notes Reprinted with permission from Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 55–81. 1. By Anne Desarménien-Labia, in her unpublished “These de Troisième Cycle” (Paris-IV Sorbonne, 1983). 2. Who seems to have completely forgotten his original persona and gives a very creditable account of his birth as an authentic Wild Man’s son. 3. The Silence story takes place a long time after King Arthur’s reign: Silence declares she wants to exact revenge on Merlin because he has helped to dishonor his/her ancestor, the Duke of Cornwall, when, through Merlin’s ingenuity, Uterpendragon managed to sleep with the Duchess. 4. My translation unless otherwise noted. 5. Admittedly this text does not seem to be talking about the same character as the Historia regum Britanniae; indeed, the Vita Merlini takes place inside a different time-frame, just remotely Arthurian. 6. These names, obviously a doublet of the same one, can probably be traced to the Welsh “gwen “meaning “white” or “whiteness,” and routinely employed to describe somebody or something linked to the Otherworld. 7. Literally so: Merlin, inheriting a wealth of traditions that show him under various aspects, can only solve this apparent contradiction by being able to assume different appearances at will. 8. Ulrich Füetrer, eventually, says what all texts have alluded to during three centuries: he makes Merlin Uter’s father (that explains, at least, the prophet-enchanter’s unaccountable fondness for the young king, so apparent in the episode of the Duchess’s seduction), and consequently Arthur is quite officially Merlin’s grandson, and the devil’s great-grandson. 9. Also called Les Premiers faits du roi Arthur, according to the title given by the Bonn manuscript. 10. See Dumézil and his analysis about Numa Pompilius and the nymph Egeria in Ancient Rome. 11. As stated repetitively in the Prophesies de Merlin. 12. This vision of Morgue, paradoxically, does not redeem Merlin; on the contrary, if she is used to dealing with demons since her early youth, her association with Merlin is but another confirmation that Merlin is indeed a demon among devils. The Prophesies de Merlin almost constantly call Morgue “la desloiaus Morghe,” while Niniane-Niviène is “la bone Dame dou Lac.”

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13. “Morgan le Fey (or Fay)” in English texts. 14. Several texts mention this fact quite casually, although the exact chronology of this transformation is not so clear: for instance in the Suite-Post-Vulgate, it is said that “[c]e jour… emporta le pris et l’ounour de biauté Morgue, la fille Ygerne. Et sans faille elle fu bele damoisiele jusques a celui terme que elle commencha a aprendre des enchantemens et des charroies. Mais puis que li anemis fu dedens li mis et elle fu aspiree et de luxure et de dyable, elle pierdi si otreement sa biauté que trop devient laide, ne puis ne fu nus qui a bele le tenist, s’il ne fu enchantes.” (Roussineau, § 27); [This day, Morgue, Ygerne’s daughter, won the prize for her beauty. She was indeed a very beautiful damsel, as long as she did not practice enchantments and conjurations. But, as soon as the devil entered her and she was filled with luxury and the demons, she lost so completely her beauty that she became very ugly, and from then on nobody could ever find her beautiful, without being enchanted.] 15. Morgue herself has left her brother’s court because of her anger at Guenevere on account of Guiomar. 16. Which also suggests that every woman wants to learn magic, an interesting assumption per se. The problem, of course, as illustrated by the Lady of the Lake’s quandary in the Prophesies de Merlin, is that a woman must be a virgin to perform magic. According to this undeniable law of magic, Merlin may only be perceived as deliberately attempting to deceive his “amies,” since the payment he wishes to exact from them will automatically prevent them from putting his teachings to work. 17. Niviène’s magic, either learned from Merlin or inborn, is eventually revealed as much superior to Morgan’s, when it comes to a power match between them. 18. He is dead, of course, when Accolon tells Arthur the truth about his sister. But he could have done something before his own death, especially if one remembers that he is the one who taught Morgue most of what she knows… 19. This is indeed a constant in all stories about Lancelot, and almost the only common point between the “French” character and his analogue in Ulrich von Zazikhoven’s Lanzelet. 20. And very difficult to handle: as the example of the Suite-Post-Vulgate shows to some extent, dealing with a prophet in the course of a romance is not easy, because it requires a very fine balance between the events told according to the ordo naturalis, and the prolepses of the fortune-teller predictions. 21. Especially in this case: Merlin has much to lose and nothing to gain in telling Niniene who he is, as the following events clearly show. 22. The anonymous Lai of Tydorel tells the story of a “devil’s son” whose father is not officially a devil, but a merman who slept with a mortal woman asleep near his lake. While at the time of the child’s conception there does not seem to be any suspicion of black arts or deviltry in this low-key seduction, a generation later, when the child Tydorel is grown up, he is branded a devil because of his inability to sleep. 23. In the Lancelot, the word “ingremance” and others of its kind are almost never used about the Lady of the Lake. 24. She is, according to Merlin, a “king’s daughter,” and she tells Queen Guinever that she is “the daughter of a noble man from Brittany.” 25. There is some confusion in the Suite-Post-Vulgate about the identity, or the title, of the Lady (ies?) of the Lake. The Damsel of the Lake who allows Arthur to get Excalibur as a boon granted to Merlin, is not Morgue, nor apparently the Damsel Huntress; conversely, and although Merlin does know her well enough to lead Arthur to the Lake and to know the value of the sword she has to give, there is no romantic entanglement between them: nothing even suggests that Merlin has ever taught her anything, or tried to seduce her.

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26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

(However, if one hypothesizes that this unnamed character is in fact the Queen or Lady of Avalon, whom the dying Arthur will return to after returning his sword to the lake as a signal for her to come and take him back to her kingdom, then the Lady of Avalon figure is indeed one of Merlin’s discarded mistresses in the Prophesies de Merlin.) Nevertheless, the romance introduces Niviène by stating unequivocally that she will later be known as the Lady of the Lake who abducts and raises Lancelot. In fact, the text seems to be of two minds about it: every sentence stating the sincerity of Merlin’s love is followed by another one repeating that the only thing he is interested in is sleeping with the Damsel Huntress. In France at least, this will last until the sixteenth century, when Michel de Nostre-Dame will offer a new kind of prophet, and Merlin will progressively be forgotten or reduced to a minor character in a few folk-tales, like Merlin-Merlot. “Samildanach” is an epithet of the Irish god Lugh, and means more or less “with the multiple gifts, or talents.” Like Hermes or Ulysses, Merlin is such a character, a polymorphous figure who can adapt to a number of different roles within the same story or in different stories. Curiously enough, he does not seem to be also Ban de Benoic’s brother, as if Bohort and Ban had not the same parents; this mystery, if it is one, is never explicit, and never solved. More or less: if Guinebaut remains quite happily with his lady, it is suggested that he will die not so long after that, and that she will remain in possession of the “enchantments” he builds for her after his death. No more details are provided, but it still sounds a little ominous. It is told, without much conviction, that of course she was no goddess, but was named so by the people, in awe of her wisdom. This is the common excuse for using the old words of “goddess” or “fairy,” all the time pretending not to believe such creatures exist. “Et quant ele s’en parti si li donna on don qui molt bien li avera, et li dist: “Dyonas, […] li dix de la Lune et des Estoiles si face que li premiers enfes que tu auras femele suit tant couvoitie del plus sage home terrien apres ma mort qui au tans Vertigier de la Bloie Bretagne comencera a regner, et qu’il li ensaint la greignor partie de son sens par force d’yngremance, en tel maniere qu’il soit si sougis a li, des qu’il l’aura veue, qu’il n’ait sor li pooir de faire riens en contre sa volente. Et toutes les choses qu’ele li enquerra, que il li ensaint.” (Premiers faits du roi Arthur, Bonn Ms., folio 216c.): [And when she left, she gave him a valuable gift, and said: “Dyonas, may the god of the Moon and the Stars grant that your first girl-child be so coveted by the wisest man in the world, who will start reigning during Vertigier’s time in the Blue Britain after my death, that he teach her the best part of his knowledge in black magic, in such a manner that he be completely her subject, up to the point where he would be unable to do anything against her will.”]; actually, the father seems to think this gift a rather mixed blessing. At least his father the devil confesses that his child’s soul is out of reach for the demons… A unique manuscript presenting an “alternate” version of the first years of King Arthur’s reign. Informed probably the same way as the bird-knight in Marie de France’s Yonec, who can come to his lady as soon as she has formulated her wish in her heart. As per the Vita Merlini, or the final scene of the Mort Artu, featuring a queen Morgue coming from Avalon to bring her dying brother there in order to heal him. Which is, strictly speaking, hardly a French romance, since it is the only remaining example of an “occitan” Arthurian romance. There are a few male “faes” in the romances; but, after the ambiguous twelfth-century period, where Tydorel’s father, in the eponymous Lai, is not quite made into a demon (see

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note 22), the thirteenth-century prose romances do not hesitate to assign to Hell their black knights riding out of a tomb at night to fight whoever happens to defy them. 39. Actually, Morgue shares these feelings, almost in the same words: “De l’autre part quant Morghe en oï conter la nouviele, ele en fu lie et courouchie. […] Et dolante et courouchie, pot 9011 ke s’ele eüst aucun besoins de lui ele en seroit hounie par defaute de lui.” (Berthelot, p. 98, fol. 133V.): [On the other hand, when Morgue heard the news, she was at the same time glad and sorry. […] And sorry and worried, because if she were to have need of Merlin, she would be ruined for want of him.] 40. Emphasis mine. My translation insists also on the “technical” character of the “merveille,” which is dealt with more precisely in the whole scene: the scientific description of the automatons would be too long to quote.

CHAPTER 4 Merlin in Italian Literature DONALD L.HOFFMAN

Out of an enigmatic murk of murder, madness, pigs, and apples, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini created two separate Merlins. The Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1200) and the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1400) preserve something of the tradition upon which he drew. The “Afallennau” (Apple Trees) and the “Hoianau” (Greetings, Little Pig) tell of Myrddin’s connections with his lord Rhydderch, his sister Gwenddydd and his responsibility for the death of her son, and his fifty years of wandering in the Forest of Celidon, an exile and a madman whose only companion is his little pet pig.1 Some of this material is reflected in Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini. Composed after the more famous Historia, this adapts the Welsh tradition of Merlin’s madness and his retreat, after the Battle of Arfderydd, to the forest, where he continues to prophesy.2 Although it contains the anecdotes of Merlin’s laughter and the prophecy of the triple death, the Vita’s Merlin never achieved the popularity of the Merlin introduced to the world in Geoffrey’s far more influential Historia Regum Britanniae, which includes the eccentric Prophetiae Merlini. While the son of the incubus and adviser to Arthur (Merlinus Ambrosius) has eclipsed the fame of the madman in the forest (Merlinus Silvestris), it is Merlin the prophet who unites both of these figures and links them with the Welsh tradition in which all but one of the surviving Myrddin poems “are prophecies and deal with the early history of the Welsh and their later struggles against the Normans and the English” (Jarman, 20). It is in this role as prophet that Merlin develops most dramatically in Italy, where an understandable lack of interest in the struggle for Cambrian liberation leads to Merlin’s naturalization as a prophet intimately embroiled in the politics of the court of Frederick II in Sicily and later with the Este dynasty in Ferrara. Although Merlin may have arrived in Italy as early as 1128,3 it is in 1191, the year Arthur’s tomb was discovered at Glastonbury, that he enters Italian literature in Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon, a universal history whose Arthurian material is drawn directly from Geoffrey’s Historia.4 Godfrey retells the story of the fatherless boy and Vortigern’s tower, and he ends with Merlin’s prophecy of the coming of Arthur. It is a curious coincidence that Godfrey, tutor to Henry VI (son of Barbarossa and father of Frederick II), should end his account with Merlin’s prophecy of a deathless king: “Nec perit omnino, maris observabitur imo, vivere perpetus poterit rex ordine primo: ista tibi referro, caetera claudo sinu” [and not perish utterly, but be preserved

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beneath the sea to live forever a king as before: these things I tell you, the rest I keep shut in my breast] (Gardner, 6–7). Whatever the caetera enclosed in his breast, Godfrey’s version of the exitus dubius could apply not only to Arthur, but to the rumors that would surround the death of Godfrey’s patron’s son, the Wonder of the World, Frederick II. But if Godfrey did not, in fact, prophesy the doubtful death of Frederick, he did not hesitate to celebrate his birth, hailing him as “the future Savior fore-told of prophets, the time-fulfilling Caesar,” while with no less extravagance his contemporary, Peter of Eboli, updated Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue to announce the birth of the miraculous child.5 Their prophecies were no doubt encouraged, if not actually commissioned, by Henry VI and his court, but the joy attending the birth of Frederick was considerably less than universal. It was widely rumored that the Empress Constance, whom most of us imagine benignly smiling with Piccarda from Dante’s lunar marguerite, was thought to have practiced monumental deceit upon her unsuspecting consort. Contemporary accounts add a decade or more to the age of the forty-year-old empress who produced an heir after nine years of a childless marriage; according to one report, she attempted to prove the legitimacy of her motherhood by publicly giving birth in an open tent in the marketplace of Iesi (Kantorowicz, 5). Nevertheless, doubts remained, and they were given wide circulation by the gossipy Franciscan, Salimbene de Adam, who believed Constance had substituted a butcher’s baby for the imperial infant. To justify his belief in the empress’s deceit, Salimbene cites three supporting arguments: the fact that Frederick’s father-in-law once called him the son of a butcher (“Fi de becer diabele!”); the fact that “trickery of this kind is common among women”; and because Merlin himself had spoken of “Secundus Fridericus insperati et mirabilis ortus” (the unexpected and miraculous birth of the second Frederick).6 The birth was so “unexpected and miraculous” that, according to the fourteenthcentury chronicler Andrea Dandolo, Henry VI was not convinced of his child’s legitimacy until he was persuaded by no less an authority than the prophesying Abbot Joachim,7 who assured him that Frederick was indeed his son by the empress and predicted a glorious future for him.8 Salimbene was convinced that the pseudoJoachimite Expositio Abbatis Joachimi super Sibillis et Merlino records the very words in which the prophet reassured the emperor. With this enigmatic Expositio, Merlin moves far from Godfrey of Viterbo’s mere incorporation of Geoffrey into a universal chronicle, and he is now thoroughly embroiled in the politics of thirteenth-century Italy. Although it is difficult to tell who started it, Merlin seems to have been called into service to support the legitimacy of Frederick’s birth and prepare for the triumph of the imperial party. The propaganda may have backfired, however; the apocalyptic praise of the miraculous boy turned into warnings against the coming of the Antichrist. Throughout his extraordinary life, Frederick was alternately seen as Savior, a view he did not discourage, and Antichrist, a view encouraged by the rumor that he was accustomed to turn churches into brothels and altars into privies (Van Cleve, 420), and given official support when Gregory IX, on the occasion of Frederick’s excommunication, wrote of him as a beast

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“out of the sea…filled with words of blasphemy,…formed with the feet of a bear, the mouth of an enraged lion and, in the rest of its body, shaped like a panther, [which] opens its mouth in blasphemy of the Divine Name” (quoted in Van Cleve, 431). When Frederick confounds the prophets by dying nearly two decades too soon, according to some interpretations of Joachimite schemata, Salimbene attempts (desperately) to reconcile the contradictions between prophesied and actual dates, and also recounts the rumors that the emperor had not, in fact, died, as prophesied by the Sybil who said, “Sonabit et in populis: ‘Vivit’ et ‘non vivit’” (And it was voiced among the people, “He lives” and “He does not live,” Salimbene, 347). Some believed that this once and future emperor slept beneath Mt. Etna.9 This miraculous dwelling is associated with Arthur, like Frederick another deathless king sleeping under Mongibello until the moment of his return. Although Salimbene’s belief in Joachim’s prophecies was severely damaged by Frederick’s early demise, he provides powerful testimony to the apocalyptic sentiment surrounding the emperor and the degree to which the English prophet Merlin became implicated in this development. While the pseudo-Joachimite Expositio seems to have been intended to quell the rumors of Frederick’s illegitimacy and the empress’s treachery, it set the stage for the explosion of prophecies for and against the emperor, such as the Dicta Merlini de primo Friderico et secundo (Salimbene, 521), which records the very prophecy explicated in the Expositio,10 as well as the prophecy De versibus Merlini, quos fecit quibusdam civitatibus Italie, ut sibi cavere possent (Salimbene, 254–56); if it is true, as Zumthor says, that l’inspiration en est gibeline” (Zumthor, 97), its inclusion in Salimbene’s anti-Ghibelline chronicle reflects his faith in the sanctity of recorded prophecy of whatever partisan stripe; but his chronicle also shows how quickly the Ghibelline initiative was co-opted and subverted by the parte guelfa. In addition to Salimbene and the prophets, several lyricists (Rustico di Filippo, Ruggieri Apuliese, and Leonardo del Guallacca) attest to the arrival of the Vulgate Merlin in thirteenth-century Italy (Gardner, 29, 36–37). In Leonardo’s poem, Merlin is paired with Samson as an example of the wise man “per femina treccera” (betrayed by a woman).11 This is the earliest Italian reference to Merlin’s betrayal by the sorceress Vivian, and it is echoed in the contemporary L’lntelligenza (stanza 76). Dante’s “tutor,” Brunetto Latini, also refers to this betrayal when he links Merlin with King David, Solomon, Samson, and Aristotle, remarking that “Merlins furent deceu par feme, selonc ce que les ystoires nos racontent” (Merlin was betrayed by a woman, as the histories tell us).12 From this point the Vulgate eclipses Geoffrey of Monmouth as the favored source of Merlin’s biography in Italy. But, if Merlin the betrayed lover is a new arrival in thirteenth-century Italy, Merlin the political prophet maintains his popularity. In a tenzon of 1274, in which Chiaro Davanzati, Monte Andrea, and other Florentines participate, Merlin is the authority for hailing the arrival of Rudolph of Hapsburg in Italy to defend the land from the ravages of Charles of Anjou (Monaci, 263–71). Brunetto Latini, in addition to his knowledge of Merlin the lover, acknowledges the authority of Merlin the prophet, sharing with Salimbene the belief that Merlin had prophesied the end of the empire

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with Frederick II. Thus, these poets continue the tradition of Merlin’s imperial prophecies, as well as naturalizing tales from the Vulgate tradition. The most idiosyncratic, yet influential, thirteenth-century Italian contribution to the Merlin tradition is, however, the extraordinary Les Prophécies de Merlin (c. 1274– 79), which claims to be a translation from Latin into French undertaken by a certain Master Richard of Ireland at the request of Frederick II.13 Thus, like Godfrey’s translation of Geoffrey and the prophecies cited by Salimbene, a Frederician authority is established for a Merlinian text, an authority that maintains its force even within a context that is distinctly critical of imperial policies. Moreover as Paton has shown, the frequent references to the bons mariniers (good sailors), and to localities in northeastern Italy and the Veneto in particular, are convincing evidence of a Venetian rather than Sicilian provenance. Condemned by Langlois as “une detestable loghorrhée d’homme sans culture littéraire ni autre, qui s’adresse a des illettrés” (a detestable logorrhea of a man without culture, literary or otherwise, who addresses himself to the illiterate),14 the text does, nevertheless, contribute to the development of the Merlin tradition in Italy, and it introduces remarkable innovations in narrative structure in its peculiar mode of progression via interrogative anecdote. Whether its peculiar structure is identified as innovation or incompetence, the first problem posed by Les Prophécies is the need to determine what it in fact is. As J.D.Bruce recognized, Les Prophécies, “although usually referred to as a romance, is entitled only in part to that designation”.15 Those “parts” are the episodes involving Alisandre P Orfelin, the Tournament at Sorelois, Palamede, Dinadan, and Segurant le Brun, among others. But despite the romance subject matter, the method is erratic, with plots arbitrarily introduced, abandoned, and interrupted by diverse and random elements. As prophecy, Les Prophécies is equally anomalous. The text is clearly aware of the prophetic tradition from the Old Testament to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and of the particular impetus to prophecy in thirteenth-century Italy provided by the notoriety of Joachim of Fiore. As in Salimbene, Merlin adopts the enigmatic language of prophecy to lament and correct contemporary abuses. Like Moses in the Hebrew tradition and Gildas in the British, he not only prophesies plagues and famines, but anatomizes the abuses that call down the wrath of God in the form of these punishing natural disasters. But if Merlin’s political dicta make Les Prophécies a peculiar romance, the inclusion of romance material makes it a peculiar apocalypse. How can one take seriously a prophet who predicts the fate of literary heroes? What mystery is involved in predicting the episodes of a novel that has already been written? Does not the indiscriminate mixture of the loves of Merlin and the wars of Ezzelino, the felon seigneur (evil lord) who dominated Padua from 1237 to 1256 (Paton, II, 115), adulterate the authority of prophecy with the artifice of romance? Les Prophécies seems to be an intentional mix of antithetical genres, destined to destroy each other as thoroughly as antimatter annihilates matter, while the text propels itself onward, more by accident than design, by a process of accretion, accumulation, invention, and

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plagiarism, subject only to a refusal of closure or completion, ignoring, if not rejecting, any principle of unity or coherence. A simple survey of an arbitrary sequence, chapters 3 to 18, gives a rough idea of the text’s erratic plenitude. Chapter 3 treats of la damoiselle de Galles to whom Merlin reveals that her son will become the king of Bellistans (Paton, I, 60); the next chapter foretells “la grant mortalite qui sera parmi le monde” (the great mortality that will befall the world) in 1163, and a remarkable alignment of the sun, the moon, and the stars that will occur in 1202. When Master Antoine, the inevitable interlocutor, asks, “est donc cest chose establie des le commencement du monde?” (Has this thing then been established since the beginning of the world?), Merlin provides the crucial determinist reply upon which the validity of prophecy depends: “Vraiment le saches tu…et le met en ton escrit que toutes les choses celestiaus furent establies et fetes des le commencement du monde” (Truly, you know it…and set it down in your writing that all celestial things were established and completed before the beginning of the world, Paton, I, 61). The next chapter proclaims the advent of “ung mauvais dragon qui sortira de Viterbe” (an evil dragon that will come out from Viterbo), apparently a younger relative of the apocalyptic Great Dragon of Babylon, who features almost as prominently as Merlin himself in the prophecies, and whose advent is preached by the dragonet in the following chapter. The next chapters detail the afflictions of the Dolorous March, which Paton has identified as a commentary on contemporary events in the March of Treviso under the rule of the corrupt and brutal Ezzelino. He transformed the marche amoureuse (the loving March) into the marche dolereuse (the sorrowful March, see Paton, II, ch. 4). The next few chapters prophesy war and famine, the fate of Orbance, the fires that accompanied Lucifer’s fall, and a chapter that responds to Master Antoine’s desire to know “Quelle chose est Paradis et quelle chose est Enter” (What Paradise is and what Hell is). The sequence concludes with the episode “De Merlin qui commenca a plourer” (Concerning Merlin who began to cry). This reasonably typical sequence mixes unverifiable apocalyptic prophecies with denunciations of contemporary policies that are prophetic only because they are supposed to have been predicted and condemned six or seven hundred years before they occurred. The chapter on the Nature of Heaven and Hell illustrates the kind of simple religious and/or moral lesson scattered throughout the text. The story of Merlin’s weeping is the earliest account of Merlin’s prophetic tears. In this tale, Master Antoine comes upon the sobbing Merlin. When he asks the reason for his sorrow, Merlin tells him that he was overcome with sadness for the destruction of the beautiful palace in India designed by St. Thomas, a palace he has seen only in his mystic vision and whose destruction will occur as Merlin has foreseen. Surely romance is not the appropriate genre description for this melange of political analysis, apocalyptic prophecy, Arthurian narrative, and religious instruction? Perhaps the ultimate model for this peculiar bundle of modes may be the random compilation of the Sibylline leaves, but a more immediate model may be the ordinary manuscript anthology. For example, Manuscript 593 of the Bibliothèque Municipale of Rennes, which includes the text of the Prophécies edited by Lucy Paton,

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also contains treatises on astronomy, miracles of the Virgin, prophecies of the Sybil, and philosophical works, notably Brunetto Latini’s Le livre dou tresor and Jean de Meun’s translation of Boethius (Paton, I, 4). Although this selection may reflect the individual tastes of Robin Boutemont, the scribe who signed and dated (1303) his work (Paton, I, 4), it also reflects the range of material in the Prophecies, which adds narrative to prediction in the fragmented stories of Perceval, Merlin, Tristan, Segurant le Brun, and others. There are even passages of “practical” value, especially the remarkable Chapter 119, “Du cours de la lune” (On the Course of the Moon). Here, for example, we learn that on the second day of the moon “Nostres Sires fist Eve, et si fu fete de la coste Adam. Saches que celuijour est bone parler devant juge et pour acheter et pour vendre, ou quel li enfes nest et vit par aage, il sera fort de ses membres, et se il [naistra] aucune demoiselle, elle sera pute. Mes grant merveille sera se elle vit jusques a .vii. ans” (Our Lord created Eve, and she was made from the rib of Adam. Know that this day is good for speaking before a judge and for buying and selling, and that a boy who is born and lives to maturity will be strong in his limbs; and if any girl is born, she will be a whore. But it would be a great miracle if she lived to be seven years of age, Paton, I,160). The value of this information is attested to by the fact that the owner of one manuscript (B.L. Add 25434) of Les Prophecies liberally marked this chapter with asterisks for easy consultation. Apart from its oddities, Les Prophecies, for the first time in a text of Italian provenance, provides a narrative context for the story already alluded to by Leonardo del Guallacca and Brunetto Latini: Merlin’s betrayal by the Lady of the Lake. In Chapter 122, we discover the essence of this unfortunate relationship: “Se Merlin amoit la Dame du Lac de tout son cuer, la Dame le haoit autretant ou plus” (If Merlin loved the Lady of the Lake with all his heart, the Lady hated him as much or more, Paton, I, 164). In the Forest of Aurences, they come to the place “dont la Dame l’avoit tant prie” (that the lady had so strongly begged him for, Paton, I, 164). Tricked by the Lady and locked in the tomb, he promises her that, although his flesh will rot away within the month, his spirit will continue to speak (Paton, I, 170). He proves true to his word, for a month later the Lady of the Lake asks Merlin, “se sa char estoit porrie, et il li dit oil” (whether his flesh has rotted yet, and he said, “Yes,” Paton, I, 172). There is perhaps no text, with the possible exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini, which attempts so assiduously to validate the authority of Merlin as prophet, teacher, and Christian. The last is of particular concern, both because Geoffrey established Merlin as the son of a demon, and because the Prophécies is concerned to make Merlin as authentic a critic of the Church as he is of the State. Although Merlin is, to the despair of most critics, little more than a disembodied voice responding to the questions of Master Antoine and subsequent interlocutors and scribes, his susceptibility to the wiles of the Lady of the Lake is all the more devastating. Anomalous as the text may be, it remains the most original and influential Italian contribution to the development of the Merlin tradition. Contemporary with Les Prophecies, Merlin makes brief appearances in the Meliadus (Gardner, 51) and the Tristano Riccardiano,16 where he resumes his more traditional role: in the Tristano Riccardiano, he prophesies the encounter between Lancelot and Tristan

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at the perron, probably the most oft-told tale in the Italian popular tradition.17 There are, however, tales that continue to develop the didactic Merlin of Les Prophécies. In Il Novellino, he rebukes a woman for purchasing a dress from the profits of usury,18 an anecdote derived from chapter 238 of Les Prophecies. In the Sette Savi di Roma (Seven Sages of Rome), Geoffrey’s tale of the prophetic child is imaginatively transformed into the story of a blind emperor prevented by magic from leaving the confines of his city. The ruler’s misfortune is caused, in this case, not by a dragon under the tower, but by a bubbling cauldron under the bed. On the advice of the boy Merlin, the seven sages are beheaded one by one, and, as each head falls, a bubble subsides. With the seventh decapitation, the cauldron no longer boils, and the emperor is free to leave the city.19 A very brief allusion in “Il Mare Amoroso” refers to Merlin’s gift of a boat to the Lady of Avalon,20 a tale that may be derived from Les Prophecies, chapter 263. In the fourteenth century, the Italian Merlin is at last fully clothed in the Italian language. Paulino Pieri’s Storia di Merlino (c. 1324) abridges (and somewhat clarifies) the earlier text of Les Prophecies, while the Vita di Merlino con le sue prophetie, the first Arthurian text to be printed in Italy (Gardner, 191), finally brings together the dialogue structure of Les Prophecies with episodes from the biography of Merlin invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth (the stories of the triple death and Merlin’s laughter) and elaborated by Robert de Boron, particularly the details of Merlin’s birth as a demonic plot to foil Christian redemption and his success in asserting both his virtue and his orthodoxy. Contemporary poets Fazio degli Uberti and Giovanni Boccaccio provide passing references to Merlin along with Uther, Arthur, and the Round Table, which show basic familiarity with the content of Geoffrey’s Historia; the popular cantare know Merlin, but, apart from the appeal of the encounter at the perron, they have little interest in his biography or his prophecies.21 Toward the end of the fifteenth century, however, Merlin reclaims his privileged, if minor, position in Italian literature. In the brilliant explosion of invention supported by the House of Este in Ferrara, the prophet once again becomes significantly involved in dynastic politics in the chivalric epics of Boiardo and Ariosto. Boiardo’s first mention of Merlin is in the context of the famous and familiar combat at the Petron di Merlino,22 but his most original contribution to the Merlin tradition is the invention of the fountain of disamore (unlove), designed by the prophet to cancel the effects of the potion that induced Tristan’s destructive love for Isotta. The fact that Tristan never manages to reach the fountain reveals the fallibility of prophets and the (apparent) indeterminacy of romance, an arbitrariness intensified when the wrong knight, Ranaldo, drinks from the fountain and falls out of love with the inevitable Angelica (Boiardo, 2.15.59), who will have her own turn at the fountain (Boiardo, 3.20.44). Boiardo’s contribution to the history of Merlin, delightful but slight, pales in comparison to the use to which he is put by Ariosto, whose relentless invention and productive fusion of the Matter of Britain with the Matter of France effects a new creation, the Matter of Italy, centered on the legendary history of the House of Este. Ariosto reconciles the prophetic Merlin and the romance Merlin. Mingling fantasy and learning, he fuses the story of Merlin’s entrapment by the Lady of the Lake with

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Aeneas’ descent into Hell. Bradamante, tricked by the devious Pinabello, falls from a tree into a cave, and finds “herself in a sacred and holy place.” There she is startled by the sight of a woman, “ungirded and barefoot,” whose “hair fell loose about her shoulders”,23 and who reveals to her the history of the house of Este, of which she will be the Great Mother. From “the tomb which held the bones and the spirit of Merlin” (Waldman, 22 [3.14]) since his entrapment by the Lady of the Lake, the “voice of the spirit which haunted those mortal spoils” (Waldman, 22 [3.16]) speaks to her of the glory of other male descendants; later, the sorceress Melissa will reveal to her the illustrious women of the House of Este (Waldman, 134ff. [13.58ff.]), particularly praising the “beauty, merit, fortune, and good repute” of Lucrezia Borgia (Waldman, 135 [13.69]). In canto 24, Ariosto reinvests Merlin with some of the vatic power with which he was endowed in the age of Frederick II, as he once again prophesies the advent of an apocalyptic beast, who “brings distress to many parts of the world, [who]…from his advent to our own day…has kept growing, and…shall continue to grow until he shall eventually be the greatest monster that ever lived, and the most dreadful” (Waldman, 312 [24.42]). In canto 33, Ariosto praises, above the achievements of Leonardo the artist who can paint the future, a feat accomplished by demons summoned by Merlin. These decorate a hall with frescoes illustrating the wars (successful or not) which the French were to fight beyond the Alps from his day for the next thousand years…. The king had every future action of the French divulged just as if it had already happened,/ to impress upon his successors that by taking up the defense of Italy against all foreign aggression they could win victory and honour, whereas whoever descended upon Italy to injure her, to place the yoke upon her and tyrannize her, was to be under no illusion but that beyond the mountains he would find his grave yawning. (Waldman, 397 [33.7–12]) In these extraordinary Ariostan inventions, Merlin speaks with the authority of prophecy, the glamour of romance, and the spirit of nationalism, but he speaks authentically for the last time in Italian literature. He is barely a name in the sixteenthcentury prose romances, L’opere magnanime dei due Tristani cavalieri della Tavola Ritonda (1555) and La dilettevole historia, del valorosissimo Parsaforesto Re della gran Brettagna, con i gran fatti del valente Gadiffero Re di Scotia, ver essempio de Cavalleria (1556–58). In Alamanni’s Avarchide, an eccentric conflation of the Trojan war and Arthurian romance, the Lady of the Lake takes on the character of the sea-nymph Thetis, guarding her foster-son Lancelot-Achilles, and presenting him with armor she receives from Merlin at his tomb and upon which is engraved the history of the kings of France. The greater poet, Torquato Tasso, recalls Merlin’s perron in his Rinaldo, when Rinaldo and Isoliero reach the perron, now decorated with memorial statues of Tristan and Lancelot. In the heroic poem of Giulio Strozzi, Venetia edificata (1624), Merlin returns to be implicated in the Venetian history he first entered as a thirteenthcentury prophet, but now as a precursor of Galileo, inventing the telescope and preserving its secrets for a later age.

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Merlin remains silent for nearly three centuries until he is revived for a brief appearance by the incredibly minor playwright, Domenico Tumiati, whose Merlino e Viviana tells the story of devotion and suffocation in a tremulous drama imitating the fin de siècle excesses of Gabriele d’Annunzio. In conclusion, Merlin cannot compete with the Italian popularity of Tristano, the hero of several romances and the ubiquitous perron. But as that famous episode reminds us, the prophet and the hero are indissolubly linked in Italian romance’s Castles of Crossed Destinies. As Italy’s Tristan strives towards a transcendent eroticism, Italy’s Merlin achieves his greatest effect in intricate immanence, in imperial politics, and ducal dynasties. It is a long journey from the Forest of Celidon to the palaces of Ferrara, but by the time the madman of the Battle of Arfderydd has become the voice of Italian liberty in Orlando Furioso, Merlin is no longer a tourist in Italy. He has become a citizen. Notes Parts of this article were first published as “Merlin in Italy,” in Philological Quarterly 70. 1 (Summer 1991), pp. 261–75. It has been substantially revised. 1. A.O.H.Jarman, “The Welsh Myrddin Poems,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 20–22. 2. It is generally agreed that Geoffrey changed Myrddin to Merlin in order to avoid the appearance of an obscene French pun on merde. 3. This early historical reference to a quondam Merlinus has been interpreted by Pio Rajna as merely the dimunutive of Merlo and not an early indication of the prophet’s presence in Italian culture: see Il Cantari di Carduino giuntovi quello di Tristano e Lanciolotto quando combattettero al Petrone de Merlino, ed. Pio Rajna (Bologna, 1873). 4. Edmund G.Gardner, The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature (New York: Dutton, 1930), pp. 6–7; Lucienne Meyer, Les légendes des Matières de Rome, de France et de Bretagne dans le “Pantheon” de Godefroi de Viterbe (Paris: E. de Beccard, 1933), p. 222 5. Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second: 1194–1250, trans. E.O.Lorimer (1931; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), p. 3. 6. Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, 2 vols., ed. Ferdinando Bernini (Bari: G.Laterza et figli, 1942), p. 57; The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, trans. Joseph L.Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi, and John Robert Kane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 40 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), p. 17. 7. Thomas Curtis Van Cleve, The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: Immutator Mundi (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 13–14. 8. Andrea Dandolo, Andreae Danduli ducis Venetiarum Chronica per extensum descripta, aa. 46–1280 cc., ed. Ester Pastorello, in Rerum Italicorum Scriptores: Raccolta degli Storia Italiani dal cinquecento al millecinque cento, ed. L.A.Muratori (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938–42), Vol. 12, p. 274. 9. A legend first recorded in Thomae de Eccleston Libro de Adventu Minorum in Angliam (in MGH, SS. xxviii, 568) cited in Van Cleve, p. 529. 10. Paul Zumthor, Merlin, le prophéte (Genève: Slatkin, 1973), p. 100. 11. Ernesto Monaci, Crestomatia Italiana dei Primi Secoli (Citté di Castello: S. Lapi, 1912), p. 199.

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12. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. P. Chabaille (Paris, 1863), Vol. 2, p. 106. 13. Les Prophécies de Merlin, ed. Lucy Allen Paton, 2 vols. (New York: Heath, 1926–27), Vol. l, p. 57. 14. Connaissance de la Nature (Paris, 1927), p. 214. Quoted in Cedric E.Pickford, “Miscellaneous French Prose Romances,” in Loomis, p. 354. 15. James Douglas Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1928: rpt. Gloucester, Mass: Smith, 1958), Vol. 2, pp. 28–29. 16. Tristano Riccardiano, ed. E.G. Parodi, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1896); “Dal Tristano Riccardiano” in Prose di Romanzi, ed. Felice Arese (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1950). 17. See, especially, the fourteenth-century cantare, Lancilotto e Tristano quando combattet-tero al Petrone di Merlino, which is devoted to this episode, in Il Cantari di Carduino giuntovi quello di Tristano e Lanciolotto quando combattettero al Petrone de Merlino, ed. Pio Rajna (Bologna, 1873). 18. Il Novellino, ed. Guido Favati (Genoa: Rozzi, 1970), #25; Prosatore del Duecento: Trattati Morali e Allegorici Novelle, ed. Cesare Segre (1959; rpt. Turin: Einaudi, 1976), #26. 19. Il Libro dei Sette Savi di Roma, ed. Antonio Cappelli (Bologna, 1895), pp. 21–24. 20. “Il Mare Amoroso,” in Poeti del Duecento: Poesia Cortese Toscana e Settentrionale, ed. Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols. (1960; rpt. Turin: Einaudi, 1976), II, 213–15. The reference is to the gift that Merlin gave to the valiant lady of Avalon (“quella che dono Merlino a la valente donna d’Avalona”). 21. The Carduino and the Cantare dei Cantari do little more than mention Merlin’s name. The famous Lancilotto e Tristano quando combattettero al Petrone di Merlino celebrates a site associated with Merlin and his prophecies, but Merlin does not appear in the tale. See Rajna. 22. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, ed. and trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 36–37. “…those who want/To find him, come beyond the town/Where what’s called Merlin’s Stone stands in/The green field by the Pine Tree Fountain” (“Fuor de la terra lo venga a trovare,/Nel verde prato alla Fonte del Pino,/ Dove se dice al Petron de Merlino,” 1.1.27). 23. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 21 (3.7).

CHAPTER 5 Merlin in Spanish Literature BARBARA D.MILLER

Representations of the enchanter figure differ notably among Hispanic texts. For instance, Merlin’s characterization in the Spanish medieval prose romance, El baladro del sabio Merlín (Burgos, 1498; Seville, 1535), contrasts sharply with his persona as set forth in Benjamin Jarnés’s modern experimental novel, Viviana y Merlín (1936). Although variation between such chronologically and generically disparate works may be inevitable, the Baladro protagonist nevertheless functions as the prototype for most ensuing Spanish versions, or as their comparative foil. In this sense, the Baladro prophet determines the majority of Spanish Merlins. Following a brief survey of early Iberian Arthuriana, this essay will describe a key Hispanic Merlin who may be viewed as a precursor to his Baladro incarnation. The subsequent section will detail the unique text and personality of “El sabio Merlín,” and will provide a point of departure for discussions of Golden-Age and twentiethcentury renderings. Early Transmission and Influence of Arthurian Literature and the Enchanter Figure on the Iberian Peninsula Ibero-Arthurian literature and events have been traced as far back as 1170.1 In William J. Entwistle’s enduring monograph, Arthurian Legend in the Literatures of the Spanish Peninsula (1925), the author cites the amusing fact that the fourteenth-century King Juan I of Aragón named one of his hounds after the sorcerer. David Hook’s onomastic studies, supplemented by Harvey L. Sharrer’s research, reveal the possibility that “Merlin” and other Arthurian names may have been borne by human peninsular inhabitants even prior to the publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1138).2 The earliest occurrence of Arthurian literature and lore on the Peninsula has been found primarily in two regional pockets roughly corresponding to northwestern Galicia and northeastern Catalonia. Scholarly debate on transmission and origination of properly Arthurian and related Celtic tales has centered upon the issues of religious pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, Catalonian ties to the Provençal troubadour phenomenon, and the Celtic heritage of the adjacent Galician and Portuguese lands.

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Possibly as early as the second half of the thirteenth century, Hispanic scholars undertook the translation of French romances such as those of the Vulgate and PostVulgate cycles. One of three headings under which María Rosa Lida de Malkiel categorizes surviving interpretations is that of “Merlin and the Holy Grail” (408). She groups the Burgos incunable and the Seville imprint of the Baladro, together with the Estoria de Merlín, as the three forms in which Portuguese friar Joannes Bivas’s redaction of the Post-Vulgate Merlin and the Suite du Merlin come down to us. A latefifteenth-century copy of Bivas’s 1313 translation3 includes portions of all three PostVulgate branches (that is, of the Estoire, the Suite, and the Queste). The Estoria, Lida de Malkiel tells us, is found within the same manuscript as a Josep Abarimatía. This Merlin text has become well known among Hispanists through the 1924–25 linguistic studies of Karl Pietsch, whose emphasis on the Leonese strain is regarded by some scholars as exaggerated.4 Intriguing among Hispanic Post-Vulgate texts is the lost forerunner of the 1498 Baladro. Empirical proof of at least one such document rests in the fragments of an early-fourteenth-century, Galician-Portuguese Post-Vulgate translation, discovered during the late 1970s. This evidence of an intermediary version occurring between Bivas’s work and the Burgos incunable strongly justifies attention to textual descent. As articulated by Sharrer, significant contrast among the connected reworkings “reflects a tendency by later adapters of Arthurian romance to modify the original with material from other sources.”5 Moreover, the possible existence of additional such texts, which may have been lost, naturally multiplies the potential for the kind of variation addressed by Sharrer, and readers should not lose sight of the effects that this could create in any given work, especially as it may influence the portrayal of Merlin. Arthurian literature’s Iberian popularity and dissemination, as well as its influence on Hispanic social custom, can be connected to Peninsular identity. For example, the prestige of chivalric honor proved obsessive for the fifteenth-century Castilian knight, Suero de Quiñones, whose quixotic defense of the bridge at Orbigo has become a favorite legend associated with the Santiago pilgrimage.6 Yet some scholars have argued that the comparative unpopularity of Arthurian romance in the region of Castile may reflect the rugged quality of the land and the corresponding vigor of the people, resulting in an unromantic inclination to favor the logocentric epic form. This paradox must be relevant to Merlin as he appears in Peninsular guise, since he has emerged in Arthurian literature overall as a stronger dynastic authority when promoting the martial and questing endeavors of knights, than when involved in more erotically charged adventures.7 The devilish Merlin of the Vulgate Lancelot, for instance, stands apart for his failure to be baptized. This factor particularly marks his personality as it relates to sexual behavior.8 In medieval accounts, Merlin’s tendency toward Christian virtue usually prevails within his warring personality because of his mother’s devout gesture in having him christened immediately at birth. However, the wizard is ever the son of an incubus, and so his demonized predisposition has its sway in practically every text.

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Amadís de Gaula, one of Don Quixote’s best-known books of chivalry (the title character serves among his cardinal models), represents a significant generic development. In the wake of translated medieval French material, such works as the Amadís imitate, rather than retell, strictly Arthurian tales. Nevertheless, Luis Murillo deems this indigenous romance “the major contribution in Spanish to Arthurian literature,” and notes the involvement in both books of the anonymous primitive Amadís (c. 1340) of “adapted Arthurian motifs and characters from French sources.”9 Neither the primitive Amadís nor the elaborated text of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo (1508) occurs until well past the high flowering of French romance associated with the likes of Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and their continuators.10 As might be expected, Merlin as such does not appear in the Hispanic work. Some interesting sorcerers do turn up, however, taking the opposing forms of the prophetess “Urganda la desconocida” (the Unknown), a Morgan le Fay analogue, and the evil male variant, “Arcalaus el en-cantador.” Edward Dudley has described the two Amadís enchanters as seeming “to divide between them the positive and negative forces of fate and chance.”11 By contrast, as discussed in the following section, a completely unambiguous Merlin arises within the medieval Spanish canon. Merlin and the Court of Alfonso the Wise Like the fictional protagonist of the Baladro, the historical figure, King Alfonso X of Castile, is known by the telling sobriquet of “The Wise.” The king merits his famous honorific by dint of his own remarkable learning, and by his extraordinary gathering of Moslem, Christian, and Jewish scholars engaged in virtually every field of endeavor. Alfonso’s knowledge of the Arthurian legends may be attributed, in part, to his family connections, since his great-grandmother, Queen Leonor (daughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine), is said to have carried Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia to Spain as an item in her dowry. Alfonso’s sister, another Leonor, became the English Edward I’s Queen Eleanor, and as such witnessed the excavation of the alleged remains of Arthur and Guenevere at Glastonbury. A few Arthurian figures occur among the folios of the best-known Alfonsine literary work, the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Canticles of Holy Mary, 1281). The historical value of this gathering of miracle tales comes down to us largely through its exquisite illuminations. In depicting the song contents, the images have preserved information on many facets of thirteenth-century life.12 And the collection’s musical worth extends beyond the ancient Iberian melodies to reveal an impressive variety of tone, tempo, and tricultural impact.13 Thus the work presents us with a true “cultural mirror,” bringing to light a time and place both like and very unlike our own. Although we know that the vast compendium of the Cantigas results from a remarkable collaboration of artists and artisans, the work is normally ascribed to the king. It is certain that Alfonso did compile many of the tales, and he even authored some of the canticles including those designated as “loores” (lauds). Of course the king’s direct involvement enhances the prestige and interest accorded the

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compilation, as does the element of his appearance in a few of the stories, as hero, worshipper, or beneficiary of the Holy Virgin.14 Of the poems involving Arthurian themes and figures, Sharrer has singled out Cantiga 135, in which Brutus and Arthur are said to populate Britain and Dover, respectively.15 Cantiga 108, of which Merlin is the protagonist, has been studied as one of those songs projecting unfortunate Jewish stereotypes, which seem to indicate curiously xenophobic tendencies within Alfonso’s celebrated convivencia. The poem features Arthur’s sage prevailing through Christian faith over the intellectually driven theology of Cayphas, a learned Jewish doctor of law. As in the majority of the Cantigas narratives, the hero achieves his triumph through devotion to the Virgin Mother. During a debate in which Cayphas remonstrates against the dogma of the Incarnation, the wizard leaves off trying to convince his adversary, and falls to his knees in supplication before Christendom’s sovereign lady. Merlin’s prayer, that the Jew’s child be born with its face on the wrong side of its head, certainly qualifies as one of the collection’s most jarring elements for modern readers. However, when this situation is read metaphorically, its artistic intricacy comes to the fore. When the Virgin grants Merlin’s objective, Cayphas tries to seize the child, meaning to kill it rather than see his own offspring so disfigured. In a move reminiscent of Merlin’s role in the nativity of Arthur, the mage spirits away the child and takes it to raise as a foster son. In a sense, when Merlin then displays the boy all around the countryside, he transforms the affliction. According to a Christian reading, he has saved Cayphas’s son—in body by keeping his father from him, and in soul by putting him to the good Christian use of warning the heretical unconverted. Although modern readers are likely to find the image of the deformed child freakish, the leitmotif of turning one’s face to a new direction—found in Merlin’s reaction to Cayphas, and also in the little boy’s physically inverted viewpoint—signifies the paramount Spanish Christian value of conversion from Judaism (and from Islam).16 The story’s repeated action of turning around, furthermore, relates to the question of prophecy. Merlin’s capacity as seer defines him more than any other in Spanish literature, and it has proven similarly fundamental to all those depictions substantially influenced by Robert de Boron.17 The Jewish perspective represented by Cayphas and his son is backward-looking in that it derives from the Old Law. From the New Testament stance, that viewpoint becomes obsolete and otherwise inferior. An understanding of this didactic theme may clarify the otherwise puzzling fact that tradition (particularly as expressed in Robert’s version) treats Merlin’s prophetic gift as the divine token of his salvation, whereas his knowledge of the past is styled a demonic paternal legacy. Such an attitude toward Merlin’s powers may seem odd, since knowledge of the past can be discovered through apparently innocuous natural means. Moreover, it would be rare for the Church to favor any kind of supernatural activity, except perhaps in a saint or in Christ himself. However, the demonization of Merlin’s wisdom of the past, together with the Church’s exaltation of his prophetic gift, becomes logical when the Christian motif of turning and moving forward as a symbol of spiritual progress is considered. Merlin’s foreknowledge can thus serve ecclesiastical ends as a sign of the New Covenant, given by God expressly to transform

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the Old. This is precisely what happens as the prophetic ability is set apart and elevated over Merlin’s other magical powers in Robert’s Merlin. It should be added that this dedication of future vision to the glory of the Christian religion becomes even more intense in the late-fifteenth-century Baladro text. The enchanter’s unexpected role in the Cantigas—an early literary paradigm that is not part of the Arthurian tradition—as evangelist and instrument of conversion placed Merlin in a favorable position two hundred years later when the Inquisition was operating in full force.18 The promotion of political centralization and religious homogeneity largely motivated the Inquisition to focus on the Jewish question, over and above alternate forms of heresy. King Alfonso’s anti-Jewish proselytizing Merlin, then, emerges as an emblem of Christian righteousness that anticipates his role as the prophet of orthodoxy in the age of the “Catholic” Monarchs. The Baladro and Its Merlín The predominant antecedent of the late-fifteenth-century romance refundición (reworking), El baladro del sabio Merlín (The Shriek of the Sage Merlin), is the French Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. This fact has led scholars as influential as Post-Vulgate expert Fanni Bogdanow to underestimate the Spanish work, viewing it as little more than a translation whose nearly exclusive value would be its preservation of otherwise lost material from that French source. While such preservation is undeniably valuable, several of the work’s attributes are comparably far-reaching, both critically and philologically. In her 1998 guide to reading the Baladro,19 Paloma Gracia underscores the work’s multifaceted and ultimately unique significance. En consonancia plena con la evolución de la materia artúrica, el Baladro se muestra respetuoso con la tradición heredada a la par que proclive a una novedad que se manifiesta en la supresión, alteración y adición de pasajes, unas veces anecdótica, pero que en otras supone una transformación profunda del original (7) (Italics for emphasis, and following translation, mine) [In full consonance with the evolution of the Arthurian material, the Baladro proves respectful of its inherited tradition to the extent that it inclines toward a novelty that manifests as suppression, alteration and addition of passages, in some instances anecdotal, but which in others supposes a profound transformation of the original] Gracia reinforces her argument by reminding the reader that the French Post-Vulgate also recapitulates a massive proportion of Vulgate material, yet the later cycle is not normally treated as inferior owing to the repetition per se.20 Furthermore, despite the fundamental link between the French and Hispanic PostVulgate branches, the Suite by no means constitutes the Baladro’s only source.21 To the contrary, its textual genealogy is complex. Gracia underscores the basically shared descent of all texts rooted in the French cycles. Given this factor, any argument for French (or other) Arthurian textual “purity” by definition misses the mark. Each

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rendition has its own configurations of previous materials, from mythology and folklore to any preceding Arthurian literature. Considerations essential to the Baladro include thematic and structural relationships among branches of the romance trilogy of Robert de Boron, outcomes of the famous “double-esprit” of the immense Vulgate, and the portentous tone of the Post-Vulgate. Although the elaboration of such issues is available elsewhere and lies beyond the purview of this essay, the related questions of cyclical unity, and of whether the Post-Vulgate represents qualitative evolution or degeneration compared to the Vulgate, should be emphasized as keys to both French and Hispanic textual derivation. Among the most important findings of late-twentieth-century Hispanists are the manuscript evidence uncovered by Amadeu-J. Soberanas that confirms Lida de Malkiel’s theory of a pre-Burgos primitive Baladro text (c. 1467–97), and extensive scholarship on Hispanic components apart from the French sources, completed by Sharrer. The latter efforts trace appendices and modifications exemplified by the work of redactor, Juan de Burgos,22 whom Sharrer aptly compares to the famous Malory remanieur, William Caxton. Even laying aside for the moment the distinctions of the interpolated Estoria de dos amadores, the original woodcuts, and the defining tale of the shriek with its connected Baudemagus episodes, Sharrer enumerates fully four constituents that set apart the 1498 Baladro from its French forerunners. They are the textual amplifications and suppressions later to be noted by Gracia (including the three full-fledged appendages of the “nota preliminar,” the prologue, and the epilogue), borrowed rhetoric from the Hispanic genre of the “novela sentimental” prophetic material taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini (c. 1130– 1135), and the introduction of Alonso de Córdoba poetry at the close of the crucial Hispanic intercalation. Such a list, in and of itself, makes a case for treating the Spanish romance as a work in its own right. Moreover, Sharrer demonstrates that Hispanic Arthurian texts typically “survive in late copies and frequently reveal significant alterations to the original content and tenor of their source, reflecting changes in literary, social and political interests on the part of the author and the audience.”23 It is important to note the continuing development of the Spanish romance: for instance, as it is represented by an entire book of prophecies, unrelated to Geoffrey of Monmouth, encoding a glorification of the Spanish Trastámara dynasty, and occurring within a single binding between the 1535 Baladro and its companion Demanda (Queste). Essential to the Baladro’s Hispanic character, the interpolated Estoria de dos amadores exemplifies a close affiliation with oriental didactic tales, which is typical of much early Peninsular literature. Lida de Malkiel and Sharrer have indicated the Estoria’s probable derivation from a tale of the first kalenda of the Thousand and One Nights.24 Of particular interest is the incorporation of the same basic story within two novelas sentimentales: Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’s Siervo libre de amor (Free Servant of Love, c. 1406–1454), and Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradissa (late fifteenth century).25 The Estoria interpolation, in my own opinion, is vital to Baladro hermeneutics. For instance, alternative readings may be undertaken, depending on placement of the Estoria within the final section. In that crucial part of the romance just prior to the

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sorcerer’s death, Merlín takes Niniana from Arthur’s court in order to attempt consummation of their relationship. Although this theory as it stands in my unpublished dissertation calls for elaboration, a component of it deeply connected to Merlin’s portrayal is whether the Hispanic tale may form part of a deliberate amplification of frame-text themes through foreshadowing. In fact, even if this effect were inadvertent, it would distinguish the figure of el sabio Merlín from all his predecessors. An additional factor relevant to this structurally driven interpretation is the interplay between the Estoria and the intercalated account of Faunus and Diana carried over from the Vulgate (which precedes the Estoria within the Baladro). A feature that even suggests calculated multiple foreshadowings is the large number of alchemical elements found throughout both these interpolations. An aspect similar to the frame text is the appended book of prophecies, which ends the 1535 Seville imprint although it does not appear in the 1498 incunable. These prophecies are bound as a bridge between the death of Merlin and the onset of the Grail quest. Also, whereas the prophecies could be read as a prelude to the Demanda in the 1535 edition, their position may have differed within a 1515 binding cited by Entwistle.26 The 1535 prophecies, with their apparent reference to the House of Trastámara, demonstrate a well-known inclination seen in the Arthurian literature of various nations: that of ostensibly Merlinian prophecies employed as organs of medieval propaganda. Considering Entwistle’s assertion that Enrique de Trastámara’s half-sister and heir, Isabella the Catholic, possessed a Hispanic Post-Vulgate translation (21), it is easy to imagine her favoring such prophecies. For example, the Seville appendage posits the Spanish “Lion’s conquest of Moorish peoples.” This item is clearly readable as divine affirmation of the 1492 triumph over Granada, which culminated the so-called Christian Reconquest, and in the views of many historians (in combination with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile) heralded the birth of Spain as a modern nation. The unique character of the Baladro enchanter is attributable in great part to the intricate descent patterns of the texts he inhabits, and it corresponds just as much to his cultural, as to his literary, milieu. The imposing Merlin of late medieval Spain also represents a kind of apogee for the personage first seen in Britain and France. Following his early permutations, beginning in Celtic myth, and continuing through medieval British chronicle and French romance, a progressive magnification of the wizard’s power may be detected. An example of this dynamic, addressed by Jeff Rider, is Merlin’s burgeoning dynastic authority, even surpassing that of the kings he purports to serve. In a comparative study of Wace’s and Layamon’s Brut poems, Rider traces the sorcerer’s increasing aloofness toward his liege lords, evident at moments of political urgency. In this way the sage controls the rulers, who must make unusual efforts to gain his attention, and who have little choice but to accept his reticence if they are to have his assistance.27 My own application of this kind of reading extends Rider’s premise that the level of the wizard’s control increases with each new version. The ultimate fault line regarding the extent of Merlin’s power lies in the great thematic rupture of the Vulgate. Hence eros—a private and individualistic drive that tends to undermine the

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political ends of knights, kings, and prophets—becomes the thematic rival of the sacred Grail quest and of nationalistic martial conquest. The basic personality of the Spanish Merlin was formed a generation prior to the Vulgate, however. This happened when Robert de Boron employed the politically useful wise man found in the British pseudo histories. And, as love counters quest in medieval romance, the magician is either absent or limited where women and eros come to the fore. But Robert (together with the majority of his clerical continuators) converted Merlin the political oracle, making him an evangelical instrument who was just as useful to the religious institution of Church Militant as he was to the nationalistic establishment of the British monarchy in the chronicles. With the crusading spirit driving fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish Christians to subjugate their Moorish brethren at home, and indigenous peoples in the next hemisphere, the Spanish Merlin of those periods must serve texts in which imperial [con]quest prevails. In such circumstances, individual passions can only prove distracting (if not destructive) since they cannot aid undertakings bent on homogeneous empire. Although the Baladro enchanter is not identical to Robert’s prophet, the chief distinction between the two may be described as a new intensity in the Merlin of the later Hispanic renderings. The following passage from the Bohígas edition relates the enchanter’s death lament of the title episode. In it, the apocalyptic tone is unmistakable, and it is enhanced by stress on the demonic and even directly anti-Christian. Merlin’s harsh attitude here seems most fitting to a Post-Vulgate prophet of doom. “—¡Ay mala criatura, e vil, e fea e espantosa de ver e de oyr, mal aven-turado e de mal fazer, que ya fuyste flor de veldad, e ya fuyste en la bendita silla en la gloria celestial con toda alegría…criatura maldita e de mala parte, desconoscida e soberbia, que por tu orgullo quesiste ser en lugar de Dios e por ende fuyste derribado con tu mezquina e cativa compaña…. Ven e tómame, que de ti vine por mala ventura, e a ti me quiero tornar; que yo soy tuyo de comienço; que siempre fize tus obras….¡Ay infierno, que siempre estás abierto para mí e para otros! Alégrate, que Merlín entrara en ti, e a ti me do derechamente.” (82) “—Oh evil creature, and vile and hideous and terrifying to see and to hear, of evil fortune and of evil doing, you that were once a flower of beauty, and once were in the blessed seat in heavenly glory with all joy…cursed creature from the side of evil, unknown and arrogant, that by your pride wished to be in place of God and therefore went adrift with your filthy and ensnaring company…. Come and take me, I that came from you by evil fortune, and you whom I desire to take, I that am yours from the beginning; that always did your works Oh hell, that ever you were open toward me and toward others! Be joyous, that Merlin entered in you, and to you ere I go straight away.” (My translation) The enchanter’s bitter tone extends to his judgment of Niniana’s crime against him.

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“¡Ay Bandemagús! Sabe que yo soy el más malaventurado ombre de mundo, e verdaderamente así es; porque yo mesmo fize que muriese tan crudamente; que yo me maté con mis propias manos, porque enseñé a la más mortal enemiga que en el mundo avía, con qué me pudiese matar.” (75) “Oh Baudemagus! Know that I am the most unfortunate man in the world, and truly it is thus, because I myself caused my own death in so shameful a manner; that I killed myself with my own hands, because I taught the most mortal enemy that there was in the world, the means to kill me.” Thus it is love and lust that transform Merlin’s supernatural wisdom into mortal folly. Apparently he would have survived and continued his service to God and king, if only he had remained devotedly at court. So the opposition between the Vulgate themes of love and quest becomes central to a Merlin who, without the moral obstacle of erotic temptation, might have emerged as a single-mindedly religious prophet. Such a vision of the enchanter would correspond perfectly to the apocalyptic tone by which Bogdanow distinguishes the parent texts of the Post-Vulgate Baladro. And as illustrated through the above citations, the original Spanish textual components exceed their French sources in that regard. The Baladro’s detailed erotic scenario, then, becomes a determining factor in his Peninsular manifestation. In light of the Church-state merger initiated by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Merlin of their time seems to derive his power from a consolidation of roles. Thus he becomes the dualistic monarchical and religious “portavoz.”28 It could even be said that this Merlin personifies the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, in part because of the ultimate price he pays for his error. Furthermore, he does so with a might and a purpose transcending earthly concerns. However, he also embodies a tragic paradox. Like the Spanish Empire itself, he carries the seeds of his irresistible dominion, but also of his inevitable decadence. As in so many legendary downfalls, the blame is placed on a woman. Two salient (and evidently conflicting) facets of the Baladro sage are his functions as lover and as prophet. The result of this double emphasis, which parallels the thematic split between love and quest, once again is explosive because the institutional purposes of a royal advocate naturally clash with the personal ones of a lover. But they are also counteractive because the controlling entity is so different in each case. A lover in medieval romance, even if he does not answer exclusively to the whims of his lady, customarily does react to her. A court wizard is at least backed by the court, and may even occupy a position of de facto command. Be that as it may, an important distinction of the Spanish romance is a full development of Merlin’s role as lover, which is not as evident in its French precursors, nor even in approximate contemporaries such as Malory’s Morte D’Arthuri. And this is so even though the seeds of Merlin’s fatal love are sown in various earlier works. The incidents upon which Merlin’s obsession with Niniana seem to be based have been studied by Carol E.Harding, for instance. One of Harding’s main findings is that the relative harshness or benignity of the sorcerer’s death reflects a more or less sympathetic femme fatale. Specifically, she points to the Viviane of the Vulgate, who seems almost fond of

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Merlin. Even after he has fallen victim to her wiles, she visits him in prison and refrains from killing him.29 Later Harding points out that, unlike Viviane, her PostVulgate counterpart, “Niviene,” “must resort to violence to rid herself of this unwelcome devil’s son once and for all” (138). The all-important episode of the “baladro” or death-shriekitself, while sometimes alluded to in the French romances, is never fully articulated, that we know of, prior to the Spanish version. As Gracia has expressed it, the tale’s import goes beyond its extensive length and even its originality, to the point that “su inclusion como cierre a los contenidos de la Suite dotan a la obra de un sentido ajeno a su fuente” (its inclusion since it finishes the narrative content of the Suite endows the work from a direction removed from its source, 7). Merlin’s far-reaching bellow marries and crowns both the lover and prophet facets of his persona; he would not be suffering his death agony if it were not for his lady love’s betrayal. And the emotional severity of his experience elicits a cry, not just of pain, but of the otherworldly insights attributable to the mad prophet and seen in earlier epiphanies, notably that of Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini (c. 1150). For this reason, Niniana may be viewed in a number of contrasting ways. She may be seen as the darkest rendering of the dangerous woman for her ruthlessness. Alternatively, her image may be redeemed by the fact that, despite her murder of the royal counselor, in the end she makes a form of restitution (perhaps even of a kind of substitution) through her noble support of King Arthur. The very last of Merlín’s death throes reach an ultimate pitch not only because he screams them, or because they are punctuated by the title shriek, but also because those cries are made, not in the voice of a man, but in that of a demon. Interestingly, his final truly human utterance is a description of his lady, in which he carefully names her. Given the personal enhancement inherent to this act, his gesture seems to highlight her ambivalent nature. The wizard has fully condemned her treachery, but by affirming her in this way has stopped short of condemning her person. Depending on the importance settled on the prophecies themselves, Niniana may be interpreted as the midwife of their inherent political and religious insights and powers. She may become absolvable in light of the fact that birth cannot be achieved without pain. However she may be judged, Niniana becomes intrinsic to Merlín’s identity, when this particular retelling—unique, to a considerable degree, for its full narration of the enchanter’s death and its erotic causation—forms the basis of subsequent Spanish depictions. Early Modern and Modern Spanish Merlins Merlin in the Golden Age The Merlin personae of Golden Age literature follow naturally on the great epistemological shifts defining the Renaissance, especially the defining faith crisis ushered in by Renaissance Humanism with its development of modern science.

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Although empiricism cannot eradicate mysticism, the figure of the wizard is generally diminished. Amanda Meixell perceives a chronological sequence to Merlin’s declining stature during the Spanish Golden Age. In the introduction to her dissertation, Meixell considers the enchanter’s apparent degradation and the variety of ways in which he is incorporated by Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca and some of their contemporaries. Characterizing the seer as a buffoon, and even a “gracioso” in many such authors’ treatments, she emphasizes the sense that he has fallen a very long way from his typically dominant medieval position. The body of criticism on the (non-Arthurian) texts that Meixell proposes to interpret should be enhanced by her original focus on the mage. Although the European context of the works is well known, and although the overall effects on the enchanter character are generally foreseeable, the reader should bear in mind that a number of factors can leave their marks on discrete texts. One of Merlin’s most captivating aspects is his adaptability, limited only by the individual imaginations of authors. And despite the imposing nature of his medieval incarnations, it is important to remember that such defining traits as his powers, his goodness, and his relatively Christian and pagan resonances wax and wane during the Middle Ages, much as in other periods. Some of the components affecting his mutations include the manner of the wizard’s conception, his baptism or his failure to be baptized, the nature of the personalities closely associated with him, and warring proclivities toward love or quest. In other words, practically all the basic moral possibilities and character shadings relevant to the sorcerer preexist the Spanish Golden Age. However, new combinations of elements such as those just mentioned, and other influences such as Merlin’s relative prominence in a given work, can impact his personality in unexpected ways. The texts that Meixell initially proposed to examine in her study include Lope’s La imperial de Otón (c. 1598), Cervantes’s drama La casa de los celos (a 1615 production treated as an early dramatic work), the Quijote (1615), Calderón’s zarzuela El jardín de Falerina (1640) (which includes only references to the enchanter), Calderón’s dramas Auristela y Lisidante (c. 1650–53), Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa (1680), and also his Estatua de Prometeo (1669). Although Meixell surveys all of these, her concentration is directed toward key dramatic pieces in which Merlin has significant roles. Particularly since none of these works is Arthurian, the enchanter is likely to be employed for such reasons as his universality and his mythic presence (even where the force of that presence may be reduced). Along these lines, an acute kind of debilitation seems in evidence when Merlin is styled a disembodied spirit in La casa de los celos (The House of the Jealous). At first glance it may seem that Cervantes is diffusing Merlin’s presence, not only by introducing him in discarnate form, but also by embedding his spirit among a panoply of legendary figures—from Roland and Bernardo del Carpio, to Venus, Cupid, and even a cadre of simple personifications labeled “Curiosity,” “Suspicion,” and the like. However, Meixell reveals Merlin as a force to be reckoned with in La casa, referring to him as “the voice of ultimate reason,” and pointing out that his knowledge supersedes that of the foolish human

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magician, Malgesí. This may recall to the reader the wise man’s most powerful (albeit similarly disembodied) voice, emanating from a sealed-up tomb to carry the irresistible force of prophetic word. It bears underscoring that el sabio Merlín’s isolated cry also functions as a kind of intermediary presaging of the Grail knight, even at a time when the enchanter is no longer available to counsel the king at court. These last considerations suggest two main questions raised by Meixell: that of humankind’s epistemological limitations—even in a culture that exalts human reason —and that of Cervantes’s (and other authors’) responses to thought modes of their times. Not wishing to anticipate Meixell’s study unfairly, it may be nevertheless useful to make a few additional text-specific observations in order to develop an initial comparison. As in La casa de los celos, in Lope’s La imperial de Otón, as discussed by Sonia Jones,30 the conjurer plays his familiar hero-making role. A relative paradox noted by Meixell in the Quijote is the combination of Merlin’s usual engagement in prophecy and spell-casting, together with his projection of an uncharacteristically sinister shadow. Among the most tantalizing points addressed by Meixell is Merlin’s subversion at the hand of his own daughter, the title character in Calderón’s El jardín de Falerina. If the impression of Merlin’s degradation in that case is borne out, it will support the contention that Merlin, women, and power seem incapable of peaceful coexistence. If a woman comes to the fore, she usually does so to the wise man’s detriment. Issues related to women and tradition arise as well in Calderón’s Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa (Fate and Heraldic Device of Leonido and Marfisa), where Merlin is lowered to the status of servitude. Although he is prophetic in a minor way, he is no more able to penetrate Marfisa’s disguise as her twin brother than the mere mortals who parallel the wizard’s astonishment at the young hero’s “resurrection.” Merlin’s character appears to decline in Spanish literature during the Golden Age, then, and the general European context explains this phenomenon to a great extent. The development of scientific method obviously distinguishes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout the West, and would naturally affect the concurrent treatments of Merlin based on his association with magic. However, Spain may also be set apart from other European countries in applicable ways. In order to limit the spread of unorthodox thought, the obsessive Catholicism of Philip II leads him, for example, to deny most students from Spain university matriculation outside his dominion. Meixell’s groundbreaking work thus may provide substantial food for thought about such concerns as how Catholicism versus science might exploit the enchanter. Benjamin Jarnés’s Viviana y Merlín Four centuries after the publication of the Baladro, a new, essentially Arthurian, wizard is developed by a contemporary of the famous poetic “Generation of 1927.” Despite obvious differences, Spain in the 1930s bears some striking political similarities to her late medieval and early Renaissance situation. In 1931 the

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monarchy had been driven from authority, and a complicated ferment of opposing constituencies sought to determine a new society. Among artists and intellectuals, sweeping reform under the aegis of the Second Republic constituted the chief goal. However, as it was in the late fifteenth century at the culmination of the Reconquest, ecclesiastical and military control was reestablished, through the victory in the Civil War of the dictator Francisco Franco (who declares himself a monarchist at heart). In spite of all this, during the brief period of liberal idealism leading up to the conflict, a courageous vision of Spain emerged. According to it, the divisions along class lines were diminished, so that ordinary citizens could share in both educational and material sustenance. In the very year that the Civil War broke out, Benjamin Jarnés’s experimental novel Viviana y Merlín (1936) was released in its final form, as if sending out a last ray of hope for the fading Camelot of the Second Republic. It is fair to think of the work in these terms, not only because of its subtle vanguardism, but even more because its main theme is a world where old biases shrivel up and die so that souls can be nurtured. The first of the old prejudices to suffer under Jarnés’s quietly chiding pen is the static position of Spanish women under the Roman Catholic Church. Through that extraordinarily powerful establishment, their roles have been predominantly within the home or convent, and thus marked exclusively for service to others. In response, the author’s placement of Viviana’s name first in the title is deliberate, and it represents a subversive declaration of women’s potential. However, although with the very first lines Jarnés identifies Viviana as his heroine, his intention is not to undermine the position of men in society, but rather to enlighten them as true partners of their female compatriots. To comprehend the Merlin of Jarnés’s novel, it is necessary to appreciate the wizard’s platonic mate, the humorously wise Viviana. Together, this pair forms the perfect marriage of anima and animus. He is the kingdom’s intellectual genius, handing down the fruits of erudition from the tower, which specifically forms the head of the castle.31 By contrast, she represents the kingdom’s heart, and triumphs over the foolishness of human nature from the palace core, symbolized by the nurturing kitchen and great hall. Yet she is able to transcend the fixed levels of hierarchy and thus to free a Merlin who fails to realize his personal hunger for joy in living, and who suffers from an arrogant belief in his own indispensability.32 “—Merlín, Merlín, ¿qué haces aquí con la nariz hundida en el texto de Plotino? ¿Por qué no sales a cazar con el rey? ¿Por qué no bajas al patio, donde los pajes y las doncellas de Ginebra te eneñaran?—¡Oh, huraño maestro! ¿Lecciones de coquetería no sabes? Archivo ambulante: si no estudias para vivir más intensamente, ¿por qué estudias? …¿Por qué no intentas buscar tu felicidad en mis brazos, como en otro tiempo?” “—Merlin, Merlin, what are you doing here with your nose buried in that textbook of Plato? Why don’t you go out hunting with the king? Why don’t you go down to the courtyard where Guenevere’s pages and ladiesin-waiting

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would teach you?—You antisocial schoolmaster. Don’t you know any lessons in coquetry? You walking archive: if you don’t study in order to live more intensely, why study at all? …Why don’t you try seeking your happiness in my arms, as in another time?”(141) At the end of the story when she takes him away to be one with nature, she does not engage in a win-lose dynamic, but rather shares in a win-win victory. The author’s beautifully crafted expression transforms his image of the couple walking off to regain the earthly paradise into a veritable prayer. “Que en todos nuestros actos, aún en los más menudos, vayamos siempre del brazo con la pareja más encantadora de toda la Edad Media y de todas las edades. Con la gracia y la sabiduría. Con Viviana y Merlin.” (“That in all our actions, even in the most ordinary ones, we may go always arm in arm with the most enchanting pair of all the Middle Ages and of all ages. With grace and wisdom. With Viviana and Merlin”280). In this way Merlin is released from the rigid bonds of his place in the isolated tower, to enjoy fulfillment. However, the kingdom is never abandoned, for it is cared for by his “femme vitale.” Having seen their errors and foibles through the device of Viviana’s gentle humor, the people are challenged to claim the independence that maturity can enable. This Merlin, together with his soulmate, forsakes a deadening authority, and with her shows by example the way to genuine contentment. For Jarnés, such a path is defined by individual striving, by love and compassion, and most of all by the capacity to rejoice in the fullness of life. Alvaro Cunqueiro’s Merlín y familia Merlín y familia (1955) has in common with Viviana y Merlín a nonlinear structure frequently seen in twentieth-century literature. However, unlike the modern generic composite of Jarnés’s work, which places Viviana y Merlín somewhere between the essay and the narrative, the organization of Cunqueiro’s book harkens back to its early prose precursors. In the first chapter the writer introduces the principal characters of Merlín, Ginebra (Guenevere), and our narrator, Felipe, an old boatman reminiscing over his years as the enchanter’s page. The remainder of the novel is composed of tales and sketches, only loosely connected through the setting and main figures. The majority of the story’s diverse plot shows a common trajectory in which a motley spectrum of personages arrives at the sorcerer’s remote castle—the locus for all adventures—ultimately to find that Merlin knows best. Thus, episodic situations echo the chivalric adventures arriving at Arthur’s court in medieval romance. Additionally, the tale further reflects other traditional texts such as the celebrated El Conde Lucanor (c. 1340). Like this collection of fables, the adventures of Merlín y familia have obviously didactic purposes, with the wise elder as the catalyst if not the overt advisor. In essence, the sage becomes the anchoring figure for a string of edifying tales, in which he enjoys the status of knowing patriarch. However, this basic pattern is softened a great deal by the work’s appealing lightness and by its very fine subtlety.

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Although Merlín y familia has its historical relevance, the reader may easily approach it as simply delightful entertainment, from its lyrical word craft to its sometimes preposterous humor.33 The author’s Galician heritage is important to the work, however, on multiple levels. Alvaro Cunqueiro (1913–1981) devoted a sustained effort to the promotion of Galician, his native regional language, by choosing it over Castilian as the vehicle for his literary production. In fact, the original title of his first major fictional work is Merlín e familia i outras historias. The connection between northwestern Galicia and Celtic ancestry, as it pertains to the earliest Hispanic Arthurian texts and social influences, has been addressed in preceding sections. Yet the modern Galician background of this piece relates to the twentieth-century Cunqueiro as a political writer, an aspect that makes for an interesting point of comparison to Jarnés. Neither the works nor the authors are precise contemporaries, Jarnés having died a few years prior to the publication of Cunqueiro’s novel. Nevertheless, the lyricism and fantasy elements found in these works both clash and coincide suggestively, and of course both writers are influenced by the volatile Iberian landscape of the 1930s. Perhaps because, as Kevin Gustafson reminds us,34 Cunqueiro actually denied any interest in politics, this author and his Merlin become rather enigmatic. In the first place, it is at least provocative for a Spanish writer of the Franco era to promote regionalism in any form, and above all to publish literature in a Spanish language other than Castilian. The dictator was infamous for his prohibition of the regional languages (although he was most rigid in the more threatening cases of Basque and Catalonian), because they were linked to aspirations toward autonomy. Further to the purposes of a comparison between Jarnés and Cunqueiro, the coincidence of Cunqueiro’s (at least nominal) conversion to Falangism, and the release of Viviana y Merlín in its revised form during the same key year, is striking.35 Also, despite such factors as Cunqueiro’s conflicting statements on his bilingualism,36 by virtue of his journalistic vocation it would be unusual if he had managed to remain truly apolitical. Galician scholar Ana María Spitzmesser has devoted a notable portion of her research to Cunqueiro’s work, and believes that this author ridicules the dictatorship in understated ways. In the novel under discussion, she points to a focus on a benevolent patriarch who understands the needs of his “family,” or constituency, far better than its members themselves. The telling ambivalence of the word “family” here is even reflected in the 1996 English language edition, through Colin Smith’s choice of Merlin and Company for the title. Spitzmesser’s observation on characters in Merlín y familia, who remain “sin posibilidad de de-sarrollo o madurez” (without the possibility of development or maturation),37 suggests a diametrical opposite to the courtiers served by Jarnés’s Merlin. In fact, it is Viviana (the necessary complement to the bookish sage) who expressly challenges the courtiers to grow up (which at least suggests their capacity to do so). Spitzmesser argues convincingly for a reading of all Cunqueiro’s fictional worlds as utopia analogues, according to the medieval understanding of the concept. She cites a number of relevant defining features, including isolation, perfect order and harmony, the incorporation of moral and aesthetic ideals, and a community of elite, auto-

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exclusive and eminent people. Such an elite is served by the masses but does not enter into real communication or communion with them. Apropos of this point, an example of Cunqueiro’s delicacy may be found in the relationship between Felipe and Merlín. While illustrating Spitzmesser’s contention on elitism, the connection between the wise man and the boat-man also involves a kind of sentimental concern. This represents one of the wizard’s more endearing qualities, since it obscures “Don” Merlín’s less attractive condescension. However, Spitzmesser singles out a characteristic typical of Cunqueiro’s patriarchal figures as a group that is in accordance with the oriental didactic tradition of early Iberian folk tales and fables (in Castilian “fabulas”). She tells us that these entities “fabulan” (speak),38 but that no one within the stories is depicted as actively listening. If such utopian worlds, including the magical setting of Merlín y familia, are meant to parody the almost forty-year Spanish dictatorship, she adds, they do so indirectly, not by portraying accurately the real system, but simply by employing some of its ridiculous aspects (791). If this is so, she points out, then the most sinister allusion to Franco’s Spain in Merlín y familia may be its narrative and structural imitation of a static and elliptical organization (797). Consequently, Merlin’s magic is reduced to a production of glittering hypnotic illusions that hold the characters surrounding him (and perhaps the readers as well) suspended in paralytic delight.39 A veces, por hacer fiesta, el señor Merlín salía a la era, y en una copa de cristal llena de agua vertía dos o tres gotas del licor que él llamaba ‘de los países’, y sonriendo…nos preguntaba de que color queríamos ver el mundo, y siempre que a mí me tocaba responder, yo decía que de azul, y entonces don Merlín echaba aquella agua por el aire y por un segundo el mundo todo…era una larga nube azul que lentamente se desvanecía. (16) Sometimes, to cheer everybody up, Merlin would go out to the kitchen garden, and pour two or three drops of the liquid he called ‘of all countries’ into a glass cup full of water; then, with a smile…he would ask us in what colour we would like to see the world. Whenever it was my turn to answer I said blue; then Merlin would throw the water up in the air, and for a second the whole world…was a huge blue cloud which vanished away bit by bit. (Smith translation, 6) Ultimately, the world of Cunqueiro’s “Miranda” may be neither more fantastic nor more sinister than any other Camelot. When read for artistic appreciation, Merlín y familia can be every bit as charming as Viviana y Merlín, similar in its lyricism, its charming humor, and its colorfully imaginative qualities. Through such a comparison one might recall Arthurian literature’s general tendency to straddle the lines between escapist story and political and/or ecclesiastical allegory. The thematic opposition between Jarnés’s book, in which Viviana challenges court members to take responsibility, and Cunqueiro’s, in which Merlin provides advice and the diversion of magic tricks (after finishing his scrambled eggs and rosé), is nevertheless remarkable. Applicable to the prophetic function is the question of

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whether the characters in Cunqueiro’s book represent aspects of Spanish politics, and also the impact of the reader’s cultural viewpoint on related perceptions. Juxtaposing Jarnés’s and Cunqueiro’s novels almost automatically bring to mind the historical issues and political permutations of twentieth-century Spain. Furthermore, all these issues are connected to time as a theme, and to the key relationship between time and prophecy, particularly as an essential of romance discourse involving Merlin. Perhaps because political concerns do enter inevitably in, the transcendence—of time and of human fallibility—seems to overlay Cunqueiro’s stories through their intimation of truth, as well as through their artistry. Gustafson asserts culture itself as an inextricable web conflating “lies, truths, and half-truths” (106). In Merlín y familia it may all come down to the use of languid memory as a form of beautiful dreams adding joy to life, or alternatively, as a kind of lotus flower keeping us from the possibilities of selfactualization. Conclusion Although the Merlins proper of Jarnés and Cunqueiro are probably the best-known modern Spanish Arthurian wizards, even more recent Spanish fiction takes up the character type, in testimony to its ongoing presence in the Hispanic imagination, extending also to Latin America.40 Given the formative place of Merlin as depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, it is striking that Pedro Jesús Fernández’s first novel, Peón de Rey (King’s Pawn, 1998), opens enigmatically at the famous Toledan court along lines similar to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Peón de Rey’s argument, which unfolds along the vector of the Santiago pilgrims’ way, and whose main action is initiated from the subterranean monastery of San Juan de la Peña, features a protagonist who feels compelled to set eyes (at least) upon the Holy Grail. What seems noteworthy is the placement of the Grail quest as narrative prelude to Raoult de Hinault’s royal commission. This charge, to solve a murder mystery enmeshed in Alfonsine court intrigue, has in common with the paradigmatic Arthurian search its basis as a truth-seeking enterprise. Even if there were no evidence of a Merlin avatar here, the Arthurian Grail and quest elements would be cpnspicuous. For one thing, this arrangement repeats a suggestive feature of the Cantigas, the coexistence of two apparently separate royal heroic conventions—those of Arthurian themes and of Iberian scholarship—brought together in Spanish legend and fantasy. Perhaps due to the novel’s historical backdrop, the specific and overtly supernatural personage of Merlin is absent. The leader of the Grail guardians, however, one Guillén de Monredón, possesses suspiciously Merlinian traits such as a timeless outward appearance, a lack of “rasgos definitorios individuales” (distinguishing individual features)—readable as a shape-shifting capacity—and also that most popular and frequent physical characteristic, the long beard of the wise elder. In light of his wizardly attributes, Guillén’s identifying purpose as Grail master must qualify him as a Spanish version of the type, at least comparable to the enchanters inhabiting the Amadís. Although the work as a whole is much less Arthurian in kind than the tale

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dominated by the chivalric hero of Gaul, its Spanish Celtic setting coincides to a degree with that of Cunqueiro’s world, and also with that of Alfonso X, who has his own place as organizing figure in Fernández’s book. Finally, a thoroughly contemporary Merlin, traditional in many ways yet creatively expressed, works his magic in the Arthurian children’s books of Argentinian writer Graciela Montes. Appearing with the new millennium, the title character of her story “El mago Merlín,” also present in other stories of her collection Caballeros de la Mesa Redonda (2001), customarily wraps himself in spectacular thunderclouds when obliged to deliver important news to adults. He seems to know the usefulness of smoke and mirrors for an audience impressed by such things. Yet when he becomes the small miracle boy of the Vortigern legends, it is such powerful adults as the king and his counselors who eagerly await the plain-spoken speech of the wisest one of all, a child. Whenever the next Spanish Merlin should materialize, his forebears, from the wizards of the early French translations and derivations to the innovative patriarchs of twentieth-century fantasy, will leave their marks on his (or her) unique persona. Merlin’s function as prophet will remain integral, whether to continue the character evolution rooted in the far past, or to reverse old meanings that may seem obsolete to latter-day writers and readers. His problems in relationships with women may well increase as complex social issues continue to evolve. The unusual mixture of Eastern and Western, European and African ethnic strains defining Spain must always color an Iberian rendition of the Celtic enchanter. His past use as an intensively Catholic entity may seem to dissipate as modern Spain carries forward the new pluralism of its young democracy. But tradition, which in Spain derives from a unique confluence of peoples, and which in all things Arthurian remains a cornerstone, must influence twenty-first-century Spanish enchanters in a formative way. Since the prophet, like romance itself, is defined largely by a mysterious relationship to time, perhaps it is no wonder to find him simultaneously new and old in his Spanish manifestations— universal in type, yet unique in character. Notes 1. See María Rosa Lida de Malkiel’s classic article, “Arthurian Literature in Spain and Portugal,” Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 406–18. 2. Whereas Sharrer reports “Merlín as the family name of a witness to a document dated 1173” (“Spain and Portugal,” Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Norris J.Lacy [New York: Garland, 1996], pp. 407–408), Hook cites a “Merlin as the owner of an orchard at Sahagún, dated 1171” (The Earliest Arthurian Names in Spain and Portugal [St. Albans: Hook, 1991], p. 8). The telling point in the latter case—that the person referred to would have to have been an adult in order to hold property—indicates a birth date potentially prior to 1134. 3. For further details on the Hispanic Post-Vulgate Baladro precursors, see Portuguese philologist Ivo Castro’s article, “Sobre a data da introduçao na Peninsula Ibérica do ciclo arturiano da post-Vulgata,” Boletim de Filología [Lisbon], 28 (1983), pp. 81–98. See also

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

Amadeu-J.Soberanas, “La version galaïco-portuguaise de la Suite du Merlin: Transcription du fragment du XIVe siècle de la Bibliothèque de Catalogne, ms. 2434,” Vox Romanica, 38 (1979), pp. 174–93. Karl Pietsch, ed., Spanish Grail Fragments, 2 vols., Modern Philology Monographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924–25). See Sharrer, “Baladro del Sabio Merlín” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1991), p. 31. See Sharrer, “Spanish and Portuguese Arthurian Literature,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, pp. 425–28. This important aspect of the persona creates a distinguishing focus for Vulgate specialists such as Carol Dover, who brought to my attention the maverick sorcerer of the Vulgate Lancelot. Sharrer’s article, “The Acclimatization of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle in Spain and Portugal,” in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Texts and Transformations, ed. William W.Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 174–90, furnishes an in-depth description of Hispanic Vulgate texts. See Murrillo’s “Montalvo, Garci Rodríguez de,” The New Arthurian Encydopedia, pp. 326–28. For a discussion of the philological question of dating the “primitivo,” see Sharrer, “Spain and Portugal.” See The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 31. For a concise elaboration of the work’s characteristics and influences, see the 1998 documentary video, “Las Cantigas de Santa Maria: An Historical Mirror from 13th-Century Spain,” produced in New York by Jordi Torrent of Duende Pictures, in collaboration with such specialists as John E.Keller, and sponsored by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Of particular bearing is the section on coexistence among Jews, Moors, and Christians, because it features illustrations from the canticle of which Merlin is the central figure. Under the king’s patronage, seholarly and artistic cooperation among Moors, Christians, and Jews—representatives of the three dominant Alfonsine cultures—fundamentally enabled all the undertakings just mentioned. For example, she acts as patroness of the king’s political and military exploits in song 181, and she miraculously cures him of grave illness in song 209. “La materia de Bretaña en la poesía gallego-portuguesa,” Actas del I Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, ed. Vicente Beltrán (Barcelona: PPU, 1988), pp. 561–69. The reversal symbolism and its historical background are detailed further in Dwayne Carpenter’s 1993 Bulletin of the Cantigueiros de Santa Maria article, “A Sorcerer Defends the Virgin,” 5, pp. 5–24, and in my own 1998 essay, also published in Cantigueiros, “That French Enchanter in King Alfonso’s Court,” 10, pp. 51–60. Robert’s effects on the figural evolution of the sage in Spanish literature are explored in my dissertation. See “The Matter of Merlín: Manifestations of the Enchanter and El baladro del sabio Merlín” (diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1996), pp. 155–95. The widespread misconception that the Spanish branch of the Inquisition was a rare instance of such a tribunal, and that its cruelty was unique, overlooks the institution’s central purpose. The Holy Office was created as a safeguard against heresy. The Spanish dedication to that objective was applauded in Rome and throughout Europe until the Protestant Reformation. Pertinent to the 108th Cantiga, practically the most common form of Christian heresy in late-fifteenth-century Spain was the reversion of “New Christians” to their former

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

religious practices. This tendency was feared in great part for its potential to create political, as well as religious, disunity. “Baladro del sabio Merlín” (Burgos, Juan de Burgos, 1498): Guía de lectura, Guías de lectura caballeresca, 1, series eds. Carlos Alvar and José Lucía Megías (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1998). In fact, proponents of the Vulgate’s relative purity as a more “original” version (that is to say, one representing a textually earlier “generation,” by definition closer to the earliest sources) might consider the Post-Vulgate incorporation of Vulgate material as one of its virtues. For an explanation of the Baladro’s textual descent, encompassing a survey of competing theories and also graphic representations of them, see the fourth chapter of my dissertation, “The Matter of Merlín” (cited in note 17). A full description of Juan de Burgos’s activity, involving Arthurian and also nonArthurian texts, is found in Sharrer’s “Juan de Burgos: Impresor y refundidor de libros caballerescos,” El libro antiguo español: Actas del primer Coloquio Internacional, ed. María Luisa López-Vidriero and Pedro M.Cátedra (Madrid: Ediciones de la U de Salamanca, Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid; Sociedad española de la historia del libro, 1988), pp. 361–69. See “Spain and Portugal,” p. 402. For an in-depth exploration of the mutual influence between Spanish Arthurian refundiciones and the novela sentimenta, see Sharrer, “La fusión de las novelas artúrica y sentimental a fines de la Edad Media,” El crotalón: Anuario de Filología, I (1984), 147–57; Rpt. in abridged form as “La fusion de la artúrica y sentimental,” in the first supplement to Vol. I, Historia y crítica de la literatura española, ed. Alan Deyermond and Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Crítica, 1991), pp. 307–11. The uncertainty regarding publication dates provides grist for educated speculation on which Spanish piece may have adopted the story from which other one. And this question becomes more compelling in light of the existence of at least one Baladro text prior to the Burgos edition. Arthurian Legend in the Literatures of the Spanish Peninsula (New York: Phaeton, 1975), p. 152. See “The Fictional Margin: the Merlin of the Brut” Modern Philology, 87 (1989), pp. 1–12. In this way, the fictional character parallels the historical entity of the Spanish royal “privado,” a court advisor whose power in some documented cases proved inflammatory, and even deadly. See Merlin and Legendary Romance (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 98. See Jones, “Lope’s Use of Foreshadowing in La imperial de Otón” Renaissance and Reformation, 2 (1975), pp. 79–84. In fact, the word “torre” is used in colloquial Spanish to mean a person’s head. Viviana y Merlín, ed. and intro. Rafael Conte (Barcelona: Cátedra, 1994), is the cited edition. Translations are my own. It is difficult to imagine the reader who would refrain from at least smiling at such inventive irreverence as that of “The Portuguese Cock” or “The Tale of the Devil’s Fart.” See Gustafson’s review of the Colin Smith translation in Arthuriana, 9.3 (Fall 1999), pp. 105– 106. Carlos Feal Deibe makes the cautionary observation that Cunqueiro’s Falangism was more cultural than political in nature. See page xxvii of translator Colin Smith’s introduction to the English language edition. See page 791 of Spitzmesser’s article, “Utopia y distopia: el mundo mágico de Alvaro Cunqueiro,” La Torre 3.10 (1996), pp. 789–801.

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38. An interesting nuance of the linguistic play indicated by Spitzmesser is its implication for the oral foundations of early texts. In modern Castilian, the previous orthographic fluctuation between the letters “f” and “h” has been standardized so that, for example, the Castilian form of the verb “to speak” is “hablar,” versus Portuguese “falar.” Although Galician is the linguistic “sibling” of both Portuguese and Castilian, it is interesting to note that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which mark the height of the troubadour phenomenon, there was virtually no distinction between the former two. The split through which they evolved into separate languages, very relevant to the question of elitism in Cunqueiro’s work and his choice of textual language, evolved along the lines of rural versus court society. The Lisbon dialect of Portuguese formed its modern base, whereas full standardization has still not been achieved in Galician, precisely due to its socioeconomic foundations and usages. For further information, I recommend the article published by the Sociolinguistic Institute of Catalonia found on the Internet at www.uoc.es/euromosaic/web/document/gallec/ an/il/il/html. 39. The Castilian language version cited is Merlín y familia (1955; Barcelona: Destino, 1986). 40. A suggestive phenomenon recounted to me by Argentinian children’s author Graciela Montes is the eager reception of her Arthurian (and other traditional) stories in remote mountain villages bordering Argentina and Chile. The childlike appeal of the legends is underscored by the villagers’ incorporation of Arthurian aspects into their games.

CHAPTER 6 Merlin in German Literature ULRICH MÜLLER

For centuries, Merlin has been of comparatively little interest in the Germanspeaking countries,1 unlike the situation in France, Italy, Britain, and North America. Middle High German poets and writers wrote little about Merlin, whereas many medieval and late-medieval romances were written about “König Artus” and the knights of the Round Table. Later on, King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Mordred grew less and less important in Modern Middle Europe; instead, people, writers, and composers in the German-speaking countries concentrated on Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on the love story of Tristan and Isolde. You could say that the Arthurian legends were “received” without King Arthur in modern German culture and literature; if you look at the medieval plots used by Richard Wagner for his operas, you will learn which medieval stories have become important and interesting for the German-speaking people since the end of the eighteenth century: the Grailstory (Lohengrin, Parsifal), Tannhäuser and the ‘Combat of Singers’ at the Wartburg, Tristan and Isolde, the late-medieval Mastersingers (Meistersinger), and—ofcourse— Siegfried and the Nibelungs. But things have changed within the last two decades: More and more Arthurian novels have been translated from English into German, and the books of T.H.White, Mary Stewart, and especially Marion Zimmer Bradley—to name only a few—have sold very well in Germany (West), Switzerland, and Austria, even producing a bestseller (The Mists of Avalon, 1982). Movies like John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) had large audiences—and then there arrived the huge Merlin-drama by Tankred Dorst/Ursula Ehler (1981), the most spectacular show and theatrical success on the Germanspeaking stages (Düsseldorf, Munich, Zurich, Vienna) during the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to this, however, Merlin was not completely unknown and unimportant in the German-speaking countries. He was known in the Middle Ages as one of the great visionaries; he appears in at least one Middle High German romance and, since the eighteenth century, several poems, dramas, and novels. Merlin in the German Middle Ages The great magician and sorcerer in Middle High German romances dealing with Arthur and the Grail is not Merlin but Clinschor. His name is mentioned for the first time in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (but not in his source, Chrétien’s

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Perceval). Although Clinschor was a powerful magician, he was castrated by a count who found him in bed with his wife; later Clinschor built “Schastelmarveile” (Magic Castle). There he imprisoned hundreds of noble women, until Gawan broke the spell and freed them all. In the Wartburgkrieg, a strophic poem of the thirteenth century, the pious Christian poet Wolfram and Clinschor the sorcerer fight against each other. In this Clinschor tradition, Merlin is depicted as a treacherous giant who is killed by the chivalrous hero of the verse romance Wilhelm von Österreich, composed in 1314 by the Franconian Johann von Würtzburg. The only extant German romance that deals with an Arthurian Merlin is the Buch der Abenteuer (Book of Adventures), composed in the late fifteenth century by the Bavarian painter and writer Ulrich Fuetrer (died 1495/1496).2 In stanzas 121–383 (only a small part of the huge strophic romance), Fuetrer tells Merlin’s story as it is known from the French romances3: Moerlin, son of the devil and the daughter of King Constanns, advises Wertigierr to build his castle, supports Pandragon and Uter, helps Uterpandragon to found the Round Table and to seduce Ygrena, and educates young Arthur. His name is mentioned for the last time in stanza 359, announcing to the princes how to find their new king. Fuetrer also states that the story came from France, and that he is using an earlier retelling by Albrecht von Scharfenberg (stanza 126; cf. also stanza 17). Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s version, as well as a romance about “Seifrid de Ardemont,” have not been transmitted and are only known through the adaptations of Fuetrer. According to Panzer (1902) and Nyholm (1967), Albrecht used the French Prose Merlin as a main source, although Fuetrer also quotes some additional sources (stanzas 122, 152). In contrast to the situation in Britain and France, Merlin was never localized in the German-speaking countries,4 and this helps to explain his lack of popularity. Although Arthur was not localized either, he became popular through the agency of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach. As in other parts of Europe,5 Merlin was known as a visionary and prophet. For example, Michel Beheim mentions predictions by Merlin, “the prophet of Britanny” (“der Britaner prophete”: 241, v. 133) who lived “at the time of King Arthur” (“pei könig Artus zeit”: 352, v. 120).6 Both songs, Nos. 241 and 352, tell about the fall of Constantinople, which was conquered by the Turks in 1453, and the poet blames all the Christians of Europe. Indeed, prophecies about social and political catastrophes were very common at that time. One century later, Ambrosii Merlini Britanni Vaticinia, a series of prophecies with a commentary at one time attributed to Alanus ab Insulis (Alain of Lille, composed ca. 1167), were printed in 1603, 1608, and 1649 at Frankfurt, and they had a rather large circulation. Merlin Rediscovered It was Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) who rediscovered Merlin for German literature. Probably around 1775, he read the medieval story of Merlin, Uther, Arthur, and Viviane in the famous collection of romances by the Frenchman Louis-Elisabeth de Lavergne, comte de Tressan (Bibliothèque universelle des romans), and he published a brief retelling in prose in 1777, with a commentary Merlin der Zauberer,7 in his widely

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read journal Der Teutsche Merkur (founded 1784). He also had some earlier knowledge of Merlin: there is an allusion to the magician Merlin in his novel Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764),8 which A.M. Weiss notes was “the first appearance of… Merlin in modern German literature” (56). Further translations and retellings of the Merlin legend started to appear in the nineteenth century. In 1804 Friedrich Schlegel published a translation from a Paris/ French Arthurian manuscript in prose (the exact manuscript is not known): Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin.9 This first and only slightly abridged translation of a full-length late-medieval version was in fact done by Schlegel’s wife Dorothea and her friend Helmina von Chezy in Paris, but it was printed under Schlegel’s name. He even incorporated it later into his collected works (1827: Vol. 7), an odd suppression of authorship for this educated and progressive man.10 Some years later, in 1811, the Austrian Felix Franz Hofstätter published a modern retelling of Fuetrer’s Buch der Abenteuer (in Altdeutsche Gedichte aus den Zeiten der Tafelrunde aus Hss der k.k. Hofbibliothek in die heutige Sprache übertraqen. 2 vols., Wien 1811). Although criticized by several scholars, it did prove influential. Further contributions to Merlin’s fame were Ludwig Tieck’s unstaged translation (1829) of William Rowley’s grotesque drama The Birth of Merlin, or The Childe Hath Found His Father (published 1662),11 which was later used by Immermann and Dorst; and the translations from several medieval literatures in the collection Die Sagen von Merlin by the Prussian “San-Marte” (Albert Schulz) in 1853.12 Educated German writers also had known, from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (ca. 1506–1532), the story that Merlin lies in a tomb of marble, foretelling the future to all who ask for his advice. Goethe, in his poem “Kophtisches Lied” (1787–89),13 alludes to “Merlin der Alte, im leuchtenden Grabe” (Old Merlin in his shining tomb). Wieland also used the motif in Merlins weissagende Stimme aus einer Gruft im Wald Brosseliand (Merlin’s voice prophesying from a rocky grave at the woods of Broceliande, 1810).14 In this long poem, written for the twenty-fourth birthday of Maria Paulowna, the Russian wife of the young prince of Weimar, Merlin announces to Viviane the birth of a divine child and future happiness for the Germans, who were at that time defeated and dominated by Napoleon. It seems to have been the seventyseven-year-old Wieland himself speaking with the voice of the medieval prophet to the young Russian princess. Merlin the wise, knowing the mysteries of nature but at the end of his life trapped and imprisoned by a woman, appears in several poems of the com-ing decades, by Ludwig Uhland,15 Heinrich Heine,16 Nikolaus Lenau,17 and by the Rhineland poets Gottfried Kinkel,18 Alexander Kaufmann,19 and Wolfgang Möller von Königswinter.20 Merlin, asdepicted by the Germans of the nineteenth century, was a combination of romantic love for nature and for a woman, of “Weltschmerz” as well as of male anxiety and panic. We find this dominating motif also in the most important and influential work on Merlin during the century, Immermann’s drama Merlin.

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Immermann’s Merlin Karl Lebrecht Immermann (1796/Magdeburg-1840/Düsseldorf), legal clerk, writer, and for five years owner of a private theater at Düsseldorf, was occupied with the Merlin legend for many years. In 1818 he composed a poem entitled “Merlin im tiefen Grabe,” which is influenced by Goethe’s “Cophtisches Lied”; years later (1831– 32), when he wrote his drama Merlin. Eine Mythe, he was still under the influence of Goethe, although now trying to find his own style.21 Immermann, using (among others) Schlegel, Hofstätter, and Rowley/Tieck as main sources, never intended his Merlin to be produced on stage, although as director of a theater he would have had the opportunity to do so. Consequently, he subtitled it “A Myth.” It was not until 1918 that the drama was staged, at the Berlin “Volksbühne” by Friedrich Kayssler, for the first and so far only time. The Merlin, as Harry Maync states, “Ist kein Bühnenwerk, sondern ein Gedankendrama” (is no stage play, but a philosophical drama).22 And that is why connoisseurs of literature and scholars admire and praise it as “one of the most noteworthy philosophical productions in the field of German literature,”23 although most German people have never read or even heard of it. Immermann’s Merlin is a new Messiah and Anti-Christ as well. Like Goethe’s Faust, the drama begins with a Zueignung (Dedication) and a Vorspiel (Prelude), which specify that it is intended also as a new Faust, even an “Anti-Faust.” Satan, in conversation with Luzifer, accuses God of treachery because he sent his son to the world, and he announces that he will do the same. As mother of his future son he chooses Candida, a beautiful and pious virgin who is the daughter of a rich man, and he succeeds in overpowering her body but not her soul. Therefore their son Merlin has, like Faust, “two souls in his bosom.” Combining the attributes of Faust and his shadow self, Mephistopheles makes him “the living contradiction.”24 The main part of the drama is entitled Der Gral (The Grail). Merlin, suspected and threatened on account of his unknown father, has to flee to Britain where he erects Stonehenge as a tomb for his mother. He reveals to the hermit and chronicler Placidus (Blaise in French and English romance) that it will be his duty to take the Holy Grail, the blood of Christ, from the clan of Titurel and “Parzifal,”25 and to give it into the custody of King Arthur (the new Messiah) and the Knights of the Round Table. Satan realizes that he has no power over his son. On his way to meet Arthur, Merlin defeats the wicked prophet Klingsor (taken from Wolfram’s Parzival), and he is hailed as the new savior of mankind at Arthur’s court. He appoints Arthur King of the Holy Grail, and leads him, along with “Ginevra” and the knights, to Montsalvatsch.26 Parzifal’s father Titurel, however, having been warned that the Anti-Christ will approach, orders the Grail to be removed to India (a motif first found in Albrecht’s Jüngerer Titurel, and since then familiar to German Grail tradition). In the forest of Briogne, Merlin meets the beautiful Niniane and forgets his mission. She unintentionally imprisons him for eternity, not knowing that the spell cannot be undone; because he cannot hear Arthur and his knights crying for help and guidance on their search to the Holy Grail, they all die on their quest in a hot desert.

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In the “Nachspiel: Merlin der Dulder” (Epilogue: Merlin, the Sufferer), Satan tempts his son by accusing him of having led Arthur and his knights, not to the Grail, but to Hades, and by promising to liberate him. But Merlin turns to God, and he dies praying in repentance the Pater Noster. This rather symbolic, even allegorical, drama portrays the fate of Man who struggles in pursuit of ambitious plans and unobtainable salvation but is finally ruined by his own nature. Immermann not only departed from the German tradition, but he also changed the Merlin legend considerably, for example in the account of his death. He also applied Gnostic doctrines, for example by emphasizing a veritable and un-Christian dualism of God and Devil fighting against each other. Many scholars, though not all, praise Immermann’s Merlin as an outstanding piece of German poetry, comparing it with Goethe’s Faust or Wagner’s Parsifal. In any case, there is no doubt that Immermann advanced the distinctive German approach to the Merlin legend. He not only exercised a great influence on all who dealt with the Merlin legend subsequently, but he also inspired artisans, such as the painter Franz Stassen (1869–1949) who illustrated nearly a hundred books,27 mostly by combining art decor and symbolism, and who designed twenty-five watercolors for Immermann’s Merlin. Merlin at the End of the Nineteenth and in the Early Twentieth Century Two German authors, Paul Heyse and Gerhard Hauptmann, have used the legend of Merlin as a substructure for modern novels. The two novels are very different in style and meaning—Heyse’s book is somewhat trivial, whereas Hauptmann’s novel is burdened with heavy symbolism—but both of them are worth reading for all who are interested in German literature of the fin de siècle and the beginning of the twentieth century. Paul Heyse (1830–1914) was a prolific and, in his time, best-selling writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1910. Merlin. Roman in sieben Büchern (1892)28 recounts the life and death of a contemporary but fictional author named Georg Falkner. One of Falkner’s most important dramas is about Merlin and Viviane, but he provides a different ending to the story. Merlin, happily married to Arthur’s daughter Blancheflur, is envied by Viviane; she seduces and imprisons him, but finally he is released, not by the love of his wife but by his six-year-old son. The opening night of the drama is a great success for Georg, especially due to the capricious actress Esther who plays the role of Viviane. Like Viviane she seduces Georg (once called “Dr. Merlin” by her). Filled with guilt, Georg returns home some days later, only to learn that his wife Lili has died. He never really recovers: shortly after he meets Esther again many years later, he has a stroke. He ends up at a hospital for patients with mental diseases, where he commits suicide, like a modern Merlin in the garden under a whitethorn. Heyse had probably no special interest in the Merlin legend, but he did use the motif of Merlin’s ominous enchantment by a woman as a mythological parallel. Another German Nobel laureate, Gerhard Hauptmann (1862–1946), took the

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medieval myth much more seriously. He used the other part of the German Merlin tradition when he began, in 1917, to conceive the novel Der neue Christophorus, although he never finished it. The first chapter was published in 1932, entitled Merlins Geburt. Aus den Fragmenten des Romans ‘Merlin’; some more parts were published later; and finally in 1970 all the printed parts, papers, and drafts were collected in volume VI of the so-called Centenar-Ausgabe (for the 100th birthday of Hauptmann).29 The highly metaphysical fragments are overloaded with religious and especially Christian speculations. They tell, again in discourse with Goethe’s Faust,30 the story of a new Messiah, first called Merlin, later “Erdmann” (Man of Earth), because he was mysteriously born in a grave. His spiritual father, a catholic hermit—in the first drafts called Franz, since 1937 “Christoph(orus)”—oversees Merlin’s/Erdmann’s education and life, but to what exact end we never learn from the fragments. Merlin and Viviane, and Merlin the devil-born Messiah, were also the dominating motifs of several more German adaptations of the Merlin legend. Most of them are completely forgotten today, and they are hard to find even in philological libraries. Hilde Wallner, in her Viennese dissertation of 1936, provides some information about these authors and their “Merlins”: Friedrich W.van Oesteren (Ein modernes deutsches Merlinepos, epic, 1900), Friedrich Lienhard (König Arthur, drama, 1900; Merlin der Königs-barde, novella, 1900), Gustav Renner (Merlin, drama, 1901–1904), and Richard von Kralik (Merlin, a dramatic adaptation of the Viviane episode, using techniques of the Baroque theater, 1913). A great success in their time were the eight Grail dramas by Eduard Stucken, written between 1913 and 1924. Stucken (1865–1936), born in Moscow the son of an American-German businessman, was one of the neoromantic poets, and he composed several dramas, poems, and epics. His novel Die weiβ en Gotter (The White Gods, 1918–22) deals with the fall of the Aztec empire, and it is still known and read even today. Four dramas of his Grail cycle depict episodes of the Arthurian Merlin: Merlins Geburt (1903; also entitled Lucifer, produced 1923 in Dresden), Zauberer Merlin, Vortigern (also entitled Das verlorene Ich), and Uther Pendragon. Stucken’s Merlin is the great wizard and magician of the Arthurian legend. His plays are full of neoromantic coloring and often feverish sensuality, but they lack real dramatic impact. Wilhelm Kubie, pseudonym of the Austrian writer Willy Ortmann (1890–1948), composed one of the most fascinating German novels about Arthur, Mummenschanz auf Tintagel (Masquerade at Tintagel, 1947; shortened version, 1937). The whole story, in which Merlin plays his usual Arthurian role, is told by the knight Bedivir, farcically depicting a rather gloomy and somber society. The novel was forgotten for nearly four decades, until rediscovered by Siegrid Schmidt; her dissertation (1989) includes a reprint of the whole book. Like many writers of his time, Kubie is rather sarcastic about old myths and visionary ideas, and as a result Merlin emerges as an unpleasant person.

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The Merlin of Tankred Dorst/Ursula Ehler In 1976 Elisabeth Frenzel, in her Stoffe der Weltliteratur (4th edition, Stuttgart), rightly stressed that the modern (especially the German) Merlin tradition was dominated by problems and nebulous speculations that reduced Merlin to an “unklare Vorstellung” (a character without clear and definite contours).31 This situation was already changing, however, since translations and movies from Britain and the United States were beginning to inundate the Western German-speaking countries. Furthermore, the Merlin by Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler, the largest drama of modern German literature and the theatrical sensation of the early 1980s, finally made Merlin familiar, at least to all Germans interested in literature. It seems appropriate for me to depict the situation from my personal memories. I can well remember the time when my students and I learned from announcements that the already prominent playwright Tankred Dorst was writing an Arthurian revue; together with John Boorman’s movie Excalibur (1981) and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel (The Mists of Avalon 1982), the Merlin drama established something like an “Arthurian triad.” There were, however, significant differences between the AngloAmerican and German use of the Arthurian legend and of Merlin. It is necessary to remind American readers of the special intellectual situation in Middle Europe during the early 1980s, which was rather different from the United States and even Western Europe (France, Britain). There was an inarticulate feeling of an approaching catastrophe, possibly another European war or an atomic or ecological disaster, generated by the politics of the first Reagan administration and intensified by Thatcher’s and, to some degree, also by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s hard line, which led to the installation of new atomic missiles in Germany. A pop group called Geier Sturzflug wrote a song that was very popular during those times and expressed cynically the vague anxiety of many young people: “Besuchen Sie Europa, solange es noch steht” (Visit Europe so long as it is still standing). Nevertheless, that feeling did not prevent most people from enjoying life and the still-flourishing economy. And for many of us, Merlin articulated that strange combination of feelings, a nearly baroque and lustful apprehension of some catastrophic twilight of the modern gods. Boorman’s movie, portraying an optimistic Arthurian disaster, was surprising, unfamiliar, and militant, whereas Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Arthurian fantasy depicted a more sympathetic world of contrasts: a mythological, legendary world with an intact nature, with a good, natural, and human religion (unlike the “new” Christian religion), a world inspired by women and not dominated by belligerent males. Dorst, at that time already the leading West German dramatist, first conceived in 1978 an Arthurian revue for the British producer Peter Zadek, then living and working in Hamburg, to be produced at a large hall in Hamburg (the Fischhalle). I had the chance to meet Tankred Dorst while he was working on his Merlin project, and he told me that he began with clippings of T.H.White’s novel, hoping to construct the Arthurian piece within a short time. When he and Zadek realized the financial problems of staging the Arthurian legend in a revue-like style at the Hamburg

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Fischhalle, he and Ursula Ehler began to write a new piece: Merlin oder Das Wüste Land.32 As sources, they used Wolfram von Eschenbach, Thomas Malory, Rowley/ Tieck, Immermann, Mark Twain, and T.H.White, and they were especially inspired by the books of the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and of Emma Jung, the wife of the psychologist C.G.Jung. Dorst told us, at a discussion at Salzburg University, that he had been reading all of these sources in a “fast and greedy manner.” To construct the huge and complicated drama, he fixed a gigantic sheet of paper to the wall beside his writing desk; it was fascinating for me to see his bookshelves with all the volumes he used, and that big dramatic map outlining the structure of the drama in progress. When the drama was published in 1981,33 it was instantly praised as an outstanding achievement. Dorst and Ehler tell the whole story of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table, from the first beginning to the violent end, combining dramatic, epic, and lyric elements into a baroque blend of overwhelming intensity. Without abridgement, the more than one hundred scenes, sometimes still revue-like, would require nearly fifteen hours of staging and about fifty actors. It is a real “gran teatro del mundo” (great theater of the world) in the tradition of the Spanish baroque theater, of Goethe’s Faust, and even of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungs, and therefore it is deeply rooted in European and German theatrical tradition. Dorst and Ehler blend not only storytelling, dialogue, and songs, but also, like Shakespeare, seriousness, irony, and humor, and, like Goethe’s Faust, different periods of history. Merlin here is the “master of the play,” the auteur of the Arthurian world. Although he is the son of the devil, he tries to transform Arthurian society into a world of understanding and tolerance, into something like “medieval democracy.” But at the end he fails: human failures, passion, jealousy, and greed destroy all his dreams and plans. He retires together with Viviane into the magic bush of whitethorn, leaving the Arthurian world to end in blood and tears. The drama suggests two finales to the reader and audience: one depicting the end of the planet Earth, ruined by mankind himself; another depicting the end of the Arthurian dream, but leaving behind at least a little bit of the usual Arthurian hope. Much more than in other Arthurian dramas and epics, Merlin here is the dominating person of the story, a “positive Mephisto”; in contrast to other works about Merlin and Arthur, the view of the world, as it is shown by the two authors, is dominated by a flamboyant pessimism, a lust for grand catastrophes. After the first production of this enormous play in Düsseldorf and (to much warmer praise) in Munich, it was staged in other ways: as a semimusical in Vienna (again with a dominating Merlin, videotaped by the Austrian Television), and as an alternative love story at Zurich (reducing the role of Merlin). Dorst and Robert Wilson also produced a sequel that concentrated on Parzival (Hamburg)34; the musician George Gruntz even created a musical piece named The Holy Grail of Joy and Jazz, using Dorst’s play for structuring a jazz oratorio without words. Even some alternative and smaller theater groups adapted it for smaller stages, sometimes with remarkable success. In the ensuing years, Dorst’s and Ehler’s Merlin has been constantly staged, not only in Germanspeaking countries, but also in several countries of middle and eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands,

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Denmark, Sweden, Cameroon, the United States, Portugal, and Brazil; Dorst and Ehler were especially impressed by the compelling production in Brazil (1993/4), and they also told me (in July 1994) that the Berlin State Opera (Munich) had commissioned a Merlin opera (libretto by Dorst/Ehler, music by the German composer Trojan).35 Dorst’s and Ehler’s Merlin, together with Boorman’s movie and Bradley’s novel, have made Merlin for the first time a popular figure for German-speaking readers, theater-goers, and cinema-lovers. During the 1980s, their Merlin has been something of a “Kult-Stück” (cult piece), especially for students and young intellectuals, and it seems now to have become a modern classic of German theater. If there are more possibilities for the use of the Merlin myth in German, in the aftermath of the Cold War, German reunification, and new bloody conflicts around the world, nobody knows at the moment. In 1988–89, when Christoph Hein, the leading playwright of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), was inspired by Dorst’s and Ehler’s Merlin to conceive a drama about politicians being out of date and the necessity of a “Wende” (turning point), he used the legends of the Arthurian Round Table and the Grail quest, but he left Merlin aside.36 We may be sure, nevertheless, that the Old Magician will live on one way or another in German literature. Notes 1. There are some problems with the word “German”: like “deutsch” or “allemande,” it means the national language spoken in Germany (before 1990, the two Germanies), Austria, parts of Switzerland, and the southern Tyrol (in Italy); it also means, however, the German nation and German states/countries (some dozens of larger and smaller German territories, a single country from 1871 until 1945, two until 1990, and again a unified single one since 1990). For the purpose of this article, “German” refers to “German language/literature, and so on,” but not the German and German-speaking states and countries. 2. Editions: Merlin und Seifrid de Ardemont von Albrecht von Scharfenberg in der Bearbeitung Ulrich Fuetrers, ed. Friedrich Panzer (1902; StLV 227); Die Gralsepen in Ulrich Fuetrers Bearbeitung (Buch der Abenteuer), ed. Kurt Nyholm (Berlin, DDR: 1964) (DTM 57). 3. See the editions of Panzer, 1902, S.XXXIII-LXII, and Nyholm, 1964, S.XCIX-CII; see also Nyholm, 1967. 4. There exists a fourteenth-century fragment of 324 verses about Merlin and Saint Luthild from the Lower Rhinelands that tries to combine the two legendary figures; edition: Der Rheinische Merlin. Text, Übersetzung, Untersuchungen der ‘Merlin’- und ‘Luthild’-Fragmente. Nach der Hs. Ms. germ. qu. 1409 der Staatsbibliothek Preuβ ischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Hartmut Beckers, trans. Gerhard Bauer et al. (Paderborn, 1991). 5. See Paul Zumthor, “Merlin le Prophète, un theme de littérature polémique et historiographique” (diss., Genève, 1943; reprint: Genève, 1973). 6. Edition: Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, ed. Hans Gille and Ingeborg Spriewald, vol. II (Berlin, 1970). See also William C. McDonald: “Whose Bread I Eat”: The Song-Poetry of Michel Beheim (Göppingen, 1981) (=GAG 318). 7. Sämmtliche Werke, XXXV (Leipzig, 1858), pp. 364–66.

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8. In Geschichte des Prinzen Biribinker, which is incorporated into the novel. Wieland might have known Merlin from the libretto of the French operetta Ile de Merlin (first composition: 1717). At Vienna, Christoph Willibald Gluck composed for this libretto twenty-one “airs nouveaux” that were produced for the first time in 1758 at Schönbrunn, the Royal Court of Vienna: see Adelaide Marie Weiss, “Merlin in German Literature. A Study of the Merlin Legend in German Literature from Medieval Beginnings to the End of Romanticism” (diss., The Catholic University, Washington, D.C., 1933), pp. 53–54. 9. Leipzig, 1804. Modern paperback edition, with an Afterword by Klaus Günzel: Frankfurt and Berlin, 1988 (=Ullstein Buch 37058). 10. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, XXXIII (1980), pp. 211–312. The editor, Liselotte Dieckmann, mentions rather briefly in her Introduction some problems between the two translators and Schlegel (pp. viii, xix). 11. Published in Tiecks’s Shakespeares Vorschule, II (Leipzig, 1829): “Die Geburt des Merlin oder Das Kind hat seinen Vater gefunden.” 12. Halle, 1853; reprint Hildesheim and New York, 1979. 13. Written between 1787 and 1789, originally for a German opera or comedy and later called Der Groβ -Cophta (1791). Goethe published two songs of the never-written opera separately in 1796 with that rather cryptic title. The musician Johann Friedrich Reichardt, one of Goethe’s friends, had already composed melodies for them in 1789. 14. Published in 1856 in Ein fürstliches Leben by Ludwig Preller. 15. Merlin der Wilde (1829), a romantic ballad about Merlin, “the Wild Man of the Woods” who knows the secrets of nature. The poem was dedicated to Uhland’s friend Karl F. Mayer who answered with a short poem of two stanzas (“Wenn Phantasie ein armes Reh”). 16. Nine poems entitled Katharina (1838): in Poem IV, “Wie Merlin, der eitle Weise…” (1833), he compares himself with Merlin, held spell-bound by two beautiful eyes; see Weiss, pp. 126–28. 17. Nine poems entitled Waldlieder (1843): Poem 5, “Wie Merlin möcht ich durch die Wälder ziehen…,” “manifests the author’s desire to live in the forests like Merlin. The nobleman Lenau (1802–50), born in Hungary, knew not only the forests of Germany but also of Ohio where he purchased land in 1832 to become a farmer; he left the New World one year later, however, in disillusionment. 18. “In der Winternacht” (1840–50), a love poem mentioning the enchanted Merlin. The poem was perhaps written at Spandau near Berlin, where Kinkel, professor of theology at the University of Prussian Bonn, was imprisoned after the revolution of 1848–49 for political reasons. In 1850 Kinkel and his friend Carl Schurz (who later emigrated to the United States and became an important politician there) succeeded in a sensational escape. Printed by Weiss, p. 132. 19. Two poems in his Gedichte (published 1852): “Unter den Reben” and “Merlin and Niniane” about nature, love, and Weltschmerz (world-weariness); Kaufmann was a friend of Kinkel, and as an answer to “In der Winternacht” in 1848 he also wrote some verses mentioning Merlin. 20. “Merlin der Zauberer” (published 1857), a romantic ballad about Arthur’s love for Guinevere and Merlin’s for Niniane. 21. First published Düsseldorf, 1832; modern edition: Karl Immermann, Werke in fünf Bande, ed. Benno von Wiese, vol. 5 (Wiesbaden, 1977), pp. 549–686. 22. Harry Maync, Immermanns Werke IV (Leipzig and Wien, n.d.), p. 272. 23. Weiss, p. 111. 24. Weiss, p. 113.

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25. The name of the Grail seeker is “Perceval” (in Old French) and “Parzival” (the usual spelling in Middle High German, pronounced “Partsifal”). Wagner decided to use the spelling “Parsifal” (according to an etymological explanation of the nineteenth century that later was proved to be wrong). Modern German tradition knows several mixed spellings of the name: Parzifal, Parsival, Partzifal, and so on. 26. The castle of the Grail, according to Wolfram’s Parzival, usually translated “Mount of Salvation.” 27. Among others, the Greek Myths, the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Goethe’s Faust, and Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungs. 28. First published 1892; modern edition: Paul Heyse, Gesammelte Werke, 2nd Series, vol. 1 (Stuttgart/Berlin, n.d.). 29. Gerhart Hauptmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans-Egon Hass et al., vol. 10 (Darmstadt, 1970) (“Centenär-Ausgabe”), pp. 675–1115. There, on pp. 1108–15, is also a brief account of the complicated history of the fragments. 30. Notice by Hauptmann, dated October 15, 1919; “Nachlaß-Nr. 234, S. 43,” printed: vol. 10, p. 1069. 31. Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Querschnitte (l96l), 8th Edition (Stuttgart, 1991) (=Kröners Taschenausgabe 300). Neither Frenzel nor most other readers had realized that Arno Schmidt had used the legend of “Merlin and Niniane,” together with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach, for the deep structure of his gigantic and enigmatic novel Zettels Traum (published 1970); for Schmidt, Merlin is the archetype of the senex amans (the old and aged lover). See Rudi Schweikert, in Bargfelder Bote/Materialien zum Werk Arno Schmidts, vols. 58–60 (March, 1982). 32. Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler have collaborated in writing since the 1970s. 33. An edition of the whole text, with many drafts, was published in 1985: Tankred Dorst, Werkausgabe 2 (Frankfurt, 1985). Sequels to Merlin, but without Merlin himself, are the story “Der nackte Mann” (published 1986), the movie scenario “Der Wilde” (published in Forum. Materialien und Beitrage zur Mittelalter-Rezeption, III, ed. Rüdiger Krohn [Göppingen, 1992] [=GAG 540]), and (together with Robert Wilson) a Parzival production for the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1987: Parzival: Auf der anderen Seite des Sees. All Parzival sequels were later printed in: Tankred Dorst, Parzival: Ein Szenarium. With Ursula Ehler (Frankfurt, 1990). 34. See note 33. 35. The first German opera about Merlin was by Karl Goldmark: Viviane (1886). On May 8, 1993, the opera Merlin by the Austrians Constantin Oeffinger (libretto) and “Franz Xaver Frenzel” (pseudonym for the composer Friedemann Katt) had its premiere at St. Pölten (Niederösterreich); the opera, using T.H.White’s The Book of Merlyn as its source, was a mixed success. For productions (1981–2002), see Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler, Merlins Zauber (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 139–40. Four CDs recorded in 1993 were published by HörVerlag in Munich, 1995. 36. Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (The Knights of the Round Table), first published in 1989, in both East and West Germany.

CHAPTER 7 Merlin as New-World Wizard ALAN C.LUPACK

Although basically the creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin has his roots in earlier traditions. He combines elements of Myrddin, the Welsh bard and prophet; Lailoken, a Scottish wildman of the woods; and Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas and Nennius refer to as a British military leader and worker of wonders. Geoffrey links the prophetic and wonder-working traditions by saying that Merlin was also called Ambrosius.1 The Merlin we know today generally descends in a direct line from Geoffrey’s character, as developed by Thomas Malory and as adapted by a number of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury authors to their own situations and concerns. Among those to adapt Merlin are a surprising number of American writers, most of whom seem more interested in his reputation as visionary, prophet, and magician than in retelling the old tales. In fact, American authors take considerable liberties with the traditional character and the stories surrounding him. Some of the earliest of these authors depict Merlin as having the vision to foresee a better world or the power to bring one about. For others, particularly after the Civil War, Merlin becomes the focal point for a questioning of the possibility of achieving the ideal represented by Camelot. It is hardly unusual that American Arthurian authors associate the Dream of Camelot with the American Dream and the related notion of the American Adam, perhaps America’s only truly native mythology. For the Dream of Camelot, like the American Dream, is a glorious ideal, the envisioning of which is an inspiration for much that is good. But for all its glory, the American Dream has been seen— especially since the Civil War and the rise of realism in literature—as something that more often than not turns into a nightmare and leads to disillusionment, if not doom, when it comes into contact with practical considerations and harsh realities. The Arthurian world, often with a focus on the character of Merlin, is similarly seen as one in which the dream of perfection is impossible to achieve because of its distance from the actual and the practical or, more simply, because of the demands of the real world. Though ultimately doomed to failure, the vision of Camelot, like the American Dream, is so noble that its failure is usually not pathetic but tragic. Merlin as prophet was the inspiration for the first American Arthurian work, a pamphlet with a blatantly political purpose. In 1807 Joseph Leigh, a Welsh-born American, wrote Illustrations of the Fulfilment of the Prediction of Merlin, which imitated

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the prophecies of Merlin as found in Geoffrey and other authors.2 Leigh created his own prophecy, which speaks about a lion that wounds a “Virgin true,” as a commentary on the relationship between Britain, represented by the lion, and the United States, represented by the Virgin. The latter symbolizes “injured innocence” (10–11), both because of the events leading to the Revolution and because of the incident leading to Leigh’s writing of the prophecy: the attack by the British ship Leopard on the American frigate Chesapeake. This attack, occasioned by a British demand to be allowed to search the Chesapeake and remove four members of the crew considered to be deserters from the British navy, was part of a pattern of British impressment of members of the crews of American vessels. Tensions between the United States and England were greatly increased by what the former saw as an assault on its sovereignty. Leigh’s prophecy is a reminder, in appropriately cryptic language that he then explained in detail, of the consequences for Britain the last time it tested the United States and its ally France, as well as a warning that a similar fate awaits if Britain does not make reparations for the attack. In the terms of the prophecy: “When the Cock [France] and Dove [the United States] the Lion [Britain] shall fight,/The Lion shall crouch beneath their might” (12). The final line of the prophecy states bluntly that “The Lion’s might shall be undone” (18). Leigh’s prophecy is clearly proudly patriotic. It appropriates the British prophet not, as some earlier prophecies of Merlin had done, to glorify the British monarchy, but rather to lend the supernatural weight of prophecy to the claims of a young nation. Though less political, Merlin: A Drama in Three Acts by Lambert A.Wilmer, the next American work to focus on the magician, goes just as far in adapting Merlin to the New-World setting.3 Wilmer’s Merlin has no link to the traditional character, except that he is a wizard who helps to direct events, a magus ex machina who engineers a happy ending. He is actually more like Shakespeare’s Prospero than any Merlin from earlier literature, as he commands “all elves that flit in air,/Or skim the wave…” (1), and as he controls the elements to unite a pair of lovers. Wilmer’s two lovers are based, interestingly, on Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Elmira Royster, whose parents had convinced her that Poe was not an acceptable suitor. In the play, Alphonso and Elmira (their names derived from the middle names of Poe and Royster) are kept apart by Elmira’s father; in another echo of Poe’s life, Alphonso is contemplating suicide. At one point, he says—in lines that show how American the play can be, “Now since my ticket in this lottery Of man’s existence hath come up blank, I will expunge my number from life’s book.” (8–9) Merlin travels to “Lapland’s freezing clime” to get a magic root, which “None but myself do know” (11) and which he uses to banish the symbolic Furies who are plaguing Alphonso. Ultimately the Prospero-like Merlin reunites the lovers on the banks of the Hudson River, near Elmira’s home, and thus the play advises Poe against

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despair by suggesting that even seemingly hopeless situations may have a happy ending. Another romantic Merlin appears in several pieces by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who makes Merlin central to three poems (“Merlin I,” “Merlin II,” and “Merlin’s Song”) and alludes to him in two others (“The Harp” and “Politics”). In none of these is there a suggestion of, or allusion to, any specific incidents from Malory or other Arthurian romances. Instead, Emerson is concerned almost solely with Merlin’s symbolic value as a bard/prophet.4 In “Merlin I,” Emerson describes the “kingly bard” who: Must smite the chords rudely and hard, As with hammer or with mace; That they may render back Artful thunder, which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of the supersolar blaze.5 The power of the bard’s song results from his vision, which puts him in tune with nature. Kenneth Walter Cameron has observed that “The song which Merlin sang or taught is the voice of the Divine indwelling Reason or Oversoul.”6 This song echoes the balance of Nature that “Made all things in pairs,” as Emerson says in “Merlin II” (123), a poem that demonstrates how the order of art reflects the order of the universe. Merlin’s bardic chords seem also to predict—almost to control or direct— the secrets of the universe. In “Merlin I” and “Merlin II,” his song is associated with fate. In the former, Emerson says: Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate, Chiming with the forest tone, When boughs buffet boughs in the wood; Chiming with the gasp and moan Of the ice-imprisoned flood; With the pulse of manly hearts; With the voice of orators; With the din of city arts; With the cannonade of wars; With the marches of the brave; And the prayers of might from martyrs’ cave. (120–21) and in the latter: Subtle rhymes with ruin rife, Murmur in the house of life, Sung by the Sisters as they spin;

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In perfect time and measure they Build and unbuild our echoing clay. (124) The prophetic nature of Merlin’s vision, and its link to the mystic vision of the selfreliant individual that Emerson sees as an ideal, is suggested by a journal entry he made in 1848: “The boy Merlin laughs three times, and, in each instance, because he foresees or second-sees what is future or distant. We are always on the edge of this, but cannot quite fetch it.”7 Unlike Wilmer, whose plot and purpose require a Merlin who is a wonder-worker, Emerson’s peculiar romanticism emphasizes the vision and power of the bardic Merlin as poet and prophet. Although Emerson praises “the old lays in which Merlin and Arthur are celebrated,”8 there is evidence in his writings that the romance traditions were not compatible with his personal philosophy. For example, he praises an incident from the Morte d’Arthur that recounts “Sir Gawain’s parley with Merlin in his wonderful prison,” calling the scene “a height which attracts more than other parts, and is best remembered.”9 Perhaps what most attracted Emerson was the following exchange: “How, Merlin, my good friend,” said Sir Gawain, “are you restrained so strongly that you cannot deliver yourself nor make yourself visible unto me; how can this happen, seeing that you are the wisest man in the world.” “Rather,” said Merlin, “the greatest fool; for I well knew that all this would befall me, and I have been fool enough to love another more than myself, for I taught my mistress that whereby she hath imprisoned me in such manner that none can set me free.” We see here that the Merlin of medieval romance ultimately surrenders his selfreliance. By using the alternative bardic tradition in his poems, Emerson escapes this contradiction of his own romantic philosophy and of the symbolic meaning he intends for Merlin. The willingness to subordinate the Arthurian narrative traditions to personal vision is typical of American authors who use Merlin in their works. This is exemplified in the late nineteenth-century drama The Quest of Merlin by Richard Hovey, the introduction to what was intended to be a nine-part sequence collectively called Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Dramas. Only four of the nine plays and fragments of others were completed, but it is clear that Hovey was allowing himself a free hand in his retelling of the Arthurian legends and in his treatment of Merlin. His principal concern is with the love affair of Launcelot and Guenevere, which he attempts to justify by suggesting that a bond existed between them prior to Guenevere’s marriage to Arthur. (It can be noted that at the time he wrote these plays, Hovey, like Launcelot, was having an affair with a married woman.) The Quest of Merlin introduces the problem of the love triangle by showing Merlin in a typically romantic quest for knowledge, in this case knowledge of the outcome of

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the projected marriage between Arthur and Guenevere. The play begins in a rocky cavern in the bowels of the earth, in which is seen a tortuously twisting root of the tree Yggdrasil; Merlin has come to seek the answer to his question from the Norns.10 But Hovey is not content simply with mixing Arthurian and Scandinavian legends. After the Norns predict, “Woe to the maiden!…Woe to the Knight!…Woe to the Prince!” (9), there follows a procession of mythological characters that includes Sylphs, Gnomes, Naiads, Dryads, Fauns, Pan, Satyrs, Bacchus, Goblins, Elves, Oberon, Titania, Puck, Ariel, Fairies, Aphrodite, Valkyrs, and Angels. The function of these characters is, in part, to make cryptic suggestions about later events in the cycle of plays, and thus to make this initial masque truly introductory. At the same time, the reader is whisked, as Merlin is, through the mythologies of the Western world and ultimately led to a new mythology—or at least to a new worldview. Towards the end of the play (with the setting now in Avalon), Argente, the Lady of the Lake, once again predicts the downfall of Arthur, but her ladies comfort her by saying, “the man and the woman/Build heaven for themselves” (65–66). The play concludes with a series of monologues by “Three forms, like unto Angels,” who are called the Star of Arthur, the Star of Launcelot, and the Star of Guenevere, because “on the forehead of each gleams a star.” These characters of Hovey’s new mythology predict a harmonious outcome and make it clear that despite “that bitter strife within,” Launcelot will be: As in the outer battle’s din, Victor where’er his fate be cast, The triumph shall be his at last…. They also say that Guenevere will “leave a name beyond Time’s scorn” and that “love may shrine and Song revere/The memory of Guenevere” (75–80). Though Hovey’s play was written several years after Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, it is clearly in the romantic tradition. His Merlin is a quester who travels to strange places and encounters marvelous beings; though he does not have within himself the ability to foresee the future, he does have the ability to discover it. Another fascinating dramatic reinterpretation of Arthurian story can be found in Excalibur: An Arthurian Drama (published in 1909, but written in 1893) by neo-Gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram.11 The play is of interest largely because of the role of powerful controlling force that Merlin plays in it. Merlin is ordinarily presented as a guide who sets Arthur on the path to kingship but who does not control Arthur’s destiny; this is represented in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, for example, through the early disappearance of Merlin from the story. Cram’s Merlin, on the other hand, says of himself: …I am he That God has made His deputy on earth. I am incarnate will, and I abide

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Forever scathless. (52) Unlike the Merlin of Malory, who is a tool of fate, Cram’s Merlin sees himself as playing the role of fortune or destiny in creating the king and the realm: All passeth as an ordered pageantry, And without hindrance the great design That gathered perfect form within my brain Takes shape and substance. So I stand with God, Who did conceive the project of a world And give it being, in that I may weave A splendid fabric where the warp and woof Are little lives that, like a tangled web Of knotting threads, would break and haul awry Did I not play the part of destiny. (49) Later, when Merlin separates the duelling rivals in love even though the king wishes to continue, Arthur asks, “Am I the king, or thou, bold sorcerer?” Merlin responds that no king “sits on a steadfast throne unless he learn/The wisdom that God gives not with a crown” (99). When Arthur asks if he must learn this wisdom from Merlin, the magician responds unequivocally in the affirmative. Arthur suggests that such subordination makes his rule “but a pageant.” Merlin offers no consolation, no face saving to the king. His metaphor is even harsher than Arthur’s: Ring thyself with knights And daunt the world with show of dreadful arms, Thou art a crowned jester, if thou lack’st The prop of wisdom for thy majesty. (99) And, of course, it is Merlin who is that prop of wisdom. In the final scenes of the play, Arthur is willing to give up his crown in order to have the woman he loves. He is deceived into thinking he is meeting Guenever, when in fact he meets and yields his sword to Morgan. Even at this point, Arthur appeals to Merlin as the controlling agent. “Give me back my lady and I do thy will,” (155) he says. Merlin agrees, despite the dangers he foresees. This unusual relationship between Arthur and Merlin is a fairly radical deviation from the normal dynamic between the two. Merlin is clearly directing events, and Arthur seems little more than a tool he must use to achieve his end. Cram’s Merlin is less the beneficent guide and more the romantic figure of a frustrated artist or creator, annoyed with the lack of understanding of his higher purpose that Arthur epitomizes. In contrast lo these romantic Merlin figures, there is another tradition: the realistic approach to Merlin, which is generally thought to have begun with Twain’s A

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Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.12 Twain is the central figure in this tradition, as he is in all of American Arthurian literature; and it could be argued that the Merlins of Robinson, Cabell, Berger, and others are descended from Twain’s character. Yet there are earlier examples of a more realistic approach to Merlin and the Arthurian legends. The first instance occurs in “The Antique Ring,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.13 The ring of the title is given by Edward Caryl, a minor writer, to his fiancée, Clara Pemberton, who asks him to create a legend about the ring, a story that need not be true. What she seeks is for him not only to offer the traditional symbol of love, but to unite with it his creativity. The legend he creates, a story within the story, traces the ring to “Merlin, the British wizard, who gave it to the lady of his love.” Merlin made the ring’s diamond the abiding-place of a spirit, which, though of a fiendish nature, was bound to work only good, so long as the ring was an unviolated pledge of love and faith, both of the giver and receiver. But should love prove false, and faith be broken, then the evil spirit would work his own devilish will, until the ring were purified by becoming the medium of some good and holy act, and again the pledge of faithful love. (111) The ring is handed down to Queen Elizabeth, who gave it to the Earl of Essex. Now in the Tower of London awaiting execution, Essex asks the Countess of Shrewsbury to convey it to the Queen as a reminder of her former affection. But the Countess betrays Essex and keeps the ring. It is later stolen from the ancestral vaults of the Shrewsburys by one of Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers and is used as a pledge in a series of faithless relationships, until it passes to the New World and winds up in a collection box in a New England church. The charity of the giver purifies the ring and makes it once again a symbol of “faithful and devoted love” (123) and so a fitting engagement ring. Clara’s reaction to the story is to announce that “whatever the world may say of the story, I prize it far above the diamond which enkindled your imagination” (124). She seems to be suggesting that the world will not think highly of the story, that it is a tale only a fiancée could love. She goes on to say that it is “really a pretty tale, and very proper for any of the Annuals. But, Edward, your moral does not satisfy me. What thought did you embody in the ring?” (124). Though it is intriguing that Hawthorne should write about Merlin, even in this peripheral way, the story leads to the conclusion that Hawthorne is rejecting such tales. Like Chaucer ‘s “Tale of Sir Thopas,” “The Antique Ring” is deliberately flawed in order to comment on the tale itself. The fantastic legends of the old English poets, legends such as those about Merlin, Hawthorne implies, are not a fruitful area for those who, like Edward Caryl, are seeking to assist in “the growth of American Literature” (108). Hawthorne uses the tale of Merlin’s ring to show the danger to a young writer of relying on such foreign legends. Thus the story is analogous to Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux “a tale that depicts a young American whose coming of age requires him to reject personally and politically the dominance

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of his kinsman, a colonial governor appointed by the King of England. Just as Robin must learn to make his own way in the world, so must Edward Caryl learn to reject the magic of Merlin and make his own way in literature. “The Antique Ring” thus uses a legend about Merlin to reject such legends and the British domination in literature they imply, just as, in a sense, Twain uses an Arthurian story to reject such stories and British claims of cultural superiority. Another work in which Merlin figures foreshadows the comic aspect of Twain’s treatment of the legends of Camelot and pokes fun at British cultural pretension at the same time that it satirizes superficial values. Edgar Fawcett’s The New King Arthur: An Opera Without Music (1885) opens with a tongue-in-cheek dedication to Alfred Lord Tennyson: Take, Alfred, this mellifluous verse of mine, Nor rank too high the honor I bestow, Howe’er it thrill thy soul with grateful pride. For thou hast sung of Arthur and his knights, And thou hast told of deeds that they have done, And thou hast told of loves that they have loved, And thou hast told of sins that they have sinned, And I have sung in my way, thou in thine. I think my way superior to thine, Yes, Alfred, yes, in loyal faith I do…,14 Fawcett’s play is what his title advertises: a new, that is a New-World, version of the Arthurian story. The play involves a plot by Lancelot to steal Excalibur so that he can gain control over Merlin. The latter is believed to possess two products, which Lancelot describes as “a face-wash that shall lend those blooming cheeks/ A pearlier beauty than of mortal tint” and a “hair-dye that shall stain each silken strand / Of those rich tresses into sunnier sheen” (32). With these products, he will win Guinevere away from Arthur. Guinevere agrees to help Lancelot, and even Merlin is enlisted in the plot when Lancelot promises to make him Prime Minister. The fact that he is tempted by this offer suggests that Merlin’s relationship to Arthur is far different from that in traditional sources, and certainly different from the romanticized concept of a prophet assisting a man fated to reshape his nation—the concept found, for example, in Tennyson. In fact, Fawcett’s Merlin considers Arthur a “self-centred prig” (123). Even the relationship between Merlin and Vivien is reinterpreted by Fawcett for comic effects. In the play, Modred loves Vivien and wants the magic cosmetics to win her. Vivien, in turn, loves Galahad and believes that if she can become a blonde (thus brighter and more like the vision of a beautiful woman, an ersatz Grail maiden, that he describes to her) he will love her. Thus she too plots to gain control of Excalibur. Only one character in The New King Arthur is truly noble: Dagonet the Fool, who is devoted to his king. He is able to frustrate the attempts to steal Excalibur, but in doing so he is caught with the sword and accused of the theft by Modred and the

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other conspirators. Like the Dagonet in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem Merlin, Fawcett’s fool is wise and loyal. But his virtues are not recognized. Instead, Merlin and the other conspirators make a scapegoat of him, and he is sent to a monastery to be treated as a lunatic. Though The New King Arthur is a comic play, it has, like Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, a serious side. It mocks Tennyson and Tennysonian notions of chivalry, to be sure, but it also satirizes the morals of the characters. Their interest in products that will enhance image rather than in substantial values seems more a criticism of American than of British society—a criticism that still seems valid today. In the satire of American values, the deromanticization of the Arthurian legend, and the presentation of Merlin as more of a schemer than a sorcerer, whose reputation—like that of many a modern product—is based on a pearly whiteness and sunny brightness that he can not really deliver, Fawcett’s play foreshadows Twain’s novel. As in The New King Arthur, Twain’s Merlin is not the wise advisor and mage seen in Malory. Nor is he the prophet used by Leigh, or the powerful, romantic figure found in Wilmer, Emerson, and Cram. Rather, he is a villainous enemy of the learning and progress that Hank Morgan would bring to Arthur’s Britain. To appreciate Twain’s departure from tradition, one might compare his Merlin not only with the early American predecessors, but also with Tennyson’s Merlin who is, like them, a romantic wonder-worker. The mage of the Idylls creates Camelot, a city built to music. But the wizardry of Twain’s Merlin cannot even protect his own tower from Hank’s technological “magic.” At first glance, it seems as if Merlin is a relatively minor character in Connecticut Yankee. He appears sporadically throughout the book and is, in most instances, defeated fairly easily by Hank. He is dealt with contemptuously by the Yankee, who calls him “Brer Merlin,”15 talks of his “enchanting away like a beaver” (147), and tells him, “the thing for you to do is to go home and work the weather, John W.Merlin” (155). Moreover, Merlin is only one of the forces Hank must battle in his attempt to initiate his reforms. As Henry Nash Smith observes, Hank “is involved in three conflicts with three adversaries…the Knights of the Round Table, defenders of the throne; Merlin; and the Established Church.”16 But Merlin, as the advisor of the King, represents the throne and the inherited hierarchical structure that supports it and that is supported by the Church (cf. 55–56). (It is interesting that in one of Dan Beard’s illustrations for the first edition of Connecticut Yankee, Merlin is depicted as Tennyson, who symbolized for Twain the monarchical order that he set out to criticize.17) Merlin also represents blind, unquestioning superstition that, in Hank’s view, is the basis for the authority of the Church. Thus Merlin may be seen as the embodiment of the attitudes with which Hank is in conflict. There is some evidence that Twain saw Hank’s conflict with Merlin as central to the book. In the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine of November 1889, there appeared selected passages from Connecticut Yankee. Between the passages, Twain provided linking notations in which he commented that Hank’s “miracle” of the eclipse

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raises him at once to the dignity of chief minister and executive, and at the same time so damages Merlin’s stock as an enchanter that Merlin becomes his enemy, and a bitter struggle for supremacy in magic ensues between the two which lasts to the end of the book, Merlin using the absurd necromancy of the time, and the Yankee beating it easily and brilliantly with the more splendid necromancy of the nineteenth century—that is, the marvels of modern science.18 It should be remembered that before Hank enters the lists “to either destroy knighterrantry or be its victim,” he says that it is “a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of superhuman art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age…. Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against mine” (275). Hank wins that battle, but he has one more to fight, the Battle of the Sand Belt, which results from Hank’s proclaiming his Republic. The proclamation declares that the monarchy “no longer exists” and that “its several adjuncts died also; wherefore there is no longer a privileged class, no longer an Established Church” (304). This proclamation is signed “the Boss” and is dated “from Merlin’s Cave.” It is from this cave that Hank directs the slaughter of the knights he calls the “original Crusaders, this being the Church’s war” (306). And it is in Merlin’s Cave that magic and science meet in a final confrontation. Despite Hank’s claim that “every time the magic of folderol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of folderol got left” (282), the result is a draw. Merlin gives Hank a potion to “make him sleep thirteen centuries”; then Merlin, intoxicated by the thought of his victory and “reeling about like a drunken man,” touches one of the defensive electrical wires and dies with a “petrified laugh” (318) on his face. A comic villain throughout much of the book, Merlin becomes frightening only in this final scene—maybe only in this final image. But to understand the true nature of this image and therefore Merlin’s role in the book, it is necessary to explore another of its themes. As Smith has pointed out, Twain’s Yankee is on one level “an avatar of the American Adam dwelling in the Garden of the World.”19 Hank himself says early in the book, “I stood here, at the very spring and source of the second great period of the world’s history; and could see the trickling stream of that history gather, and deepen and broaden, and roll its mighty tide down the far centuries…. I was a Unique; and glad to know that that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure” (53). Hank has the opportunity to make of the world what he will. He decides he can “boss the whole country inside of three months” (23). Like those of other American Adams, his rise to power is phenomenal. But, as it does for other American Adams—Jay Gatsby, for example—the American Dream turns into a nightmare, which leads the Adam to his fall. Merlin may be seen as the tempter in this new Old-World garden. He is the one whom Hank imitates in using “magic” to deceive and control, and he is the one who leads Hank to the ultimate betrayal of the democratic and moral principles he espouses.

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By the end of the book, Hank, who has spoken out for the masses and who has been appalled by the low regard some of the characters—like Morgan le Fay—have for human life, tells his fifty-two faithful followers that they should not be concerned about the upcoming battle because, although the whole of England is marching against them, they will have to fight only the 30,000 armed knights, and then “the civilian multitude in the war will retire” (307). How cheaply Hank has come to regard life is indicated in his concern, as he checks the electrified fences that will slaughter the knights, that Clarence has set up the electrical connections in a way that will waste energy: It’s too expensive—uses up force for nothing. You don’t want any ground connection except the one through the negative brush. The other end of the wire must be brought back into the cave and fastened independently and without any ground connection. Now, then, observe the economy of it. A cavalry charge hurls itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending no money, for there is only one ground wire; the moment they touch it they form a connection with the negative brush through the ground, and drop dead. Don’t you see—you are using no energy until it is needed, your lightning is there, and ready, like the load in a gun; but it isn’t costing you a cent till you touch it off. Oh, yes, the single ground connection—(302) Surely it is no accident that the Yankee’s name was changed in the early stages of the writing of the novel from Bob Smith, a good name for a democratic hero, to Hank Morgan. This new name links him to Morgan le Fay, whose callous disregard for human life and liberty he has vowed to punish some day (see 115). Nor is it an accident that Hank uses Merlin’s Cave for his scientific magic of electrical wires and Gatling guns. Hank has fallen because he has eaten of the tree of knowledge—the knowledge of technology and science and the knowledge, which parallels Merlin’s, that people can be forced to submit to what they perceive as more powerful than themselves. Nowhere is Merlin closer to Satan, whose son tradition claims him to be, than in his maniacal laughter at the end of the book. The petrified laugh that lasts beyond death is so terrifying because it is laughter at all our human illusions that progress can improve the world, and laughter at the dream that we can change the human condition and so remake the world. It is a laugh that mocks and reminds us of our human failings that impede all our attempts at true progress. Whatever vision Hank has of the ideal world that democratic theory and technological achievements might produce, that ideal is up against the practical concerns of gaining and using power; for Hank, as for so many others, power corrupts. This is demonstrated in another scene in which Hank, disturbed because he seems to have been bested in an argument about economics by the black-smith Dowley, misuses his superior knowledge and becomes as undemocratic as Merlin and the forces he represents. Hank’s anger leads him to say: “And to think of the circumstances: the first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the best informed in

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the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of any political firmament for centuries, sitting here apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country blacksmith” (236). Then Hank deliberately strikes “below the belt to get even” (237), making Dowley fear for his life because he has inadvertently admitted that he paid a worker more than the allowable wages. Here we see Hank’s democratic ideal yielding to the realities of pride and petty jealousy (and we see too why Hank’s name could never have remained Smith). Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee is, for a number of reasons, the most important American work to treat Merlin. Not only is Connecticut Yankee itself the subject of numerous parodies but, by reinterpreting the legend and one of its chief characters so radically, it paves the way for those who want to use Merlin as a focal character in a reinterpretation of the legend that comments on American values and aspirations. Though not the first work to do so, it is undoubtedly the most influential. Moreover, many of the popular versions of the Arthurian legend probably would not exist without Twain. The direct influence of Connecticut Yankee can be seen in retellings of the story in a 1921 silent film, a 1931 movie starring Will Rogers, another in 1949 with Bing Crosby in the title role, various TV movies, and a Rodgers and Hart musical (1927), which was revived in 1943 with the Yankee as a naval officer. In addition, there have been a Walt Disney version (The Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court), a Bugs Bunny cartoon (A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court), and a National Lampoon parody called “A New York Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” in which Reggie Jackson, the New York Yankee, is hit with an empty whiskey bottle hurled from the stands, wakes up in Arthur’s time, and comes into conflict with “Billy Merlin” (a play on Billy Martin, Jackson’s combative manager). But more significant than such retellings is the thematic analogue to Twain’s book that can be found in a number of other American works in which Merlin appears. These question the possibility of achieving the glorious dream of Arthur’s kingdom or of remaining an innocent in a world that, however Edenic it may seem, always has a serpent in the garden (or, as Twain might have put it, a snake in the grass). The association of Arthur’s dream with the American Dream, and that of Arthur, attempting to create a new order, with the American Adam, is a fairly natural one to make; certainly not all of the occurrences of such a conjunction are due to the direct influence of Twain. In fact, Emerson alludes to a connection between Arthur and Adam in an 1848 notebook entry.20 But Twain brings Merlin to prominence in the tradition of linking disillusionment with the American Dream to Arthur’s realm. A minor but very interesting use of this linking can be seen in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. In two passages in the story, the Dansker from whom Billy seeks advice is referred to as the “Old Merlin.” These references are part of a pattern of mythological allusions that accentuate the innocence of Billy, who is compared to “Adam before the Fall,” and the inevitability of his tragedy. It is because he is so innocent that he does not recognize unmotivated evil of the type that drives a character like Claggart (or Modred). The allusions imply that, just as Arthur’s ideal society is destroyed by his inability to recognize Modred’s evil, so the American Dream of Edenic purity and limitless potential, personified in Billy Budd, is destroyed

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by the mysterious iniquity about which the Dansker tries, ineffectively, to warn him. The Merlin of Billy Budd, though not evil himself, ultimately lacks the magic and the power to thwart the evil he foresees.21 Another writer who uses Merlin to comment on the illusory nature of any attempt to achieve perfection in the real world is James Branch Cabell. In his episodic novel Something About Eve, Gerald Musgrave, a young writer, allows a devil to take over his earthly body so he can seek Antan, a land where he believes he will find perfect happiness. Along the way, he has many experiences and meets many characters who make him question and ultimately abandon the journey. One of these is Merlin, who explains the notion of chivalry that he gave Arthur and his knights “to play with.” This notion was “very beautiful” and for a time “created beauty everywhere”; and the knights “discharged their moral and constabulary duties quite picturesquely.” But it was also “a rather outrageous notion upon which all was founded.”22 After a while, his “toys…began to break one another. Dissension and lust and hatred woke among them. They forgot the very pretty notion which I had given them in their turn to play with. The land was no longer an ordered realm. My toys now fought in the land’s naked fields and they murderously waylaid one another in its old forests.” This continued until Arthur was dead and the Round Table dissolved. Merlin, who had left behind his “toys” so that he could dwell with Nimue, found a measure of domestic bliss with her, but no variety. And so he left her to seek Antan. Gerald’s encounter with Merlin (and other characters in the book) convinces him of something that even wise Merlin did not learn from his own experiment with chivalry —that “the one way for a poet to appreciate the true loveliness of a place is not ever to go to it” (339). Merlin’s wisdom, which substitutes one ideal for another, is not the answer. In fact, the wisdom of Cabell’s Merlin, like that of Twain’s, is illusory because it is not based on, and cannot deal with, the real and the practical. Instead of continuing his journey to Antan, Gerald goes back to Lichfield, his hometown, and reoccupies his now old body. In the end, he returns to his writing, to be always a man who finds “one or another beautiful idea to play with and who must remain, so long as life remained, a poet whose one real delight was to play with puppets” (363). Like the Merlin of the book, Gerald Musgrave creates beautiful notions, but because he does not try to make actual his dream of Antan, “it must remain…whatever I choose to imagine it” (338). Thus Something About Eve has a comic ending, but the tragic implications are as clear as they are in Connecticut Yankee, which is also on one level a comic book. Cabell suggests that dreams and ideals remain beautiful only until they come in contact with reality. And, like Twain, he presents Merlin’s chivalry as illusory because it maintains its perfection only as long as it is the toy of men’s minds, and only as long as there is no attempt to realize—that is, to make real—the dream. A similar skepticism about the possibility of the survival of the ideal is suggested by another American Merlin, that of Edwin Arlington Robinson in his poem Merlin. Robinson, who takes considerable liberty with the traditional Arthurian material, sets his book-length poem in a time when Arthur’s kingdom is crumbling while Merlin remains, of his own will, with Vivian in Broceliande. It is her natural charm, not any

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supernatural one, that keeps him there. As Nathan Comfort Starr has observed, Vivian is a believable and intelligently conceived woman, no vulgar wanton as in Tennyson, no ambitious amateur in magic as in Malory, but an unusually fascinating and capable person, entangled in a difficulty far more troublesome than a love affair between a young woman and an older man. Vivian is no longer simply a seductress, finally extracting the secrets of Merlin’s magic and condemning him to a perpetual imprisonment. Like Dalila she is involved in a national emergency. While Merlin lingers with her, Arthur has to meet terrible difficulties in his crumbling kingdom without the counsel of his trusted sage.23 Broceliande, where Merlin and Vivian live happily for a time, is described as an “elysian wilderness.”24 And when Merlin first approaches it, The birds were singing still; leaves flashed and swung Before him in the sunlight; a soft breeze Made intermittent whisperings around him Of love and fate and danger, and faint waves Of many sweetly-stinging fragile odors Broke lightly as they touched him; cherry-boughs Above him snowed white petals down upon him, And under their snow falling Merlin smiled Contentedly; as one who contemplates No longer fear, confusion, or regret May smile at ruin or revelation. (56–57) It is clear that Merlin is entering an Edenic place—but even in this idyllic description there is a hint of the eventual, inevitable fall. Later in the poem, Robinson makes it explicit that Broceliande is Merlin’s Eden. As Merlin prepares to leave because of his concern for Arthur and Camelot, Vivian says to him: …I contemplate Another name for this forbidden place, And one more fitting. Tell me, if you find it, Some fitter name than Eden. We have had A man and a woman in it for some time, And now, it seems, we have a Tree of Knowledge. (126–27) Merlin’s departure from Broceliande is prompted by his inability to ignore the concerns of the real world, represented by the fate of Camelot. But though he returns to Camelot, he is unable to save the doomed kingdom. Thus, there is a double fall in Robinson’s poem. Arthur’s ideal kingdom collapses, and Merlin’s personal happiness is destroyed because he cannot ignore the larger political situation. This, Robinson’s

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poem suggests, necessarily overrides, or at least overshadows, personal considerations. Because of the historical and social forces that affect men’s lives, Broceliande and Camelot, the two Edens of Robinson’s poem, both become fallen worlds. Robinson, like Twain, is ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of achieving an ideal. Late in the poem, Merlin imagines Vivian saying: Time called him home, And that was as it was, for much is lost Between Broceliande and Camelot. (163) Living in a world of Time, the home of men, Merlin may imagine and strive for an ideal; but he is never able to achieve it. The practical considerations and the forces that control men’s lives wake him from his dream of perfection in Broceliande. Although Robinson’s Merlin is very different from Twain’s, both authors use the character to suggest the triumph of the real world, the world of Time and Change, over the ideal. A more recent work, Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, is reminiscent of Connecticut Yankee in its use of ironic, satiric, and comic elements to make a serious point. Although Berger’s Merlin is not the central character, as Robinson’s Merlin is, or even central to the book’s main conflict, as Twain’s is, he is important in laying the groundwork for one of the novel’s main themes. This theme is formulated in a thought that Guinevere has late in the story. Launcelot says that the war between him and Arthur has not come about because they hate each other, and Guinevere thinks to herself, “Nay, it hath happened because of men and their laws and their principles!”25 She is, in effect, suggesting that idealism itself is responsible for many of the world’s problems. This notion is echoed in episodes throughout the book. For example, Morgan la Fey, who had repeatedly sought to undermine Arthur’s kingdom, finally entered the Convent of the Little Sisters of Poverty and Pain, because after a long career in the service of evil she had come to believe that corruption “were sooner brought amongst humankind by the forces of virtue, and from this moment on she was notable for her piety” (453). In the early chapters, this theme of the dangerous ideal is suggested through Merlin when he instructs and assists Arthur. The young king, with the zeal of youth, wants to burn the “dreadful stews” and have the prostitutes sent to a nunnery, but Merlin “cast a spell upon Arthur, in which he seemed to see smoke and flames arising from the stews” (33). Just as Merlin uses a spell in Malory to save Arthur in a battle with Pellinor, so here he uses a spell to save Arthur from a moral battle that will bring him harm. In another instance, when Arthur sees evil in the officials of the Church, he commands that the bishops be flayed alive and the Archbishop of Canterbury be “quartered, then burned.” Arthur explains that “our purpose shall be solely to serve the Right, by destroying the Wrong.” Once again Merlin controls Arthur’s incendiary inclinations and convinces him that political considerations make it necessary to have the support of the Church. Merlin advises Arthur, therefore, to have the Archbishop

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crown him (34–35). Later, when Arthur is concerned about wielding the enchanted sword Excalibur against his enemy King Ryons, who is armed with a “conventional weapon,” Merlin says that it is “never justice, but rather sentimentality, to deal mildly with intruders” (39–40). As one who tries to limit Arthur’s idealism and adapt it to the practical necessities of the real world, Berger’s Merlin belongs in that American tradition, which originates with Twain, of questioning the possibility of achieving perfection in a fallen world. Although not a villain, Berger’s Merlin is practical and realistic (as opposed to the romantic Merlin of Tennyson and other British writers). This theme of the dangerous ideal—which is in some ways the ultimate rejection of the traditional romantic Merlin and of the hope of creating a perfect realm— appears in other stories about Merlin. It is especially important in two science-fiction works. (Perhaps this is another reflection of the significance of Twain, who was the first to blend science fiction and the Arthurian legend through the use of time travel, which is explained as the “transposition of epochs—and bodies” [Connecticut Yankee, 11]. An element of science fiction also appears in connection with Berger’s Merlin, who uses electric lights, experiments with x-rays and photography, and speaks of the power of the atom.) The first of these works is Andre Norton’s Merlin’s Mirror, in which Merlin is the product of an advanced civilization from outer space. He is conceived through artificial insemination when a metal container traveling through space detects a beacon left by former alien visitors to earth, descends, and impregnates a British woman. As he tries to help Arthur establish a new order based on his superior knowledge, however, Merlin comes into conflict with Nimue, descendant of an alien race that is hostile to Merlin’s. Though our sympathies are with Merlin throughout the book, in the end we see that Nimue acted responsibly in undermining the kingdom Merlin wanted to create: “once before, men became the playthings of the Star Lords who used them carelessly, taught them what they were not yet ready to know, drew them into their own disputes with one another. Finally this world itself was riven and nearly destroyed.”26 Thus, Nimue suggests, men have not advanced far enough to deal wisely with the knowledge Merlin would bring to them, and the ideal world Merlin envisions would be even more dangerous than the one they live in. A similar questioning of the ideal in a science-fiction setting may be seen in Roger Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot,” a story in which Merlin is, as in Connecticut Yankee, unquestionably a villain. Launcelot, kept alive until the twentieth century by a spell of Merlin’s, is still searching for the Grail. Morgan Le Fay and Merlin have also survived, and the latter plans to use Launcelot to start rebuilding a world like Camelot. But Morgan warns Launcelot that Merlin’s was the most dangerous morality of all. He was a misguided idealist. In a more primitive time and place and with a willing tool like Arthur, he was able to create a legend. Today, in an age of monstrous weapons, with the right leader as his catspaw, he could unleash something totally devastating. He would see a wrong and force his man to try righting it. He would do it in the name of the

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same high ideal he always served, but he would not appreciate the results until it was too late.27 To oppose this misguided idealism, Launcelot fights with an enchanted suit of armor that serves the magician. While Launcelot is defeating the armor, Morgan appears and, in her struggle with Merlin, the two enchanters are destroyed. Launcelot is led off, and finally encompassed, by a bright light: he has achieved the Grail by being the last defender of Camelot. And he defends Camelot by not allowing it to be re-created in a world whose complex realities make its idealism more dangerous than beneficial. From Twain’s bumbling enchanter to Zelazny’s misguided idealist, the character of Merlin is used in the works of many American authors as a means of examining the inevitable distance between the perfection that men may envision and the reality that will keep them from achieving it. Mark Twain is seminal in this American tradition because he is the most significant author to take the powerful, romantic magician of other nineteenth-century authors, British and American, and make him a means of questioning the Dream of Camelot (and ultimately the American Dream). It may be difficult, or even impossible, to demonstrate Twain’s direct influence on all the Merlins that appear in American literature after his own. However, without Twain’s radical break with traditional writing about Merlin, it is almost equally difficult to imagine such characters as this essay has examined: Robinson’s Merlin, who is at the mercy of naturalistic forces; Cabell’s Merlin, who uses chivalry as a toy; Berger’s Merlin, who advocates practical solutions to real problems; Norton’s science-fiction Merlin, who endangers the world; and Zelazny’s Merlin, who is a dangerous idealistideologue. All of these writers follow Twain in making Merlin the focal point in their questioning of the American Dream. There are, of course, in American popular literature many other incarnations of Merlin that follow Twain’s example. Peter Goodrich has provided a useful account of some of these in a bibliographic essay that discusses British and American literature,28 and other interpretations of the character have appeared and continue to appear. These include numerous returns and reinterpretations of Merlin in comic books (in which he is the most common Arthurian character), pulps, and novels. In most of these versions, the magician is presented as a powerful, positive figure in the romantic tradition. There is, for example, the Merlin of Parke Godwin’s Firelord, a spirit presented as a young boy whom Arthur calls “my genius,…always the more impressive part of me”29; and the Merlin of Peter David’s Knight Life, an eight-yearold boy (since Merlin ages backwards) who helps Arthur become mayor of New York City and who, in a nod to the Connecticut Yankee tradition at the end of the book, watches Bing Crosby in one of the movie versions of Twain’s novel.30 In K.W.Jeter’s novel Morlock Night, a sequel to H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine, Merlin returns to save Victorian civilization from the Morlocks who have used the time machine to invade.31 In Simon Hawke’s The Wizard of 4th Street, Merlin returns in the twenty-third century and, in the book’s sequels, possesses the body of a “cockney punk” to fight the forces of evil.32 In H.Warner Munn’s Merlin’s Godson, Merlin reaches the new world after the fall of Arthur’s realm and becomes a military leader of the Aztecs.33 In two books

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based on the TV series Mr. Merlin, Merlin is a mechanic who hires a young boy to work in his garage after the boy pulls a crowbar from a block of concrete.34 Examples of Merlin in American popular culture could be multiplied by reference to other books, comics, magazines, TV shows, and movies. He is undoubtedly the most frequently occurring Arthurian figure in the United States, where only the stories of, and allusions to, the Holy Grail come close to rivalling his popularity. Perhaps this is because Merlin, in some of his shifting shapes, appeals to something in the American character that draws us to heroes who will make things new, who will tame the new world, make a new deal (a phrase that originated in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee), set out for a new frontier, or strike a new covenant, but also who have the power to effect the newness they speak of. We look to heroes like Paul Bunyan and Superman, like cowboys who ride the range and right wrongs, and self-reliant detectives who will bring justice where weighty bureaucracies cannot, and to Merlin who can offer the hope—however often it may be frustrated—of transforming society, taming the moral frontier, and creating a new and better world, just as the British Merlin hoped to do by bringing Arthur to the throne. In other shapes, Merlin represents the painful truth that Americans have learned—that even when one can envision and strive for a society based on justice and equality, on values and respect for human dignity, there are forces that prevent the full realization of this dream. Notes Parts of this article were first published as “Merlin in America,” Arthurian Interpretations 1.1 (Fall 1986), pp. 64–74. It has been substantially revised and expanded for this volume. 1. For an account of the early development of the character of Merlin, see “The Welsh Myrddin Poems” by A.O.H.Jarman, and “Geoffrey of Monmouth” by John J.Parry and Robert O.Caldwell in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 20–30 and 72–93. 2. Joseph Leigh, Illustrations of the Fulfilment of the Prediction of Merlin Occasioned by the Late Outrageous Attack of the British Ship of War the Leopard, on the American Frigate Chesapeake, and the Measures Taken by the President, Supported by the Citizens Thereon (Portsmouth, N.H.: Printed for the Author, 1807). 3. Originally published in the Baltimore North American on August 18 and 25 and September 1, 1827. Reprinted in an edition by Thomas Ollive Mabbott (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941), the edition cited here. 4. See Nelson F.Adkins, “Emerson and the Bardic Tradition,” PMLA, 63.2 (1948), 662–67. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems (1904; rpt. NewYork: AMS, 1968), p. 120. (Other references to Emerson’s Poems will be given in the text.) 6. Kenneth Walter Cameron, “The Potent Song in Emerson’s Merlin Poems,” Philological Quarterly, 32, No. 1 (1953), 28. 7. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. A.W.Plumstead, William H.Gilman, and Ruth H.Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1975), XI, 43. 8. Emerson, Journals and Notebooks, XI, 42.

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9. There is some doubt about the exact source of the passage that follows (quoted on pp. 54–55 of the first edition of Letters and Social Aims [Boston: Osgood, 1876]), which is clearly not from Malory. See Adkins, “Emerson and the Bardic Tradition,” p. 673, for a discussion of this question. 10. Richard Hovey, The Quest of Merlin (1891; rpt. Boston: Small Maynard, 1898), p. 3. (Other references to this work will be given in the text.) 11. Ralph Adams Cram, Excalibur: An Arthurian Drama (Boston: Badger, 1909). 12. It should be noted, however, that the image of Merlin as a wise adviser to the young king retained strong popular appeal. In youth groups set up by William Byron Forbush for the instruction of young boys and described in a book (The Knights of King Arthur: How to Begin and What to Do) co-authored with his son, he suggests a club or “Castle” modeled after the Round Table and its knights as a way of molding the youngsters. Each Castle is to be guided by a “Merlin” (whose charge is laid out in Forbush’s book The Knights of King Arthur: The Merlin’s Book of Advanced Work). A similar arrangement with a Merlin as adviser was recommended by Perry Edwards Powell and described in his book The Knights of the Holy Grail: A Solution of the Boy Problem. Forbush’s organization was particularly influential. It spread throughout the country and had well over 150,000 members. Through these groups, the romantic figure of Merlin remained a part of the popular culture in America. 13. The story appeared in The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (Boston: Osgood, 1876), pp. 107– 24. 14. Edgar Fawcett, The New King Arthur: An Opera Without Music (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1885), p. iii. 15. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: Signet, 1963), p. 48. (All subsequent references to Connecticut Yankee will be to this edition and will be given in the text.) 16. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee” (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964), p. 62. 17. A comparison between Dan Beard’s comic and satiric illustrations of Merlin and, for example, Aubrey Beardsley’s brooding, romantic depictions of him also demonstrates very well the change from the romantic to the realistic conception of the character. 18. Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” The Century Illustrated Magazine (Nov. 1889), p. 74. 19. Smith, Mark Twains Fable of Progress, p. 67. 20. Emerson, Journals and Notebooks, X, 209. 21. For a fuller treatment of these allusions, see my note on “The Merlin Allusions in Billy Budd” Studies in Short Fiction, 19 (Summer 1982), 277–78. 22. James Branch Cabell, Something About Eve (New York: McBride, 1927), pp. 230–31. (Other references will be given in the text.) 23. Nathan Comfort Starr, “The Transformation of Merlin,” in Edwin Arlington Robinson Centenary Essays, ed. Ellsworth Barnard (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), p. 111. 24. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Merlin: A Poem (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 60. (Other references will be given in the text.) 25. Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (New York: Delacorte, 1978), p. 442. (Other references will be given in the text.) 26. Andre Norton, Merlins Mirror (New York: DAW, 1975), p. 202. 27. Roger Zelazny, The Last Defender of Camelot (New York: Pocket, 1980), pp. 279–80.

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28. Peter H.Goodrich, “Modern Merlins: An Aerial Survey,” in The Figure of Merlin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Jeanie Watson and Maureen Fries (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1989), pp. 175–97. 29. Parke Godwin, Firelord (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), p. 290. 30. Peter David, Knight Life (New York: Ace, 1987). 31. K.W.Jeter, Morlock Night (New York: DAW, 1979). 32. The first book is Simon Hawke, The Wizard of 4th Street (New York: Popular, 1987). The sequels are: The Wizard of Whitechapel (New York: Popular, 1988); The Wizard of Sunset Strip (New York: Popular, 1989); The Wizard of Rue Morgue (New York: Popular, 1990); The Samurai Wizard (New York: Warner, 1991); The Wizard of Santa Fe (New York: Warner, 1991); The Wizard of Camelot (New York: Warner, 1993); The Wizard of Lovecraft’s Café (New York: Warner, 1993); and The Last Wizard (New York: Warner, 1997). 33. H.Warner Munn, Merlin’s Godson (New York: Ballantine, 1976). The first part of this novel originally appeared in Weird Tales, 34, Nos. 3–6 (Sept.-Dec. 1939). 34. William Rotsler, Mr. Merlin: Episode 1 (New York: Wanderer, 1981), and Mr. Merlin: Episode 2 (New York: Wanderer, 1981).

CHAPTER 8 The Enchanter Awakes: Merlin in Modern Fiction RAYMOND H.THOMPSON

Among the figures of Arthurian legend, few have been as popular with authors of modern fiction, particularly fantasy, as has Merlin. Given that he is the most famous enchanter from the Island of Britain, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising, however, is the extent to which the power of so famous an enchanter is restricted. Though a valued counselor, he is rarely the main actor in the events that unfold, relying on others to shape the destiny that he foresees. Moreover, when he does intervene directly, the effect is almost invariably less conclusive than might be expected.1 A rapid scrutiny of modern fiction reveals that Merlin’s influence upon events is restricted in several different ways, among them his physical limitations. In C.S.Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), Merlin is awakened from his long sleep to participate in a great trial of strength between the forces of good and evil, or between Logres and Britain as Lewis calls them. Because he belongs to an earlier age when the division between good and evil was less clear cut than in modern times, he is able to manipulate the so-called neutral spirits of the world, but at a cost: “even in Merlin’s time…though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely…. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them Merlinus is withered something has been taken out of him.”2 To defeat the powers of evil, moreover, Merlin must employ powers that are not merely neutral, but good; and just as contact with the neutral powers withers a man, so wielding the still greater powers of good consumes. Merlin appears to one character in a vision, ablaze with “all sorts of lights in the most curious colours shooting out of him and running up and down him And you could see in his face that he was a man used up to the last drop,…that he’d fall to pieces the moment the powers let him go” (449). The enchanter is aware of the danger and understandably reluctant to commit himself to so selfdestructive a task. Yet when he recognizes that no alternative exists, he accepts his fate with fortitude: “if the earths are stopped the fox faces the hounds” (363), he declares. Drawing upon awesome powers, Merlin destroys the center of the enemy’s hideous strength, but at the cost of his own survival. The heavy psychic cost of wielding supernatural power recurs in many novels, and it imposes a major constraint upon the magician’s activities, especially when he is mortal rather than immortal.

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In Lewis’s novel, Merlin is revived from his long sleep as a mature adult, but in some books he is reborn as a youth with all the vulnerabilities that entails. In Pamela F.Service’s Winter of Magic’s Return (1985) and Tomorrow’s Magic (1987), he revives in the body of a teenager in a post-nuclear Dark Age. With the help of two friends, he brings Arthur from Avalon to fight against Morgan La Fay and her mutant hordes. He is, however, still learning the extent of his powers, and he needs all the assistance that his friends can provide. Arthur and Merlin are again revived to fight against Morgan le Fey in Peter David’s Knight Life (1987), though this time the setting is modern New York. Arthur runs for the office of mayor, with Merlin as his campaign manager. Since the latter is only an eight-year-old boy, however, he is easily abducted by the opposition and has to be rescued by Gwen (Guenevere). When Merlin returns in Simon Hawke’s wizard series, which begins with The Wizard of 4th Street (1987), it is as an adult who teaches the world how to use magic, instead of exhausted fossil fuel reserves, as a source of energy. In the continuing struggle with the Dark Ones, a demonic race with supernatural powers, however, his own body is destroyed, forcing his mind to take refuge in the body of a teen-aged descendant. When the original mind is in control of their shared body, Merlin is much more vulnerable to attack. Lately, too, there has been a spate of fiction dealing with Merlin’s early years: The Young Merlin Trilogy (1996–97) by Jane Yolen describes his struggles to survive after being abandoned in the wild; in The Lost Years of Merlin (1996–2000), a series of five novels by T.A.Barron, he journeys to the legendary Isle of Fincayra where he learns to exercise his magical powers under very dangerous conditions. Authors also draw upon traditional material. Thus in The Hallowed Isle. Book One: The Book of the Sword (1999), Diana L. Paxson borrows from the French prose cycles the story of how the three-year-old Merlin defends his mother and himself from accusations of witchcraft; and from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae she borrows the threat to his life by Vortigern.3 The latter is the subject of “A Refuge of Firedrakes” (1996) by Susan Shwartz, as well as a number of adaptations for younger readers, such as, Robert D.San Souci’s Young Merlin and Pamela F.Service’s Wizard of Wind and Rock, two illustrated children’s books that were published in 1990. Because he lacks experience and full control over his gradually awakening powers, the youthful Merlin must struggle to survive attempts upon his life by older enemies whose grasp of their own powers, however inferior these might be, is much surer. The contrast in skill level between his early and mature years is made explicit in Paxson’s novel when he recalls his childhood: “Then the visions had come uncontrolled and unexpected. Now he was a man in the fullness of his power, and he called them.”4 Moreover, despite his prophetic talents, Merlin remains physically vulnerable. Indeed, the visions often leave him lying helpless and exhausted, unable to defend himself against attack. Even when he recovers consciousness, he feels “Weak as a kitten” in Shwartz’s story.5 At the other end of the scale, Merlin’s powers are weakened, not by youth, but by age. As one might expect, this is more marked in historical fiction than in fantasy. In The Dragon’s Boy (1990) by Jane Yolen, Old Linn, as he is here known, is subject to fits that reduce him to “a shambling wreck of an old man.”6 In The Last Enchantment (1979), the third book of Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, his strength ebbs while that

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of Nimue, his apprentice, grows: “I could feel the power coming from her, my own power, stronger now in her than in my own hands. For myself, I felt nothing but weariness, and a kind of grief.”7 This decline leaves him increasingly vulnerable to the plotting of Morgause who poisons him early in the novel, something she could never have managed when he was younger and stronger. The infirmity of age does affect Merlin in fantasy as well, however. He appears as an archaeologist in Raven (1977), a novel in a contemporary setting by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, but his aged and crippled condition prevents him from leading a conservationist movement to save a network of caves. The task must be left to other, younger people. Age hinders Merlin with more comical results in Fang, the Gnome (1988) and its sequel King of the Scepter’d Isle (1989), in which Michael Coney presents him as a dirty old man whose futile attempts to seduce Nyneve are easily repelled, and whose supernatural powers are, in any case, far inferior to those of his mother. In The Dragon and the Unicorn (1994) by A.A. Attanasio, Merlin is born aged and grows younger with the passage of time. One symptom of the ageing process that robs Merlin of his powers is senility. The Sword and the Flame (1978, published in the United States as The Pendragon, 1979) by Catherine Christian and The Mists of Avalon (1983) by Marion Zimmer Bradley both not only designate the Merlin as a druidic office rather than a personal name, but also show the mind of one occupant degenerating into madness. By contrast, in The Weathermonger (1968) by Peter Dickinson, as in Stewart’s novel, the madness is induced by drugs. Madness afflicts Merlin too in stories like Diana L.Paxson’s “Wild Man” (1995) that are based upon the Lailoken tradition,8 though it is usually caused by grief rather than age. A less severe affliction is the absent-mindedness that marks his behavior in The Once and Future King (1958) by T.H.White. Merlyn explains that this is because he is living backwards in time, and it accounts for his ability to foresee the future. Nevertheless, because it does confuse him, he forgets to tell Arthur who his parents are until it is too late to prevent the incest with Morgause.9 The impression of mental decline is reinforced by his fondness for taking naps. In Robert Newman’s Merlin’s Mistake (1971), the title refers to another consequence of the absent-mindedness that reduces Merlin’s effectiveness, this time endowing his godson with future knowledge rather than the magical powers he really wants. The consequences are less dire in “Once and Future” (1995), a humorous story by Terry Pratchett. This Merlin is a time traveler who finds himself marooned in an alternate time line with a memory impaired by time travel; as a result, when he arranges for the sword to be drawn from the stone by a suitable candidate, he is easily tricked by Nimue into endorsing not a young man but a young woman. Merlin finds that his freedom to exercise his power is confined by more than physical limitations and their mental side effects, however. He often has to contend against opponents with mighty powers of their own, powers that stretch his to their full extent and leave him too little time for dealing with other than the most urgent concerns. The struggle is most closely fought in those fantasies where the forces of good and evil, often called Light and Dark, are locked in mortal combat at a

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supernatural level.10 In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, so formidable is the strength of evil that Merlin is obliged to draw upon powers so great that he destroys himself as well as the enemy. Fate can prove even more remorseless a foe, however: in “King’s Man” by Sasha Miller (1989), Myrdin attempts to escape from his infatuation with Artyr’s bride by transforming himself into someone else, but that someone else proves to be a Lancelot with no memory of his previous life; in “The Architect of Worlds” by Brian Stableford (1998), his designs for Arthur’s realm are frustrated by the workings of “blind, stupid, horrid chance,”11 when Guinevere drinks a truth serum intended for Arthur and reveals her adultery with Lancelot. Even when Merlin is immortal, as in Attanasio’s on-going Arthurian fantasy cycle (1994-) and Susan Cooper’s series The Dark Is Rising (1965–77), there is no guarantee of victory. Merriman, as Merlin is called in the latter, provides some protection and guidance to the young protagonists, particularly at the outset of their adventures, but he is soon obliged to leave them to cope on their own. In Silver on the Tree (1977) he rescues Simon from drowning, but in doing so is prevented from performing another important task: “I must go,” he says after the rescue. “Will needs me. As the Dark knew, Simon, when it caught you in peril in a time from which only I could ransom you, by leaving the place where I was.”12 The war between Light and Dark is a very close thing, requiring everybody to do his or her utmost. Mistakes can prove costly, as Will Stanton discovers in The Dark Is Rising (1973) when he carelessly plays with his newly awakened powers of making fire. Merriman arrives to save him from an agent of the Dark, but he does not always have the leisure for acts of charity and mercy, as Will recognizes in The Grey King (1975): “Sometimes,…in this sort of a war, it is not possible to pause, to smoothe the way for one human being, because even that one small thing could mean an end of the world for all the rest.”13 After the final battle in Silver on the Tree, Merriman leaves for a world outside time, “because,” he admits, “I am very tired” (268). Merlin finds himself pitted against such daunting foes as demons in Sir MacHinery by Tom McGowen (1971); the Devil in Robert Nye’s Merlin (1978); the evil force behind the siege of Vienna by the Turks in The Drawing of the Dark (1979) by Tim Powers; the semi-immortal Dark Ones in Simon Hawke’s wizard series; and, in Attanasio’s fantasy cycle, a bewildering array of supernatural beings led by the savage northern god known as the Furor. In science fiction, his opponents’ powers are technological rather than supernatural, but they remain formidable. Merlin needs the help of a reborn Arthur to thwart the plans of the evil Morlocks to invade nineteenth-century England in K.W. Jeter’s Morlock Night (1979), a sequel to H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine; nor can his scientific skills avert the engulfment of Atlantis and Lemuria in Merlin and the Dragons of Atlantis by Rita and Tim Hildebrandt (1983). His chief foe in fantasy literature, however, is most often a sorcerer like himself. In The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter (1920) by Padraic Colum, The Testing of Tertius (1973) by Robert Newman, The Hawk’s Grey Feather (1990) by Patricia Kennealy, The Forever King (1992) by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy, and The Merlin Mystery (1998) by Jonathan Gunson, this foe is male and so powerful that Merlin is often bested in direct confrontation. Victory can be won only with the help of others.

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Lacking that help, he goes down to defeat in Victor Milan’s short story “Soldatenmangel’ (1981). Influenced by the medieval tradition that Merlin was enchanted by the Lady of the Lake or one of her damsels, most fantasy authors make Merlin’s sorcerous opponent a woman.14 The tradition is followed most closely in Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and in short stories like Jane Yolen’s “In the Whitethorn Wood” (1984), Madeleine Robbins’s “Nimue’s Tale” (1988), “The Dog’s Story” (1996) by Eleanor Arnason, and “The Raven’s Quest” (1998) by Fiona Patton, where Nimue, as she is most frequently called, deceives and traps the enamored enchanter despite his wisdom and foresight. In Fred Saberhagen’s Dominion (1982), they meet again in modern Chicago where Merlin helps to frustrate Nimue’s plan to bring from the past an evil sorcerer. In Merlin’s Mirror (1975), Andre Norton recasts the struggle between Merlin and Nimue in a science-fiction setting, but he has no better success in dealing with her there because the tolerance and enlightenment he seeks to introduce into a brutal, Dark Age society are too premature. His chief opponent in Stewart’s trilogy is Morgause rather than Nimue, and she succeeds in seducing Arthur and poisoning Merlin despite the latter’s famed powers. More often, however, it is Morgan le Fay—indeed she is behind his entrapment in Bradley’s novel. The replacement of Nimue by Morgan is a result of the enmity that developed between Arthur and his sister in medieval romance.15 She seems thus a more plausible enemy of Merlin than does Nimue, who is identified with Arthur’s other great protector, the Lady of the Lake. In The Sleepers (1968) by Jane Curry (where, as in Bradley’s novel, Margan uses Nimiane to trap Myrddin in the Eildon Tree, as they are here called), The Kings Damosel (1976) by Vera Chapman, and Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle (1987– 97), Morgan is the embodiment of evil that seeks the destruction of all good, and she pursues her goal with frightening single mindedness. She is treated with more sympathy in Bradley’s novel and in Fay Sampson’s Daughter of Tintagel sequence (1989–92), where she emerges as a defender of the right of women to share power in a predominantly patriarchal society. In Sampson’s Herself (1992), Morgan proclaims herself to be the embodiment of the female principle, which she identifies as nothing less than the life force itself: “I am what I am. Not good or evil. My ancient faith takes no account of morality. My metaphor is not the battlefield, right against wrong. I till the harvest-field. Birth, fullness, and death. All are necessary. Accept them. I am both darkness and light. Accept me.”16 Against such a force, it is no wonder that Merlin must ultimately go down to defeat despite his many victories. He has better success when he and Morgan lay aside their enmity in order to work amicably together in furthering their respective aims, as they do in Hawke’s Wizard of 4th Street (1987), Esther M. Friesner’s “Goldie, Lox, and the Three Excalibearers” (1995), and Gregory Maguire’s “Builder of Keeps” (1998). In historical fiction the magicians of fantasy are replaced by men hungry for political power. These figures have their origin in Gildas’s sixth-century De Excidio Britanniae and the medieval chronicles, with their picture of British kingdoms divided by bitter feuds and rivalries while the land is remorselessly conquered by the Saxon

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invaders, and they loom large in most modern Arthurian works. Deprived of his magic, Merlin loses much of his influence in such a context.17 In Stewart’s trilogy,18 in The Pagan King (1959) by Edison Marshall, in Victor Canning’s Crimson Chalice Trilogy (1976–78), and in The Road to Avalon (1988) by Joan Wolf, Merlin plays a valuable role in Arthur’s rise to power despite the opposition of ambitious rivals. Thereafter, however, he is increasingly marginalized, a minor character overshadowed by other, more important figures. His status is even further diminished elsewhere: he is a bard and counselor to Arthur in John Gloag’s Artorius Rex (1977), and to a rival king in W. Barnard Faraday’s Pendragon (1930); in The Duke of War (1966) by Walter O’Meara, he leads the engineers in Arthur’s army; in George Finkel’s Twilight Province (1967, published in the United States as Watch Fires to the North, 1968), he is a tutor and physician; in Roy Turner’s King of the Lordless Country (1971), Persia Woolley’s Guinevere trilogy (1987–92), and Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles (1995–97), he is a druid and a trusted counselor; in Douglas Carmichael’s Pendragon (1977) and in Excalibur! (1980) by Gil Kane and John Jakes, he has drug-induced visions of the future; in Warwick Deeping’s Uther and Igraine (1903) he makes use of hypnotism. This marginalization occurs in fantasy too, especially in those that emphasize the historical setting. In both Meriol Trevor’s Merlin’s Ring (1917) and Sharan Newman’s Guinevere trilogy (1981–85), Merlin is still a counselor, yet despite his wisdom we see but little of him amidst the many figures that crowd the court. Because historical fiction on Arthurian legend usually emphasizes the role of Arthur in events, it spares little time for supporting players, especially when they are not involved in the actual fighting that is the focus in so many. Though he is more central in The Coming of the King (1988) by Nikolai Tolstoy, Myrddin, as he is here called, exerts very little influence over political events.19 The marginalization of Merlin occurs not only because of the process of historical rationalization of Arthurian legend, however. Sometimes his influence upon events is confined, not by either physical limitations or formidable foes, but by his own choice. He has, in other words, better things to do than to meddle further with the events that are unfolding. In Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous (1955), he grows increasingly tired of publishing the Camelot Chronicle newspaper, reducing his involvement until he finally resigns: “What a bore it all was, thought Merlin, how much he would like to get out of it, just had to see poor young Arthur through and then he would go. Back to Paris. Talks and discussions on a really high level, something you missed in London. The University. The salons. Nimue.”20 In Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex (1978), he decides to leave the new world of idealism he has helped to create, for it is one in which his “practical cunning” no longer has a place21; as the Lady of the Lake points out: “for in the irony that so characterizes human affairs, it is thee who art the realist, while he [Arthur] will go ever further into the legendary” (109). Instead, he retires to concentrate upon his scientific experiments.22 In “The Secret Leaves” (2001) by Tricia Sullivan, Myrddin again turns his back on the material world and, driven by curiosity, chooses to enter into and lose himself in an ancient oak tree. At the prospect of this journey, he enthuses, “I could

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Change into the trees, I could feel the sun translated in their leaves, I might understand the meaning of the sun. It would be the next best thing to Changing to the sun itself.”23 In Peter Dickinson’s Merlin Dreams (1988), Merlin also chooses to withdraw from the world, though here he is a shaman who seeks escape from his own powers in an enchanted sleep beneath a stone. He wakens briefly to save the protagonists from rapacious vivisectors in John Cowper Powys’s Morwyn (1937), but he immediately resumes his enchanted sleep once the latter flee. In The Quest for Excalibur (1959) by Leonard Wibberley, and in Andre Norton’s Steel Magic (1965) and Here Abide Monsters (1974), he is awake, but too busy elsewhere to offer the young protagonists more than a few penetrating questions or words of advice in their quest for self-knowledge. In Helen Clare’s Merlin’s Magic (1963), Edward Eager’s Half Magic (1954), Linda Haldeman’s The Lastborn of Elvinwood (1978), and Clive Endersby’s Read All About It! (198l), Merlin provides a useful spell to move the action along and then goes back to what he was doing before. In Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy (2000-ŷ ), of which the first two books have appeared to date, Merlin serves as guide to another Arthur who lives on the Welsh Marches at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet although he gives this new Arthur a stone in which to view events in the life of his legendary predecessor, he leaves him to draw his own conclusions about what he sees and to apply these lessons as he sees fit. A fourth limitation upon Merlin’s influence, and, like the last, one of his own choosing, is his belief that others must be allowed to make their own decisions if they are to learn meaningfully. In White’s Once and Future King Merlyn transforms Arthur, his young pupil, into a fish: “Oh, Merlyn,” he cried, “please come too.” “For this once,” said a large and solemn tench beside his ear, “I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”24 Although he promises, at the end of the first book, “The Sword in the Stone,” to stay with Arthur for a long time, Merlyn recognizes that his pupil must learn how to reach his own decisions, instead of relying upon others to tell him what to do. “And what is going to happen when there is nobody to tell you?” he angrily insists. “Are you never going to think for yourself ?” (226) In Powys’s Porius (1951) Myrddin Wyllt, as Merlin is known here, profoundly mistrusts those in authority: “the Devil is every god who exacts obedience…. Nobody in the world, nobody beyond the world, can be trusted with power.”25 He himself matches his actions to his words by declining to control, or even guide, the affairs of men: “What the world wants is more common-sense, more kindness, more indulgence, more leaving people alone…. I never took arms against anything but the tyranny of heaven” (276–77), he avows. When Arthur complains, in Berger’s Arthur Rex, that he has seen little of Merlin recently, the sage sternly rebukes him: “You are no longer a boy, and it would not be

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proper for me to attend you constantly, extricating you from every difficulty, for then I should be the king, and you the retainer” (75). Indeed, Arthur learns to trust his own judgment so rapidly that he grows “somewhat weary of the old magician and his devilry” (106); he is thus more relieved than distressed when Merlin announces his departure, as the latter rather ruefully recognizes: “for to speak truly, now that Arthur hath all the furniture required to reign well, he would seem to need me no longer” (109). In The Last Enchantment by Stewart, Merlin says of the council meetings, “I was there, appealed to sometimes, but in the main watching and listening only: the counsel I gave him [Arthur], I gave in private, behind closed doors. In the public sight, the decisions were his. Indeed, they were his as often as mine, and as time went on I was content to let his judgment have its way” (235). Eventually, Merlin completes the shift to the role of passive listener: “Less and less did he need to come to me for counsel, but, as always since his boyhood, he needed the chance to talk over —to himself as much as to me—the course of events, and the problems of the newlybuilt concourse of kingdoms as they arose” (324). The importance of allowing people to make their own decisions is confirmed by those works in which Merlin interferes unduly. His actions have always been resented by his enemies, but that is only to be expected when he hinders their personal ambitions in the higher interests of the kingdom. Sometimes, however, the only interests he serves are his own. In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Merlin is exposed by Hank Morgan as a charlatan concerned only with his own influence over others;26 he plays a similar role in Peter Vansittart’s Lancelot (1978), where the narrator observes, “Neither he nor his book of signs often impressed me, he did not extract the mystery inherent in things and people but merely exploited the general ignorance.”27 Though less severe upon his behavior, Gawin, the narrator of Kinsmen of the Grail (1963) by Dorothy James Roberts, nevertheless resents Merlin’s loquaciousness and inquisitiveness: “No affair of yours, old crock, Gawin thought. But you must stick your snout into everything that happens at the City of Legions.”28 In “The Gwynhfar” (1986) by Yolen, he is a schemer who treats Gwynhfar badly and plans to deceive the king; in The Queens Knight (1956) by Marvin Borowsky, he is a crafty politician whose purpose in placing Arthur on the throne is to provide a puppet for the Lords of the Council. When Arthur seizes actual power, Merlin supports him only out of desperation, realizing that he will be punished by the Council for the failure of his plan. His plots take him a step further in A Trace of Memory (1962) by Keith Laumer and in The Emperor Arthur (1967) by Godfrey Turton, where he actually betrays Arthur in an attempt to win more power. Merlin’s ambitions are even more evident in The Third Magic (1988) by Welwyn Wilton Katz. As a member of the Line, locked in a struggle with the sisterhood of the Circle on the world of Nwm, it is his task to bring Earth under the domination of his order, and he looks upon it as an opportunity to further his own ambitions. With the cruelty typical of all Linesmen, he callously rapes one of the sisterhood, then sacrifices Arthur’s life in order to complete her destruction. In Walker Percy’s

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Lancelot (1978), the Merlin figure is a film producer and director who manipulates the career of his actors to his own advantage, including the enjoyment of sexual favors.29 His drive to dominate others culminates in “The Last Defender of Camelot” (1979) by Roger Zelazny, where he is depicted as a misguided idealist. His intolerance threatens all who do not share his narrow views before he is destroyed by an untraditional alliance between Morgan le Fay and Lancelot. The danger that he poses to freedom and progress is seen in The Weathermonger by Peter Dickinson where, under the influence of drugs, Merlin returns Britain to a repressive, premachine culture. Because his body is occupied jointly by the romantic young woman and the pop psychiatrist who travel back in time in “The Camelot Connection” (1988) by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, he can hardly be blamed for the disastrous consequences of urging people at Arthur’s court to do what they want rather than what duty requires, but the criticism of therapeutic manipulation of people’s lives may be applied to Merlin’s own role in Arthurian legend. He can, moreover, be held accountable for the reckless creation of a dragon he is unable to control in The Dragon Lord (1982) by David Drake, and for the violence caused by his “designs for power” in Gary Gygax’s “Duty” (1995).30 The danger posed by the irresponsible use of power in these works makes it clear why Merlin’s effectiveness is so restricted in Arthurian tradition. His guidance and protection are valuable to the heroes while they are young and lacking both experience and strength to deal with the dangers that surround them on all sides. Thus Merlin is important as a tutor and strategist. Indeed, in the thirteenth-century Vulgate Merlin, he even leads armies into battle with notable success, a role preserved in Jack Whyte’s Dream of Eagles cycle (1992-present).31 Paradoxically, however, for the heroes to fulfil their potential, they must be allowed the freedom to gain both experience and strength for themselves. An allpowerful Merlin would eventually become paternalistic and oppressive, reducing the heroes to a state of perpetual childhood.32 His influence, therefore, must be gradually reduced so that they may gain maturity. Traditionally, Merlin is first besotted, then trapped in an enchanted sleep, by Nimue, leaving Arthur and his knights to manage without his further guidance. Modern authors, however, often reject this solution, offering alternative explanations for the withdrawal of his influence. This is achieved by the means we have just examined: physical limitations, whether of age or youth, reduce his effectiveness; mighty enemies, whether wielding supernatural or political power, threaten to overwhelm him; other interests distract him; finally—and most significantly—he has the wisdom to recognize that his time must pass and a new generation be allowed to exercise its authority. This allows Merlin to remain involved in events for longer: in Merlin’s Harp (1995) by Anne Eliot Crompton, for example, he helps Lancelot rescue Gwenevere from being burned at the stake. Yet to ensure the complete development of the young heroes, he must leave them eventually. After all, one of the most important lessons we can learn is that we must lose those who have guided and protected us in the past. Were this not so, there would be no need for a new generation to learn responsibility.

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Yet while historical fiction has to accept mortality, fantasy does not, and Arthurian novels persist stubbornly with the medieval tradition that Merlin does not die but falls into an enchanted sleep. This may be variously translated: In Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, he departs to “the time that is outside Time” (264); in Norton’s Merlin’s Mirror, he enters a state of suspended animation provided by advanced alien technology; in Colum’s Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter, he stays on an island floating in the west. Even when Merlin appears to die, there are hints that this is but another metamorphosis of the shape-changing enchanter: in Burnham and Ray’s Raven, a merlin mysteriously emerges from his grave; though his death is implied in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, it is not actually witnessed. Even in historical novels, rumors abound that he is not dead but only in an enchanted sleep. The need for Merlin’s survival, like that of Arthur and his champions in the Cave Legend, is based, not upon a slavish adherence to tradition, but upon reasons that are as deep rooted as those that require his departure to make way for a new generation. Although most Arthurian fiction records great victories against the forces of evil, it stresses that these cannot be final. In Lewis’s novel, Curry, the subwarden of Bracton College, survives the great destruction as proof of the endurance of the human folly that first allowed evil to gain such hideous strength: “Britain [evil] has lost a battle, but she will rise again” (460). In Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, Merriman concludes, “We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control…. And the world will still be imperfect, because men are imperfect. Good men will still be killed by bad, or sometimes by other good men, and there will still be pain and disease and famine, anger and hate” (267). Yet if victories cannot be final, neither can defeats, as Arthur, on the eve of his last battle in White’s Once and Future King, tells his page, young Tom of Warwick: “Thomas, my idea of those knights was a sort of candle, like these ones here. I have carried it for many years with a hand to shield it from the wind. It has flickered often. I am giving you the candle now—you won’t let it out?” “It will burn.” (674) The struggle between good and evil is a psychomachia that must be fought over and over again by each generation, and by each individual. And though battles may be won and lost, the struggle will continue as long as humanity survives. Yet what is gained in the struggle is added power and wisdom to aid in later battles; because these are the very qualities traditionally embodied in the figure of Merlin the Enchanter, it is appropriate that he survive rather than die. The solution to these conflicting thematic needs—on the one hand, for the enchanter’s departure to allow continued development of the younger heroes, on the other, for his survival as a symbol of the power of good to resist evil, of knowledge to enlighten ignorance—is to effect a temporary, rather than permanent, withdrawal from the mortal sphere of activity. He remains thus a symbol of hope for the future. In Parke Godwin’s Firelord (1980), this is accomplished by transforming Merlin into a projection of Arthur himself, speaking to him out of his dreams. He becomes, in effect,

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the spirit of heroic inspiration that Arthur shares with others, weaving a vision of “bright tomorrows you carved out of wishes and painted with dreams.”33 As Arthur lies dying, Merlin sets off to find “Another dreamer, to be born in the same old place: where he’s needed” (390), though he pauses to comment, “You didn’t do badly at all, Arthur. If I hadn’t been at this for ages, I might even boast a bit” (391). Merlin survives, thus, by virtue of his identification with the forces of good that struggle against evil, of knowledge that struggle against ignorance. And just as evil and ignorance cannot be finally destroyed, so neither can good and knowledge. Herein lies Merlin’s true immortality, and it ensures that while he must withdraw from the world to allow others to fulfil their own potential, his return is assured. When the need arises, Merlin may be awakened from his enchanted sleep, to nurture a new generation of heroes—perhaps even a reborn Arthur himself—until they are ready to bear the burden of power in their turn. Only then can he return to rest until he is needed again to preserve our dreams of a finer world. Notes 1. Parts of this article were first published as “The Enchanter Awakes: Merlin in Modern Fantasy,” in Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Carl B.Yoke and Donald Hassler (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 49–56. It has been substantially revised and expanded. 2. C.S.Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-ups (London: Lane, 1945), p. 352. 3. For a summary of traditional Merlin material, see The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris Lacy et al. (New York and London: Garland, 1991), pp. 319–22. 4. Diana L.Paxson, The Hallowed Isle. Book One: The Book of the Sword (New York: Avon, 1999), p. 99. 5. Susan Shwartz, “A Refuge of Firedrakes,” in Return to Avalon, ed. Jennifer Roberson (New York: DAW, 1996), p. 172. 6. Jane Yolen, The Dragon’s Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 32. This version, published separately as a children’s book, is a substantially expanded revision of a short story that first appeared in 1985 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; it was subsequently included in Yolen’s collection of short stories and poems entitled Merlin’s Booke (New York: Ace, 1986), pp. 73–92. 7. Mary Stewart, The Last Enchantment (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), p. 352. 8. See Neil Thomas, “The Celtic Wild Man Tradition and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini: Madness or Contemptus Mundi?” Arthuriana, 10.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 27–42. 9. See D.Thomas Hanks, Jr., “T.H.White’s Merlyn: More Than Malory Made Him,” in The Figure of Merlin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Jeanie Watson and Maureen Fries (Lewiston, N.Y./Queenston, Ont./Lampeter, Wales: Mellen, 1989), pp. 108–109. 10. For a discussion of this category of fantasy, see my study The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), p. 88. 11. Brian Stableford, “The Architect of Worlds,” in Camelot Fantastic, ed. Lawrence Schimel and Martin H.Greenberg (New York: DAW, 1998), p. 123. 12. Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 123.

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13. Susan Cooper, The Grey King (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 147. 14. See Anne Berthelot, “Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake,” Arthuriana, 10.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 55–81, reprinted in this casebook; and Peter H.Goodrich, “The Erotic Merlin,” Arthuriana, 10.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 94–115. 15. See Fanni Bogdanow, “Morgain’s Role in the Thirteenth-Century French Prose Romances of the Arthurian Cycle,” Medium Aevum, 38 (1969), pp. 123–33. 16. Fay Sampson, Herself (London: Headline, 1992), p. 61. 17. For a fuller discussion of Merlin’s role in historical fiction, see my article “Rationalizing the Irrational: Merlin and His Prophecies in the Modern Historical Novel,” Arthuriana, 10.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 116–26. 18. Despite the intrusion of apparently supernatural elements, I consider Stewart’s novels to be historical fiction: see The Return from Avalon, p. 50. Christopher Dean, in A Study of Merlin in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present Day: The Devil’s Son (Lewiston, N.Y./ Queenston, Ont./Lampeter, Wales: Mellen, 1992), considers them to be “epic fantasy” (p. 282). 19. See Dean, A Study of Merlin, pp. 299–300. 20. Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous (1955; Oakland, Cal.: Green Knight, 1999), pp. 175–76. 21. Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (New York: Delacorte, 1978), p. 109. 22. For a discussion of Merlin’s role in this and other ironic novels, see my article, “The Comic Sage: Merlin in Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex,” in Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 145–53. 23. Tricia Sullivan, “The Secret Leaves,” in Out of Avalon, ed. Jennifer Roberson (New York: Roc, 2001), p. 72. 24. T.H.White, The Once and Future King (London: Collins, 1958), p. 41. 25. John Cowper Powys, Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (London: Macdonald, 1951), p. 276. 26. See, for example, Allison R.Ensor, “The Magic of Fol-de-Rol: Mark Twain’s Merlin,” in Watson and Fries, The Figure of Merlin, pp. 51–63. 27. Peter Vansittart, Lancelot (London: Owen, 1978), p. 120. 28. Dorothy James Roberts, Kinsmen of the Grail (1963; Oakland, Cal.: Green Knight, 2000), p. 138. 29. See John Bugge, “Merlin and the Movies in Walker Percy’s Lancelot” Studies in Medievalism, 2. 4 (Fall 1983), pp. 39–55. 30. Gary Gygax, “Duty,” in Excalibur, ed. Richard Gilliam, Martin H.Greenberg, and Edward E.Kramer (New York: Warner, 1995), p. 443. Although the figure of Merlini in Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Joel and the Great Merlini (1979) is not identified as Merlin, he too fits this pattern: his well-intentioned assistance to a young boy who is trying to learn magical tricks becomes a form of control, and it must be broken so that the latter can learn and grow in freedom. 31. For a discussion of Merlin’s role in the medieval prose romances, see Aileen Ann Macdonald, The Figure of Merlin in Thirteenth Century French Romance (Lewiston, N.Y./ Queenston, Ont./Lampeter, Wales: Mellen, 1990); see also Berthelot, “Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake.” 32. For a discussion of the adverse impact of excessive, if well-intentioned, interference in medieval romance, see my article, “The Perils of Good Advice: The Effect of the Wise Counsellor upon the Conduct of Gawain,” Folklore, 90 (1979), pp. 71–76. 33. Parke Godwin, Firelord (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), p. 7.

PART II Major Motifs and Works

CHAPTER 9 Merlin as Wise Old Man HEINRICH ZIMMER Translated by Friedhelm Rickert

The growth of northern Europe’s pagan religions was arrested in its prime when their practitioners came under the sway of Christianity. It was the Church rather than Roman culture that deprived the mythology of the Celts, the Germanic peoples, and the large pre-Celtic aboriginal population of France and the British Isles of its proper sphere of existence, sapping the vital energy of the old religion. Pre-Christian mythology, despoiled of its cult and ritual, was transformed into legend and poetry; it became secularized and seemingly uprooted and unpracticed, turning into an elusive adversary for the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages, it continued to offer the tender nourishment of the soul for which the Church’s teachings of salvation could not provide anything comparable. Using the images and figures of Celtic and pre-Celtic myths and legends, medieval man dreamed out the buried youth of his people’s prehistoric days. In the cycle of Arthur and the Grail, these myths and legends were transformed into the social romances of knightly and courtly Europe. That explains the immediate appeal these subjects hold for us, the descendants of the medieval and prehistoric peoples. Brought to life by poets time and again, the legends are of the same substance which can still be found in the depths of our soul. The initiator at the center of these cycles of legends is Merlin. He represents for the West in lone perfection a figure which in other culture groups—those of India or of the American Indians, for instance—is a common and commanding presence: the wizard as teacher and guide of souls, comparable to the guru as the house priest and master of initiations in Hinduism, and to the medicine man as the oracle and guiding spiritual principle of the tribe. Merlin makes his home in the “enchanted forest,” the “Valley of No Return,” which is clearly suggestive of “the land from which no wayfarer returns,” the land of the dead. The enchanted forest is, of course, the dark facet of the world. It is full of all sorts of adventures, and nobody enters it without losing his way and finding himself multifariously in peril of death. The elect one who proves himself and passes its tests emerges from it transformed, a reborn man. The forest is an old place of initiation. Here, in the wilderness, the demonic elements, the ancestral spirits, and the forces of nature manifest themselves. It is here that the quest for the encounter with one’s superego, the totem animal, takes place. The medicine man leads the young men into the wilderness of the forest so that they may be born anew, emerging from the

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frightful rites of initiation as warriors and men. Wilderness and jungle represent the antagonistic sphere of house and hearth, village and landmark, where the domestic tutelary gods, the laws and customs of the day, and human order hold sway. They conceal the inadmissible, the uncanny and dreadful, from the ordered and protected, the explicable and familiar. Here in the domain of the dreadful, where one can be swallowed up forever by the seat of the dark forces—in league with which one would have a tremendous hold on the customary area of familiar order and power—here, somewhere in the valley of no return, Merlin’s castle can be found, with its countless windows overlooking the secrets that surround it, with its innumerable entrances for those arriving by a multitude of paths, and with just as many exits into the vastness of the world.1 Full of whispering voices, the forest encompasses life’s adventure and the adventure of the soul with its abyss of forces and images. And Merlin’s castle in the forest is the heart of darkness which sees and knows everything with its many eyes, and which offers each of the elect a different access to the mystery. But Merlin is not only the master of the wilderness and of the dreadful forces which tempt the elect one to prove himself; he is also the founder and mentor of the knightly Round Table, and the teacher of its lord, King Arthur. He assembles the host of the elect in the world of light until their number is complete; he then entices them into the darkness of their trials, sending them on the path of their transformation. In the late stylization of the twelfth century, the age of the Arthurian cycle and the romances, Merlin is the son of a demonic incubus and a virgin (first mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, circa 1136). This version represents the medieval Christian view that the ancient divinities of the Britons, by then already shrunk to demons, wanted to bring an Antichrist and son of a virgin into the world so that he might restore their waning power against the realm of the Savior. It is a tendentiously distorted version of the worldwide mythical motif that he who is called to perform miracles—to be the god or hero destined to bring a new order, be he dragon slayer or savior—has no human father. His seed has descended from the sphere of the supernatural powers into the virgin soil of a human mother. A princess is predestined to become Merlin’s mother. Innocently, through heedlessness, she succumbs to the incubus. She conceives a spirit child and must give birth to it, cast out and sorrowful, in a dark dungeon. The mythical world treats sons of virgins even more harshly than does bourgeois society. Yet the dark and endangered beginning is a necessary element of the miraculous course of life, of the child’s calling. It points to his supernatural origin. The child comforts his mother; he already knows of his extraordinary destiny and is not afraid of the path he will have to follow. A son of man, child of a virgin, endowed with supernatural powers as Jesus was endowed with the power of the Father and the Holy Ghost, Merlin is akin to Buddha and Perseus. The elect one always represents the merging of two spheres: the supernatural and the human. In the realm of myth, the singular hero who averts the plight or turns the tide, this unexpected and unique being cannot issue from the customary marital union as practiced by a group of ordinary people. Perseus is the fruit

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of the golden seed the sky god poured into princess Danaë’s womb, the human hero with godlike, divinely inspired strength who overcomes the Medusa and delivers Andromeda from the sea dragon. Perseus purges the powers of monsters from the world of humans—in this respect resembling Indra, the dragon slayer and fatherless son of a virgin, who as a result of his cosmic deeds becomes king of the gods and ushers in a new age. Merlin, though akin to them by his origin, is, however, not a hero but a wizard, employing knowledge and magic instead of arms and feats of strength. He does not rise to the rank of hero and king of a new world order, but its king, Arthur, owes him his very conception. Merlin also presides over the establishment of Arthur’s new order, the Round Table.2 This can be seen as an expression of the priestly, mantic culture of the British Isles, a culture in which the druids overshadow the kings because of their magic powers and knowledge, just as the hierarchy of Buddhist priests does in Lamaistic Tibet. The “gospel of childhood”—sayings, acts, and miracles performed by the child, which bespeak his exalted origin—is part and parcel of the elect one’s mythical career. King Vortigern, who has bloodily usurped the throne, has a tower built to guard himself against attacks. But the tower totters, and even the king’s two court magicians cannot stabilize it. Vortigern learns of the child Merlin, who is thoroughly versed in magic, and sends for him. Merlin reveals to the king the secret of the tottering tower. He reveals his vision of the two dragons fighting with each other deep under the tower, their struggle causing the tower to fall. He thus puts to shame the king’s two magicians, who pride themselves on their knowledge, and proceeds to prophesy Vortigern’s fall, as prefigured by the victory of the white dragon over the red. In so doing, the child rises above the old order that still looms large in the early years of his life. It boasts of its strength, striving to assert itself tyrannically, while actually already doomed to perish. He himself shall usher in the new order: the glory of the Arthurian world is his work. By virtue of his magic powers, he brings together the parents of the child Arthur, Uther Pendragon and Igerne, so that they, who do not belong to each other, can be united with each other. He watches over Arthur’s youth. For Arthur, also being elect, is brought up like the child Zeus in secrecy, preparing himself for the hour of his destiny. Merlin creates the symbol of his glory, the marvel of the Round Table (a copy of which is still on display in Winchester). He also uses his magie powers for Uther Pendragon, and brings the “Giants’ Dance,” a prehistoric circle of upright stones, from Ireland to Salisbury where it now stands as “Stonehenge.” Merlin becomes the inspiring mentor of the Round Table, the king’s counselor, a seer and wizard in the pre-Christian druidic sense, like a Brahmanic guru at the court of Indian princes. Radiating from Wales, Merlin remains the prophetic figure of the Celtic world far beyond the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages couches criticism of contemporary issues and wishes for the future in the guise of prehistoric prophecies about the present and recent past (a practice influenced by the prophecies of the sibyl, the prophets of the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse). Such prophecies give vent to the judgment and feelings of the people who, being illiterate, have no public voice. Their suffering and

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yearning, their foreboding of dire things to come, turn into prophecies of future events. Just like Joachim de Fiore’s prophecy of the coming of a third empire, so, in Wales, are Merlin’s prophecies, his oracular discourses with his sister, and his songs all links in a chain of utterances giving voice to the genius of the people which continues beyond his grave for centuries. Even as late as the sixteenth century, these prophecies represented such an alarming phenomenon that the Council of Trent (1545–1563) put them on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum [List of Forbidden Books]. In all of them, through the mask of Merlin, the genius of the Celtic people raised its voice against political forces and conditions of the time. The ancient type of wizard and druid, seer and weather-wise magician, who embodies the profound divinatory powers of his tribe and who dreams its deep dreams and interprets them, has become in Merlin a dominating figure which, long after the mythical time of its growth and evolution, continues to be a presaging, comforting power for his people. Merlin’s dual origin from the world of man and the realm of the supernatural powers is symbolic for legendary figures of his caliber. They are descended from a union of the human world and the sphere of the spirits. The historical germ of actual people enriches itself with timeless, archetypal, ideal traits and deeds. Arthur and Merlin, Arthur’s parents and Vortigern, are all actual figures of British history from the bloody time when the Romans have abandoned the island, when the Scots from the north and the Irish from the west invade Britain, and when the Saxons of the mainland gain a firm foothold in the course of the migration of peoples. Vortigern is a British king who calls the Saxons into the country to help him keep the neighbors at bay, and then is unable to keep his allies under control. Brut Tysilio, the old Welsh chronicle of princes from the first third of the twelfth century (one of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s sources for his Historia), tells how Vortigern wanted to build a castle to defend himself against his enemies but did not succeed, and of his encounter with the wise child Merlin.3 According to this chronicle, Arthur, Uther’s son, helps the British cause once more to victory against the enemies on all sides. In a successful overseas campaign, he also deters the Scandinavian Vikings. He ventures into Gaul and, for the most part victorious, threatens the late Roman rule; he is even planning a march upon Rome to seize the imperial crown, like Charlemagne after him, when treachery strikes in his kingdom. At home, on the island, his nephew Mordred rises against him and abducts his wife Guinevere. Arthur must return, just as German emperors had to return when their sons rose against them at home.4 He defeats his nephew’s army, and Mordred is killed, but Arthur himself is also mortally wounded. He sails to the island of Avalon, to seek miraculous healing, but it is his journey to the realm of the dead. This last journey to the fairy island is already like the homecoming of a mythical hero who is carried off to the blessed island—or like the return of an ancient god who withdraws from the world and disappears into his native beyond. Just as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s characters live on two levels,5 so Merlin, Arthur, and figures like them move on two planes: that of the historical reality of the chronicles, as well as that of a mythical timelessness full of preexistent patterns. In this sphere, their temporal appearance becomes immortal as the transfigured body of an idea.

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The figure of Arthur was given the power to attract superhuman attitudes and traits, which are readily available in timeless myths, to the human part which is recorded in the chronicle. Already resembling an archetypal character, he could actually be transformed into one. It is to this that he owes his appeal throughout the ages. The features of vanished ancient gods and primordial heroes transform a historical face that had remained mute in the plainness of the chronicle’s report. Once endowed with these features, however, this figure is capable of speaking in a timeless fashion. One such trait is how Arthur proves himself to be the preordained ruler. Upon Uther’s death, the great lords of the realm vie for the crown. The supernatural powers are to decide. Before the church portal there is a stone, with a sword buried in it, and whosoever can pull it from the stone is destined to reign. Many try in vain. Young Arthur, whom Merlin has secretly raised at the court of Sir Hector, Uther’s loyal vassal, comes riding with Sir Hector whom he attends as a squire. It is Arthur, unaware of performing a miraculous feat, who frees the sword from the stone, demonstrating not only that he is born to rule, but also that he is predestined by his sacred strength. Freeing the iron from the stone is a prehistoric symbol of the transition period between two ages: until the discovery of bronze and iron, there are no swords, only stone axes. Who extracts the metal from the stone? The miracle-working hero who leads humanity out of the Stone Age and teaches them the smelting of metals. Whoever can pull the iron sword from the stone is the elect one: not necessarily a great warrior, though in any case a superior magician, master over supernatural powers and material substances, a wizard. In the role he plays in the Iron Age, he is related to today’s inventor, chemist, and engineer, who makes new weapons and armors for the peoples.6 To the people of those early times, when the transition from stone to metal was made, the one who freed the metal from the stone had to appear as the chosen master of secrets. In those days, the hero made his weapons himself; he was a “forger of his own fortune,” and a hero’s superiority depended to a large part on his ability to forge a weapon that would not break. The superior weapon seemed to be god-given and marvelous, a blessed gift as a sign of favor from the supernatural powers. Victory depended as much on the weapon as on the hero’s courage and strength (a mythological parallel to the secret of superior technological armament coveted by nations). It had to be the great dream of the early metal age to possess the divine sword that would not break—how many must have shattered initially!—just as it was the great dream of the Stone Age to have a marvelous projectile which would return to the hand that threw it, like the thunderbolt of Zeus, the hammer of Thor, and Indra’s lightning bolt. The value of the prehistoric weapon fashioned by the hero himself, or bestowed upon him by divine grace, is a part of himself, a symbol of his sacred strength. It follows him to his grave, or may be taken only by someone who is worthy of it, someone who bears an archetypal resemblance to its original owner. So it is with the bow of Ulysses which none of the suitors can draw. The sword granting the power to

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rule preserves itself for the heir elect who, young and unrecognized, approaches among the great and old to reveal himself as the son of the old king after the feat that proves his calling. The supernatural powers present Arthur with another sword after the sword he pulled from the stone has been broken in combat. Because the first one failed him, he could not overcome King Pellinor who had challenged him to single combat. Arthur seizes yet another sword from the giant Rions: the weapons the hero takes from his defeated foes tangibly represent their strength, which now passes to the victor. The man who vanquishes the giant is a giant-man [Riesen-Mensch], who establishes himself as a super-giant [Über-Riese].7 In this way the mythical imagination, so rich in archetypes, settles upon the historical character, revealing through primordial and timeless traits the greater depth of the figure, something the chronicler is not aware of. That is the double life of the elect one in myth and history. For instance, in E.T.A.Hoffmann the Archivarius Lindthorst leads a double life as a man who is actually a fiery dragon, [his daughter, the student Anselmus’] lady love is a green snake, and the student George Pepusch is also the thistle Zeherit.8 It is just that the world does not see these things; to the timeless child in one’s soul, however, it sounds familiar. The Round Table made for Uther falls after his death to his friend King Leodegran of Cameliard, who keeps it for Arthur. When Arthur has grown into a young man, he rescues Leodegran from his enemies and, as a reward, is given the hand of his daughter Guinevere. With her the Round Table passes into his possession. The circle is made up of knights who were already in the service of Guinevere’s father; others are appointed by Arthur at Merlin’s behest. The last empty seat at the Round Table (except for the “siege perilous” which has to stay empty, awaiting mysterious things to happen in the future) is taken by King Pellinor who, unvanquished, bends his knee before Arthur’s majesty out of his own free will. Guinevere in Arthur’s possession, the Knights of the Round Table assembled in full strength and ready for action: life seemed to be full of meaning and purpose when all the Knights of the Round Table, at the circling cup of the heroes’ communion, raised their swords as one and swore again and again to turn wrong into right, to punish the guilty, to feed the hungry and to help the weak, to abide by the law, and to never refuse to succor a woman in distress. However, they had hardly sworn their solemn oath when extraordinary things began to happen.9 With barking and a haunting sound of horns, a wild hunt broke into the hall, a white hart in the lead, closely followed by a quick little bloodhound such as a hunter is wont to have with him in his saddle while hunting, with a large pack of hounds in the rear. The hunt tore around the assembled knights, and suddenly the hart, in its great distress, leaped over the seated Gawain and knocked him over. The little bloodhound was fast on its heels, but Gawain caught it with his hands and, as if under a spell, was dragged by it into the turmoil of the hunt which dashed out of the hall after the stag. The knights were sitting there as if lost in a dream, when an enchanting maiden on a white palfrey appeared in the door to the hall, lamenting over the loss of her little

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dog. “The knight had no right to take it from me! Remember your oath, King Arthur. I am in need—you have sworn not to refuse to help any woman in distress!” King Arthur sat there without saying a word, his hand on his sword. He had dreamt of other challenges and deeds when taking the oath, not of retrieving a little dog for some grieving girl. The echo of the horns of the uncanny hunt had not yet faded away in the distance when a shadowy black knight on a black horse rode into the hall, seized the reins of the girl’s palfrey and abducted the lamenting and resisting maiden before any of the knights could move. They all stood in a daze, and Arthur called upon Merlin: “What does it all mean, great wizard? Did this hunt and this black knight come from your forest? Are they apparitions?” Then Merlin threw back the hood that shaded his aged face and concealed more than it revealed. As his face became visible, his features were transformed: the familiar countenance with its white beard, crowned with mistletoe, changed into the radiant face of an ageless boy with laurel in his golden locks. He smiled and exclaimed—and his voice sounded like the distant horns of the uncanny hunt: “Was it a ghost hunt and a fairy maiden? Are you not man enough to go out in search of adventures and to ride in pursuit of fairies? Why are you assembled here—if not to follow Gawain’s example?” With that he covered his face again with his hood, and was gone. Merlin, a master teacher, is also the lord and master over dangers. The mentor of King Arthur and his father is likewise the lord of Castle Perilous in the Valley of No Return.10 Thus balance is maintained. The fellowship of the Round Table was completed by Pellinor, the only champion who had been a serious threat to Arthur and who still appeared on the horizon of external fights and risks as an unvanquished menace. The fellowship is complete and, as something that has found its definitive form, it can now pass into the uneventful. It has reached, like Arthur in possession of Guinevere, the goal of its development. How are things to go on? Apparently in the same way, over and over again: lots of action but, strictly speaking, without anything really happening; lots of adventures but, when all is said and done, without real danger. For after all, who in the tangible world would be a match for the pure heroism of the Round Table? Have the heroes been ordained the world’s lords and judges, who may presume to carry out the duties of archangels, in order to remain in the knightly here and now of the human world? Whosoever has reached such lofty heights that, angel-like, pure, strong, and without desire, both caring and impartial, he executes the higher law against the greedy and sullen rage of the creature against whose malevolence he is immune as long as he stands by his vow. He must measure himself against the world beyond, into which he already reaches with his head, and whose acts his arm dares to execute. Therefore Arthur and his knights may not long rejoice in the completion of the Round Table, nor in the consummated mystical marriage of king and queen, both symbols of a stage accomplished and a fulfillment achieved. For the elect knight, every achievement is but a step and already carries within it the seeds of death, of wilting and shriveling in regularity, uniformity, and repetition, if he comes to believe that what has been achieved is the totality of what can be achieved. The elect one is

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set apart from the populace, the mere creature, by virtue of his being elect, and the seat at the Round Table, the drink from the cup, and the oath taken are all signs of having been chosen. The tangible world, in as far as it is always conquerable and (at least in theory) well ordered, becomes desolate without true dangers and challenges. At this point a new danger in the form of an enticement and an alarming apparition emerges from the unknown, from the enchanted forest, from the Castle Perilous in the Valley of No Return.11 The forest shimmers in a lovely twofold light, that of danger and, at the same time, initiation. There is a pure godly strength that protects the hero, but how does he counter its protean, alluring pull and might? Who is a match for powerful magic? The forest is no hellish counterworld in the Christian sense, but rather a possible province of the soul where it can find its real adventure. That is the way Gawain understands it when he beholds the white hart, the most beautiful guise of the innocently roaming, constantly escaping goal: what a fairy maiden must the hart change into, if one were to succeed in catching it! In the enchanted forest, we encounter all the dark and tempting aspects of the world once more as they spring from our deeper longings and the soul’s primeval dreams. The fellows of the Round Table understand that all the ordinary knightly world has to offer are only assigned duties: a public office, but no more challenge and temptation. They realize the adventure of the soul is the true field of their actions; the archangel-like knights have to wrestle with the supernatural world of magic. The form of knightly excellence they have achieved is in danger of turning into a game and, at the same time, a routine, as can happen to any form of achievement for the elect who stop at this point on their path—whereas such form of achievement, at the level of the ordinary creature, means the very breath of life and a divinely ordained order. Merlin caused a wind to blow through the castle and everything appears to have changed, in fact has changed. It was only a hart chased by dogs which had passed through like an apparition, and a helpless lamenting maiden, yet the heroes quail helplessly. However, this ironic repartee to their grand oath stings the knights and embarrasses them. The idleness and emptiness of their glory dawns on them: the real challenge is yet to be met. The enchanted forest, the true site of dangers and initiations, summons them. The spiritual guide and guru of the Round Table reveals the deeper meaning: the magic hunt comes from him; the true adventure is announcing its arrival. Everything else was but a prelude to gather the circle of the elect. The distinction of being chosen makes all members of the Round Table equal. Their fateful course through life, traced out for each of them individually, takes them on their particular paths that meet, cross, and become en-twined. These often lead through similar trials and dangers to similar ends. The metaphorical language depicting the events hints at different ways of initiation, transformation, and achieving perfection, like the deeds of Heracles and the voyage of the Argonauts, the heroic life of Theseus and the wanderings of Odysseus. The knights of the Round Table are the Celtic-British equivalent of these mythical figures. The Arthurian legends are one of

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the significant complements of institutionalized Christianity (another one being the encounter with Islam and its antique traditions). Rising up from prehistoric times, they have remained fascinating over centuries as tutorial examples of achieving a higher form of humanity through initiation and proof of worth. It is not until the advent of the new man of the Renaissance that humanity frees itself from Merlin’s magic of initiation. The deeper dream symbolism of his knightly adepts’ journeys and “quests,” gone stale in the popular romances and worn out, is held up to mockery by Rabelais, and is dealt the death blow of irony in Cervantes’ knight-errant of the rueful countenance. But Merlin himself has long since withdrawn from the world in which he brought together his adepts in the fellowship of the Round Table, only to disperse them on the many paths of the greatest adventure— that of transformation. Merlin’s end is well known. One day, he met the beautiful maiden Niniane in the forest. She is said to have been the daughter of a rich nobleman by the name of Dionas. Diana, Siren of Sicily—so they say—who was a sea goddess and very powerful, is said to have bestowed many gifts upon her.12 Thanks to these gifts, she had foreordained that Merlin should succumb to Niniane’s charm. Merlin entertained Niniane with a magic game. He broke a twig and drew a circle. Presently, there appeared knights and noble ladies holding hands and singing more beautifully than had ever been heard before. Minstrels chimed in with their instruments, so that one thought oneself to be listening to the music of angels. As the sun rose higher, a grove grew up around them, and flowers and fragrant herbs sprouted from the grass. Niniane never grew tired of listening to the singing even though she only understood the refrain: “Love’s beginning in sweet joys/ends nevertheless in bitter sorrow.” She entreated Merlin to teach her his art. Both pledged eternal love and gave themselves to each other. In the spirit of love’s games and pleasantries, Merlin taught Niniane many of his skills: for instance, how one can make water spring from the soil, and then make it disappear again. They could hardly bear to part from each other, and each time they met Merlin became more closely bound to Niniane, teaching her more and more of his marvelous art. He was well aware that some day she would cast a permanent spell over him, using his own magic which he had imparted to her. So he bade a moving farewell to Arthur and the world of his fame. When he returned to Niniane in the forest, she received him more passionately and coaxingly than ever. “Teach me,” she entreated him, “how to hold a man captive, without fetters or a tower, purely by the power of magic, so that he can escape nevermore, unless I set him free myself.” Merlin gave a deep sigh and bowed his head. Then he taught her all she needed to know for casting such a spell, keeping nothing from her. Niniane was beside herself with delight and bestowed so much love on him that he knew no other happiness than to be with her. Hand in hand, they strolled through the forest of Broceliande and, when they grew tired, sat down under a sweet-smelling hawthorn bush in full bloom. Here, they again enjoyed each other with words of love and embraces. In the end, Merlin laid his head in his lover’s lap, and she stroked his cheeks and played with his hair until he fell asleep.

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When she was sure that he was sound asleep, Niniane got up softly, took her long veil, and encircled the hawthorn bush with it. Then, casting the spell as Merlin had taught her to do, she walked nine times around the circle she had made, nine times whispering the magic words until the spell was indissoluble. She then softly sat down again, and took Merlin’s head back into her lap. When he woke up and looked around him, he felt as if he were lying on a sumptuous bed in an incredibly high tower. He exclaimed: “You have deceived me, unless you now will stay with me forever, for no one but you can release me from this tower.” “My dear love,” Niniane replied, “I shall often be in your arms.” And she was true to her promise. Few were the days and nights that passed that she was not with him. Merlin could not move from the spot to which she had bound him by her spell; but she came and went as she pleased. She would have gladly given him back his freedom, for it hurt her to see him imprisoned like that. However, the spell was too powerful, and it was no longer in her power to undo it, for which reason she languished in sorrow. A dazzling happening with a bitter-sweet flavor, full of the sweet charm of Tristan and soft shades of melancholy. The ancient magic of spellbinding someone to a certain spot, and the love spell which kept the man from roving far afield, have been colored by the amorous rococo of the medieval culture of courtly love à la French Arthurian romance, and been assigned to the courtly sphere of gallant knights and ladies. But the courtly element is limited to the stylization which the older mythical material has undergone. Merlin gives away his store of magic knowledge, though not to the knights of the Round Table and not to their royal sovereign, his protégé. For it is not in the interest of the world theater to be directed by a group of wise initiates, a circle of mahatmas from beyond the Himalayan Mountains, by Sarastros and Cagliostros in their temple halls,13 or by any other hierarchy of initiates. This wishful dream of virtue and reason to disentangle the horrors and tangles of the world-yarn, and to weave it, after some ideal pattern, into the carpet of perfection, a utopian process improving the conditions of life on earth, cannot occur to the wise Merlin whose prophetic vision beholds future ages as well as present images. And so he places the power of his wisdom into the tenderly charming hands of sweet folly. The elfin creature, life’s bewitching driving force, receives in her thoughtlessness that which means power over all thought. She can do nothing better with it than to cast a spell over the master of magic himself. The lord of the enchanted forest finds himself spellbound, knowingly and willingly, by the bewitching fairy child, the embodiment of the forest’s temptations and deep mystery. Merlin passes into the power which he constitutes himself, seemingly its victim, though he only returns home from the outside world—into its silently blooming existence with its own fragrance—after having represented for so long its power outwardly directed. He had been the face and the voice of the forest. Now the face hides itself, and the voice grows silent within the silence from which it has sprung and from which it drew all it wanted to voice in the space of the outside world. So the unconscious, after having turned itself into gestures and words for a while, after

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having ruled and guided as consciousness, returns to slumber in its own stillness. Niniane’s deceit is mere semblance: Merlin’s acquiescence is knowledge. Within her bird-like eye he recognizes his own nature. To magically transform oneself in order to make an end and to disappear, to withdraw from the world and the triumphant exploits, is the enticement of the depths, its wisdom and sublime indifference. Merlin had entered into the world, and he has come home to the forest. After all, what is the world to the forest? But it only befits Merlin to ask this question, and to answer it by letting himself be swallowed up within the forest, becoming forest and tree again. For he is the lord and essence of the forest, while the Arthurian knights are human: lords of castles and knights of the world. The creature of the unconscious has given symbols of initiation to the creatures of the world, and then sinks back into its own stillness. By knowingly yielding himself to Niniane’s magic—to becoming spellbound by his very own magic arts, fully aware of what he surrenders to her bit by bit and of what he relinquishes in doing so, and what will necessarily be the end of it all—Merlin rises to the unperturbed heights of an Indian god who withdraws impassively from the world into the stillness of his own self. For him nothing really remains to be done, to be saved, and to be judged or settled in the maya of the sensible world. Merlin rises to the posture of the reposing Shiva, who silently yields to the loving impetuosity, the tender insatiability of his goddess, who does not withstand the intoxicated girl but entrusts the world drama of evolving, blooming, and passing away to her enticingly creative ministrations. Arthur and his knights were sorely distressed over Merlin’s leave-taking and neveragain-to-return departure. They waited for him in vain, and for many a year wandered through the world in search of him.14 Once, Gawain was joylessly riding through the forest of Broceliande when he heard a voice to his right, yet saw nothing but a faint smoke which his eyes could not penetrate. Again the voice made itself heard; it said, “Do not be sad, Gawain; everything that happens is what had to happen.” “Who speaks to me,” cried Gawain, “Who calls me by my name?” Then the voice said, teasing him, “Do you not know me anymore, Sir Gawain? Once you knew me well. Then the old saying must be true, after all, ‘If you leave the court, the court leaves you.’ When I served King Arthur, I was known and loved by everyone. Now, however, I go unrecognized, though that should not happen if there were loyalty and trust on earth.” At that Gawain exclaimed, “O Master Merlin, now I recognize your voice; come forward so that I may see you.” “You will never see me,” Merlin replied, “and after you, I shall not speak to anyone any more; you are the last man to hear my voice. Henceforth, no one shall ever come to this place, and even you yourself will never return here. I can never come out and join you; no matter how much it pains me, I must forever remain here. Only she who holds me here has the power and might to come and go as she pleases. She is the only one who sees me and talks with me.” “How, dear friend,” cried Gawain, “are you held here that you cannot get away from this place ever? How could something like that have happened to you, the wisest of men?” “I am also, and at the same time, the greatest fool,” Merlin answered. “I love

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another more than myself; I taught my love how she might spellbind me, and now no one can free me.” Gawain sadly departed, and brought the news to the court. Their sorrow and mourning were great when he told them that no one would ever see Merlin or hear his voice again, and when he told them with whom he had to stay forever. They all broke into tears upon hearing how Merlin had sent greetings and his love to the queen and the king, the barons and all, and had blessed them, together with the realm. It is the superiority of the enchanting elfin powers that is celebrated here, the primeval motif of Celtic myth and legend, fairy tale, ballad, and mysticism. The magic of love and of the senses, the power of nature and of the night, the ecstasy of the instincts and of the unconscious are a more imperious and more initiating force than light and will, renunciation and consciousness, reason, commandment, and the asceticism of action. Here we encounter the reverence paid to the forces of dissolution, the loving sense of ecstatic annihilation in the womb of the generating powers, celebrating Tristan and Isolde’s indissoluble interlacement. On the other hand, though, these powers, testy and demonically evil, pursue and capture those who want to escape from their circle dance, as Sir Olaf from the daughters of the Erlking, and Tannhäuser from the love-fairy in the bowels of the mountain.15 It is the morality of the elves and fairies, of the powers of water and forest, the old nature religion and the fundamental mysticism of the Celts, which celebrates its victory, here as in Isolde’s love-death. The course of world history has decided against the Tannhäuser-like morality of the Celts, against Merlin’s divine squandering of himself by lovingly giving himself up to his own magic, losing himself to the being to whom he had made a present of the golden snare of magic by which he will be bound. The world has decided against it: Englishmen, not Irishmen or Welshmen, built the greatest empire since Rome. The world certainly is in favor of Round Table rule, and of adventure and exploits. But the hawthorn hedge continues to bloom unfadingly, and Merlin’s home is still in it. Yet can the wizard who is at home in timelessness and sees the ever-changing pictures of things to come in time inside a crystal, while he himself hovers above the flow of time—can he, at the same time, struggle with its waves as if within a nutshell? Merlin’s end provides food for thought. There are worse fates. To be forever driven on journeys that never end, the monotony of endless adventures, however varied—no matter how far one rides and rides—can be equally as confining a circle as that of being spellbound under the blooming hawthorn. In the end, Odysseus is as weary of all the Circes and Calypsos with whom he has lain, finding oblivion in their embrace, as he is of the monsters he has overcome and of the dangers he has escaped. He is weary of all the islands with their cliffs and inlets, be they hospitable or hostile, that have emerged and disappeared again behind him, as he is weary of all winecolored seas under the silence of a starry sky. In the end, he is satisfied with the uneventful routine within the confined circle of familiar day-to-day life, with his island and his home, with his no longer young wife. Here there is the wild forest of the wide world without as well as within, pathless, full of adventures and monsters, abounding with fairies and sorceresses and lovely

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enchanted beings who must needs be rescued, and who then cast a spell over the rescuer and hero. Then, there is the dense, fragrant, hawthorn hedge. And under its aromatic cloud, the yearning for far away expanses has come home to itself, stilled in its own stillness. The serpent lies coiled in its own dreamy state. It is like a homecoming a moment before the beginning of creation, before a profusion of figures and events—the rise of the gods and the fall of the titans—sprang from the womb, whose mystery no one has ever fathomed. There seems to have been a reversal of sex roles: Merlin, vanquished and reposing, Niniane, knowing and free, who dominates and delights him whenever she visits him. Enough of worldly play. The creation of the august brotherhood, which institutes a higher order with sword and vow, fades into oblivion, since the master who guided its activities dropped his magic wand. The deeper principle—that which gave form to the idea of the Round Table in the world, chose its supporters, and guided them—is withdrawing into itself, preserving itself in its own dreamy state. Notes Translated from Heinrich Zimmer, “Merlin,” Corona 9 (1939), pp. 133–55. Notes and bibliographical references are by the translator and Peter H.Goodrich. 1. This appears to be a reference to the retreat built for Merlin by his sister Gwenddydd in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin), with its seventy windows and seventy scribes. Alternatively, it could be the castle of glass attributed to him in Welsh legend, or the invisible castle where he is immured by Viviane/Niniane in the Vulgate Merlin of the French Lancelot-Grail cycle—Zimmer’s primary source, along with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works, for this article. 2. Joseph Campbell’s translation and expansion of this article interpolates here the fervid assertion that “Merlin is the master of the entire cycle—the shapeshifter, the mysterious, benign, yet frightening pedagogue, the summoner, the tester, and the bestower of the ultimate boon; he is Meleagant and King Bademagu, Bernlak de Hautdesert, and the Ward of the Wood (Giant Herdsman or ‘hom sauvage’)”; Campbell supplies a lengthy footnote on the last-named in the Old French Livre d’Artus story of Calogrenant’s visit to the perron de Merlin or Merlin’s Stone in Broceliande: see Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil, Bollingen Series XI, Second Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 182–83. For Meleagant, Bademagu, and “Bernlak,” however, no textual evidence supports Campbell’s claim. 3. The Brut Tysilio is a version of the tenth-century Annales Cambriae. Campbell’s revision reads, “Geoffrey’s Historia Britonum”—either an incorrect title for the Historia regum Britanniae (whose title he gets right elsewhere) or, more likely, a confused reference to the ninth-century work attributed to Nennius, source of the wonder-child and Vortigern legend. 4. This happened to Otto I, the Great (936–73), who was compelled to return to Germany from Italy in 952 because of his son Liudolf’s ambitious and rebellious plans. Likewise, Henry IV 1056–1106) was forced to abandon an expedition against the Saxons in 1104 in order to fight his rebellious son, a struggle that lasted until the father’s death. And finally, Frederick II (1212–50) returned to Germany from Sicily to put down the open rebellion of his son, which he accomplished without having to resort to force of arms.

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5. E.T.A.Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a German Romantic writer. The action of his tales often takes place on the two levels: the ordinary reality of everyday life, and the fairy-tale world of the supernatural and marvelous. The portrayal of everyday reality as possessing a hidden magical meaning reveals the true significance of that reality. The characters partake of both, thus forming the connecting element between the two worlds’ realities. 6. Though this magical power is transferred to Arthur by the tale, it is still through Merlin’s contrivance. 7. Here, Campbell’s edition adds a few sentences to correct Zimmer’s omission of how Arthur receives Excalibur from the lady in the lake after his encounter with King Pellinor. 8. The first two characters referred to are from Der goldene Topf (1814, The Golden Pot), the third is from Meister Floh (1822, Master Flea). 9. This story is retold from the Huth Suite du Merlin, fol. 157–58 in the edition edited by Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich (Paris: 1886), II, 76–79; see also Norris Lacy, ed., LancelotGrail: The Old French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993–96), IV, pp. 227–28. 10. In medieval romance this is not Merlin’s retreat, but Morgan le Fay’s. Campbell deletes this mistaken reference to Merlin’s ownership leaving only a subsequent mention and an earlier metaphorical reference to the “Valley of No Return” as Merlin’s domain and dwelling place. 11. See previous footnote. 12. Both Zimmer and Campbell refer to Diana as a “Sicilian siren,” but the source, the French prose Lancelot, refers to her as Queen of Sicily, who reigned during the time of the poet Virgil: see Norris Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail, II, p. 5. Campbell knows (like the anonymous author of the Lancelot) that the mythological Diana is a goddess of woodlands and of hunting, and so he deletes Zimmer’s description of her as a sea goddess. However, Campbell’s revision then departs from both Zimmer and medieval textual tradition by making her the mother of Niniane, not merely the godmother of Niniane’s father Dionas. Diana’s most famous cultic site in Italy was at Aricia on Lake Nemi, site of the Golden Bough influentially described by Sir James Frazer. Here she was worshipped along with Egeria, a water nymph associated with childbirth, and Virbius, a male woodland deity with a sacrificial or year-king aspect. This classical tradition is probably the source for the Diana-Faunus story and the Merlin-Niniane relationship described in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, where the Lake of Diana is placed in the lands of King Ban of Brittany. Zimmer’s article concentrates on the positive “love-death” of the Vulgate Lestoire de Merlin, in which Merlin’s beloved continues to visit him, instead of his grim ending at her hands in the Post-Vulgate continuation and in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The story retold here is from H.Oskar Sommer’s edition of The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances (Washington, D.C.: Carnegic Institution, 1908–16), 2, pp. 451–52; see also Norris Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail, I, pp. 416–17. 13. Sarastro is the High Priest of Isis and Osiris in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791, The Magic Flute). A man of wisdom and noble character, he presides over the Temple of Light and its brotherhood of priests who serve the ideals of humanity as they inspire freemasonry. Cagliostro (1743–95) was an adventurer and charlatan who posed as an alchemist, magician, and medium. He also postured as the founder of some occult branch of freemasonry. He gained an amazing reputation and enjoyed great success in pre-revolutionary Paris, until his banishment from France in 1786. 14. The story that follows is retold from Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, 2, p. 461. See also Norris Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail, I, pp. 421–22. 15. Sir Olaf would seem to be the “Herr Oluf” of the broadside ballad that bears his name in Achim von Arnim’s (1781–1831) and Clemens Brentano’s (1778–1842) Des Knaben

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Wunderhorn (1805–08, The Boy’s Magic Horn), an important collection of German folksongs. The ballad tells of Sir Oluf’s fateful encounter with the Erlking’s daughters. His refusal to join their dancing has fatal consequences for him: he dies upon arriving home on the morning of his wedding day. Tannhäuser was a historical minnesinger of the thirteenth century, who grew into the legendary knight whom the goddess of love lured into her magic mountain. Richard Wagner (1813–83) combined the Tannhäuser legend with an equally legendary contest of the most famous minnesingers in his Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (1845, Tannhäuser and the Song Contest at the Wartburg). At the center of the operatic action is the conflict between the spirit and the senses and the theme of redemption.

CHAPTER 10 Merlin in the Grail Legend EMMA JUNG AND MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ Translated by Andrea Dykes

Merlin as Medicine Man and Prophet The remarkable story in which the young Merlin discloses that a pair of fighting dragons—one red and one white—are responsible for the collapse of King Vertigier’s tower is to be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth as well as in Robert de Boron. Psychologically it is Merlin who points out a problem of the opposites, which has become unconscious again, a problem of which the people of the time certainly knew nothing, but by which they none the less felt themselves to be undermined. The red and white dragons play an important part as a motif of alchemi-cal symbolism, where they also portray the psychic problem of the opposites. Bernard of Treviso, the fifteenth-century Italian alchemist, depicts the problem in the following parable.1 He goes into an orchard, the place of the “chymical” transformation, and there finds a castle “in which lived two dragons, the one red and heavy of cadaver,2 the other white and without wings. They came together and embraced each other in the heat of the sun, as it is in Aries. They played together until the conjoined dragons disappeared and both jointly changed into black ravens. The ravens then moistened each other until they became white, until the sun entered Leo; until, therefore, the raven that had become white had become red as blood in the latter, in the heat, and in this work was transformed into a conjunction.” It is possible that the legend of Merlin was known to the Count of Treviso and that he incorporated it into his system of alchemical ideas. Depicting the opposites as dragons indicates that the split is constellated far down below, in the world of instinct, and that there is as yet no sort of relationship. According to the alchemistic point of view, however, these opposites should be united, since red and white are the colours of the bridegroom and bride who come together in the “chymical wedding.” Something is therefore separated which in nature should be united; and it is Merlin who draws men’s attention to this faulty situation. This suggests that he is the one who can bring the unconscious problem of opposites up into consciousness and in this way might act as a “lightbringer” for men. But according to Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini3 he withdraws into the forest, away from human society, because he has gone mad from suffering as the result of a battle between the Scots and Britons (Merlin was a Briton). In this battle, three brothers of the Briton

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chief—perhaps of Merlin’s own chief—were killed. In the forest Merlin leads the life of a wild animal, and when by chance he is discovered, the emissaries of his sister Ganieda have to soothe him with song and lyre before they can prevail upon him to return to the world of men. At the sight of a crowd of people his madness breaks out anew. He is released and is once more free to return to the forest. There he wishes to remain and even consents to his wife Gwendolina taking another husband, though not without intimating that he will be present on the wedding day with a very exceptional gift. A few days after he reads in the stars that Gwendolina is about to remarry, he appears before the house of the newly wedded couple, riding a stag and driving a pack-deer before him. He calls to Gwendolina, who is much amused at the spectacle. But when her bridegroom appears at the window, Merlin wrenches off the stag’s horns and throws them at the head of his rival, whose skull is shattered. He then flees back to the forest on his stag. Crossing a stream, he loses his balance and falls into the water. He is fished out by his sister’s servants and delivered to her. Once again he is captured and in his yearning for the forest loses all joy in life. There is no alternative for his captor but to give in to his longing and release him. However, he allows his sister to provide him with a few comforts. She builds him a house in the forest, with seventy windows and doors, where he can devote himself to his astronomical observations. With her servants Ganieda settles herself a little way off in order to dwell near him. During the summer Merlin lives in the open; when the winter cold sets in and he can find nothing to eat, he returns to his observatory where, fortified by his sister with food and drink, “he explores the stars and sings about future happenings.”4 Later he teaches her to prophesy and extols her as his equal. It is noteworthy that while Merlin reveals the unconscious conflict symbolized by the two dragons, yet he is unable to endure the senseless strife of men among themselves; in a deeper sense these two motifs belong together. It is the unconsciousness concerning the inner problem of the opposites that leads to war and hinders the royal wedding of the white and red. Merlin, who certainly knows this, despairs of the stupidity of men who are unable to see it. In the way in which from then on he lives in the forest with his sister, hidden far away not only from others but from his wife as well, dedicating himself to the observation of the stars and to prophecy, he appears to have taken on more than a little of the nature of the Druid priest and Celtic bard. Furthermore, he resembles the general type of primitive medicine man and priestly personality.5 The shaman and the medicine man and the analogous figure, the Celtic Druid, embody, as it were, the type of religious man who, in complete independence and solitude, opens up a direct and personal approach to the collective unconscious for himself and tries to live the predictions of his guardian spirit, i.e. of his unconscious. The result is that he becomes a source of spiritual life for his surroundings. As Mircea Eliade has shown,6 states of temporary insanity are often an attribute of the shaman and medicine man. More especially the disturbance of psychic balance which characterizes the early stages and the initiation of novices is frequently accompanied by a plunge into water; this also happens to Merlin.7 The Eskimoes, however, differentiate between this form of disturbance and psychic illness, when the shaman himself seeks out the cure for his

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own suffering, whereas the ordinary sufferer from mental illness does not do this. In fact, a spring gushes up beside the raving Merlin, by whose waters he is healed and is later enabled to heal others. His madness therefore should be looked upon as an initiation by means of which he comes into closer contact with the otherworldly powers. As a result of his cure he pledges himself, as many shamans do, to an isolated forest existence in the service of the divine. Parallels to Merlin’s life are to be found not only among primitive peoples but also in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, where it is especially the life of the prophet Elijah which, in its legendary formulation, exhibits close similarities to that of Merlin.8 Helen Adolf was the first to draw attention to this parallel: Elijah, among the Jews, is the “prophet” his prophecy even goes on in the Bird’s Nest, where the “effigies are woven of all the nations who band together against Israel.” Merlin, too, is a devins and in his farewell speech says that in the esplumoir “je profetiserai tou que nostre Sire commandera.” Elijah did not die, but was translated to Heaven…. It is the same with Merlin: “Lor dist que il ne poroit morir devant le finement del siecle” Elijah records the deeds of men and the chronicles of the world, as do Merlin and Blaise. Elijah is shown in close connection with the Messiah ben David…and with the Messiah ben Joseph (or Ephraim), who will be slain by the Antichrist, but resuscitated by Elijah. This reminds us of Merlin, who, after the fateful battle where Arthur is grievously wounded, goes into his esplumoir, expecting the time when Arthur (who thus represents both Messiah ben David and Messiah ben Joseph) will return from Avalon. Among other similarities, Adolf remarks that: It is Merlin who points out to Perceval the road that leads to the house of the Fisher King. He seems to know all about the Grail. According to Jewish tradition, all lore, especially all secret lore, emanates from Elijah. He is also credited with founding the Cabala. “What Moses was to the Torah, Elijah was to the Cabala.” There seems to be ample evidence in favour of our argument that there is a connection between Merlin, the seer, and Elijah, the prophet. We shall be still more inclined to grant such a possibility, if we take into consideration that a contact between Jewish tradition and Arthurian romance already existed. I refer to the legend of Solomon and Asmodeus, which is said to have inspired parts of Merlin’s own history. Of course, the legend of Solomon was a favourite of the Middle Ages and had spread all over Europe. But Elijah shared the privilege of being a hero in Jewish as well as in Christian tradition…. Moreover, we are able to show that there was a connection between Asmodeus and Elijah, so that by the very fact

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that Merlin borrowed from Asmodeus, he also stepped into the shoes of the prophet.9 It is possible that the cleric Helyes, who according to legend recorded Merlin’s prophecies, was in reality Elijah.10 In the legend Elijah appears as the religious prophetic personality who also has the rascally and even somewhat demonic traits which so often characterize the typical heathen medicine man and which are also so clearly displayed by Merlin. Thus Elijah goes so far as to murder a man; he changes himself into an hetaera in order to rescue a pious rabbi; and he plays repeated pranks on men by wandering around on earth, unrecognized, with Khidr. In such connections as these he becomes a personification of the trickster archetype11 whose function, among others, is to compensate the disposition to rigidity in the collective consciousness and to keep open the approaches to the irrational depths and to the riches of the instinctual and archetypal world.12 A prophet such as Elijah is not, however, merely an example of an individuated personality but, as [C.G.] Jung explains13 and as is even indicated by his name, he is also a human personification of Yahweh, i.e. of God. In the legend he is identified with the Metatron, the figure known in the Pistis Sophia as the “little Yahweh.”14 Thus, his image represents an aspect of the highest God, inasmuch as the process of individuation, when seen from the “other”—the archetypal—side, actually depicts a process of the incarnation of the divine.15 In later times Enoch, Elijah and John the Baptist were equated with the Metatron. In the Pistis Sophia Jesus says: “I found Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptizer, before she had conceived him, and I sowed into her a power which I had received from the little Iaŷ [Yahweh], the Good, who is in the Midst, that he might be able to make ready my way…. So the power of the little Iaŷ , who is in the Midst, and the soul of the Prophet Elias, they were bound into the body of John the Baptizer.”16 They represent the “completed man” and the Ancient of Days.17 Like John the Baptist, Elijah (Elias) is unusually hirsute, as if the animal were still extremely prominent in him. This same remarkable hairiness is exhibited once again by Merlin. Our story tells us that Merlin inherited his outer appearance from his father and that those present at his birth were horrified by his hairy body. He is further characterized as being close to the animal in that he always returns to the forest—for which reason he is known as Merlinus Sylvester—and that he appears as the shepherd of wild animals. This latter trait is particularly in evidence in the Vita Merlini18 in which Geoffrey goes so far as to compare him with Orpheus.19 He lives in his forest observatory with three trusted companions (a quaternity group): his pupil, the bard Thelgessin or Taliesin; his sister Ganieda; and a former sufferer from mental illness who has been cured by drinking from the healing fountain that springs up beside Merlin’s house.20 Merlin’s laugh is especially well known; it is the result of his more profound knowledge of invisible connections. For instance, he laughs aloud when he sees a poor, tattered man sitting down, or when he sees a youth buying himself a pair of shoes. The reasons are that the poor man is unknowingly seated on a buried treasure, while the young man is fated to die the following day.21 Merlin’s loneliness is

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understandable. His all-embracing knowledge, which grants him insight into the unconscious connective processes, isolates him from ordinary people, to whom his reactions must appear nonsensical. For this reason, he remains in the forest in a state of voluntarily chosen poverty and renunciation of love, and refuses to let himself be drawn back into the world by glittering temptations. For, as he says, “Nothing would please me that could take me away from here, from my Calidon, which in my opinion is always pleasing.”22 Calidon is an oak grove in which he lives and which suggests Wotan.23 In this grove he serves God only, and to the man cured of mental illness he utters the significant words: “Now must thou go hesitantly forward to thy confrontation with God, who gave thee back to thyself, and now mayest thou remain with me, in order, again in obedience to God, to redeem the days of which insanity robbed thee.”24 Taliesin likewise renounces his scientific avocations in order to be able to follow his teacher, and Ganieda, Merlin’s sister, gives up her love affair so that they can live together as a quartet. Finally, at a great age and famous for his holiness and surrounded by a circle of spiritual pupils, Merlin retires from all society and withdraws into eternal silence.25 The decisive factor in Merlin’s forest life appears to have been his absolute surrender or religio, i.e. his painstaking attentiveness to the divine, through which he incarnated something of its knowledge and mystery within himself. The living reality of the unconscious was thereby enabled to manifest itself through him. It is as if a part of the unconscious, the (additional unconscious psyche) of man, that unites with the animal world and with cosmic nature,26 fears the clutches of consciousness and can live only when man to some extent voluntarily surrenders collective adaptation and the superiority of consciousness and his own free personal will, so that he can offer a possibility of life to that more archaic and at the same time more prospective part of himself. Under this condition such an act of surrender grants him presentiments of the future that reach far beyond the present moment, just as, for example, the motifs of the Grail legend reach out beyond the Middle Ages into our time, and will perhaps reach even further. Merlin thus becomes the legend-entwined image of the whole man, the homo quadratus or homo altus of alchemy, in which the ordinary man has become one with the wholeness that transcends him. His renunciation of the judgments of a self-assured, one-sided consciousness and of selfwilled emphasis cause him to appear at times as the jocosus, the fool who not infrequently meets with strange mishaps, such as the plunge into the water after his vengeance on his adversary. These curious ineptitudes on Merlin’s part call to mind Jung’s comments on the archetypal trickster: “The trickster is a primitive ‘cosmic’ being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness. He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct. These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so well adapted to the environment as the animal’s but, instead, has prospects of a much higher development of consciousness based on a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in the myth.”27 The archetype of the trickster therefore always appears as a healing figure when collective

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consciousness is in danger of stiffening obstinately into one-sidedness. Again and again he holds open the approaches to the divine-animal substrata of the psyche, and this was obviously also Merlin’s task in medieval culture. The observation of the stars, to which he devotes his declining years, is likewise significant. We know from Caesar that the Celtic Druids observed the stars,28 and in this respect Merlin embodies this type of medicine man or priest. At that time the heavenly bodies were still the great messengers of fate and the future. Their astrological—i.e. symbolic—groupings enabled the projections of the collective unconscious to be perceived, and in them may be read the secular “constellations” of the archetypes, thus extensively foreshadowing our cultural history and spiritual destiny.29 Through this curious life in his forest observatory Merlin is, as it were, merged in the unus mundus, in union with the origins of all cosmic and psychic being, the unity of which is most clearly foreshadowed in the phenomenon of synchronicity, of which the astrological coincidences are indeed also a part.30 By observing it, the understanding sometimes touches briefly on the “absolute knowledge” of the unconscious and is thereby filled with presentiments that stretch far beyond every conscious reflection and are capable of anticipating future possibilities of human development—which is exactly what constitutes the nature of prophecy. Merlin and the Alchemical Mercurius A prodigious literary output elaborating the figure of Merlin from many points of view was soon grafted on to the Merlin legend. “Prophecies of Merlin” also began to appear, which more or less prepared the way for the political and ecclesiastical conflicts of the age.31 The flood of this literature mounted higher and higher during the following centuries, appearing in Brittany, Spain and Italy.32 The followers of Joachim of Floris published the ideas of their teacher concerning the coming of the Antichrist (whom they saw in the Emperor Frederick II, 1194–1250) under the title Verba Merlini,33 and a Venetian Joachimist published a further work entitled Les Prophéties de Merlin.34 This work, which is orthodox in its doctrine, contains some very forceful criticism of abuses within the Church. In Italy these works were followed by political writings which went in for every possible tendentious theme, so that the Church eventually reached the conclusion that such productions dealing with Merlin were dangerous. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) placed the Merlini Angli liber obscurarum praedictionum (Book of Dark Predictions by the English Merlin) on the Index of Prohibited Books;35 after this the tide of literature on the subject subsided on the Continent. When a figure, in itself highly fantastic, is suddenly on everyone’s lips to such an extent, it is natural to assume that it corresponds to an intensively constel-lated content of the collective unconscious, and it might be expected that parallel manifestations would be discernible. In point of fact, the efflorescence of the Merlin literature coincided in time with that of Occidental alchemy, and in the latter we find a personification of the arcane substance, which bears a striking resemblance to Merlin, namely the alchemical Mercurius. In alchemistic literature Mercurius

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personifies the prima materia and in him the ancient god of revelation was not only kept alive but also enriched with numerous amplifications. The doctrine of the godlike Anthropos of late antiquity survived, not exactly expressis verbis but disguised under a thousand forms, in the speculations of the alchemists concerning the materia. [C.G.] Jung has brought the most important aspects together in his essay on “The Spirit Mercurius,”36 to which we must refer since it is impossible to describe the manifold aspects of this figure in a few lines. A concealed nature god37 and personification of the lumen naturae,38 the alchemical Mercurius is at the same time an embodiment of the great inner man, the Self, which displays features complementary to the ecclesiastical figure of Christ.39 He is the guide and counsellor of those who in solitude prepare themselves to seek the immediate experience of the divine. It is remarkable how many features Merlin and the Mercurius of the alchemists have in common. Both are capable of infinite transformations. Both are compared, now with Christ, now with the Antichrist.40 Both serve as analogues for the inspiring breath of the Holy Spirit,41 or are derided as false prophets. Both have the nature of the trickster, both are hidden away, both are the mysterious agent behind the transformation of the “King”42 and are connected with the gods of love.43 Both are associated with Saturn44 and both engender or themselves fall victim to insanity.45 Finally, both represent the mystery of a “divine vessel”46 which serves as the object of men’s search. Both are connected with the experience of the divine in nature or in the unconscious. Two songs of Taliesin, who as already mentioned was looked upon as the pupil and companion of Merlin,47 extol this spirit: I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. I have been a narrow blade of a sword; I have been a drop in the air; I have been a shining star; I have been a word in the book; I have been a book in the beginning; I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half; I have been a bridge for passing over threescore rivers; I have journeyed as an eagle; I have been a boat on the sea; I have been a director in battle; I have been a sword in the hand; I have been a shield in fight; I have been a string of a harp; I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of water; there is nothing in which I have not been.48 In an Irish counterpart to this song, from The Book of Cecan and The Book ofBallymote, Taliesin says:

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I am the wind that blows upon the sea; I am the ocean wave; I am the murmur of the surges; I am seven battalions; I am a strong bull; I am an eagle on a rock; I am a ray of the sun; I am the most beautiful of herbs; I am a courageous wild boar; I am a salmon in the water; I am a lake upon the plain; I am a cunning artist; I am a gigantic, sword-wielding champion; I can shift my shape like a god.49 In these utterances Taliesin describes himself as a kind of cosmic spiritual being, creative and divine and capable of self-transformation. At the same time he suggests the figure of Mercurius who is frequently described by the adepts as just such a spirit, also capable of transforming himself. One text calls him “the spirit of the world become body within the earth.”50 He is also a wind or pneuma and the water of the sea,51 he incarnates in the eagle and other animals,52 as well as in the sunbeam.53 The alchemist Avicenna says of him: “He is the spirit of the Lord which fills the whole world and in the beginning swam upon the waters. They call him also the spirit of Truth, which is hidden from the world.”54 We are forcefully reminded of Merlin who was accustomed to telling the truth and who lived hidden away from the world. Mercurius likewise is cunning and duplex (double); one text says of him that “he runs around the earth and enjoys equally the company of the good and the wicked.”55 He is an embodiment of the original man,56 a figure that unites Christ, the light half of the symbol of the Self, with its dark half, the Antichrist, in one being.57 If we think of Merlin as a parallel to Mercurius it becomes understandable that de Boron should describe him as the Antichrist and then conversely depict him once more as a servant of Christ. Moreover we are entitled to compare Merlin with the alchemical Mercurius since the alchemists themselves did so. Verses about a Merculinus are quoted in the Rosarium philosophorum (probably fifteenth century). The joining of the two names in this instance could have arisen out of a misreading of Mercurius, but even so it is no coincidence. In addition there is also another well-known alchemical writing, the Allegoria Merlini, which describes the mystery of the murder and transformation of the king.58 Merlin stands equally behind Arthur and the Grail King as maker, guardian and counsellor of the King, as well as being in the background behind Perceval. Officially he is a helper, but he also possesses another side which comes to our attention in the description of the Saturnian man with the wooden leg. Like Merlin the latter is also an astronomer and magician, indeed of a rather more

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dangerous and uncanny aspect, and for this reason we have emphasized his role as the figure of the Grail King’s opponent. The King himself has a “ghostlike” background. Many scholars identify the Grail King with Bran (which would account for his name —Brons), a god-hero and king of the infernal regions of the Mabinogi,59 and this aspect lingers behind the christianized figure. In the work known as the “Elucidation”60 he is said to understand necromancy and to be a magician who can change form at will. In the Queste del Saint Graal61 his suffering is caused by two snakes which curl around his neck (the same problem of the opposites as portrayed by the white and red dragons). In such guise he comes strikingly close to the nature of Merlin, i.e. he loses the characteristics of a collective principle of consciousness and (like the sol niger of alchemy) is assimilated to an archaic dual aspect of the Self symbol. He and his opponent are then identical, and both—the King as well as his invisible enemy—correspond in many respects to Merlin. The latter therefore unequivocally embodies an enigmatic aspect of the Self, in which the opposites appear to be united. It is as if he raised the King to the throne as well as having prepared and brought about his downfall, i.e. as if he incarnated the dual aspect of the Self in which he is once more analogous to Mercurius. Because he lives with his sister, he can be compared with the well-known brother-sister pair of alchemy, a figure embodying the dual aspect of the arcane substance. [C.G.] Jung’s comprehensive statement about Mercurius may also be applied word for word to Merlin: He is both material and spiritual. [Merlin is a physical man, later a spirit which speaks from a grave.] He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. [As his opponent, Merlin pulls the Grail King down into physis and for his spiritualization sends Perceval up to Mount Doulourous.] He is the devil [as the Antichrist], a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature. He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum. As such, he represents on the one hand the self, and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious.62 It is amazing how such a figure of the Self emerges almost simultaneously as Mercurius in Occidental alchemy and as Merlin in the Grail legend. This indicates how profound the psychic need must already have been at that time for some such undivided personification of the incarnated Godhead that should heal the opposites of Christ-Antichrist. Another of Merlin’s aspects should be discussed here: his connection with the symbol of the stag. The stag appears in the curious episode in which Merlin punishes the unfaithfulness of his wife. He rides to her on a stag and kills the enemy with a stag’s antler which he hurls at him. This relation to the stag he also has in common

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with Mercurius who is often described in alchemical texts as the cervus fugitivus (fugitive stag).63 It is possible, however, that a memory of the Celtic god Kerunnus— a god, according to Marx,64 who underwent a transformation mystery—also survives in this stag symbol. Kerunnus is dismembered and cooked in a bowl (!) in order to arise again, rejuvenated, from the dead;65 he therefore undergoes a truly alchemical transformation mystery. In this Merlin would himself be the hidden content of the Grail.66 In the third part of the de Boron trilogy Merlin appears to Perceval as an aged man carrying a sickle round his neck and wearing high boots. He instructs Perceval to go to a tournament, and when Perceval asks him who he is he replies, “Si fait, grand partie de ton afaire gist sor moi” (“Yes, indeed, a large part of your affair rests with me”), and reminds him of his oath not to sleep twice under the same roof until he has found the Grail.67 It is asserted here that Merlin is the mysterious instigator of Perceval’s quest; he is charged with the hero’s task, precisely because he represents the Self, the inner wholeness to which Perceval should attain through the quest of the Grail. Thus Merlin is the mystery of the Grail. The sickle which he carries round his neck equates him more or less with Saturn, whose role we have already discussed. In other versions he appears as an old hermit,68 sometimes clad in white,69 the ghostly colour of the Celts,70 sometimes as a woodcutter in the forest or, in the guise of an ombre (shadow), he encounters the hero on his path. Here it is worth while once more to examine Merlin’s role in Chrétien’s continuators.71 There Merlin himself does not actually appear, but a woman riding a mule helps Perceval with advice and a magic ring. Later, it turns out that she is a daughter of Merlin, and when Perceval ties his horse to the pillar at Mount Doulourous, she tells him that the pillar was erected by her father. Here the invisible Merlin works indirectly on Perceval through the figure of the anima. In this version it is as if the symbol of the Self were not personified independently behind the anima but only effected its purpose from its place of concealment behind the scenes. In de Boron on the other hand, as also in his continuator, who discusses the Christian problem of the opposites far more earnestly, the figure of the being who heals the opposites comes unexpectedly into the picture and even becomes the dominating figure in his work. It seems, however, that yet another trace of Merlin may possibly be found in Chrétien’s continuators, namely the red-robed woman who emerges from the water and sends Perceval out to bring back the stag’s head. This Red Star Woman, whose robe symbolically ascribes to her the power of enlightenment, turns out to be an heiress of the fairy Morgana, from whom she received the chessboard at which Perceval is checkmated by an invisible opponent. Might not this unseen chessplayer turn out to be “the hidden Merlin” with whom the woman lives (as Morgana had done)? In any event it is an archetypal motif in fairy-tales that before the hero can gain her love he must first separate the anima figure, whom he must win, from an invisible pagan spirit which he has first to overcome. In a Norwegian fairy-tale, “Der Kamerad”72 a princess has nightly intercourse with a troll and together they kill all of her admirers, until the arrival of the hero who is able to vanquish the troll. In a North German parallel story73 the troll is an old man who

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lives in a mountain and serves before an altar on which lies a prickly fish. This ancient one must be defeated before the hero can marry the princess. Here the “old man in the mountain” is certainly Wotan awaiting the moment of his return and in the meanwhile (because he is not acknowledged or taken seriously) taking possession of the man’s unconscious soul, the anima, in a sinister form. The game of chess, however, points rather to Kerunnus who is often portrayed with a games board.74 Like Wotan’s runes, all these games served the purpose of a divinatory investigation of the will of the gods. In Merlin the older image of God is probably resuscitated, an image in which aspects of Wotan are mingled with those of the archetypally related Kerunnus, an image of inner wholeness which presses its still unfulfilled claims on man. Similar to the above-mentioned fairy-tales, Merlin— always assuming that it was he who stood behind the water nixie—likewise constellates a somewhat dangerous fate for the hero. The task of finding the stag’s head, which the Red Star Woman sets Perceval, might perhaps be taken to mean that the stag represents the Merlin-Mercurius who haunts the anima like an invisible lover and whom Perceval must first overcome before he can win her. But in this case why should the Grail Bearer suddenly intervene and delay Perceval’s finding of the stag? Supposing, as we have suggested, that Merlin were the divine contents of the Grail vessel, we would then be faced with a duplication of the motif. The secret aim of both figures is to lead Perceval to the symbol of the Self, but the Grail Bearer is more inclined to set him on the path of a further development of the Christian symbol, while the water nixie would guide him towards a return to the pagan nature spirit—the latter not necessarily to be interpreted as something of inferior value. In the final analysis both women are striving in the same direction. In this connection Garsales, the White Knight, could be interpreted as a Christian ethical attitude opposed to the intentions of the second anima. Since Merlin has both a Christ and an Antichrist aspect, the problem posed was almost insolubly difficult for medieval man who was incapable of thinking in paradoxes. In the story the stag appears in duplicated form, for which the following diagram might be considered:

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Inasmuch as he carries the animal components of the Christ symbol and, as the image of superbia, is impressed with devilish traits,75 the first stag nailed to the tree is a central figure between the polar opposites of Christ and Antichrist. It is a regressive outer manifestation of the Redeemer, in which the light and dark sides still appear to be united. The second stag, pursued by Garsales, would be a progressive form of the manifestation, equivalent to Merlin, a saviour in whom the opposites appear closer together on a more conscious level. The axis of tension (Christ-Antichrist) illustrates the moral problem of good and evil, while the second axis (Stag I-Stag II) depicts the problem of the regression or progression of the life process and the danger of sinking back into the original pagan oneness instead of progressing to a renewed state of unity. It is not only the stag but also the figure of the anima which appears in duplicated form. This indicates an emotional uncertainty of outlook which it is obviously almost impossible to overcome at first. It does certainly require great breadth of consciousness and maturity of feeling in order to understand thoroughly a figure such as the alchemical Mercurius or the Merlin of the Grail legend. Until modern psychology uncovered the fundamental dual nature of man—the fact that he consists of a conscious and an unconscious personality, each of which compensates the other— such a realization was practically impossible; it was only with difficulty that the conscious mind was able to free itself from unequivocal single-track formulations. Furthermore, medieval man had still another task to accomplish, one which accorded with the upward striving so clearly revealed in the architecture of that age. He had risen from below, out of the darkness of unconsciousness and barbarism, and his problem was to overcome the purely natural condition in which primitive man is still held captive76 and to assume a spiritual attitude. For this task the Christian doctrine provided not only the most complete expression but also offered help and guidance. Even today many people are still labouring over this problem; moreover, it is individually posed in every human life. Nevertheless, the problem for modern man is on the whole a different one, in so far as during the course of the centuries he has extensively identified himself with good, or with the spirit, and is therefore no longer below but above—or at least imagines himself to be above. It has therefore become necessary for him to retrace his steps to the dark instinctive side once more. If the uniting of opposites into a synthesis was not possible in the Middle Ages, nevertheless everything seems to point to the fact that our age is charged with the duty, if not of accomplishing this task then at least of taking it in hand. The uncertainties of modern life will more and more compel people to concern themselves with their “other side,” and it is certainly not by chance that the findings of psychology are forging an instrument that can both show us the way and help us to accomplish the task. The opening up of the unconscious induces a broadening and deepening of consciousness which makes possible a new and better orientation, thus proving to be of invaluable assistance. Moreover, through the reanimation or inclusion of the archetypes—which are definitely not mere images but also idées forces, i.e. powers—it is precisely these powers which become available. In addition to knowledge and understanding, the influx of these forces into consciousness also

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makes it possible to bring about the required attitude which is necessary, as has already been explained at length, for the completion of the wholeness. Notes Reprinted with permission from Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, 2nd ed. (Boston: Sigo, 1986), pp. 357–78. Bibliographical references and minor clarifications have been incorporated into the notes. 1. Des Bernardi Grafen von der Marck und Tarvis Chymische Schriften, trans. into German by Joachim Tanck (Nuremburg, 1746), pp. 293ff. 2. Body. 3. According to Edmund Faral, La Légende Arthurienne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1929), Vol. III. 4. Faral, op. cit., pp. 323–24:

Cumque venire hiems rigidis hirsuta procellis, Quae nemus et terras fructu spoliabat ab omni, Deficeretque sibi pluviis instantibus esca, Tristis et esuriens dictam veniebat ad aulam: Illic multotiens aderat regina dapesque Et potum pariter fratri gavisa ferebat, Qui, postquam variis sese recreverat escis Mox assurgebat, complaudebatque sorori. Deinde domum perargrans ad sidera respiciebat, Talia dum caneret, quae tune ventura sciebat. Cf. also John Jay Parry, “The Vita Merlini,” Studies in Language and Literature, No. 3 (August 1925), pp. 36ff. 5. In Shamanism (New York, 1964), pp. 25ff, Mircea Eliade has shown that this kind of priestmedicine man corresponds to a type that is spread over the whole world and that the aspects and phases of development of his personality correspond, as C.G.Jung has shown, to the process of individuation. 6. Ibid. 7. It was only after the publication of the German edition of this book that the author (M.-L. v. F.) discovered with great pleasure that Brigit Beneŷ had found connections with shamanism in the legend of Buile Suibne (Spuren von Schamanismus in der Sage von Buile Suibne. Zeitschrift für keltische Philologie, 1961). As the Irish parallel to Merlin, Suibne, together with Lailoken and Myrddhin (also analogous to Merlin), has many connections with shamanism (p. 313). Suibne is associated with the stag: “These are my stags, from glen to glen.” 8. Cf. “Elie le Prophète,” in Etudes Carmélitaines, Vol. II, and especially C.G.Jung’s introduction to the same, pp. 15ff. 9. See “The Esplumoir Merlin,” Speculum, XXI (1946), pp. 173ff, and the further literature there mentioned. 10. Cf. Paul Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète (Lausanne, 1943), p. 198.

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11. Cf. Paul Radin, The Trickster, with commentaries by Karl Kerenyi and C.G.Jung (London, 1956). 12. Cf. ibid., especially pp. 210–11. 13. “Elie le Prophète “pp. 15ff. 14. Concerning the Metatron as the “little Yahweh,” cf. H.Bietenhard, De himmlische Welt in Urchristentum und Spätjudentum (Tübingen, 1951), especially p. 157. 15. Cf. C.G.Jung, “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” in Psychology and Religion, Vol. 11 of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1958), par. 427. 16. Pistis Sophia, ed. and trans. G.R.S.Mead (London, 1955), pp. 9–10; Bietenhard, op. cit., p. 157. 17. Cf. Charles Allyn Williams, “Oriental Affinities of the Legends of the Hairy Anchorite,” University of Illinois Studies, No. 2 (May 1925). Williams also cites the parallel figure of Elias. 18. According to Faral, op. cit., Vol. III. 19. Cf. Zumthor, op. cit, p. 43. Another parallel would be Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh; see Williams, op. cit. 20. Zumthor, op. cit., p. 40. The madman had become insane because he had eaten the poisoned fruit of one of Merlin’s deserted loves. 21. Cf. ibid., p. 42; further examples are to be found on p. 41. 22. Verses 1237–38. Cf. ibid., p. 40. 23. Verse 1239, ibid., p. 43:

Tunc Merlinus ait: tibi nunc cunctanter eundum est in agone Dei qui te tibi reddidit et nunc mecum maneas, ut quos tibi surrepiebat vis verunca, dies iterum reparare labores obsequio Domini…. (Parry, op. cit., p. 113) (“Then Merlin said: You must now continue in the service of God who restored you as you now see yourself [lit.: to yourself], you who for so many years lived in the desert like a wild beast, going about without a sense of shame. Now that you have recovered your reason, do not shun the bushes or the green glades which you inhabited while you were mad, but stay with me that you may strive to make up in the service of God for the days that the force of madness took from you….”—Verse 139, Canto XA, 2014, i). 24. Verses 144ff, ibid., p. 44. 25. Ibid., p. 45. 26. Concerning this idea, cf. C.G.Jung, Aion, Vol. 9 (2) of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1959), pars. 269ff. 27. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol. 9 (1) of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1959), par. 473. 28. De Bello Gallico,VI, 18. 29. Cf. Aion, especially par. 128, and also by C.G.Jung, “Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth,” in Civilization in Transition. 30. Cf. C.G.Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Vol. 14 of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1963), par. 662, and “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol. 8 of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1960), passim. Cf. Zumthor, op. cit., pp. 55ff; and San Marte, Die Sagen von Merlin (Halle, 1853). Cf. Zumthor, op. cit., pp. 97ff. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., pp. 101–2. Ibid., p. 113. In Alchemical Studies, Vol. 13 of The Collected Works (London, New York, and Princeton, 1967), pars. 239–303. Ibid., pp. 112 and 135–36. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 87 and 135–36. Ibid., pp. 103, 105 and 111. Cf. ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 119ff. Ibid., pp. 102 and 115–16. Ibid., pp. 116–17. lbid., pp. 116ff. Ibid., p. 102. There was even one work called A Dialogue between Merlin and Taliesin. Cf. “The Book of Taliesin,” according to C.Squire, Celtic Myths and Legends; or W.F. Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868), Vol. I, p. 276. These literary references were very kindly supplied by P.Wolff. Concerning the question of dates, cf. W.A.Nitze and T.Atkinson Jenkins, eds., Le haut livre du Graal, Perlesvaus (University of Chicago Press, 1932), p. 154. Cf. Squire, op. cit.; and Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology (London, 1903). These references were also provided by Herr Wolff. Cf. the whole of “The Spirit Mercurius,” in Alchemical Studies, especially par. 261. Cf. ibid., pars. 265 and 261, where Mercurius is described as totus aereus et spiritualis. Cf. Lambsprinck, De Lapide Philosophico (Frankfurt, 1652). Cf. Senior, De Alchemia (1566), pp. 9ff. Alchemical Studies, par. 263. Ibid., par. 267. Ibid., par. 268. Ibid., par. 270. For a closer comparison see Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 357. Cf. Jean Marx, La Légende Arthurienne et le Graal (Paris, 1952), pp. 68–69, 201 and 285; also Dorothy Kempe, The Legend of the Holy Grail (London, 1905; reprinted 1934), p. xxi. Cf. Marx., p. 185. Ibid., p. 285. Alchemical Studies, par. 284. Cf. Jung and von Franz, op. cit., p. 259. In the story of Grisandole, Merlin appears openly as a stag. Cf. Zumthor, op. cit., pp. 197–98. Cf. also, Suibne’s connection with the stag; see Beneŷ , p. 313. Op. cit., p. 184. On the cup of Gundestrup. See also Marx, op. cit., pp. 184–85. An unpublished manuscript by Margarete Riemschneider also suggests that behind the stag-god Kerunnus the secret of the Grail might be hidden. Information about this MS. was received too late to make use of

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

it in the text of this volume, but thanks are due Mrs. Riemschneider for the opportunity of glancing at her exposition. Suibne also has some connection with the stag, which also plays a role in Brigit Beneŷ ’ Schamanismus, p. 315. Like the pneuma in the above-mentioned vessel of the Poimandres. Cf. Zumthor, op. cit., pp. 162–63. Vulgate Merlin. Cf. Zumthor, op. cit, p. 199. In the Huth-Merlin. Cf. A.C.L.Brown, “The Bleeding Lance” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XXV (1910), p. 43. According to the views of many scholars, the above-mentioned text was not written by Robert de Boron and was reciprocally influenced by Chrétien’s continuators. F. van der Leyen and P.Zaunert, eds., Die Märchen der Weltliteratur (Jena), pp. 25–26 (No. 7). “The Bewitched Princess,” in Die deutschen Märchen seit Grimm, the same edition, pp. 237–38. This is quoted from Margarete Riemenschneider’s as yet unpublished manuscript. She compares Kerunnus with the Hittite Rundas, who was also a stag-god and a god of play. Cf. Jung and von Franz, op. cit., p. 260. The same condition is described in the myth of the Hopi American Indians, where the people at first live under the earth but, attracted by the light, take themselves even higher up.

CHAPTER 11 Robert de Boron’s Merlin ALEXANDRE MICHA Translated by Miren Lacassagne

Merlin is the dominant character from the beginning virtually to the end of Robert’s romance. Around him, Blaise, Vortigern, Pendragon, Uther, Ulfin, Igerne, the duke of Cornwall, Arthur, and Antor all have their roles to play at various times in the story. The fact that Merlin was a chronicle-romance forced the author to give his characters these successive appearances and fragmented roles. However, Blaise and Uther are set apart, owing to their own importance and to the economy of the book. It is not our intent to rehearse here the origins and the avatars of the legend of Merlin.1 We will leave aside the Myrrdhin of the Welsh tradition, who may be a local legendary figure related to the town of Kaermerdin (Carmarthen); moreover, our character is neither a prophet nor a magician. We will limit ourselves to the Merlin depicted by Robert de Boron, whose familiarity seems to extend mainly to the character created by Geoffrey of Monmouth and adopted by Wace. Geoffrey had, of course, introduced his character as early as the Prophetiae Merlini (1134), and had given him quite an important role in his Historia Regum Britanniae (1155)—“Merlinus qui et Ambrosius dicebatur”—the episode of the tower and of the fatherless child who claims to be named Ambrosius having already been present in Nennius (Historia Brittonum, chap. 40–42). Similarly, his initiative concerning the erection of Stonehenge and his obliging willingness to facilitate the love of Igerne and Utherpandragon are Geoffrey’s creations. Furthermore, Geoffrey devoted an entire Vita to Merlin (1148), where he appears as a sylvan creature married to Guendoloena.2 Robert borrowed from the three works, but he also developed the character further. The essential elements have been kept. Merlin is the son of an incubus, as in Geoffrey and Wace (ll. 7309, 8788). This allusion to Apuleius was Christianized during the Middle Ages. Guillaume of Conches echoed it in his De philosophia mundi libri quatuor,3 where devils can approach man and mix with him: “unde uncubi dicuntur daemones, qui sic concubunt.” Being the son of a devil, Merlin has the devil’s power to shift shapes. According to the Grandes chroniques de France, among other sources,4 a layman from Vaux meets the devil in the shape of a walking tree, then of a man riding a horse, a tall man, a dwarf, and a long-eared animal. Robert has taken full advantage of these “muances” (transformations). Merlin knows the past, owing to his diabolical origin (which is not Robert’s invention), but it is from God alone that he has the knowledge of the future.

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Thus, in Honorius, for example, the devils have no knowledge of the future, or they know only what God allows them to know of it. “Futura nesciunt, nisi quantum ex transactis colligunt, vel quantum Deus eos sinit scire” (P.L. 172, col. 115). It is no less certain, as Gaston Paris mentioned,5 that Robert was familiar with the beliefs concerning the way the Antechrist would be born. Adson of Moutier-en-Der (tenth century) said that he would be born of a devil and a virgin,6 and like the Antechrist, who even here has become an Antichrist, Merlin is a reincarnation of the devil. He is surrounded by mystery. Covered with hair at the time of his birth, he strikes fear into the hearts of the women who attend him and even into his mother’s. But even more than this quite monstrous physical appearance, it is his precocious skill in speaking and reasoning that makes him a prodigy—and a disturbing child, who frightens anyone who speaks to him. Abruptly discovering that his intelligence and language are highly unusual for a child of his age, his mother drops him, and the women feel a similar fear. Moreover, he shuts himself away for a long time in an amazing silence that is very unsettling to the women eager for him to speak. The Antechrist will attract kings and princes to him; Merlin is the friend of two kings. The Antechrist will perform marvelous, unprecedented deeds, as does Merlin with Vortigern’s Tower, the Stones of Ireland, the Round Table, and the Sword in the Stone. Through witchcraft, the Antechrist will take on various appearances to deceive men and to establish his supremacy, and so does our prophet.7 But since, in Robert de Boron’s romance, he becomes the servant of the Church, he does not perform false miracles such as those attributed to the Antechrist, and ultimately the parallels between the two are limited to a few features.8 In a more obvious manner, this new prophet, who prolongs the line of ancient ones by propounding a new chivalry, constructs a poetic biography that offers constant parallels with the life of Christ. Geoffrey and Wace had earlier established subtle harmonies with the Gospels; Robert, fully aware of that fact, carried the analogies farther, sometimes borrowing from the apocryphal Infancy Gospels. It is not difficult to trace this life of a Jesus-Merlin. The miracle child was born of a virgin whose maternity has supernatural causes, and of a father—Holy Spirit or Evil Spirit—not of this world. One of the parents is conceived without sin, the other from sin but without sinful intent. All of this is sufficient to support the manifestation of God’s works in him “neque hic peccavit neque parentes ejus, sed ut manifestentur opera Dei in illo” (John, IX, 3). His childhood is obscure, having been spent at the side of a mother who is his only family. It is true that there is no carpenter Joseph, but the good Blaise, his advisor and supporter, is to an extent Joseph’s counterpart. Fearing the “Jewish God,”9 Herod sends his magi to reach the child. Guided by the miraculous star, they bow before the newborn child and then return to their own country, warned in a dream to avoid Herod (Matthew, II, 1–7). In Robert’s book it is the clerics who fear the child and provoke the departure of the king’s messengers; the latter have read their destiny in a star, and once they reach Merlin, they bow before

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his wisdom; reassured by him, they return to the king. Robert transforms the story from the gospel, but he does not forget it.10 In the Infancy Gospels, Jesus is still in the cradle when he explains to his mother that he is the child of God. Merlin, still in his childhood, lets the judges know that he is the son of a devil; and just as Jesus was interrogated by a judge in the Armenian Book of the Infancy (XVIII, 12), Merlin restrains the court only to let the truth be revealed. In the canonical gospels, Jesus, a child among the doctors of the temple, astonishes everyone by his intelligence and his responses: “All of them bore him witness and marveled at his words” (Luke, IV, 22).11 And in the Infancy Gospels,12 when Jesus is to learn from his master Zachias, he knows everything in advance. This scene, further developed in the Pseudo-Matthew gospel, is recalled in chapters 13 and 14 of the romance, when Merlin distinguishes himself by his self-confidence and wisdom.13 We must add that the prodigious child may owe something to what Saint Luke said (I, 57– 60) of John the Baptist, who, precociously gifted with speech, frightens those around him. It is not impossible that Robert took the idea of the mother’s trial from the Infancy Gospels and from the Protogospel of James:14 when Mary’s pregnancy is discovered, Joseph is arrested and brought before the priest to justify himself: he is accused of having taken the virginity of the woman he had sworn to respect. The situation is parallel—but reversed—in the Merlin, for it is the mother who must go on trial. Some mischievousness attributed to the child-god in the apocryphal writings is similar to that in the Merlin.15 Jesus, who is also a wizard, throws a stone that changes shape and then returns to its original form;16 he puzzles his playmates by breaking a jug that will later be seen intact; he brings to life small figures of animals modeled by his fellows;17 and he himself assumes various forms in order to escape the dyer Israel. The Savior’s public life begins only in his thirtieth year, three years before his death. Merlin’s starts much earlier, but again offers remarkable parallels. He steps forward from among his playmates to answer the king’s messenger, just as Jesus, among his disciples, offers himself when the Jews come looking for him in the garden of Gethsemane (John, XVIII, 4–9). And although, in the Brut, the mother accompanies her son when he appears before the king, Robert takes care to strengthen the similarities with Christ by having Merlin go alone to Vortigern’s court. From that point on, he will influence the course of events in the kingdom. Merlin reveals the lies of the seers, then makes himself heard by those whom he has chosen as the instruments of Arthurian grandeur, just as Jesus reveals his mission by his miracles or by making himself known as the Prophet.18 Merlin is not a healer, but he prophesies, like the Master himself.19 His revelations and the providential aid he offers to Uther when there is an attempt on the latter’s life are equivalent to miracles, in that they provide needed comfort to some, and striking proof of an extraordinary destiny to others. Jesus, confronting the hostility of the Pharisees (Matthew, XII) angered by his thaumaturgic powers (Luke, VI, 11), and avoiding the traps set for him, resembles Merlin, who must face the envy of jealous and evil people, particularly the courtier

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who takes offense at him. He has a presentiment of this and warns the two kings: “Et li mauvais me harront” (And the evil will hate me). More than once, Merlin recalls the supernatural character of his mission—“Nostres Sires m’a eslit a son service et nus hom ne puet faire que je fais se je non” (Our Lord has chosen me for His service, and no one except I can do this)—when he leaves his mother and Blaise, as well as several times during his conversations with the latter. Similarly, Jesus points out that he is the messenger of his Father. Jesus avoids crowds and withdraws to the desert: “Withdraw to a deserted place and rest awhile” (Matthew, VI, 31–34).20 He seeks solitude in the mountain after multiplying the loaves.21 In the same way, Merlin leaves the court and the world several times to join Blaise in the forests of Northumberland, invisible and inaccessible to all. He asks Blaise to keep his revelations a secret, just as Jesus asks that his apostles not reveal that he is Christ.22 Merlin is both the main protagonist and the inspiration of the book he is dictating to Blaise, as Jesus is at the center of the gospels dictated by the Holy Spirit. Merlin chooses the Knights of the Round Table,23 as Jesus chooses the apostles (Luke VI, 13). Blaise will not escape the ordeals that awaited the disciples, because he is the depository of Merlin’s word and in a sense his evangelist: “Il te covenra de ceste chose que tu fais grant poine a soufrir et je en sofferai greingnor” (For what you are doing, you will have to suffer greatly, and I will suffer more; 15, 86–87). The differences are of course underlined: “Tu n’ies pas des apostres” (You are not an apostle). But the very fact that this clarification is offered indicates that Robert intended to create an extensive network of correspondences between the two lives. A good many features, surprising in themselves, are meaningless except in reference to Jesus’s life. Why this “je en sofferai greignor” (I will suffer more), when nothing in the remainder of the story clarifies the allusion? The jealousy directed at Merlin cannot constitute genuine suffering for him. But if there was a passion of Christ, it is essential to anticipate a parallel passion of Merlin, though a passion avoided during childhood because of the failure of his enemies’ plans (“et il m’ocirront” [and they will kill me]). The very self-confidence of Jesus is duplicated by Robert. “‘Comment pourrionsnous acheter du pain pour qu’ils aient a manger?’ Il disait cela pour le [Philippe] mettre a l’épreuve, car lui-même savait bien ce qu’il fallait faire” (“How could we buy bread to provide them food?” He was saying this to test him [Philippe], for he knew very well what had to be done). And he knows that he will multiply the loaves of bread to feed the crowd (John VI, 6–7). Merlin adopts this interrogative tone of feigned ignorance on the site of the Stones of Ireland or with his protégés, Pendragon and Uther, when in fact he knows in advance the solution and the outcome of a difficulty. In Robert’s text, there remains a hint of the sylvan Merlinus of the Vita. “Il me convient, dit Merlin, par fine force de nature estre parfois eschis de la gent” (“Sometimes my nature makes it necessary for me to leave people,” said Merlin; 39, 46–47). This wild Merlin, whose character periodically requires him to leave all human society in order to remain in contact with natural forces, has been retained by Robert, who can conveniently make Merlin disappear in order to have the kings carry

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out his instructions. The barons who contend that Merlin is dead spread the rumor that he was killed by peasants who had found him in a wild state in the woods. Moreover, knowing that he cannot escape the constraints of his nature, he imposes some conditions on the kings: “Et tant vos pris je, se vos volez avoir ma compoignie, que vos ne chaille ja, quant je m’en irai” (And I beg you, if you want to have my company, that you not be offended when I leave). Merlin’s Laughter Other elements to be considered include Merlin’s laughter, totally unknown to Wace, but recurring many times in the Vita Merlini.24 Robert has multiplied these sudden bursts of laughter, which are unlike those of any epic character. Merlin laughs repeatedly: as he comforts his mother, who is threatened with torture (11, 21); again a few days before the execution of the sentence (12, 5), when he reveals himself to Vortigern’s messengers and speaks of their intention to kill him (21, 20); when he declares to Blaise, in their presence, that they have renounced their murderous intent (22, 64); when he sees the peasant buying leather (24, 8);25 when he sees the father weeping at the burial of his child (25, 8); when he reveals to the messengers the agreement they have just made with the king (26, 48); when he mystifies Uther and Pendragon (38, 41); when he agrees to visit the supposedly sick man with Pendragon (41, 49); when he pretends to be sent by the old man whom Ulfin had seen the preceding day (62, 29); before Uther swears to grant Merlin a boon (63, 59). In only two cases does Merlin’s laughter express a happy mood: at the time of Ulfin’s mystification, and before the visit to the sick man, when Merlin realizes that, contrary to etiquette, the king is without his escort. Everywhere else, though without abandoning all suggestion of happiness, laughter resounds when, owing to his knowledge of the past and the future, Merlin knows that fears (of his mother), mourning (of the false father of the child), plotting and plans (the peasant, the messengers) are vain or will soon be proved untrue, or (with Uther’s oath) because he foresees consequences hidden to mere mortals. This laughter is of a special kind, the irrepressible jubilation of a privileged being for whom the ignorance, candor, or shortsightedness of common humanity is risible. Thus, because he expresses all the awareness that an individual can have of his own power, there may be some parallel with William of Orange in the chansons de geste, who has faith in his own courage: in both instances, there is full confidence in one’s superiority. But in our view, there appears to be an echo here of Merlin’s original diabolical nature. Paul Zumthor reminds us that in a widespread folk theme,26 the wizard “éclate de rire au milieu de ses operations magiques” (bursts out laughing while performing his magical deeds).27 Merlin is much more than a wizard, but his laughter is not the pure laughter of a funloving being. It has a darker origin and resonance. In the Gospel of Thomas, the child Jesus laughs before interrogating and confounding the schoolmaster—an event that is not unrelated to certain situations in the romance. Among the parallels that have been drawn with biblical texts,28 only one, I believe, is

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applicable here: the Book of Daniel (XIV, 6, 8), because it involves a revelation that diminishes the prestige of people in favor: Daniel laughs as he tells the king about the untrustworthiness of his priests. Beyond the common characteristics of these laughters, there are perceptible nuances. The laughter addressed to Uther at the moment of the blind promise, concerning a man who is unaware of what he is undertaking, is both prophetic and humorous; and the laughter answering the anxious mother is accompanied by a degree of kindness. In any case, this laughter is quite different from “un simple detail amusant, propre a animer son personnage” (a mere amusing detail designed to animate the character), as Paul Zumthor suggests it had been in Geoffrey of Monmouth. What role does Robert de Boron give to the main protagonist? His political mission is subordinate to the religious one that gives the character his true dimension. He is God’s chosen one: “Diex m’a esleu a un suen service faire que nus ne porroit faire se je non,” he says (God has chosen me to do for Him what no one else could, 23, 8); “Il me covient a rendre Jhesu Crist le service dont il m’a done pooir” (I must repay Jesus Christ the power he gave me, 23, 79). An inspired prophet, he is fond of saying that what he tells Blaise is ineffable so that it cannot be known except by God and himself, “et je te dirai tel chose que nus hom, fors Dieu et moi, ne te porroit dire” (And I will tell you something that no one, except God and myself, could tell you, 16, 32–38). Therefore, he will leave his mother, who does not try to restrain him as Perceval’s does in the Conte du Graal. He is the minister of Providence and the interpreter of the divine will: “Je vos dirai ce que je sai que Nostre Sires volt que vos sachiez” (I will tell you what I know Our Lord wants you to know, 48, 35). His mission is to guarantee, by creating the Round Table, the triumph of the hero who “will achieve it,” to institute a new chivalry, and to prepare Arthur’s reign in which that chivalry will flourish. Whether the chosen seat is Galahad’s or Perceval’s is of secondary importance; it is established and announced by Merlin, who announces at the same time the grandeur of the people of Logres, just as the prophets of the Old Testament announced not only the tribulations, but also the election of God’s people. Thus, his desire to leave behind a work that will immortalize him, “tous les tens que crestientez durra” (As long as Christianity lasts, 45, 33), does not reflect a thirst for glory. Merlin has many tasks. He is the counselor of the kings he protects. He is a tutelary presence for Pendragon, whom he comforts as he tells him of Hengist’s death. Even before Pendragon has had any association with him, Merlin thwarts Hengist’s attempt to kill Uther, for whom he has conceived the project of the Round Table. Three kings died, poisoned, in the Brut—Constant (Moine), Aurelius, and Uther Pendragon. In Robert de Boron’s work these tragedies are avoided, as Merlin’s caution protects the three kings from violent death. Except for Moine, they die fulfilling their duty as kings: the warrior, on the battlefield; the peacemaker, after a long reign. Merlin erects the Stones of Ireland as a mausoleum for Pendragon, and withdraws the sword from the anvil through some celestial magic. Merlin is the military advisor: he determines truces and directs negotiations (40, 22ff.). He establishes the Saxons’ evacuation plan. Both tactician and strategist, he

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understands how to defeat his adversaries, permitting them to land and move some distance inland, so that he can cut them off from their ship and from all access to the sea: thus trapped, they will be overwhelmed in two days (44). This “vise” tactic is adopted, and the Saxons are caught between the forces of Pendragon and those of Uther. Merlin advises Uther during his last campaign (78). But whereas he is useful to the kings for his prescience and his knowledge (40, 69), he never uses magic in the battles. He is vigilant whenever the interest of the kingdom is at stake. Merlin is the author, the head and the arm,29 of everything important occurring there, to the point of considering his undertakings as work he has in common with the king: “nos i feroions tel chose” (we will do such a thing, 47, 31), “nos establirons la tierce” (we will establish the third one, 48, 75). From him emanate orders that will bring about the birth, the safeguard, and the fame of Arthur: orders given to Uther, to the Queen to give up her child, to Antor concerning the “nourishment” of the stranger whom he welcomes in his home, to Uther again for the strategy of the abduction. A man of action, Merlin leaves nothing to chance. As early as his mother’s trial, he uses a perfectly logical argument to force the judge to continue his investigation. He reveals the truth and has the judge declare an acquittal. He knows how to mobilize the two brothers’ martial powers by having them take an oath on the relics before the battle, so that they will be bound by an unbreakable commitment (44, 95). There is a certain genius for intrigue in the plan to bring about Arthur’s birth. At first, he is careful —two precautions are better than one—to secure Ulfin’s commitment through an oath, then the king’s (63, 57ff.). The inexplicable situation in which this places Igerne adds credibility to her accepting her permanent separation from the infant to whom she has just given birth:30 not knowing who the father is, she finds herself at the mercy of Uther, himself in the power of Merlin. Nobody must suspect the existence of Arthur: Merlin assumes the appearance first of a feeble old man to take possession of the newborn; then he appears as a prudhomme when he presents himself to Antor, to whom he will reveal nothing of his estre (identity). And finally, instead of offering advice and care to his young protégé, he disappears, and Arthur sinks into anonymity. Thus, Arthur’s selection as king, bringing him suddenly to prominence, makes him appear all the more marked by Providence. Everything has been planned down to the most minute detail. In fact, Merlin’s sen (a combination of wisdom, intelligence, and psychological intuition) was awakened early and was recognized by the judge, who was amazed by the dialectical ability of his young adversary. He distinguishes himself later by successfully evading danger, by persuading the messengers not to harm him, and by arousing first their interest, then Vortigern’s and the seers’. His story involves the progressive development of authority and confidence. He successively wins over the messengers,31 Blaise, Vortigern (to whom he explains the secret of his tower), then finally Pendragon. Merlin and Pendragon, each with doubts about the other, choose to “test” each other (35), but Merlin prevails when Pendragon is certain that the former has saved his brother: “je ne vos doi jamais douter ne mescroire” (I must never have any doubt about you nor mistrust you).32 After thwarting the tricks of the jealous baron

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and succeeding in expelling the Saxons from the kingdom, Merlin succeeds again, for he “remest touz sires dou conseil le roi” (remained at the head of the king’s council, 40). He gains Uther’s confidence by explaining the dragon that appeared during the battle, and by revealing to him the origin of his knowledge, in terms similar to those he employed with Blaise to the same end (48, 30–31). Therefore Uther accepts all the plans that Merlin proposes to him: the transportation of the stones, the creation of the Table, the removal of the young Arthur. The desire that he had revealed to Blaise before he left his mother33—to be believed, to be totally trusted34—is fully realized, for when the throne is vacant, Merlin is the master of the situation: everyone calls on him to provide for the succession. And as it is unlikely that a royal child would be entrusted to an obscure foster father, Merlin’s assurances suffice to calm Uther’s fears (73, 35). Merlin’s success is due to his prophetic gift, which manifests itself on three levels: • that of immediate facts, divination more than prophecies: about the judge’s father’s drowning (the first of the series), about his future departure to be with Vortigern, about the death of the peasant, about the death of the priest who is the father of the dead child, about the triple death of the baron; • that of political facts involving the future of the kingdom: the disappearance of Vortigern, the Saxons’ attack, the death of one of the two brothers, Uther’s reign, his imminent death: this is the book of “ce que il dist des rois d’Engleterre et de toutes les choses dont il parla puis” (what he said about England’s kings and everything he mentioned later, 44, 12–13);35 • that of the future of the Graal, the fate of the book, and above all the “lieu vide a acomplir” (void to be filled). Man of God, prophet, inspirer of kings, tutelary genius of the kingdom, a character aware of sin—this imposing figure of Merlin is by no means always consistent. A mix of virtues and defects precludes any hieratic dimension and makes of him an example of common man. Among the virtues, we note his indulgence toward the seers to whom he had granted a respite even though they had plotted against him (29). But his principal quality is great discretion, composed of intuition and experience. He stays apart from the events that he himself often sets in motion. Aware of the enmity he incites in the king’s entourage, he prefers not to accompany Pendragon to court (35);36 to avoid indiscreet questions, he departs after the triple death of the baron (44, 34ff.); fearing that he might be held responsible for whatever might occur, he declines Uther’s invitation to the celebrations at Carduel; then he refrains from appearing at the Pentecost gathering, because it might be said (50, 48) that he came to “destorber l’essai” (thwart the attempt) or choose to punish the presumptuous man, instead of leaving it to God. His discretion is thus humility. Moreover, his presence would detract from the significance of an ordeal intended to confound the “hauts hommes” (men of high rank) “de mauvés sens” (of bad faith) and finally confirm them in their faith, since they will be witnesses to the objective fact.37 He appears only when his

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presence is necessary (to select the knights of the Round Table, for example), but he is constantly at work behind the scenes. This discretion is sometimes prudence, as when, for instance, Merlin forbids the princes reveal to anyone the military strategy he is to explain to them (44, 55). But at times he also creates mysteries out of nothing, as when he forbids Pendragon to tell anyone when he will meet his brother Uther. There can be no doubt that he dearly loves Pendragon and Uther: he tells them so “molt piteusement” (very tenderly, 44, 29), and they are touched to see him “si humilier” (humble himself so). But he frequently adopts quite a different attitude toward them. Knowing that he is useful and sought after, he does not permit them to approach him directly.38 It is useless to look for him: he appears when, where, and to whom he pleases, and Uther knows it (63, 9). There is some condescension on his part when he first meets Pendragon, required to come to him on Merlin’s terms (33, 19, 28). Merlin’s tone is not always one of deference: he agreed to make himself known, but “se je voulois, jamais autrement ne me conoistroient” (if I so desired, never would they know me otherwise, 34, 35). It is he who sets limits: “quand je voudrai que vous me conoissez” (when I want you to recognize me, 35, 45). He can speak frankly: upset to see the king caught up in the game of the baron who was feigning illness, he sternly snubs the two brothers without mincing words: “Quant je plus vos acointe, et je vos truis plus fols” (The more I know you, the more foolish I find you, 42, 28). He does not tolerate doubt about his pronouncements; when that occurs, his tone becomes gruff and unanswerable: “Se vos ne me creez, si ne faites pas ce que je vos di, quar 11 est folie de croire mauvais conseil” (If you do not believe me, then do not do what I tell you, because it is foolish to believe bad advice, 33, 33– 34). He takes to task those who disobey him (51, 7ff.); and he silences Uther if his curiosity is untimely (51, 20). His language, with its sentences punctuated by Je voil que (I want), je vos desfant que (I forbid you to) reveals an authoritarian personality. There is more than a touch of vanity in his self-satisfaction. Not content with the many compliments he receives,39 he awards himself the title of a wise man: “Or poez savoir se je sui sages” (Now you can know whether I am wise, 40, 19); he extols loudly the importance of his advice (33, 33); he enjoys astonishing his interlocutors, anticipating with pleasure their surprise or their stupefaction, “Je vos dirai une merveille” (I will tell you of a marvel, 44, 33), “Vos verrez demain ce que onques ne cuidastes veoir” (You will see tomorrow what you thought never to see, 49, 29). He proclaims that no one can deceive him (e.g., the episode of the disguised baron); his words sound like the sales talk of a peddler bragging about his increasing skills: “et encor vos merveilleroiz vos plus de ce que je li dirai que les autres .II. fois que il m’a demandé” (and what I will tell him will fill you with even more wonder than the other two times he asked me, 42, 1); he prepares his effects so as to provoke admiration for his skill: “Or vos souveigne se vos onques veistes Jordain” (Remember whether you ever saw Jordain, 65, 8). The supreme marvel: he boasts that he can make Uther, on the brink of death, speak once again. There is something of the public acrobat in Merlin, an acrobat infatuated with himself and possessed of a disturbing vulgarity.

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Worse yet: this man in communication with God lowers himself to write a love letter, purportedly from the woman whom Uther loves, and then delivers it himself to Uther; for this forged message he chooses the words that Uther will most want to hear (37, 25). When he becomes the go-between at Tintagel, his methods if not his intentions deprive him of all his dignity. Readers may justifiably lament this shocking disparity in Merlin’s character. But neither the “vast and delicate” Middle Ages nor even the sixteenth century40 were offended by such contrasts. Extremely varied and sometimes discordant tonalities mingle or coexist in Tristan, in the chansons de geste concerning Guillaume d’Orange, etc. We must not judge medieval compositions by classical norms, and we should appreciate this Merlin, who may be lacking in unity, but never in interest and pungency. Notes Translated and printed with permission from Alexandre Micha, Etude sur le “Merlin” le Robert de Boron (Paris: Minard, 1980), pp. 178–90. 1. See A.O.H.Jarman, “The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, ed. Rachel Bromwich, A.O.H.Jarman, and Brynley F.Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 117– 45. 2. La Légende arthurienne, vol. III, E.Faral, ed.; Ward’s study, “Lailoken or Merlin Silvester” (Romania 22 [1893]: pp. 504ff.): the Lailoken fragments published therein are an important source for the Vita. According to Lucy A.Paton (Modern Philology 41 [1943]: pp. 88–95), Geoffrey has introduced some features borrowed from the myth of Picus: Picus, Faunus, and other sylvan deities were identified as incubi. 3. Chap. 18, P.L. 172, under the name of Honorius Augustodunensis. 4. De la bataille du convers et du diable (1304), VIII, chap. LIV, pp. 229–33. For Gervais of Tilbury, Orderic Vital, and other earlier writers, the devils are assimilated to dwarfs (see Maury, Croyances et légendes du Moyen Age, 1896, pp. 59, 380). As to their genesis, Honorius writes: “hi saepius de crasso aere sumunt palpabile, quo magis possint fallere” (Elucidarium, II, 29, P.L 172). 5. Merlin: Roman en Prose du XIIIe Siècle, ed. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, 2 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1886), I, Introduction. See Paul Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète (Lausanne, 1943), pp. 172–74. 6. “Ex patris et matris copulatione, non de sola virgine…diabolus simul intrabit in uterum matris suae;…et quod natum fuerit totum sit iniquum, totum malum, totum perditum” (P.L 101, col. 1294). Before Adson, Lactance attributed the same birth to Merlin. Geoffrey of Paris (Antéchrist, ed. Kesten, 11. 20–22) follows Adson: “Celle dont Antechrist nestra/Del deable plainne sera, / Par le deable iert conceüs” (She from whom Antechrist will be born / will be impregnated by the devil;/by the devil he will be conceived). Henri d’Arci also follows Adson: “Meïsmes le houre k’il conceü sera/ Ly deable el ventre sa mere enterra” (At the very hour he will be conceived/the devil will enter his mother’s womb). 7. Honorius: “nobiles sibi divinitiis adscisscet…, faciet tam stupenda miracula ut jubeat ignem de caelo descendere et adversarios suos coram se consumere, et mortuos resurgere.” In the French version of Geoffrey of Paris: “il fera corre les rivières contremont” (he will make the river run uphill), witchcraft that figures also in Amadas et Idoine, ll. 2038ff., and frequently in

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

witchcraft tales; he uproots trees, then replants them, and they are immediately heavy with fruit, etc. He will deceive everyone and “fera mestre a martire ceux qui le voudront desdire” (will martyr those who will wish to contradict him). We are unpersuaded by other similarities suggested by Paul Zumthor. For example, the universality of the prophecy a mari usque ad mare refers only to the kingdom of Logres in Robert; every Christian will deny God at the advent of the Antechrist, but Merlin proclaims God; every servant of God will die by fire or by iron, but Perceval triumphs in the series of adventures culminating in the discovery of the Graal. As for Merlin being entombed by Viviane, that does not illustrate Adson’s quem Dominus interficiet spiritu oris sui. Paul Zumthor writes: “L’enfant que les sages jaloux et le roi qui tremble pour son trône veulent tuer est un parent bien proche des Saints Innocents” (The child whom the jealous wise men and the king who fears for his throne want to kill is a close relative of the Holy Innocents), op. cit., p. 174. Vortigern’s messengers go two by two, and Jesus sends his apostles two by two throughout the world (Matthew, VI, 7; Luke, X, 1). See Luke, II, 40; Mark, VI, 2–3. Ed. Reinsh, chap. 48. The narration in the Pseudo-Matthew reads: “Tunc omnes qui audierunt verba haec patefacta obstupuerunt et clamarunt dicentes: ‘O, o, o, hoc mire magnum et admirabile sacramentum! Numquam audivimus hujus modi. Numquam ab aliquo alio auditum est…. Non scimus hunc unde natus est, et vix est annorum quinque, et unde haec verba loquitur?’ Responderunt Pharisaei: ‘Nos numquam audivimus talia verba ab infante alio dicta in tali infantia.’ Et respondens Jesus dixit eis: ‘In hoc vos admiramini quia talia dicuntur ab infante? Quare ergo non creditis mihi in his quae locutus sum vobis’” (Ch. Micheland and P.Peeters, eds., chaps. 30, 3–4). Immediately after, as in the Infancy Gospels, Jesus the student astonishes his master, who wonders about the origin of the child: “Quis venter illum portavit” Ed. Thilo, chaps. XV-XVI. See Alexandre Micha, Etude sur le “Merlin” chapter VIII on the art of narration. The Armenian Book of the Infancy, XXI. The Infancy Gospel, XXXVI. We should note that line 20 of this Gospel, “Quant vaut de feme naistre en terre,” is almost identical to our chap. I, 39. By Nathanael (John, I, 47–49), by the Samaritan (John, IV, 16–19), etc. Matthew, V, 18. And Mark, I, 45; Luke, IV, 42, etc. John, VI, 15. Matthew, IX, 30–31; Luke, VIII, 31; XVI, 20; Mark, VIII, 30; IX, 30–31. Fifty knights. Jesus divides the Jews into groups of fifty people in order to feed them at the time of the multiplication of the loaves (Luke, IX, 15). In the scene where Merlin receives three oaths of faith from Uther before revealing to him the mystery of the three tables, we may also see, with Paul Zumthor (p. 175), a reminiscence of the scene in which Jesus provokes Peter to offer a triple protestation of love (John, XXI, 15–17) before revealing to him the mystery of the Church. ll. 261–62, 285, 494, 497, 501. See also Alexandre Micha, Etude sur le “Merlin” chap. II, The Sources, about the so-called revelations, pp. 49ff. In the folktales, the cause of the laughter is the superhuman knowledge of someone’s approaching death. Cf. Gaster, Folklore XVI, 1905, pp. 419ff. Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, [1955–58]), M 304; N 456; U 15; V 83, 329, 480. For A.H.Krappe, “Le rire du

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

prophète” in Studies in English Philology in Honor of F.Klaeber, pp. 340–61, the motif is linked originally to the dogma of the transmigration of souls; the laughter would mean, particularly in Little Russia, the loss of a right or of a supernatural power, which is certainly not the case in Merlin. On the laughter in our romance, see Ph. Ménard, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Age (Geneva: Droz, 1969), pp. 354ff. Op. cit., p. 45. Ibid., p. 46. “Merlins s’en ala por faire ce que il covenoit a la table” (Merlin left to do what was necessary for the table, 49, 24). See Alexandre Micha, Etudes sur le “Merlin” chapter VIII, p. 176. Who go so far as to ask him about the answer they should give to their master. His children’s games when he mystifies the two brothers have some justification: “il a tel pooir” (he has such great powers), says Pendragon admiringly (38, 70; 39, 23). “Je ferai et dirai tant que je serai li plus creuz hom…” (My words and deeds will make me the most trusted of men, 23, 12). Merlin wants to be believed by Blaise (16, 12, 38); he has no desire to provide religious instruction to Blaise, who is knowledgeable on the subject, but wishes to convince him that he is God’s spokesman: nus hom, fors Dieu et moi (no man, but God and me), by Vortigern (Si je en ment (If I lie, 27, 14), by Pendragon (vos ne lairez ja por els que vos ne me creoiz (you will not fail to believe me, 35, 36). The passage makes it clear that these prophecies do not speak of Merlin himself, since what he does is recorded in Blaise’s book, distinct from the Prophecies. This is why he imposes the condition that he must be greeted with joy (39, 55). “Et li autre qui ceste oevre ont a traire ne creroient pas tant com il lor est mestier que il croient” (And the others, who were to undertake this, would not believe what they ought to believe, 50, 49). He attends neither Uter’s crowning nor the election of the new king at Christmastime. See chapter VIII, pp. 165ff. “nus plus saiges hom” (no wiser man) is repeated, 24, 32; 44, 7, etc. We think of the Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre in which refinement is placed side by side with scatology.

CHAPTER 12 Merlin Romancier: Paternity, Prophecy, and Poetics in the Huth Merlin KATE COOPER

The first pages of the Huth Merlin present the reader with a series of scenes in which the principal themes are birth and its consequences. Merlin, the constitutive character of the novel, is an illegitimate son conceived from the fraudulent union of an incubus and a virtuous woman. The legacy of his father is the ability to know “les choses dites, faites, et alees”1 (things said, done and past); but because of his mother’s virtue, he receives divine grace and counterbalances the diabolic aspects of his heritage. Knowledge of all things past is accompanied in the wizard by a prodigious clairvoyance, the gift of God. There is thus in Merlin a mixture of perceptions equivalent to cognitive totality: the past, the present, and the future are combined within him in such a fashion that there is no speakable link between them. But to resume the question of birth, the text offers us many other examples. The judge who initiates the accusation of diabolic commerce against Merlin’s mother proves as well to be the son of a clandestine liaison. In the course of his mother’s trial, the wizard-child points out that the judge is himself the son of an ecclesiastic and not the legitimate descendant of his mother’s legal spouse. King Arthur is the offshoot of the subversive union arranged by Merlin between Uter Pandragon and Igerne, the wife of the Duke of Tintagel. And in the last scenes of the novel, Tor, a youth who aspires to the title of knight in Arthur’s court, finds that he is the heir of a king rather than the son of the humble peasant who had raised him. The narrative details of these scenes reveal certain thematic motifs which can be defined in the following terms: each son, being the offshoot of a fraudulent liaison, is necessarily destined for a certain time to an illegitimate existence; once true paternity is established, the social position of the child is valorized-—and in this latter case, it matters little whether or not the parents were married at the time of their son’s conception. We may thus elaborate a temporal model of these birth scenes developed in three stages: (1) first there is the moment of obscure origins, origins which cannot be directly certified by the external world; (2) next, the son is confronted by his illegitimate origins: he depends upon his father for his existence, but he does not receive the social approbation which is his due; (3) and finally paternity, until now highly confused or problematized, is established and valorized. There is yet another provocative and important motif proper to the four scenes: the final stage of our model, the interval of established paternity, depends in every instance upon a written document attesting to the date and hour of conception.

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This last consideration leads to a question which may be articulated in the following way: what is the status of writing as it is exposed in this text? In other words, if all of the scenes mentioned above, scenes which play an important role in the development of the romance, ultimately rely upon the testimony of a written document, what is the function of the written word? This question assumes an important place in the narrative matter of the romance, for the manuscript is supposedly based upon materials written prior to the text which we read. At the beginning of the romance, Merlin confides the redaction of the stories which he will tell to a cleric, Blaise; these stories concern Merlin’s birth and the fictional histories of two tables, the table of the Last Supper and the table of Joseph of Arimathea: ‘Mais croi chou que je te dirai de la foi et de la creance Jesucrist. Et je te dirai tel chose que nus, fors Dieus, ne te savroit dire. Si en fai un livre. Et maintes gens qui orront che livre que tu feras en seront millour, et s’en garderont de pechier, et feras grant ausmosne se tu le fais…. Or quier dont enche et parchemin assés, que je te dirai moult de choses que tu metras en ton livre.’ Et quant il ot tous quis, si li conta Merlins les amours de Jesucrist et de Joseph tout ensi comme eles avoient esté, et d’Alain et de sa compagnie tout ensi comme il avoit alé, et comment Joseph se dessaisi dou vaissiel et puis devia, et comment dyable(s) apriès toutes ces choses qui furent avenues prisent conseil que il avoient perdu lour pooir que il soloient avoir seur les hommes, et se li conte comment li prophete lor avoient mal fait, et pour choi (s’)estoient (accordé) ensamble comment il feroient un homme. ‘Et tu as bien oi et seu par ma mère et par autrui le painne et l’engien que il i ot mis. Et par la folie dont il sont plain m’ont perdu.’ Ensi devisa Merlins ceste oevre et le fist faire a Blaise. ‘And believe what I shall tell you out of the faith and belief of Jesus Christ. And I shall tell you such things as no one, except God, would be able to tell you. And make a book of them. And many people who will hear this book that you are to make will be better for it, and will avoid sinning, and you will do great service if you do it…. Now go get ink and a lot of parchment, for I will tell you many things which you are to put in your book.’ And when he had gathered everything, Merlin told him about the passions of Jesus Christ and of Joseph just as they had been, and about Alain and his company just as it had been, and how Joseph seized the vessel and then died, and how after all of these things had taken place the devils concurred that they had lost their power which they were accustomed to having over men, and he told how the prophets had harmed them, and that for this they had agreed together how they would make a man. ‘And you have indeed heard and known through my mother and through others the trouble and connivance that they used in so doing. And because of the foolish extravagance which they are full of they lost me.’ Thus Merlin laid out this work and had Blaise do it. (1:31–32) This book will serve not only as a repertory of the religious stories and Merlin’s birth, but will also include the narrative events related by Merlin concerning King Arthur, his

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ancestors, and the knights of the Round Table. When Merlin quits Blaise, he gives him this counsel: ‘Mais tu ne verras mie avoecques moi, ains t’en verra par toi. Et demanderas une terre que on apiele Norhomberlande…. Et la converseras, et je irai souvent a toi, et te dirai toutes les choses dont tu avras mestier a cele oevre faire que tu fais…. Et tu t’en iras la ou je t’ai dit, et jou irai souvent a toi et te porterai toutes ces choses que je vaurai que tu metes en ton livre. Et saches tu que tes livres sera encore moult amés et prisiés de maintes gens qui ja ne l’averont veut…. Et saces que onques nule vie de jans plus volentiers ne fu oie que sera cele de che roi qui avra non Artus et des gens qui a ce tans regneront…. Et tes livres, por chou que tu en as fait et feras de moi et d’aus, quant tu seras alés et mors, si avra a non tous jours mais li livres dou graal, et sera moult volentiers ois. Car il i avra moult peu de choses faites et dites qui ne soient pourfitables.’ ‘And you will not come away with me, but will go away by yourself. And you will ask for a land which is called Northumberland…. And there you will reside, and I will go often to you, and will tell you all the things which you will need to do this work which you are doing…. And you will go away there where I have told you, and I will go often to you and will bring you all the things which I will want you to put in your book. And know that your book will be greatly loved and esteemed by many people who never will have seen it…. And know that never could any life of a person be more willingly heard than the life of that king who will be called Arthur and of those people who at that time will reign…. And your book, because you have made and will make it about me and them, when you are dead and gone, it will be called forever after the book of the Grail, and it will be most eagerly heard. For there will be very few things there said and done which are not enriching.’(1:46–48) The sole condition governing this absent text is that it be hidden, removed from the locus of those fictional adventures which constitute the narrative substance of the romance; Merlin stipulates this when he entrusts the task of writing to Blaise: “Et ensi comme je suis oscurs et serai enviers chiaus ou je ne me vaurrai esclairier, ensi sera tous li livres celes, et peu avenra que ja nus en face bonte.” (“And just as I am obscure and will be towards those to whom I do not wish to reveal myself, so the entire book will remain hidden, and few things will occur where no one is enriched by it.”) (1:32) Henceforth, we shall find many references to this book in evolution, and we will be often reminded that the text which we read is a reduced representation—a “mise-enabyme”—of the text which comes out of the collaboration between Merlin and Blaise. Now in a sense the representation of the process of writing in the first part of this manuscript develops in stages similar to those stages leading to the discovery of paternity. In other words, the process of writing in the Huth Merlin obeys the following progression: (1) the initial stage, or the period of obscure origins; (2) the

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intermediate step, or the moment of the immanent manuscript; (3) and finally, the stage where authenticity is valorized. For the most part, the thematic motifs which characterize each stage of this progression are present not only in the various scenes treating birth, but also in the area which the theme of writing occupies in the romance. It will therefore be useful to establish a concordance between the birth scenes and the writing question at each period of their textual development, all the while scrutinizing the narrative aspects proper to the two themes. In this manner we may better arrive at a comprehension of the function of the two narrative perspectives in the first quarter of the novel; this comprehension will in turn lead to hypotheses on the meaning of this representation of writing as a force and form. We have already understood that the question of conception in the Huth Merlin is surrounded by obscurity. The emissary of the devils who hope to place a representative on earth succeeds at engendering Merlin when his mother goes to bed alone in a dark room. Outraged by the conduct of her sister who has become a prostitute, she goes to sleep entirely clothed, without crossing herself, against the counsel of her confessor. The devils, seeing therein an occasion to profit, send an emissary to the woman to impregnate her: Cele fu en sa chambre toute seule et se coucha en son lit toute viestue, et commencha a plourer moult durement, et si ot moult grant ire en son cuer de che que sa suer l’avoit ensi atornee, et en icele dolour s’endormi. Et quant li dyables sot que ele avoit tout oublié por le grant ire ou elle estoit chou que li preudom li avoit commandé, si en fu moult liés et dist: ‘Or puis je bien faire de cesti che que je vaurrai. Ceste est fors mise de la grasce de son signour et de la grasce son maistre. Et bien porroit on metre en li nostre homme.’ She was in her room all alone and lay down in her bed entirely clothed, and began to cry very hard, and had great fury in her heart because her sister had turned out in such a way, and in this grief she went to sleep. And when the devil found out that because of the great fury she was in she had forgotten everything which the virtuous man had commanded of her, he was very gleeful and said: ‘Now indeed I can do with her what I wish. She is outside of the grace of her lord and the grace of her master. And we may indeed put our man inside her.’ (1:12–13) The circumstances encompassing King Arthur’s conception are analogous to those which surround Merlin’s birth. Uter Pandragon, the king of the realm of Logres, is smitten by Igerne, the wife of the Duke of Tintagel. Igerne repeatedly opposes Uter’s blandishments. But the king, with Merlin’s aid, disguises himself as the duke; it is thus that he succeeds at sleeping with Igerne, who, mistaking him for her own husband, welcomes and accepts him as a faithful wife: Ensi jurent li rois et Ygerne cele nuit, et en cele nuit engenra il le boin roi qui fu apieles Artus. La dame fist grant goie d’Uter Pandragon comme dou duc son

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signour que elle amoit moult. (Einsi avint que li rois et Ygerne jurent ensemble toute nuit, et en cela nuit engenra il Artu),…. Thus the king and Igerne lay together that night, and during that night he sired the good king who was called Arthur. The lady provided a joyous welcome for Uter Pandragon as she would for her lord the duke whom she loved a lot. (And thus it happened that the king and Igerne slept together all night, and during that night he sired Arthur),…. (1:111) The quality of illusion predominant in the scenes cited above is equally present in those scenes treating the conception of the judge and of Tor. The judge’s mother, after having protested the allegations made against her by Merlin, finally admits her adulterous transgression in that she conceived her son by a priest and not by her legal husband. (1:28) In the same way, Tor’s mother is obliged to avow that her eldest son was conceived a few days before her marriage by an unknown knight who had raped her. (2:133) Now aside from the trait of trickery or illusion, these scenes all have one characteristic in common: the verbal testimonies made by the mothers following these originary experiences are insufficient or fallacious in relation to the experiences which they describe. In some way, the power of words is not such that it can adequately describe the immediacy of the experience which the mothers have undergone. When brought before judges, Merlin’s mother does not know what to say to defend herself: Et quant li juge le virent, si dient: ‘Dame, dirés vous qui est peres de cest enfant? Gardés que vous ne le celés mie.’ Et elle respont: ‘Seigneur, je voi bien que je suis livree a justice de mort. Si n’ait Dieus ja pitie ne merchi de moi si je le pere vi onques ne ne connui ne (on) que(s) viers homme fui tant abandonnee que il deust enfant engendrer en moi.’ Et li juge respondent: ‘Nous ne creons pas que che puist estre voirs.’ And when the judges saw her, they said: ‘Madam, will you say who is the father of this child? Be careful that you do not hide it.’ And she responds: ‘Lords, I see well enough that I am delivered to the death penalty. And may God have neither pity nor mercy on me if ever I saw or knew the father or if ever I were so wanton towards a man that he should engender a child in me.’ And the judges respond: ‘We do not believe that this can be true.’ (1:23) Nor does Igerne succeed at designating the true father of the child she is carrying. She explains to Uter, her husband since the time of the duke’s death, that she has been the victim of illusion: ‘Sire, je vous conterai merveilles.’ Et elle li conte comment uns hom avoit jeu avoec li en sa chambre (en semblance dou duc son signour): ‘Et avoit amené avoec lui deus des hommes ou monde que mes sires mieus amoit. Et ensi vint a

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moi en ma chambre, voiant toute ma gent, et jut a moi. Et je cuidai certainnement que che fust mes sires.’ ‘My lord, I shall tell you wondrous things.’ And she tells him how a man had slept with her in her room in the semblance of the duke her lord: ‘And he had brought with him two of the men in the world whom my lord loved most. And thus he came to me in my room, in the view of all of my people, and slept with me. And I thought surely that it was my lord.’ (1:121) It is interesting to note that if the mothers dissimulate the circumstances of their son’s conception, their testimonies are accepted as veritable. Such is the case of the judge’s mother: her son passes as a legitimate child until Merlin forces her to reveal her transgression with the priest. And Tor, whose father in reality is King Pellinor, passes in Arthur’s court as the son of humble parents. Already in the text we find several indications bearing witness to the trickery of the word as far as the representation of fictional origin is concerned. That which is true cannot be articulated; that which is not true is easily articulated, and the explication of the untrue serves to crystallize an illusion. These narrative currents are also present in the book which Merlin dictates to Blaise. Like the birth scenes, Blaise’s book is a representation of origin, for it is allegedly the conception of the text; as a prophetic work it corresponds to that pure and non-differentiated perception which precedes the verbal act. The book encloses only those private words which Merlin says to Blaise; according to Paul Zumthor, “ce livre ne se distingue pas plus de son auteur—du Prophète—que l’écriture sacrée ne se distingue de l’Esprit de Dieu.”2 The book as a prophetic work is a book in which discourse has no basis in externalized language; prophecy is situated outside of spatial and temporal constraints. There is in prophetic discourse a direct and rigid rapport between the work and what it signifies, between that which is articulated and the one who articulates it. Foresight is here equivalent to the state of perception which precedes all formal classification, including the order inherent to narrative language or to writing. Within the limits of this experience, elements cannot be defined; they are indissoluble in that they are not subject to the spatial or temporal distortion intrinsic to verbal articulation or written narration. The prophetic speech of Merlin corresponds analogically to the Huth manuscript as simultaneous vision exists in relation to verbal or written formulation. This observation is reinforced by the second book of prophecies mentioned in the text, the one compiled by the Kings Uter and Pandragon. After having observed Merlin’s various exploits, the young kings decide to record everything the wizard says, for they find that a book of his words would be indispensable to them: Lors dist li rois et tout cil qui l’oirent que nus n’est si sages comme Merlins est. Et disent que il ne li orront jamais dire chose qui avenir doive que il ne metent en escrit. Ensi l’ont devise (ensi fu commenciés uns livre que on apelle par nom le livre des prophecies Merlin, de) chou que il dist des rois d’Engleterre et de toutes les autres choses dont il parla puis.

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Then the king said and all of those who heard him that no one is as wise as Merlin is. And they say that they will never hear him say something which should come to pass that they do not put in writing. Thus they planned (thus was begun a book which is called by the name of the book of Merlin’s prophecies in) which he spoke about the kings of England and about all the other things which he spoke about since then. (1:85) This “livre des prophecies Merlin” is distinguished from Blaise’s book only in that the latter relates Merlin’s accounts of the Last Supper, of Joseph, and of his own birth; the book of the two kings relates only what Merlin says: “Et pour chou ne dist pas chis livres qui Merlins est ne dont il vint, qu’il ne metoient en escrit fors que chou que il disait.” (“And this book told neither who Merlin is nor where he came from, for they put in writing only what he said”) (1:85) The similarity between the two books is so close that when Blaise becomes aware of the brothers’ project, he fears a duplication of his own work. But Merlin reassures him: Et quant Merlins sot que il avoient ensi parlé et que il devoient en escrit metre ces paroles, si le dist a Blaise. Et Blaises le demanda: ‘Merlins, seront leur livre autel conme je faich?’ Et Merlins respont: ‘Nennil. Il ne meteront en escrit se che non que il porront connoistre dusques il soit avenu.’ And when Merlin found out that they had spoken in this way and that they were to put his words into writing, he said so to Blaise. And Blaise asked him: ‘Merlin, will their books be the same as the one I am doing?’ And Merlin replies: ‘Not at all. They will put into writing only that which they will be able to know when it has happened.’ (1:85–86) The content of the kings’ book corresponds therefore to the content of Blaise’s book. What is important in this respect is that the two books record Merlin’s prophecies, prophecies which in the text are classified in terms of obscurity. Just before the conclusion of the pact with Uter and Pandragon, Merlin resolves never again to say anything but obscure and incomprehensible words: “Ne je ne (n) parlerai plus devant le siecle se si oscurement non que il ne saveront que je dirai devant que il le voient.” (“Nor will I ever speak again before the world if not obscurely so that they will not know what I say before they see it.”) (1:85) Once he has undertaken the book of the kings, Merlin remains true to his promise: “Et Merlins commencha lors a dire les oscures paroles dont ses livres fu fais des prophesies c’on ne peut connoistre dusques elles soient nouvieles avenues.” (“And Merlin then began to say the obscure words of which his book was made about the prophecies which cannot be known until they have actually happened.”) (1:86) The obscurity of Merlin’s words is a sign of their immanent quality. These words (which, moreover, do not appear in the narrative matter of the romance) correspond to an immanence which is altered in externality, whether that externality be verbal or written. It is thus with respect to the Grail, the final prophecy of Blaise’s book. The Grail is the culmination of all of Merlin’s prophecies. Although its signification is implied by

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its linear rapport in the text to the Christian stories and to Merlin’s fictional history, that signification is never defined. The Grail remains an obscure word, a mystery for the reader and for the Arthurian community. The Grail belongs to no formal system; it remains, like Merlin’s obscure words, outside of the problematic time and space of writing. Its presence in the Huth Merlin is always projected; it is never attained. According to Zumthor, “…le mystère du Graal est une promesse…. Une telle promesse n’est jamais réalisée tant que dure l’histoire.”3 But Blaise’s book is as well a textually historical work, for it is the depository of the holy stories and of Merlin’s life. Inasmuch as it is based upon historical narrative event, it is a model of formulated perception. The past accounts that appear within it are far removed from the fictional time of the story. In order to be transmitted across time, it was necessary that these histories take on a logical and coherent form. The miracle of the three tables, the story of Joseph, and the story of Merlin’s conception arrive therefore before the author(s) of the romance in chronicle form. The truth of these stories has necessarily been altered by their form of transmission.4 The chronicle is at once a translation, an attempted definition and a transformation of narrative origin. The quintessence of the (pseudo-) historical parts in Blaise’s book is lost in the distortion inherent to the means of transmission: across words. But at the same time it is necessary to note that if this alteration of truth is present in the chronicled parts of Blaise’s book, the author or scribe is well aware of it. For when Merlin gives the task of writing the book to Blaise, he informs him of the similarity which will exist between this work and the book of Jesus and Joseph: “‘Et quant li doi livre seront assamblé, si i avra un biel livre. Et li doi seront une meesme chose fors tant que je ne puis dire, ne drois n’est, les privees paroles de Joseph et de Jesucrist’” (“‘And when the two books are assembled, there will be a beautiful book. And the two will be the same thing except that I cannot say, nor is it right, the private words of Joseph and Jesus Christ.’”) (1:33) Now, “the private words of Joseph and Jesus Christ” resemble the private utterances of Merlin—in other words, the implied reality behind the verbal expression of experience. Thus, for the author of the romance, the truth or immanence of the chronicles in Blaise’s book remains always hidden and mysterious because of the interdiction placed upon the secret words. However, the author(s) of the manuscript knew to compensate for the trickery of the chronicles, for in joining the chronicled segments of the romance to the body of the prophecies, he (or they) has overcome the difficulties posed by the written word. The author(s) warn the reader of the modifications in the chronicles (“je ne puis dire, ne drois n’est, les privees paroles de Joseph et de Jesucrist”), all the while binding these accounts to Merlin’s prophecies (“Et quant li doi livre seront assamblé,…li doi seront une meesme chose”). Now the conjunction of these two elements, the chronicles and the prophecies, is at the very least incongruous. Although Merlin explains his own prophetic function in connection to the past narrative events which he recounts, the causal relation remains unconvincing on the level of the romance’s narration. But in order to read the text in a comprehensible way, the reader must recognize in it a certain logic, whether that logic be explicit or not. The juxtaposition of the past narrative elements and the prophecies serves to assure this fundamental

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logic. For the book to be understood as a unity, the relations between its distinct parts must present a profound identity which is presupposed by the linear juxtaposition of the disparate elements of Blaise’s book. The implied causal relation is furnished by the temporal subordination of the elements of the book. Merlin’s prophecies remain obscure and hidden—we might be tempted to say a deliberate gesture on the part of the author(s) to avoid all descriptive or definitive contamination. But it is precisely this contamination which is evoked when the recounted chronicles and the prophecies are attached to one another in Blaise’s book, for the juxtaposition of these two groups gives rise to the positing of a common import between them. Thus, although Merlin explicitly declares the causal nature of this curious grouping,5 the structure of the metaphorical book still remains the most forceful proof of the integral unity of its constituent parts. The pure signification of the related chronicles, which is modified by their means of transmission, is therefore joined to the prophecies on the level of secret words. That which always remains immanent in the holy stories, that which cannot be expressed, is attached to Merlin’s hidden discourse, that is to say, his prophecies. A chain of meaning is then established, a chain which runs throughout Blaise’s metaphoric book. The quality of pure perception which corresponds to the prophetic book remains no less true when related to the historic book, for in both true origin is characterized by absence—absence of articulation, absence of definition, absence of translation. The narrative segment dealing with Merlin’s birth is at the intersection of the thematic and structural questions of fictional origin, for it is at once an episode included in the historic part of the metaphoric book and a scene of birth. As a thematic element, this scene fixes the structure of those motifs which reappear in other birth scenes. As we have already stated above, Merlin’s mother cannot affirm the true identity of her child’s father. The insufficiency of words in this case is particularly salient given that the scene is set up in a juridical situation. The inquisitorial process, which by its very nature relies upon the representative power of words, fails at fulfilling its essential function: the rendering of justice based upon the oral testimonies of defendant and plaintiff. When summoned before the judges, the other women who are to pose depositions find themselves incapable of giving an adequate response to valorize the attestation of Merlin’s mother: Et dist li uns des juges: ‘Dames, vous qui chi estes, avint onques a nule de vous ne a autre dont on oist onques parler que elle puist conchevoir ne avoir enfant sans compaignie d’omme carnelment?’ Et celes dient que che ne porroit avenir. Quant li juge oirent che, si s’en revinrent arriere a la mere Merlin et li conterent che que il ont oi dire as autres femmes. ‘Et des ore mais en est il drois que la justiche en soit faite.’ And one of the judges said: ‘Ladies, you who are here, has it ever happened to any of you or to another about whom one may have spoken that she could conceive or have a child without the carnal company of a man?’ And they said that this could not happen. When the judges heard this, they went back to

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Merlin’s mother and told her what they had heard the other women say. ‘And from now on it is right that justice be done about it.’ (1:23–24) Finally, as for the judge who condemns Merlin’s mother, it occurs that he is the product of an illegitimate liaison, and consequently, his mother is even more guilty than is Merlin’s mother. As Merlin himself explains to the judge: ‘Vous volés ma mere ardoir por chou que je sui nés de li et pour che que elle ne set qui en li m’engendra. Mais se je voloie, elle savroit mieus dire quels fieus je sui que tu ne savroies dire qui fu tes peres, et ta mere set mieus quels fieus tu ies que la moie mere ne porroit orendroit dire quels fieus je sui.’ ‘You want to burn my mother because I am born of her and because she does not know who engendered me in her. But if I so willed it, she would better know how to say whose son I am than you would know to say who was your father, and your mother knows better whose son you are than my mother would be able to tell you whose son I am right now.’ (1:26) Thus, the defendant (Merlin’s mother) has been transformed into the innocent victim, whereas the plaintiff (the judge) proves ultimately to be the defendant. The judge, whose social function is to judge through words, is indeed in the wrong. And the one who gives proof of the illusion of words, Merlin, is right. This scene is then not only a forceful proof of the obscurity of fictional origin in the thematic sense, but it also enhances in a gripping way the question of the illusory or fraudulent power of words. It is a decisive scene in the sense that, while being a “history” (an account of the past) included in Blaise’s metaphoric book, it is equally prophetic—for it announces in an evocative way the mystery and obscurity which will characterize Merlin’s prophetic words. Everything which Merlin’s mother says, although true, alters the normal appearance or the expected order of things. On the other hand, the judge and all that he represents, although accepted and certified by the external world of the romance, mask a profound illusion. And finally, the truth of Merlin’s mother’s testimony is never directly confirmed: it is only after the revelation of the fraudulent circumstances of the judge’s birth that Merlin’s mother is acquitted. The obscure word, the word which cannot be confirmed by a direct testimony in linguistic externality, remains preeminent in a textual system where everything depends upon the representative power of words. It is thus a scene where everything is put into play: prophecy and past narrative, fictional origin and its representation and, more fundamentally, the signifier and the sign. This last remark merits a closer look, for it is only by way of narrative, of representation or of signs that the reader manages to grasp the message of the text. To fix this question once again in terms of our initial analogy, we may say that those signs which “represent” depend in all instances upon a textual origin, or, the son owes his existence to the father. But at the same time, the son or the representative opposes the origin by substituting for it. Briefly, the son’s testimony is not necessary in the

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case where the attestation of the father or of origin is present and manifest. It is thus that the son’s situation is paradoxical: on the one hand, his existence in the text is incontestably the result of his father; but on the other hand, this result or this issue is not essential if the father or the signifier is present. Thus, the son or the representative depends simultaneously upon the father and upon the father’s absence.6 This paradoxical situation and all of the circumstances to which it gives rise are present in the four birth scenes discussed above. Merlin’s case is the most obvious example: the son of a devil and of a virtuous woman, Merlin is textually empowered with the ability to know all past events. But because of the very virtue of his mother, God redeems the child she is carrying and gives him the gift of clairvoyance. Merlin is therefore the child with two fathers irreconcilably opposite: the devil and God. By recounting past events and by being master of all history, Merlin reflects and prolongs the influence of his devil-father. Through his knowledge of the future, of the divine word, and of the unseen and unsaid, he reflects and doubles his divine father. He cannot reflect one of the two fathers without betraying the other. Merlin is thus the child with two fathers and the child without a father, for the two forces united in the wizard and called by the name of “father” cannot coexist. As we have already seen, it is not because of his knowledge of the past that Merlin renounces his diabolic father and disculpates his mother: he says that he is the son of the devil only after his mother’s exoneration. (1:28) It is rather by appealing to the profound truth behind the fraudulous deposition of the judge’s mother that Merlin’s obtains his mother’s acquittal. In other words, it is his knowledge of the secret, and analogically, of true origin, which brings about his mother’s triumph. But it is also necessary that Merlin name the true father of the judge in order for his own mother to be acquitted, and it is in this way that he prolongs his diabolic father. Once named, once designated, the true circumstances of the judge’s conception become history within this fiction. The designation of the father is inevitably historic, historic in the sense that origin is then situated in the spatial and temporal frame of externalized language. This observation is even confirmed on the thematic level, for the designation of the judge’s father curiously implies his death. Immediately after naming the priest as the judge’s true father, Merlin predicts to the judge that the priest will drown himself: ‘Ta mere s’en ira et contera a chelui qui t’engendra chou que je lui ai dit. Et quant il orra que tu savras la vérité, il avera si grant paour de toi que il s’en fuira. Et li dyables quels oevres il a tous jours menees si l’en menra a une riviere, et la se noiera. Et pour chou poes prouver que je [sai] les choses qui sont a avenir.’ ‘Your mother will go off and will tell him who engendered you what I have told her. And when he hears that you know the truth, he will be so afraid of you that he will flee. And the devil, whose works he has always undertaken, will lead him to a river and there he will drown himself. And through this you can prove that I know things which are going to happen.’ (1:29)

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And indeed, the priest does exactly as Merlin predicts. The judge’s mother goes straight to the priest to tell him what has happened at Merlin’s mother’s trial: Sitost que ele fu venue a son hostel, si parla au prouvoire en conseil et li dist la merveille que ele avoit oie. Et quant cil l’oi, si fu si espoentés que il ne li pot mot respondre, et lors se pensa que si tost que li juges verroit qu’il l’ochiroit. Si n’en a la pensant fors de la ville. Et vint a une riviere et dist que mieus li venoit que il se noiast que on l’ochesist, ne que il le fesist morir de vilainne mort. Ensi le mena dyables quels oevres il avoit faites, qu’i [1] le fist sailir en l’iaue, si se noia. As soon as she came to his house, she spoke in deliberation to the priest and told him of the wondrous thing she had heard. And when he heard it, he was so terrified that he couldn’t respond a word, and then he thought that as soon as the judge would see him he would kill him. And he went pensively outside of the city. And he came to a river and said that he would be better off to drown himself than that another kill him, or that he be made to die a shameful death. Thus the devil, whose works he had always done, led him and made him jump into the water, and he drowned. (1:29) Thus, the designation of the father brings about death, and by extension, the absence of the father. Merlin as a prophet reflects God and renounces the devil. Merlin as the master of that which is past reflects the devil and renounces God. There is no way that he can prove his originary gifts without destroying or betraying the father, this father being total knowledge of the past and the future. As soon as Merlin penetrates origin, he makes a past account of it. This narrative history is even essential to the valorization of the link between Merlin and God. The prophecy cited above is veritable only by becoming past, a narrative retelling of a fictional event. But as soon as he makes fictional history out of origin, he kills the father. A pure and exact representation of Merlin’s father is possible at no isolated moment: the future and the past cannot coexist. Merlin is therefore the child of two fathers in that his talents emanate from the devil and God, and the child without a father in that he depends upon the absence of this temporal coexistence to function. It is interesting to remark that these observations bear equally upon the judge’s situation. The judge, a textual symbol of the representative power of words, realizes the true function of his role only when his father is named. The innocence of Merlin’s mother is proved only by the revelation of the judge’s true father. Since the naming of the father implies the death of the father, we may here repeat that this scene witnesses the most profound function of words. In other terms, the valorization of words as representation (the judge) depends upon the absence of the origin (the father) from which they come. This model of paternal relations is no less true in the case of King Arthur and his father, Uter Pandragon. But here, the formal mode of sovereignty lends force to the argument. In accordance with a generalized code of royalty, we may presuppose that the son of a king does not take the place of his father excepting when the latter dies or

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is expulsed by his son. But in the instance of Arthur and his father, this process does not depend upon the traditional convention. To be sure, it is only at Uter’s death that Arthur accedes to the throne of the kingdom of Logres; however, he is not recognized as the son of a king at the time of his coronation. All the while being the son of Uter, he is not recognized as such because of the circumstances surrounding his conception, his birth, and his youth. Even when he draws the sword from the stone on the day of Pentecost—a divine indication of his election—his accession to power stirs up controversy precisely because his origins are dubious. But when Merlin convokes the barons of the kingdom and Igerne, Arthur’s mother, he elucidates the true circumstances of Arthur’s birth to them and thus dissipates all hesitations: Et pour chous que Merlins lour fait entendant que Artus fu fieus Uter Pandragon, si dient que onques mais si grant joie n’avint ou roiaume de Logres que li baron feront quant il orront ceste chose. Car il le contrehaoient et despisoient por chou que il ne savoient nule chose de son parenté. And because Merlin had them understand that Arthur was the son of Uter Pandragon, they said that never again would there be such great joy in the kingdom of Logres as the barons would display when they heard this. For they loathed and despised him because they knew nothing of his parentage. (1:165) Now, even though Arthur has rights to the throne following the death of his father, proof of his filiation is nevertheless essential for him to be accepted and approved by his people. The insistence here is placed upon the fact that the son is lost without the assistance of the father. Tor’s situation is analogous to Arthur’s. As a youth, he presents himself in Arthur’s court accompanied by an old man who explains to Arthur that Tor, although born of humble parents, wants only to be a knight. (2:70) Arthur listens to the old man’s pleas and then accords the title of knight to Tor. The barons of Arthur’s court laugh and are astonished that an adolescent of such low birth could be as presumptuous as Tor. (2:70) It is at this time that Merlin points out that Tor is not the son of a peasant couple, but in reality the son of a king. Later he names the king who is Tor’s father: Pellinor. (2:135) It is only after this designation that the barons accept the young knight :and grant him the respect worthy of their own peers. But at the same time that Merlin indicates the true links of parentage between Tor and Pellinor, he prophesies to Arthur that Pellinor will be wounded by a knight and will die after having vainly solicited the aid of his son: ‘…sera un jour aussi, a eure de douze ans, qu’il sera entrés en une queste, et enconterra en une forest que je bien sai le fil del roi ochis, et sera a chelui point navrés de moult de plaies, si que le fieus del roi occhis le trouvera si mat et si travilliet que il le metera dusques a outranche, et le laissera en la planche aussi coume demi mort après cele bataille, et gerra en pasmissons jusques a eure de nonne ou de viespres. Quant il avra taut geu en pamisons coume je vous devise, il overra les iex adont et verra vers lui venir deux chevaliers armés, (et) dont li

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uns sera Kex li seneschaus, li autres Tor; Kex s’en fuira, Tor l’encauchera; et quant li rois Pellinor verra son fil, if li criera: “Tor, biaus fieus, ne va avant, mais cha, car j’ai besoing de toi.” Tor l’orra bien et entendera, mais il ne cuidera pas que che soit ses peres, ainz cuidera que chis le gabe et escarnisse, si s’en ira outre, que onques nel regardera, et li rois remanra, qu’il n’avra pooir de soi remuer.” ‘…and there shall be a day, twelve years from now, when he will have entered into quest, and will meet in a forest that I know the son of the killed king [Gawain], and will at that time be injured with many wounds, so that the son of the killed king will find him so weak and grieved that he will almost put him to death, and will leave him in that place half dead after the battle, and he will lie in swoon until the hour of nones or of vespers. After he has laid in swoon as I have told you, he will open his eyes and will see two armed knights coming toward him, of whom one will be the seneschal Kay and the other, Tor; Kay will take flight, Tor will chase him; and when King Pellinor sees his son, he will cry out to him: “Tor, beautiful son, do not go off, but remain, for I need you.” Tor will indeed hear and listen to him, but he will not believe that this is his father, and will believe that he is deceiving and tricking him, and he will go off elsewhere and not look at him again, and the king will remain, for he will not have the strength to move.’ (2:138) Now, Tor’s complete social acceptance depends in a certain way upon the designation of his father. Tor is approved as a knight only after the definitive establishment of his parentage. But it is also in his role as knight that he renounces his father and refuses him the help that he needs. The model is thus maintained in all circumstances: the son, who owes to his father the debt of his own existence and his own valorization, nevertheless depends upon the death or the renunciation of his father to realize his own function. This ambivalent model may be equally applied to the question of writing in the text; the manuscript of the Huth Merlin upholds with respect to Blaise’s book the same relation that the son in the above examples upholds with respect to the father. In other terms, the text which we read is at once an ordered image of Blaise’s book and a transformation or renunciation of it. The text owes to the metaphoric book the debt of existence in that Blaise’s transcription is analogous to that originary cognitive moment which precedes narration. But it renounces, alters and modifies the metaphoric book by transforming it into a linguistically-determined order—the true signification of Blaise’s book, that which remains always within, loses its prophetic aspect when placed in the definitive and (inevitably) historically-determined limits of words. An analysis of the syntactic structure of the Huth manuscript reveals this profound ambivalence, for the author, although having at his disposition the means to express explicit causality, resists the formal expression of causality on the level of syntax.7 The most numerous conjunctions serving as links between the independent units of narration are of a temporal rather than causal or subordinate nature. These adverbial

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conjunctions—quant, ensi, lors, ore, atant, chi endroit, a che mot, endementiers, un soir, cele nui, puis, apriès, a l’endemain, adont, to mention a few—bind the independent sentences of the text in such a way that causality is admitted only through the consecution of the narrative elements of the romance; explicit subordination is almost never expressed on the level of the large narrative units.8 This narrative mode indicates several fundamental attributes of the prose romance. In the first place, because the elements of the romance are linked consecutively and not in a subordinate manner, they can be perceived as autonomous units. Each narrative segment remains practically independent of those which precede or those which follow it. In other words, awareness of what has been related before or of what will be related after each narrative unit is not essential to the comprehension of that same unit. The segments are not fashioned in a causal hierarchy; each narrative unit has thus its own autonomous function, its own signifying force. The meaning of each narrative unit is sufficient to itself; it does not depend upon external explanation or commentary for veritable representation because its representation does not participate with any preestablished narrative chain. In that it is a transcription of a series of linguistic events, events moreover which seem hardly to relate to each other, the Huth Merlin is exemplary of this narrative mode. The episodes which are recounted in it correspond to each other only in that they have been placed next to each other in a narrative sequence. The generation, duration and conclusion of a narrative frame in no way depend upon the incidental developments which precede or ensue. Each narrative element in the long chain of units is equally accentuated, equally important and equally significant. The temporal expressions which separate one narrative unit from another belong equally to the terminated narration and to the initiated narration without explaining, extending, or emphasizing one at the expense of the other. This tendency to resist all form of explanation creates the impression of a homogeneity between the narrative divisions of the romance. Defined only in terms which do not describe or accentuate, the discrete parts of the manuscript seem to resemble each other. The very fact that they are bound in the linear syntax of the text gives rise to the establishment of an identity between them. Circumscribed in almost indefinite terms, juxtaposed linearly in the same syntactic chain, the narrative divisions of the Huth Merlin are varied representations of one single signification, discrete facades of one implicit origin laid out in a formal order. In the same way that a facet partially represents the whole of a prism, so each narrative division represents its own origin. The fundamental identity of the scenes suggests the simultaneity of what they represent—pure, cognitive totality which remains outside of the spatial and temporal constraints of writing. It is thus that the text reflects its implied origin, this being represented by Blaise’s metaphorical book. There is in the homogeneity of the text’s narrative elements an attempt to reproduce a true image of the metaphoric book, an effort to create anew the simultaneity of Merlin’s total knowledge. Blaise’s book, as a depository of the holy stories of Joseph and Jesus, of the birth and life of Merlin and of his prophecies, symbolizes the coincidence of the past and the future, the total expanse of time reduced to a moment of simultaneous and total cognitive possibility. It is a whole

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which in its very content escapes all verbal presence: the prophetic discourse of Merlin remains obscure; the “paroles privées” of Joseph and Jesus are absent; the narrative events of Merlin’s life are but an attestation against language’s transparency. In their resistance to all causal expression, in their fundamental identity, the narrative units resist the function intrinsic to their own formal order. On the other hand, as these narrative units are depicted in terms of an actualization of Merlin’s prophetic word, the structure of the novel represents a discourse. Prophecy is a projection into the future, and as such it presupposes a rigid relation between the word and what it represents. Prophetic words are not classified in a manner such that they describe or relate a linguistic element or event outside of themselves. Prophetic discourse is a pure discourse; its elements are not immobilized in the spatial and temporal considerations dictated by narrative event. Spatial and temporal aspects lend a certain logic, a context to the textual event. It is this context which is lacking in prophetic discourse, and it is also this context which the author of the manuscript resists on the level of narration. But although he opposes the expression of causality in the large narrative units of the novel, the author cannot prohibit the implicit causality of syntax. The juxtaposition of the text’s narrative elements produces an implicit logic which is essential to effective narrative evocation. In order to understand the text as a whole, the reader must find in its distinct parts a kind of logic. The chronological alignment of the narrative segments leads to the recognition of an implicit and causal order between the text’s diverse parts. But this order is not a true image of Blaise’s book, the symbol of the moment prior to the narrative act, for the metaphoric book is characterized by the simultaneity of its elements. Briefly, history and prophecy coexist as two modes of immanent discourse in Blaise’s book without undergoing the transformation brought on by narration. Once written, the elements of Blaise’s book all become narrative history, and their internal rapport is in some way altered. The linear syntax of the Huth Merlin necessitates the awareness of an intrinsic causation between its disparate parts, an applied reading of its missing links. Because of the basic difference between the means of representation (narration) and that which is represented (origin), the causal mode is not grasped according to its original intention. The subversion of the signification of Blaise’s book is seen everywhere in the novel: the prophetic, the divine, the obscure—all that is related to the Round Table and to Arthur’s court—are ever being transformed into a textual history, the domain of the terrestrial and of the devil. As soon as a linguistic event is realized, it no longer belongs to prophetic discourse; it loses its obscure quality and is placed in the contextual frame of the novel. Obscurity, which depends upon the fact that prophecy is situated outside of any contextual constraint, disappears and abandons itself to the logical causation produced by the linear narration of fictional event. Whatever the linguistic means adopted, the author(s) or scribe(s) cannot prohibit the intervention of an implicit causality in the text. It is thus that the text of the Huth Merlin reflects and alters its origin, the total cognition symbolized by Blaise’s book. In the autonomy of its large narrative

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divisions, the text stands as a model or image of the metaphoric book, whereas its syntactic structures belie a pure and veracious representation. The text is thus analogous to the illegitimate son, who while depending upon his father for his existence and his social viability, rejects and betrays his father in his role as a representative. Yet in some way, the indication of origin, the definitive designation of the father, is always necessary. Here it is necessary to point out that the son without the father cannot be accepted and that in the case of the text, the romance does not withhold one single auto-referential meaning. The connection to an originary fiction is in one way or another essential to the signification of the Huth Merlin. On the thematic scale, this is seen in the repeated motif of the designated father and the valorized son: the adherence of the son to his external fictional universe, that which he seems to be as an independent character, undergoes a radical change once his paternity is established. Arthur is transformed from a disapproved king into a sovereign paragon; the judge changes from an imperious plaintiff into a passive defendant; Tor is converted from a humble aspirant into a valiant knight. We are in this way led to believe that the appearance of the text is not completely representative of the truth which it claims to reveal. In other words, the repeated mention of Blaise’s book is destined to transform external appearances, to establish a signification other than the one offered by the mere surfaces of the text. At every juncture of the long disruptive narration of the Huth Merlin, the author or scribe reminds the reader that the true source of the manuscript is Blaise’s metaphoric book. The refrain, “et par le resavons nous” (“and through it we know again”), signals an effort on the part of the writer to persuade his public to accept the romance according to an original intention. Even the motifs which characterize the designation of paternity on the thematic level and those which point to the metaphoric text share fundamental qualities. One of the means repeatedly used to designate the father in the birth scenes is the written document witnessing the hour and the date when conception took place. After having told Blaise, her confessor, about the eerie circumstances of her seduction by the devil, Merlin’s mother expresses her fears and her distress. Blaise reassures her by saying that he will put what she says in writing: Quant li preudom l’oi, si s’en esmiervilla moult, et puis mist la nuit et l’(u) eure en escrit si comme elle li ot conté, et dist: ‘Toute seure soiiés. Quant chis oirs que dedens toi [est] naistera, je savrai bien se tu m’a[s] voir dit u menti. Et j’a [i] bien creanche en Dieu que, se che est voirs ensi que tu le m’as dit, que tu n’averas ja garde de mort.’ When the virtuous man heard her, he was very astonished at it, and put the night and the hour in writing just as she had recounted, and said: ‘Be reassured. When this heir who is in you is born, I will indeed know if you have told me the truth or lied. And I have great faith in God that, if it is true as you have told me, you will not have affair with death.’ (1:17)

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And it is only in appealing to the priest’s written document that Merlin forces the judge’s mother to declare the true origins of her son. He provokes the judge’s mother to divulge her transgression in the following manner: ‘Vous saves bien que il est fieus a vostre prevoire. A ces ensaignes que la premiere fois que vois assamblastes a liu que vous li desistes que vous avies paour d’encarkier. Et il vous dist que vous n’encarceriés ja de lui, et que il meteroit en escrit toutes les fois qu’il girroit a vous, pour chou que il meismes avoit paour que vous ne couchissiés a autre homme et que vostre sires estoit mal de vous en cel termine.’ ‘You know well that he is the son of your priest. By these signs the first time that you had commerce with him you said to him that you were afraid of conceiving. And he said to you that you would never conceive by him, and that he would put in writing every time he slept with you, because he himself was afraid that you would sleep with another man and that your lord was put out with you at that time.’ (1:27) The designation of Arthur’s paternity occurs in a similar way. After having arranged the secret liaison between Igerne and Uter, Merlin advises the king to record the night and the hour of Arthur’s conception: ‘Je le te demanc, et voel que to saces que tu as gaaignié(e) un hoir, et que tu le m’as dounet, car tu ne le dois avoir. Et tel pooir coume tu i as tu le me donras. Et si fais mettre l’eure et la nuit en escrit que tu l’engenras si savras si je t’ai voir dit.’ ‘I ask it of you, and want you to know that you have gained an heir, and that you have given him to me, for you must not have him. And such power as you may have there you will give to me. And so put the hour and the night that you engendered him in writing, and you will know that I have spoken truly to you.’(1:112) Finally, Merlin proves Tor’s paternity by referring to the hour and the night when the knight was conceived. When trying to tear a confession from Tor’s mother, he says to her: ‘…nous ne vous demandons mie de chelui qui le norri, mais de chelui qui l’engenra; car che savons nous bien de voir qu’il ne nasqui onques de vilain, mais de gentil houme que je connois moult mieus que vous ne faite[s], et sai bien le jour et l’eure et le tans qu’il fu engenrés et qui (1) l’engendra, et suis près que je le die orendroit a mon signeur le roi et as ses houmes s’i[l] le commande, se il est ensi que vous nel voelliés dire.’ ‘…we are not asking you at all about the one who raised him, but about the one who sired him; for this we know as true that he was not born of a lowly person, but of a gentleman whom I know much better than you do, and I know

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well the day and the hour and the time he was sired and who sired him, and I am ready to say it at this very moment to my lord the king and to his men if he so orders, if it be such that you do not want to say.’ (2:132) Now these written documents of a temporal character all share a function: the naming of the father. Because they situate the moment of the sons’ conception in a temporal frame, they serve as legitimate testimonies of origin. However, they are functional only alongside Merlin’s vast knowledge. Blaise, who is the first to recount the circumstances of Merlin’s birth, presents his written documentation to the judge as evidence in favor of Merlin’s mother; but the judge rejects it as inadequate. (1:24) Merlin persists, but it is only after indicating the note kept by the judge’s father, the priest, that the evidence of Blaise’s document is accepted. In other terms, the writing which reverses the judge’s position is also that which validates Merlin’s total knowledge. The document which serves to establish paternity, which by extension serves to kill the father, is also in some way a confirmation of Merlin’s knowledge. Tor’s mother even affirms this when summoned before Arthur’s barons to designate the father of her son. Severely shamed by the biting questions which Merlin asks her, she accuses him of wanting only to display his marvelous talents: ‘…si le descoverrais, mais sachiés que ja Dieus ne vous en savra gret; car vous ne le faites mie pour l’amour de [Dieu] ne pour amender, fors pour moustret vostre savoir.’ ‘ …and I will reveal it, but know that never will God have mercy upon you; for you are not doing this at all for the love of God, nor to make reparation, but only to demonstrate your knowledge.’ (2:133) The documents are therefore affirmations of Merlin’s power, but apart from this function, they are in no way tenable. Although they attest to the hour and the date of the sexual relations between the parents, they guarantee no true description of the father. This is especially noticeable in regard to the judge’s origins. The judge’s mother, for some time estranged from her husband, hopes to inspire a reconciliation with him so that the child who issues from her clandestine liaison seem to be theirs. She thus has sexual relations with her husband on the very night of the judge’s conception. Normally, we would not know to whom to attribute the son born nine months later; but with the support of the priest’s testimony, Merlin obliges the judge’s mother to admit that her son is not legitimate. (1:28) These motifs are then similar to the text’s written mode, for they are alike in function and characteristic: they describe or represent origin (conception) in a temporal way. The description they offer is moreover limited and destined to a false interpretation. It is always Merlin who comes to the aid of these small documents, who puts his finger upon the truth of that which they represent. In the same way that the very form of the documents elicits a false interpretation, a reading of misunderstanding, so does the text as a whole. But Merlin, as the incarnation of total

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knowledge, assures the veracity of these small writings in the same way that his constant surveillance of Blaise’s book assures the true signification of the text itself. Moreover, there is Blaise. As confessor to Merlin’s mother, Blaise is at once the one who guarantees divine grace and the one who trusts the obscure word. As a result of Blaise’s first function, Merlin receives divine grace and consequently obtains the gift of prophecy. We may even say that Blaise is the instrument across which the scrivener transmits the ultimate signification of the story, the figure which furnishes a sense outside of the linguistically-determined limits of the text.9 The one who administers the sacrament of penitence to Merlin’s mother, and the one therefore who insures the prophetic abilities of her child, is also guardian of the obscure word. When Merlin’s mother confesses to Blaise what has happened to her, he is stunned and astonished. However, he reassures her and guarantees her the grace of God, even though her story is obscure and unconvincing: ‘Les granz paours en pourras tu bien avoir. Quant li juge le savront, il te prendront pour avoir tes biaus edefis, et diront que il feront de toi justiche. Et quant il t’avront prise, si le me fai savoir, et je t’irai consillier se je puis, et Dieus t’aidera se tu es tele comme tu dis; il ne t’oubliera mie.’ ‘And you will indeed have great fears about it. When the judges know it, they will take you in order to have your beautiful dwelling, and will say that they will take out justice on you. And when they have taken you, let me know it, and I will come to advise you if I can, and God will help you if you are as you say; He will not forget you.’ (1:17) Blaise is therefore the one who accepts and sanctifies that which cannot be articulated. He is the guarantor of the obscure word, the one who guards in good faith Merlin’s prophetic discourse. Although the content of the book which he will write is indecipherable, Blaise accepts the task of writing it: “Et moult s’esmiervilla Blaises des mierveilles que Merlins disoit, et toutes voies li sambloient estre boines et si i entendoit moult volentiers.” (“And Blaise was greatly astonished at the marvels which Merlin said, but above all they seemed good to him and he listened to them willingly”) (1:32) The explanation of Merlin’s mother is thus assimilated to the obscure words which will be included in Blaise’s book: neither can be said, but they are nevertheless accepted and guaranteed by the sanctifying figure of Blaise. Finally, there is Merlin himself. Merlin, the personification of total knowledge, invariably chooses to have his words recorded in a book principally characterized by its absence: not only is Blaise’s book removed from the locus of the narrative adventures, but also its content is never formulated in the text. Still, Merlin always brings his stories and his prophecies to Blaise, and insists upon the fact that the book will have an heuristic and spiritual import: “Et maintes gens qui orront che livre que tu feras en seront millour, et s’en garderont de pechier, et feras grant ausmosne se tu le fais.” (“And many people who will hear this book that you are to make will be better for it, and will avoid sinning, and you will do great service if you do it.”) (1: 31) It is thus clear that the absent book, the book of which the a priori is obscurity, is

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the retainer of meaning in the Huth Merlin, whereas the text which we read is its representation. Here it would be useful to recapitulate the functions of the transcription model which the text offers to us in the form of Blaise’s book. First, Blaise’s book represents an originary moment analogous to an instance of pure cognition, a moment characterized especially by simultaneity and absence of order. Next, the manuscript represents a copy of Blaise’s book, an interpretation which at the same time reflects and changes the essence of the absent text. Finally, there is the absent text which withholds the meaning of the romance, for not only does it include the accounts of those episodes related in the romance, but it also predicts in veiled terms the various exploits of the Round Table. In other words, it is the absent and metaphoric image of what Merlin represents as a character: total knowledge. Yet in spite of everything, a definition of the function of this absent book raises more questions than it resolves. Why does the creator of the work force himself to integrate absence in his narrative as a vehicle of meaning? Why does the content of the metaphoric book never appear in the formal order of the romance? Why is it necessary that the adventures of Uter, Pandragon, King Arthur and all of the knights of the Round Table be so rigorously bound to the obscure and the prophetic, merely to be transcribed afterwards into textualized chronicle in the metaphoric book? To answer these questions, we must first be attentive to those qualities which are at once inherent to the absent text and impossible within the confines of a syntactic order. “Order” is here the key word, for it is just its lack of chronicled order which insures meaning in Blaise’s book. An absent text, for our purposes a non-written text, the metaphoric book represents a lack of differentiation which cannot be translated into a formal narrative order. The simultaneity of its elements escapes all transcription. The written, externalized word is by nature derivative and historic, at the very least because it represents. And by extension, all order implied by narrative syntax accomplishes the same function: it represents, therefore, it must be preceded. The inevitably derivative essence of narrative—its imitative function, its innate order —cannot duplicate in one stroke the past and the future. This simultaneity can be designated only by absence, as in Blaise’s book. The metaphoric book is thus a book which exists inside and outside of linguistic logic, a book which is the unsaid and the unseen. In one way or another, the essence of this text does not fit the intermediary of narration. Blaise’s book is past and future, diabolic and divine—in other words, a pure absent simultaneity. The book cannot relate history or “signify” because all of its elements are the same. The book is abundance and synchronism. Like the forest where it is kept, the book is an obscure place, removed and chaotic, a domain where everything “…est moult estrange, car il i a de teus parties la u on n’a encore esté.” (“…is very strange, for there are such parts there where no one has yet been.”) (1:46) Thus, although Arthur, Uter, and Pandragon have historical prototypes borrowed by our author (scribe) from prior chronicles and romances, they find in the Huth Merlin a new dimension. Their story, laid out in the linear syntax of the novel, seems to produce its own meaning, its own logical principle. But Merlin’s apprenticeship at

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the court of the kings and the recording of their exploits in the absent text transmit to their stories a durable aspect, an aspect at once ideal and immutable because it is not defined. The meaning of the episodes which the Huth Merlin recounts, the numerous stories of deception and adventure, are indeed terrestrial tales of pseudo-historical kings and their knights. But on another level, less tangible and more integral, they are the representatives of a state where nothing is historic, nothing is defined, nothing is written. Notes Reprinted with permission from Romanic Review 77.1 (1986), pp. 1–24. 1. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, Merlin, roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, publié avec la mise en prose du poème de Merlin de Robert de Boron, d’après le manuscrit appartenant a M. Alfred H.Huth, 2 vols. (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1886; reprint ed., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), 1:28. All subsequent quotations taken from the text will be incorporated in the essay. 2. Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophéte, un thèmede la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans (Lausanne: Librairie Payot, 1943), p. 169. Zumthor further remarks that Blaise’s book “…se tient a l’égard du Graal dans le même rapport (qui n’est pas d’un récit a celui qui en est l’objet, mais comme la circulation incessante d’un commerce de vie veritable et de sainteté) que les Evangiles a l’égard du Christ,” p. 169. 3. Ibid. 4. A detailed description of the possible sources of the Huth manuscript is found in Gaston Paris, Introduction to Merlin, roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, publié avec la mise en prose du poème de Merlin de Robert de Boron, d’après le manuscrit appartenant a M.Alfred H. Huth. 5. See Merlin’s explanation at the time of the establishment of the Round Table. The Huth Merlin (1:94–96). 6. Jacques Derrida, “La Pharmacie de Platon,” Tel Quel 32 (Winter 1968): pp. 24–25. In a discussion of the son’s situation in Egyptian mythology, Derrida remarks that Thoth, the son of the sun-god Osiris, profits by this paradoxical existence: “Suppléant capable de doubler le roi, le père, le soleil, la parole, ne s’en distinguant que comme son représentant, son masque, sa repetition, Thot pouvait aussi naturellement le supplanter totalement et s’approprier tous ses attributs. Il s’ajoute comme l’attribut essentiel de ce a quoi il s’ajoute et dont il ne se distingue par presque rien. Il n’est different de la parole ou de la lumière divine que comme le révélant du révélé” p. 24. 7. See the analysis of the syntactic structure in La Mort Artu: R.Howard Bloch, “The Text as Inquest: Form and Function in the Pseudo-Map Cycle,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas Published by the University of Manitoba Press 8 (1975): pp. 113–115; see also J.Rychner, L’Articulation des phrases narratives dans “La Mort Artu” (Geneva, 1970). 8. An indication of this syntactic phenomenon may be observed in the incidence of adverbial terms at the beginning of each narrative division circumscribed by this edition. (We must emphasize that these narrative divisions are editorial in nature, for up until the present time we have been unable to consult the Huth manuscript itself. Although we do know, thanks to Gaston Paris’ Introduction to our edition of the Huth Merlin, that each paragraph in the manuscript begins with a painted capital letter (!), we cannot state without the editor’s

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confirmation that the paragraphs of the edition correspond rigorously to those of the manuscript.) There are in our edition 546 indented divisions; of these, 442 segments begin with adverbial or conjunctive particles. The most abundant usages are: quant (115), ensi (86), lors (65), ore (44), atant (31); with respect to the rest of the paragraphs beginning by adverbial connectives, the usages of tant, un soir, cele nuit, a ceste mot, au jour, apriès, chi endroit, endementiers, au matin, adont, puis are found in almost equal frequency. As for those segments beginning by other terms (104), it occurs that the majority of these are initiated either by proper names or by nouns designating the social function of an individual. For example: “Li rois dreche sa main et se saigne de la grant mierveille qu’il a oie…,” the Huth Merlin, vol. 1, p. 161. In this latter case, the terms utilized to introduce a new narrative direction are as well void of linguistic charge regarding the expression of causality. They serve, not to express a logical subordination between narrative elements, but rather to concentrate the reader’s attention upon another participant in narrative discourse. 9. Zumthor, p. 171. Zumthor insists upon Blaise’s role as an equivocal function: “…celui qui, administrant le sacrement de pénitence, bouleverse d’un geste, infime en soi, la face du monde—et pourtant, de lui-même, il n’est rien, la seule attitude qui lui convienne, c’est l’humilité, l’obscurité; il n’a pas a entrer sur la scene.”

CHAPTER 13 Malory’s Tragic Merlin DONALD L.HOFFMAN

The untold tale of Merlin’s birth haunts the opening of Malory’s Morte Darthur; the ghostly presence of his demon-father infiltrates the work, provoking the insults of enemies and explaining his own sometimes erratic behavior. Although the usual approach to Malory, particularly since Vinaver, is to de-emphasize the marvelous, Merlin is, nevertheless, surrounded by an aura of the uncanny. Thus, while Vinaver argues that “incidents which appealed to the French authors because of their fairy element are reproduced with an emphasis on their human and realistic aspects and with a noticeable neglect of magic,”1 Thomas Wright, in a beautifully evocative phrase, identifies Merlin as “the most intermediate of beings,” adding that “neither devil, man, nor god, Merlin wears the masks of all three” (33). Synthesizing these divergent approaches, I would suggest that it is precisely the diminution of the marvelous in Malory’s text that heightens the reader’s impression of Merlin as intermediate and indefinable.2 The problem is not that he wears the masks of devil, man, and god, but that Malory, by erasing the story of Merlin’s birth, inscribes the riddle of his origin in the margins of his text. The problem is not so much Merlin’s “masks,” but the impossibility of distinguishing mask from reality, of deducing his essence from his behavior. Preceding the tale of Arthur’s conception that opens Malory’s work, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the imitators and innovators who succeeded him, had told the tale of the fatherless boy, who, as Vortigern’s Druids discover, had been engendered by an incubus on his virgin mother. Malory transposes this tale into rumor, a rumor known to King Lot, for example, who calls him a “witch,” and rallies his troops by mocking, “Be we wel avysed to be aferd of a dreme-reder?” (1:18). Later, Pellinor overhears one knight warning another, “Beware…of Merlion, for he knowith all thynges by the devylles craffte” (1:118). The most direct allusion of all occurs when Nynyve rejects him, because “she was aferde of hym for cause he was a devyls son” (1:126). Thus, although we are never told the tale of Merlin’s birth, his contemporaries know it. In consequence, some hold him in awe, while others merely hold him in contempt. But during Arthur’s reign, at least until the coming of Lancelot, it is Merlin who protects the kingdom, intervening directly in the preparation, establishment, and preservation of the Round Table. He encourages Arthur to knight Grifflet, a young squire of Arthur’s age, because he sees that “he woll be a passynge good man whan he ys of ayge” (1:46). He reveals the mystery of Sir Torre’s birth, thus paving the way

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for the boy, ignobly raised if seminobly born, to become one of the first new knights of the Round Table. He also ensures the eventual arrival of Lancelot at Arthur’s court, and reveals the child’s future greatness to his proud mother (1:125–26). On several occasions, he preserves Arthur’s life, rescuing him from three churls (1:49), and, by means of enchantment, from Pellinor (1:51). His intervention in the wars of the kings preserves Arthur’s kingdom, when he arranges Balin’s capture of King Royns, who had been a serious threat to Arthur’s rule (1:72), and to Arthur himself. Knowing that in the battle against King Nero either King Lot or King Arthur must die, Merlin delays King Lot “with a tale of the prophecy” (1:75), until Nero has been slain, and Lot, fighting alone, can be killed by Pellinor. Thus, while “many kyngis and lordis hylde hym grete werre…. Arthur overcom hem all…[because]…the moste party dayes of hys lyff he was ruled by the counceile of Merlyon” (1:97). Extraordinarily problematic, the council of Merlin is perhaps nowhere more dubious than in the discussion of marriage that immediately follows Merlin’s assurance of Merlin’s instrumentality in the preservation of Arthur’s kingdom. “My barownes,” Arthur informs him, “woll let me have no reste but nedis I muste take a wyff, and I wolde none take but by thy counceile and advice” (1:97). Merlin asks Arthur if he has anyone in mind, and when Arthur mentions Guinevere, his council is merely to warn “the kyng covertly that Gwenyver was nat holsom for hym to take to wyff. For he warned hym that Launcelot scholde love hir, and sche hym agayne,” but adding that “thereas mannes herte is sette he woll be loth to returne” (1:97). Arthur pursues his marriage to Guinevere, and Merlin makes the arrangements as if no one, not even the prophet, had listened. But the reader, who has paid attention, has learned a number of things: that love is a power to be reckoned with; that a man’s desire has a great deal more to do with the course of history than with forethought and vision; that Arthur will marry Guinevere; and that Lancelot will come to court and fall in love with her. The reader may deduce that if Arthur had not married Guinevere, Camelot would not necessarily have been saved, but Merlin would have been proved false. The prophet is accurate only when he is ignored, only when his predictions do not change anyone’s behavior and, thus, alter the future he has announced. Thus, all true prophecies must be ignored. Cassandra’s tragedy is not unique, but the ground of prophecy. In this way, Merlin shares Cassandra’s tragedy, but his is darker and deeper. Unlike Cassandra, who merely announces events, Merlin is actively engaged in creating the kingdom whose downfall he perceives. Thus, anachronistically perhaps, Merlin is the hero of an existential tragedy. Like Camus’s Sisyphus, he devotes himself to the completion of a project in the full knowledge of his eventual defeat. In addition to establishing a tragic dimension to the character of Merlin, this essential ineffectiveness of his prophecy (ineffective in that it changes nothing) serves two functions in “The Tale of King Arthur.” On the simplest level, the prophecies provide a thematic overture to the “hoole book of kyng Arthur and of his noble knyghtes of the Rounde Table” (3:1260). When Merlin, for example, establishes the perowne, a memorial stone (literally, a mounting block), on the spot where the Lady Colombe slays herself for love and sorrow and announces that “in this same place the

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grettist bateyle betwyxte two [knyghtes] that ever was or ever shall be, and the trewyst lovers; and yette none of hem shall slee other” (1:72), he prepares for the combat of Lancelot and Tristram before either has come to court. He can prophesy the “stroke moste dolerous that ever man stroke, excepte the stroke of oure Lorde Jesu Cryste” (1:72), preparing for the Grail Quest. He hints, too, of Arthur’s end, telling him “that there sholde be a grete batayle besydes Salysbiry, and Mordred hys owne sonne sholde be agaynste hym” (1:79). Even more poignantly, he prophesies not only Arthur’s end, but his own, telling Arthur that “ye have lyene by youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the knyghtes of youre realme,” mournfully adding, “but I ought ever to be hevy…for I shall dye a shamefull dethe, to be putte in the erthe quycke; and ye shall dey a worshipfull dethe” (1:44). These “ineffective” prophecies, then, allow Merlin’s words to function as a prelude to the Morte, announcing themes and characters, sometimes as simply and briefly as a Wagnerian leitmotif, as in the few brief notes about the perowne that only hint at the fully orchestrated symphony of the Lancelot-Tristram theme. Thus, he can provide a thematic introduction to the long and complicated series of events that follow upon the conception and coronation of Arthur. But a far more important function of Merlin’s prophecies is not simply to announce themes but to position them. Reversing the famous motto of Mary, Queen of Scots, “In my end is my beginning,” Malory’s Merlin inserts the end in the beginning. His prophecies shadow the initiation of the Arthurian project with the tragedy of its end. Thus, the reader’s “sense of an ending” is doubled by Merlin’s insertion of a brooding fatality into the text itself. Both Merlin and the reader, then, read Arthurian history backwards, attempting to recover the ideal origins of chivalry after the fall. His vision and our nostalgia fuse foresight and hindsight to situate Arthur’s project in a fragile moment of recuperated history.3 Unlike the nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus tries to escape, Arthur and Merlin try to reinvent history as a dream, maintaining the Anglo-Saxon sense of dream as “rejoicing, joy, delight; melody and song.”4 The associated noun drymann, “sorcerer, magician” (derived from the cognate dryme), places Merlin at the center of this fragile project. With a kind of pre-existential sense of inevitable failure, the drymann Merlin, both todgeweiht (“doomed,” like Wagner’s heroes) and engagé (“pledged,” like Sartre’s), centers the Arthurian enterprise in hope and history. Merlin, having created Camelot, fully understands its inevitable end. But committed to enterprises he knows will fail, he achieves a tragic awareness of individual, dynastic, and imperial history, an awareness that allows him to share the joy of the tragic hero defined by Yeats in “Lapis Lazuli,” when he observed that “Hamlet and Lear are gay.” This concept of tragic gaiety provides a context in which to place the more playful aspects of Malory’s Merlin. His shape-shifting, a talent traditionally possessed by magicians and demons, which Malory derives from his sources, seems nearly aberrant in his revised context. But the shape-shifting contributes to the sense of Merlin’s “indeterminacy,” making it difficult to define not only his substance, but his accidents as well. Arthur is not only not sure of what Merlin is, he cannot even know for certain what he appears to be. As a result, he cannot always know when he has met him,

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or where he can be found, for his location is as arbitrary as his appearance. He has no clear identity and no fixed address. But Merlin’s uncanniness may be playful, even if with a kind of ominous gaiety, and some transparent showmanship designed to mystify the mob. For example, when Ulfius (and the reader) first encounters him, he is “in a beggars aray” and asks Ulfius whom he is seeking, only so that he can immediately reply, “I knowe whome thou sekest, for thou sekest Merlyn, therefore seke no ferther, for I am he” (1:8). His disguises allow him to prepare his own epiphanies and to exercise control over his sudden and arbitrary revelations to create an air of mystery that lends special authority to his announcements and councils. This gift of “omnilocality,” his apparent ability to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, also allows him to achieve a detachment, a freedom, unavailable to anyone else in Arthur’s world. He is a drifter as well as a dreamer. Merlin’s subsequent appearances take on similar aspects of showmanship, of a conscious concern for effect. He appears dramatically on a black horse on the battlefield of the eleven kings to warn Arthur that “hit ys tyme to sey, ‘Who!’” (1: 36). Soon after, he appears in his most elaborate disguise, “all befurred in blacke shepis skynnes, and a grete payre of bootis, and a boowe and arowis, in a russet gowne, and [bringing] wylde gyese in hys honde” (1:38). While he does reveal that “here in the same place there the grete battayle was, ys grete tresoure hydde in the erthe” (1:38), nothing more is heard of this treasure, and the primary effect of the scene is the playful revelation of Merlin’s identity: “Than Ulphuns and Brastias knew hym well inowghe and smyled…. So they had grete disporte at hym” (1:38). Merlin’s shape-shifting, then, is not limited to moments of significant revelation. Malory frequently presents the prophet in surprising disguises simply for dramatic effect. And perhaps to remind us of the demonic origins of Merlin’s ability to devise these dramatic entrances. Both more playful and more serious is Merlin’s sequential appearance before Arthur, first “lyke a chylde of fourtene yere of ayge,” and then again “in the lykenesse of an olde man of four score yere of ayge” (1:43–44). Apart from his relatively insignificant appearance before King Royns, this is Merlin’s final disguise. In this last metamorphosis, Merlin enunciates the dire consequences of his first, the compounded transformations essential to accomplish Arthur’s conception. The child and the old man, defining the boundaries of human life, reveal to Arthur the mysteries of his birth and death. It is the Merlin-child who tells Arthur, “I know what thou arte, and who was thy fadir, and of whom thou were begotyn: for kynge Uther was thy fadir and begate the on Igrayne” (1:43), and it is the aged Merlin who warns him of the sin that particular ignorance had made possible. “Ye have done a thynge late that God ys displesed with you, for ye have lyene by youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the knyghtes of youre realme” (1:44). Merlin, sequentially puer and senex, tells Arthur who and what he is, and Arthur’s discovery of his identity ensnares him in a genealogical chain of guilt bequeathed and inherited, the guilt of the father and the sin of the son, for the sin of Mordred’s conception is made possible by

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the secret treachery of Arthur’s own, the consequence of Uther’s lust and Merlin’s most notable, least playful, disguise. While Malory omits the story of Merlin’s own conception, a compound of demonism, violence, and violation, he begins with Merlin’s role in the conception of Arthur, erasing the desire of demons to highlight Uther’s demonic passion for Igrayne, who “was a passyng good woman and wold not assente” (1:7). For Uther, the immediate consequence of this thwarted desire is disease, an illness that might almost be diagnosed as possession. To rescue the king, “seke for angre and for love” (1:8), as he himself admits, Ulfius attempts to procure a remedy, and “by adventure he mette Merlyn” (1:8), who promises rescue but demands a reward. “And yf kynge Uther wille wel rewarde me and be sworne unto me to fulfille my desyre,…I shall cause hym to have all his desyre” (1:8). Ulfius accepts: “…thow shalt have thy desyre”; and Merlin seals the bargain: “he shall have his entente and desyre” (1:8). In this exchange, Merlin accomplishes his desire. His radical indeterminacy reappears here when Merlin, trapped in the ambiguous space where his mother’s virtue intersects with his father’s evil, is simultaneously the agent of glory and defeat. To accomplish this glorious and dangerous conception, Merlin performs his most critical transformation, disguising the king as Gorlois, Ulfius as Brastias, and himself as Jordanus. With altered identities, this unholy trinity enters the castle of Tintagil in the absence of its lord, so that “after the deth of the duke kyng Uther lay with Igrayne, more than thre houres after his deth, and begat on her that nygh[t] Arthur” (1:9). The trickery, the compounded deceptions, disguised violations, all the machinery required to accomplish the conception of Arthur, make Merlin’s conception, a simple demonic rape, seem a model of decorum. The neurotic violence of Uther’s passion, a compound of lust and betrayal, and mediated by his jealousy of Gorlois as much as by his desire for Igrayne, make Arthur’s conception the initiating crime of Uther’s dynasty. Thus, because of Malory’s opening in medias res, Uther’s lineage is not simply the righteous counterforce to the corruptions of Vortigern and his Saxon allies, but is in itself the source of the evil, the fateful sin, that haunts his son and grandson. Guilt is no longer deflected onto the Other, but imprinted in the Arthurian genealogy. This sin initiates the chain of desire that results in Arthur’s lust for his sister, and that sin is a consequence of Merlin’s desire to monopolize knowledge and control disclosure. Thus, Merlin makes possible the intercourse with Morgause. When, soon after that event, Arthur rescues Merlin and boasts, “here haddist thou be slayne for all thy crafftis, had nat I bene,” Merlin replies that he could have saved himself from the churls, but that Arthur has acquired a far more powerful enemy: “thou arte more nere thy deth than I am, for thou goste to thy dethe warde and God be nat thy frende” (1:49). Once again, Merlin perceives the beginning as merely a prologue to the end, a birth as the initiation of an inevitable “deth warde” journey. The nexus of desire and death may reflect an ascetic Christian theology, but it also evokes the universality of the Yeatsian horror of the “dying generations.” Merlin’s participation in the deceits of destiny implicate him intimately in both the success and the defeat of the Arthurian project. Just as he himself is the product of his

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father’s evil and his mother’s good, he is the source of both the creation and the collapse of the kingdom. His ambiguous complicity is nowhere clearer than in the consequences of his role in Arthur’s conception and the satisfaction of his subsequent desire, to take for himself the unbaptized child begotten on the night of lust, disguise, and death, a sorcerer’s tale of a warrior and a wooer, and a woman, who, all unknowingly, is twice a wife and once a widow in a single night. As a consequence of Merlin’s appropriation of knowledge and the baby, he makes possible and necessary Arthur’s extraction of the sword from the stone to demonstrate signally and publicly that he is “rightwys kynge borne of all En[g]lond” (1:12), but, at the same time, he makes possible the incest that destroys that kingdom. Thus, if Uther’s criminal lust for Igrayne is the seminal event in the founding of the Arthurian kingdom, it is Merlin who both anticipates and incarnates the beginning and the end, as if, one of Yeats’s gyres made flesh, he contains and presides over the cycling ages, foreseeing both Arthur’s triumph and the nightmare of the “rocking cradle,” from which Mordred “slouches towards [Camelot] to be born.” The prophet Merlin is also, however, the counselor Merlin, who attempts to delay the ending he so clearly foresees. In this aspect, Merlin becomes the sole voice of moderation in a world ruled by, in the Duke of Cornwall’s words, “warre and worshyp” (1:187). When war is necessary and provoked, Merlin is an excellent tactician, who arranges the alliance with Ban and Bors, and actually establishes the battle formations that lead to Arthur’s victory. But his preference is for peace and moderation, in what may be a forlorn hope to put off the end of Camelot for as long as possible. He manifests himself “on a grete blacke horse” (1:36) on the battlefield of the eleven kings to teach Arthur restraint: “Thou hast never done. Hast thou nat done inow? Of three score thousande thys day hast thou leffte on lyve but fyftene thousand! Therefore hit ys tyme to sey ‘Who!’ for God ys wroth with the for thou woll never have done” (1:36). Merlin’s council of moderation is a new one for a world that thrives on conquest, but it is a lesson unique to Malory’s Arthur, and a lesson that is later forgotten when Merlin is no longer around to reinforce it. It is knowing when to say “Who!” and to learn that “inowghe is as good as a feste” that allows Malory’s Arthur to succeed in the Roman wars. No longer the victim of Fortune, as in Geoffrey of Monmouth, or the over-reacher of the Alliterative Morte, Malory’s Arthur achieves a just victory over the Roman invader. This lesson of moderation and restraint is one of the happier, if short-lived, legacies of the equivocal prophet, Merlin. The competing careers of Merlin as prophet and peacemaker intersect in his analyses of the opposing virtues of the sword and the scabbard. He advises Arthur to be restrained in his use of Excalibur, “the swerde that ye had by myracle” (1:19). He casts an enchantment on Pellinor so that he will not be slain by Arthur, preventing bloodshed and creating a friend for the king. In this rescue, there is again the Merlinmixture of good and evil. Because he has saved Pellinor, the king and his sons will become famous knights of the Round Table. On the other hand, the sons of Pellinor will become embroiled in the most vicious and destructive family vendetta in the history of the Round Table. Arthur’s rashness is renewed, when, eager to test the quality

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of the new sword he receives from the Lady of the Lake, he wants to try his hand at Pellinor one more time; again Merlin instructs him in chivalry (“the knyght ys wery of fyghtynge and chasynge, that ye shall have no worship to have ado with hym” [1: 53]), and poses the significant question, “Whether lyke ye the better the swerde othir the scawberde?” (1:54). To Arthur’s unsurprising preference for the sword, Merlin responds with praise for the scabbard. While the magician does becloud his message with a magical discourse, the essential point is clear: war will destroy Arthur and his kingdom; peace will preserve it. In light of Merlin’s attempts to train and restrain Arthur, it is ironic that the last outburst of Arthur’s extraordinary potential for ruthless violence, the slaughter of the May Day babies, is blamed on Merlin. The son of a virtuous mother is too easily blamed for the crimes that seem inspired by his demon-father. When, for the last time, Merlin reminds Arthur of the virtue of the scabbard, he goes on to anticipate the theft and counterfeiting of the sword and scabbard by Morgan le Fay, who gives the originals to her lover Accolon. The abbreviated narrative of this theft, which leaves Arthur vulnerable, is followed by Merlin’s most specific prophecy of the end of the realm: “But after thys Merlion tolde unto kynge Arthure of the prophecy that there sholde be a grete batayle besydes Salysbiry, and Mordred hys owne sonne sholde be agaynste hym” (1:79). But Merlin is not only the agent of history, he is also the agent of historiography. As he moves Arthur to enact events, he moves the mysterious scribe, Blaise, to record them. After the victory of Arthur, Ban, and Bors, Merlin toke hys leve…for to go se hys mayster Bloyse that dwelled in Northhumbirlonde…. And so Bloyse wrote the batayle worde by worde as Merlion tolde hym, how hit began and by whom, and in lyke wyse how hit was ended and who had the worst. And all the batayles that were done in Arthurs dayes, Merlion dud hys mayster Bloyse wryte them. Also he dud wryte all the batayles that every worthy knyght ded of Arthurs courte. (1:37–38) Inspiring the deeds and dictating the words, knowing the end, but, nevertheless, committed to beginning the narrative, Merlin is the authentic author of Arthurian history. He also authorizes his own tragedy, for it is not only the end of the kingdom he foresees, but his own imminent death. The very event that signals the foundation of the Round Table, the oath that concludes the festivities at the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere and the quest of the white hart, initiates the end of Merlin, for Pellinor’s successful quest results in the arrival of “one of the damesels of the Lady of the Laake, that hyght Nenyve,” with whom “Merlyon felle in dotage” (1:125). With astounding economy, Malory portrays the outlines of a sad and doomed affair between a young woman with a hidden agenda (“ever she made Merlion good chere tylle sche had lerned of hym all maner of thynges that sche desyred” [1:125]) and an old, wise man, who knows the fate of the world, but cannot govern his own desire.

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In the midst of this poignant pedagogical affair, Merlin is capable of advising Arthur of the wiles of his sorceress sister (“he tolde hym how the swerde and the scawberde scholde be stolyn by a woman frome hym that he moste trusted” [1:125]), but incapable of taking steps to avoid his own tragedy. When he tells Arthur “that he scholde nat endure longe, but for all his craftes he scholde be putte into the erthe quyk,” Arthur suggests, “syn ye knowe of youre evil adventure, purvey for it, and putt hit away by youre crauftes” (1:125). To this sensible advice, Merlin responds, “Nay, …hit woll not be” (1:125). The tragedy of his own fate5 mirrors his helplessness in the context of the larger tragedy that overwhelms the kingdom he creates. Both Cassandra and her audience, Merlin’s most intimate prophecy is one that he himself does not, cannot heed. While the traditional moral of the story of Merlin and Nenyve is the power of desire, Malory’s emphasis is sadder and more profound. He does not diminish the force of love, and he retains the simple moral of the uselessness of intellect and the wisdom of age as a defense against lust and the wiles of a beautiful young woman; but Merlin’s fate in this text may be more profoundly read as the deserved undoing of a man whose career from its inception, at least from Malory’s in medias res opening, is embroiled in the desires of others. Having abetted Uther’s sick desire and accomplished Igrayne’s betrayal, Merlin’s destruction by his own lust for a beautiful, deceptive woman represents an elegant justice. His claustration may be read as Igrayne’s vengeance, a symmetrical equation of the deceiver deceived, as Merlin, the instrument of another’s lust, is in the end betrayed by his own. It is not just his own lust, however, but the silenced narrative of Merlin’s birth that, in part, accounts for his sad defeat. Like Arthur, Merlin cannot escape the pedigree that (mis-)shapes him. His demonic parentage is the reason Nynyve gives for rejecting him, but it is also clear that the woman simply doesn’t like him, although she both fears him and desires to acquire his secret knowledge. Malory presents the death of Merlin simply, but the effect shifts from an exemplum of the power of lust to a poignant acknowledgment of the frailty of the human condition and the desperate desire for love. The poignant tragedy of Malory’s Merlin is that he is willing to dare, to risk love knowing full well that the consequence is to be trapped in his tomb by the woman he loves and to whom he has given all he owns and all he is. While he is surely guilty of ignoring the woman’s feelings, there is something grandly tragic in his willingness to give his life for his last and first beloved. In his final act of existential risk, he ventures all he has, and all he is, in his amorous enterprise, and he does this in full awareness that he will inevitably fail. With his claustration, the ambiguity of Merlin, the son of the virgin and the demon, is dissolved, for, after him, magic, feminized and divided, is simpler; good magic is appropriated by the damsel Nynyve, evil magic by Arthur’s sister, Morgan le Fay. While Nynyve attempts to take Merlin’s place, her beneficence is never as complex as Merlin’s tragic vision, and she is useful mainly as a nymph ex machina to tidy up loose ends, as in the midsummer’s night confusion of the Pelleas adventure, or to rescue Arthur from rival sorceresses in the Forest Perilous. Morgan is evil, but also predictable. Thus, with the disappearance of Merlin, magic becomes less disturbing

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because it is no longer either tragic or profound. Merlin is at last displaced by Brusen’s revisionist sorcery that redefines the deceptions of Arthur’s birth to accomplish Galahad’s nativity. Redeeming Merlin’s treatment of women and introducing a pattern of chivalry that supersedes Arthur’s, Brusen is the agent of a history that transcends Merlin. But, while she may surpass him as an agent, she falls far beneath him as a character. She performs her function and disappears, and, unlike Merlin, she seems unaware of the role she plays in a universal history. Merlin knows that what he builds will fall, that what he most loves will most painfully destroy him, and yet he goes on, committed and engaged, knowing, like Yeats’s Hamlet and Lear, that “All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay.”6 Notes Reprinted with permission from Arthurian Interpretations 1.2 (Summer 1991), pp. 15– 31. 1. All citations of Malory are taken from the Vinaver edition. 2. Needless to say, I cannot agree with the conclusions of Wendy Tibbetts Greene that Merlin is “only human” [italics mine] (62). In addition, I do not agree that Merlin is finally “the bumbling magician” (62). This comic view of Merlin may be one of the unfortunate consequences of too early an exposure to the novels of T.H. White. 3. It is my view of Merlin as a reader that makes it impossible for me to accept Kimball’s more mythic view of Merlin as a “demi-urge, an ironically created force that somehow goes awry” (29). While Kimball’s introduction of the repetition compulsion into the study of Merlin reinforces my view of the cyclical nature of Arthurian history, Freud, if applied at all, should be applied to the text, not the character. There is, of course, repetition and doubling in Merlin’s dictating his own story to Blaise, when the discussion of the narrative narrates his narration. See my discussion of Merlin and Blaise below. 4. See Hall s.v. dream. 5. The tragedy of this aspect of Merlin is also noted by Muriel Whitaker, who sees Merlin as a “tragic figure whose great achievement in establishing Arthur’s kingdom is undermined by a humiliating and destructive passion for a woman” (57). I would add that failure is not necessarily tragic, but that there is a “tragic gaiety” in Merlin’s knowing embrace of his claustration. 6. A suggestive element to my concept of Merlin’s “tragic gaiety” is to be found in Piero Boitani’s discussion of “tragic sublimity” in medieval contexts dealing with the archetype of the Old Man and his connection with Freud’s notion of the uncanny (das Unheimliche). I have said less about Boitani’s tragic sublime than I ought to have, in part because I am not convinced that Merlin is in fact old. Boitani’s concluding remarks, however, deserved to be considered: “The Old Man incarnates the unbearable contrast we feel between on the one hand our notion of death as the opposite of life and on the other their equivalence. He represents the borderland, the limen or threshold where division is oneness, and his uncanniness is therefore supremely, ‘sublimely’ tragic” (19).

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Works Cited Boitani, Piero. The Tragic and Sublime in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Greene, Mary Tibbetts. “Malory’s Merlin: An Ambiguous Magician?” Arthurian Interpretations. 1.2 (1987): 56–63. Hall, John R.Clark. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. (s.v. dream.) Kimball, Samuel Arthur. “Merlin’s Miscreation and Repetition Compulsion in Malory’s Morte Darthur” Literature and Psychology 25 (1975): 29. Vinaver, Eugène, ed. 2nd ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Whitaker, Muriel. Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984. Wright, Thomas L. “‘The Tale of King Arthur’: Beginnings and Foreshadowings.” Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Robert M. Lumiansky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1964.

CHAPTER 14 Spenser’s Merlin WILLIAM BLACKBURN

In describing the “strange occasion” by which Britomart comes to see Artegall in Merlin’s magic mirror, Spenser leads his reader to believe that he is following an earlier story “as it in bookes hath written bene of old.”1 While this is in a sense true of the account of Merlin’s glass—we know similar devices in medieval literature—it is somewhat misleading in regard to Merlin himself. A comparison of Spenser’s Merlin with the Merlin of chronicle and romance suggests that, in creating his magician, Spenser made use of the tradition he inherited without allowing himself to be bound by that tradition. Before Spenser, Merlin is a prophet, a magician, an artificer; he is all those things in The Faerie Queene, but he is also something more: a figure for the poet, and so of central importance to the treatment of art in the entire poem. This is what really engages Spenser about the Welsh magician; whatever else he is and does in the poem, whatever relation he bears to other magicians, Merlin is really of paramount interest as a poet-figure. As such, he illuminates the aesthetic and philosophical questions which are a central concern of The Faerie Queene, and so the explanation of Spenser’s Merlin is to be found, not in old books, but in his function in the poem in which Spenser chose to place him. Merlin’s importance in the poem is all the more remarkable because he has what is apparently a very small role. He is the maker of Arthur’s arms and armour (I, vii, 33– 36; II, viii, 20–21), and of King Ryence’s magic glass (III, ii, 17–21); he oversees Arthur’s education and selects his tutor (I, ix, 5), commands demons to rear a wall of brass around Cairmardin (III, iii, 7), and is instrumental in bringing about the union of Artegall and Britomart, the fate of whose descendants he prophesies before disappearing from the poem forever (III, iii, 26–50). At first glance, readers of late medieval literature may find the general features of Spenser’s Merlin familiar, if not derivative. Such an impression of general familiarity is not without foundation. Of all the many and improbable powers attributed to Merlin in medieval romance, none is older than the power of prophecy. Though Merlin’s prophecy to Britomart is based directly on Bradamante’s experience at Merlin’s tomb in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (IIII, xviii-lix), rather than on anything in the medieval romances, prophecy is the first of Merlin’s powers to be celebrated in literature. Merlin seems to have originated as Myrddin, a Welsh prophet believed in medieval times to have been the author of several mantic poems. The earliest known treatment of this figure in poetry, as

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Myrddin Wilt (“Merlin the Wild,” perhaps an actual Welsh bard of the sixth century), may be as early as the ninth century,2 and conflates the story of the prophet with a northern legend of Lailoken, a mad fugitive hiding in the forest. From this deranged homme sauvage evolves the prophetic hermit and magician of the romances.3 Even before the Merlin of Celtic folklore enters the romances, however, he is subjected to that process of accretion so characteristic of the romantic imagination. Nennius, in his Historia Brittonum (c. 796), tells the story of King Vortigern (Guorthigirnus) and his tower, a tower which collapses overnight as often as it is rebuilt. The king’s sorcerers (magi) tell him that only the blood of a fatherless child will establish its foundations securely. Such a child is found—his name is Ambrosius—and he has prophetic powers which confound the king’s sorcerers.4 This account in Nennius was adapted by a twelfth-century canon, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100-c. 1154), at whose hands this obscure Welsh prophet is fitted to enter the mainstream of medieval romance and become famous from Sicily to Iceland. Geoffrey wrote three works in which Merlin figures: the Prophetiae Merlini (c. 1135), the Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, into Book VII of which the Prophetiae were incorporated), and a poem in hexameters, the Vita Merlini (c. 1149). The Prophetiae are lush, and vague, and vehement; even a brief selection shows why they were destined for popularity: “In the days of the Ram there shall be peace, and the harvests will be plentiful…. Women shall become snake-like in their gait and every step they take will be full of arrogance. The Castle of Venus will be restored…and human beings will fornicate unceasingly.”5 In fact, though their entertainment value may have been considerable, these prophecies of Merlin were taken seriously and were very widely translated: “The chronicler Salimbene tells us that the sayings of Merlin enjoyed an authority equal to that of the Sibyl, Michael Scot and Isaiah in Italy…. There was scarcely a cranny of Christendom outside the Eastern Church which did not recognize Merlin as a great seer.”6 Geoffrey creates the Merlin of Romance at one bold stroke, by identifying Nennius’ Ambrosius with the Myrddin of Celtic folklore.7 Geoffrey took from Nennius the story of Vortigern and his tower, and the boy-prophet who has no father. What he made from this unlikely beginning—”the rest of the Merlin story seems to have been a child of his own fertile brain”8—largely determined the treatment of the magician in European literature for the next three hundred and fifty years. Most influential in its effect on later writers is Geoffrey’s account of the source of Merlin’s power. Geoffrey amplifies Nennius’ story of the fatherless boy by identifying Merlin’s father. According to Geoffrey, Merlin’s mother was a daughter of the King of Demetia. She lived in a convent and, apart from the boy’s father, had never known a man. One of Vortigern’s advisers, citing the De Deo Socratis of Apuleius, suggests that the boy’s father is an incubus.9 This connection with the daemones of Neo-Platonic pneumatology (and so with the fallen angels) is the source of Merlin’s occult powers. Thus Merlin the prophet (and magician) enters the stage of European literature. Though many other powers and exploits are later attributed to him, though his story is richly and fantastically embroidered in the Vulgate cycle of the next century and in

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the works of later writers, he remains always the prophet created by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and so he passes to Ariosto and Spenser.10 But it is not simply as a prophet that Merlin attracts later writers. Though Merlin’s prophetic powers are always important, Geoffrey’s most fruitful addition to the story of Merlin is his account of Merlin’s paternity. Geoffrey’s main interest is in Merlin as a prophet rather than as a magician,11 but in creating a magician who could know the occult arts without engaging in witchcraft or entering into any pact with devils, Geoffrey prepared the ground on which the great magi of Renaissance literature—and among them Spenser’s Merlin—would one day stand. Geoffrey’s Historia enjoyed great popularity, and enriched several literary traditions. We know of at least three translations into Welsh before 1300. For AngloNorman and French readers, the Norman poet Wace completed his Roman de Brut, an adaption of the Historia, in 1155. Layamon’s poem of the same name (c. 1205)—the first work in English to mention Merlin—is basically a free paraphrase of Wace. Wace’s Brut also supplies the first part of Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle of England (completed, 1328).12 It is not surprising that Geoffrey’s interest in Merlin should have been transmitted along with his text, or that other writers should have developed and embellished the figure of the magician according to their own inclinations and the insatiable appetite of romance for the marvellous. Later writers adapted Geoffrey’s Historia in many ways, sometimes making Merlin the centre of interest. One such writer was Robert de Boron (?-1210?), author of three Arthurian verse romances. Of his Merlin, only a fragment of some 500-odd lines survives; we know the complete work only through two prose reactions of the early thirteenth century (the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin, and the Huth Merlin or Suite du Merlin).13 Robert’s most significant contribution to the story of Merlin is his full reconciliation of the magician with Christian orthodoxy. Robert exempts Merlin from the traditional association of magic with the infernal kingdom in a rather ingenious way. In Robert’s account, the devils are enraged by Christ’s descent into Hell and his deliverance of the righteous Jews. They conspire to bring about the perdition of mankind by means of an infernal parody of Christ: a prophet half man and half demon.14 Their stratagem is simple: one of the devils bankrupts a wealthy man in order to seduce his daughters. Two of them are ruined; the third daughter’s piety protects her, until one night when she forgets to say her prayers, and the demon mounts her as she lies asleep. The girl confesses, is shriven, and resumes a life of militant piety. When the child is born, he has a hairy body and the gift of prophecy, but the devils have no power over his will. The child is, of course, Merlin. His baptism, and his mother’s exemplary life, sever the connection between his occult powers and the infernal kingdom. Merlin serves the cause of political stability, finds the infant Arthur a foster-father, and brings about his coronation as the rightful heir of Uther. Robert de Boron’s treatment of Merlin ends with Arthur’s coronation. The story of Merlin is continued in the rest of the French Estoire de Merlin of the Vulgate cycle (1215–40), the most widely read and most influential of the Arthurian prose romances. Merlin’s feats of magic proliferate in this account, in which he is a shape-

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shifter, a prophet, a psychologist (he also interprets dreams), an astute military strategist, a pander, a cynic (at times a kind of romance Democritus), head of Arthur’s espionage network, a fabricator of storms, fog, and marvellous devices of all kinds, the only begetter of the Table Round, and, finally, a voice addressing Gawain from the tomb in which Viviane has imprisoned him.15 Through all his metamorphoses, Merlin remains a beneficent magician. So Robert de Boron and those who continued his narrative free Merlin from any taint of diabolism, thereby completing the elevation of the Welsh prophet into a white magician of immense power.16 The story of Merlin and his connection with Arthur became well known in England in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace and William of Malmesbury (the Gesta Regum Anglorum, c. 1125), then in the French romances, and lastly in English versions of the French stories. The Latin chroniclers helped spread the reputation of Merlin as a prophet. Later versions of the story of Merlin all follow Robert de Boron and the Estoire and Suite. There are four extant English versions of the Merlin story, all derived from French romances: Arthour and Merlin (c. 1260), Lovelich’s Merlin (c. 1450), the prose Merlin (c. 1450), and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (pub., 1485).17 Merlin as he returns to England is a figure enriched and complicated by his transit through French romance. In the pages of Malory, he is a prophet, a shape-shifter, an artificer who fabricates a tomb for King Lot (II, xi) and a magic bed, sword, and bridge (II, xix), and is finally beguiled by Nimue (IV, i). Though he is the devil’s son (IV, i), his magic is never infernal. The Merlin of the romances is a forerunner of the Renaissance magus, not the Renaissance sorcerer, and so he remains in Malory. While Malory merely sketches the magician of his French sources, and austerely spurns the surfeit of magic in their pages, his Merlin is substantially the Merlin available to anyone familiar with the French romances of the thirteenth century.18 To what extent Spenser was so familiar, we do not know. We do know that he was familiar with Merlin as presented in Ariosto; a letter from Gabriel Harvey compares Spenser’s “ELUISH QUEENE” unfavourably to the Orlando Furioso, which, Harvey tells Spenser, “notwithstanding, you wil needes seeme to emulate, and hope to ouergo, as you flatly professed your self in one of your last Letters.”19 We recognize in Ariosto’s Merlin the magician of the romances modified by the example of classical literature. The Merlin of the Orlando is once again a prophet and a demon’s son.20 In Ariosto, as at the close of the Vulgate Estoire, Merlin is reduced to a voice speaking from the tomb. He initiates the prophecy of the descendants of Bradamante and Ruggiero which Melissa continues (III, xviii-lix). Though prophecy is Merlin’s oldest function, this incident also recalls Aeneas’ vision of the Julian line in the Elysian fields (Aeneid VI, 788). The voice from the tomb is apparently based, not on the Estoire, but on Ovid’s account of the Sibyl of Cumae in the Metamorphoses. The influence of classical models is also shown in the description of Merlin’s book of magic as o fosse al lago Averno O fosse sacro alle Nursine grotte (XXXIII, iv)

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since both Avernus and Nurcia are associated with the Sibyl of Cumae (Aeneid VI, 237 ff.). Ariosto’s Merlin is really a kind of literary changeling; Arthurian in origin, he is shaped by Ariosto to do the work of the prophets and oracles of classical literature.21 So Ariosto confers the authority of Virgil and Ovid upon the magician of the romances, but he shrinks the role of Merlin in consequence. His Merlin is the maker of a fountain at Bayona (XXVI, xxx ff.; one niggardly acknowledgement of his many marvels in the Estoire) and commands demons to raise a painted dining-hall for King Paramond (XXXIII, iv). The paintings in this hall are themselves prophetic, depicting Le guerre ch’i Franceschi da far hanno di là da l’Alpe, o bene o mal successe, dal tempo suo al millesim’anno…. (XXXIII, vii) These paintings are far and away Ariosto’s most interesting contribution to the story of Merlin, because they associate Merlin’s prophetic powers with works of art. They are compared, most suggestively, to those of the great painters of antiquity and of Renaissance Italy (XXXIII, i-ii). Had he not set the yoke of prophecy upon Merlin’s neck, Ariosto might have pursued this comparison, and developed Merlin as a figure for the artist, as Spenser was to do before the close of the century. Since Ariosto is primarily interested in Merlin as a prophet, he does not explore such possibillities. Merlin’s artistry is dismissed as sorcery, and Ariosto closes the matter by informing his readers that the secret of Merlin’s magic art has been lost forever.22 We may now profitably return to the question which began this inquiry. What does Merlin in The Faerie Queene, Merlin the prophet of Britomart, the maker of Arthur’s sword and armour, and of King Ryence’s magic glass, owe to those books which “hath written bene of old”? The question remains difficult. While we can easily find general analogies, specific correspondences prove elusive. We are not certain of the extent of Spenser’s acquaintance with the Arthurian material, and so must heed his advice to be wary wise in identifying his debts. Even so, his Merlin seems a composite, rather than a figure taken in whole or in large part from one particular work.23 Furthermore, certain features of Spenser’s Merlin suggest, not that he was faithfully following a source now unknown to us, but that he, like Geoffrey of Monmouth four centuries earlier, was indulging his own imagination while claiming to follow such a source. Spenser’s interest in the Arthurian material is not grimly historical; as one critic has it, “Spenser’s use of Brutus and Arthur does not imply credulity as much as it implies a thorough knowledge of the literary pabulum of his age” (Millican, p. 94). Certainly we can agree that Spenser has added something to the gruel of the romances. He honours the tradition of Merlin’s paternity— men say that he was not the sonne Of mortall Syre; or other liuing wight, But wondrously begotten, and begonne

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By false illusion of a guilefull Spright On a faire Ladie nonne…. —but goes on to tell us that Merlin’s mother hight Matilda, daughter to Pubidius Who was the Lord of Mathrauall by right, And coosen vnto king Ambrosius:…. (III, iii, 13) This genealogy, at once so precise and yet unconnected to anything else in the poem, is apparently Spenser’s own invention.24 Merlin’s magic glass is unlike anything attributed to the magician in the romances which have come down to us. Merlin in these romances does occasionally make or produce swords, but the Variorum, after worrying the question of Arthur’s arms and armour for five pages, concludes that “they are unlike any that Arthur ever had before.”25 Arthur’s shield may owe something to the shield of Atlante in the Orlando Furioso, but the debt, if any, is slight.26 Spenser makes a number of other alterations in the story of Arthur and Merlin, some—like Arthur’s armour—apparently significant; others—like calling Arthur’s tutor Timon—apparently not. For example, what, if anything, does it mean that Merlin had made his magic glass for King Ryence, who is, in both the Vulgate Estoire and Malory, Arthur’s bitter enemy?27 The truth of the matter seems to be that his Merlin is different because Spenser’s handling of all the Arthurian material is different. Spenser’s Arthur is both like and unlike the Arthur of Geoffrey and Chrétien de Troyes and Malory, not because Spenser was following an unknown source, not because he was availing himself of the medieval license to present fiction as history, and not even because Spenser, like Ascham, found the Arthurian material morally deficient,28 but because Spenser has set out to turn other accounts of Arthur to his own overriding purposes. The small changes he makes, such as the new names for old characters and the fabricated genealogy of Merlin, are little clues, perhaps playfully given, to a larger matter: Spenser’s intention to refashion the material he inherits for his own ends, in conformity with the purposes he has set for himself in writing the poem. In his famous letter to Raleigh (Variorum, I, 167 ff.), Spenser states that “the generall end” of The Faerie Queene “is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” Believing his work should be “coloured with an historicall fiction,” Spenser “chose the historye of King Arthure as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes,” and he laboured “to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelve priuate moral vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised….” Spenser names Homer, Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso as his models; he does not name the medieval romances. Spenser was not interested in writing another romance of the sort found in

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“many mens former workes,” and the minor alterations he makes in the Arthurian material seem to blazon his intention to recast their matter in his own mould. Over two centuries ago, Upton observed that “Spenser departs from Jeffry of Monmouth, and the more romance history of Prince Arthur, and indeed from all the stories of our old English writers, in many of the circumstances relating to this British prince, that he might make a heroe for his poem, and not a poem for his heroe.”29 This perceptive remark is equally true of Spenser’s Merlin, for Merlin, like Arthur, is a hero made for Spenser’s poem, not a hero borrowed elsewhere and somehow made to fit. Certainly Spenser’s Merlin bears a general resemblance to other treatments of the magician, but, if we would fully understand his importance in The Faerie Queene, we must now turn our attention, not to the poem’s sources, but to the poem itself. We have seen that Spenser’s Merlin most obviously resembles the Merlin of romance in his role as a prophet. Merlin’s prophecy concerning the descendants of Artegall and Britomart (III, iii, 27 ff.) is strongly reminiscent of the conjuration of prophetic spirits in Merlin’s cave in the Orlando Furioso (III, xviii ff.). But we should not be deceived by this similarity; the differences are of considerable import. Spenser’s Merlin, though he is well able to command demons, does not resort to them for prophecy—Spenser seems less interested than Ariosto in reminding the reader that no magic is entirely above suspicion.30 Nor is Spenser primarily interested in Merlin as a prophet to the detriment of other possibilities. His Merlin is not a voice from the tomb, but a living presence in the poem. As we have seen, Merlin is of real interest only as a prophet in the Orlando Furioso. Even his most famous creation, the fresco in Pharamond’s hall, is a work of prophecy, and Merlin’s art, as Ariosto pointedly informs us, is extinct. Spenser’s Merlin, like Ariosto’s, is a prophet, but it is as an artificer, and a figure for the artist, that Merlin is most important in The Faerie Queene; in this poem his most famous creation is a mirror which is also an image of the entire world. It is as the creator of this world of glass that Merlin illuminates the central concerns of the poem. The significance of the mirror is indicated by something else that Merlin makes in the poem—Arthur’s shield. This shield is fashioned, not of metal, “but all of Diamond perfect pure and cleene” (III, vii, 33), and seems to work by dazzling the opponent, “so exceeding shone his glistring ray” (III, vii, 34). In this, Arthur’s shield resembles the shield of Ruggiero’s tutor, Atlante—but, in his development of this device, Spenser has clearly fulfilled his promise to over-go Ariosto. Atlante’s shield simply blinds his opponents and throws them into a swoon (II, lv-lvi). Arthur’s has powers far beyond these; of it we are told No magicke arts hereof had any might, Nor bloudie wordes of bold Enchaunters call, But all that was not such, as seemd in sight, Before that shield did fade, and suddeine fall…. (I, vii, 35) Arthur’s shield is proof against enchantment, and can distinguish the illusory from the real. In this it resembles Merlin’s mirror, which shows all things truly:

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It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, What euer thing was in the world contaynd, Betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight, So that it to the looker appertaynd; What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discouered was, ne ought mote pas, Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas. (III, ii, 19) The resemblance is interesting. It tells us that the real significance of Arthur’s shield is to be found, not simply in its relationship to anything in Spenser’s known sources, but in its relationship to this mirror.31 The magician’s art—an art apparently compatible with Christian orthodoxy—is the prince’s shield. But it is also fitting that the shield call our attention to the mirror, for, if prophecy is the key to Ariosto’s Merlin, this magic glass is certainly the key to Spenser’s. With the mirror, as with Merlin himself, the hunt for sources reveals many analogies but few close parallels. There are, to be sure, magic mirrors aplenty in Romance. Spenser read of them in the Squire’s Tale of “Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled” (IV, ii, 32), source of his story of Cambel and Triamond. Chaucer’s mirror Hath swich a myght that men may in it see What ther shal fallen any adversitee Unto your regne or to youreself also And openly who is youre freend or foo.32 In medieval literature, magic mirrors were also ascribed to such famous magicians as Virgil and Prester John. But none of these mirrors is an adequate explanation of Spenser’s mirror; all foretell the future, or show enemies at a distance—but none is a world of glass, an artifact at once mirror and microcosm.33 The treatment of true and false mirrors in the verse of his contemporaries may also have influenced Spenser’s presentation of the magic glass in The Faerie Queene, and its use as a symbol of the poet’s art. Fulke Greville (1554–1628) utters a Renaissance commonplace in “A Treatie of Human Learning” (publ. 1633), when he praises poetry which while it seemeth only but to please Teacheth us order under pleasure’s name, Which, in a glass, shows nature how to fashion Herself again by balancing of passion.34

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Equally original is Greville’s use of the mirror as a symbol of illusion: our delights, like fair shapes in a glass, Though pleasing to our senses, cannot last, The metal breaks, or else the visions pass…. (Caelica, no. 42)35 This same contrast of true and false mirrors, while not systematically developed, is a prominent feature of the work of George Gascoigne, particularly in The Steele Glas (1576), the first long, original English poem in blank verse.36 In this poem, there are two mirrors, emblems of two kinds of poetry. One mirror is of steel, and reflects the happy customs and example of the past, as well as a true picture of contemporary life. This mirror, of “steele both trusty…& true,” “shewes all things in their degree” (ll. 184; 227). The glass mirror, by contrast, delights everyone who will have a looking glasse To see himselfe, yet so he seeth him not. (ll. 176–77) His contemporaries, says Gascoigne, scorn “the poore glasse, which is of trustie Steele” (l. 217), preferring instead The christal glas, which glimseth brave & bright, And shews the thing much better than it is. (ll. 188–89) Merlin’s mirror obviously owes something to earlier writers, and to the satirical tradition in which Gascoigne places himself (The Steele Glas, 220 ff.). It is also indebted to the tradition, going back to Plato’s Phaedrus and worn thread-bare in Renaissance poetry,37 of finding in the beloved a mirror of one’s own soul (“his lover is, as it were, a mirror in which he beholds himself”—Phaedrus, 255D). But this is no adequate solution; Merlin’s mirror, and Merlin’s place in the poem, cannot be explained away by the energetic heaping up of sources and analogues. Merlin’s mirror is, to be sure, something like the magical mirrors of romance. It is also like Gascoigne’s steel glass, in that it shows all things truly, and is thus exempt from the deceit customarily associated with magic. As Kathleen Williams remarks, “in seeing Artegall in the armour of Achilles (III, ii, 25), Britomart sees not an illusion, as she supposes, but a truer vision of his essential quality than she could gain in a sight of the man himself.”38 In The Faerie Queene, as in the romances, Merlin’s art serves the cause of truth and order.39 This is made plain by an examination of the other mirrors and magicians in the poem, and it is such an examination that reveals why Merlin’s world of glass is a major symbol of art and a clue to the way in which The Faerie Queene is to be read. That the proper understanding of art is a recurrent concern in Spenser’s major poetry is no surprise to the reader who has noticed Spenser’s obsession with ambiguity and his abiding interest in the theme of illusion and reality. This interest

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finds expression in The Faerie Queene in that poem’s pervasive concern with the ambiguous nature of magicians and of those who fashion images and “semblants sly” (II, xii, 49). The magician Archimago, a prominent member of this tribe, provides an instructive contrast with Merlin. He is associated on the one hand with Error and her brood through his “Magick bookes” (I, i, 36), and with Lucifera, who is advised by “six wisards old” (I, iv, 12). On the other hand, Archimago is repeatedly referred to as a maker, Sidney’s favourite term for the poet. In his capacity as “the maker self” (I, i, 45), Archimago is a procurer of false dreams and visions, and is also associated with man’s search for Protean transformation through his manipulation of language.40 Through “his mightie science” and “might of Magicke spell,” Archimago could take As many formes and shapes in seeming wise As euer Proteus to himselfe could make. (I, ii, 10) Spenser makes it clear that, despite his occasional reliance on other methods, the “diuelish arts” (I, i, 9) of Archimago are primarily the arts of language—and of the poet. His most notable act, the seduction of Red Crosse from Una, begins when, with “wordes most horrible,” he “did verses frame” (I, i, 37). “Full of the makers guile” (I, i, 46), Archimago is at once an emblem of the Protean power of poetry, and also of its power to delude. Archimago’s talents are so convincing that he himself is “nigh beguiled” (I, i, 45) by them, so much so: That of himselfe he oft for feare would quake, And oft would flie away. (I, ii, 10)41 Spenser’s Archimago, as a black magician and poet-figure who creates false images, deceiving himself as well as others, is balanced by that other magician who affirms the poet’s ability to reveal the truth. Archimago “could file his tongue as smooth as glas” (I, i, 35). Lucifera’s “mirrhour bright,” wherein she “in her self-lou’d semblance tooke delight” (I, iv, 10), suggests the idolatry which Spenser continually associates with false art,42 but this delusive glass is countervailed by the magic mirror which is the central symbol of the “deepe science and hell-dreaded might” (III, ii, 18) of Merlin. For Merlin is Spenser’s retort to the host of black magicians in The Faerie Queene. Where they display man’s corruption of art and language, Merlin shows the proper use of man’s gifts. The sorcerer Busyrayne, for example, writes “straunge characters of his art” in the “liuing blood” of Amoret (III, xii, 31). Our first sight of Merlin (in the Third Book, which he shares with Busyrayne), reveals him “writing strange characters in the ground” (III, iii, 14). The parallel is surely deliberate, and we see Merlin more clearly for the contrast. The modern penchant for finding poet-figures under every bush should not prevent us from realizing that Merlin, the maker of that world of glass, is one of Spenser’s most powerful images of the true, god-like poet.43 His shield and mirror— devices which protect and illuminate—show the essential nature of his art. It is the

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virtue of his mirror “to shew in perfect sight” all terrestrial things. While Archimago’s art works to sunder Una and Red Crosse, and Busyrayne’s to part Amoret and Scudamor, Merlin’s mirror, in which Britomart first glimpses Artegall, serves the cause of union and harmony. This mirror is elevated by Spenser into an image of the great globe itself For thy it round and hollow shaped was Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas. (III, ii, 19) This world of glass is no ordinary crystal ball. Since it shows all things truly, the mirror is an image of prelapsarian Eden, of a world free of illusion and error, recalling Sidney’s statement that Nature’s “world is brasen, the Poets only deliuer a golden.” Implicit in it is a pattern for living well and happily; we, like Britomart, can see in it what belongs to us and fashion our lives accordingly. Finally, Merlin’s mirror is a symbol of true art since it suggests that Truth which is beyond time. The mirror shows everything “betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight” (III, ii, 19); it does not claim to depict transcendental reality, for such a claim would be idolatrous. Unlike the works of the black magicians in the poem, the mirror is not to be confused with that which it reflects or imitates. In this it resembles that other great structure of glass in the poem, Panthea, the tower in Cleopolis, which Red Crosse finally understands truly when he beholds the New Jerusalem: Till now, said then the knight, I weened well, That great Cleopolis, where I haue beene, In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell, The fairest Citie was, that might be seene; And that bright towre all built of christall cleene, Panthea, seemed the brightest thing, that was: But now by proofe all other wise I weene: For this great Citie that does far surpas, And this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas. (I, x, 58)44 For all these reasons, Merlin’s glass is central to our understanding of Spenser’s view of art, and we best appreciate its significance through the contrasts which inform The Faerie Queene. Merlin tells Britomart that It was not, Britomart, thy wandring eye, Glauncing vnawares in charmed looking glas, But the streight course of heauenly destiny, Led with eternall prouidence, that has Guided thy glaunce…. (III, iii, 24)

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Spenser is at constant pains to remind us that Merlin’s art is free of diabolism, but what we make of Merlin’s mirror depends on our awareness of the threat posed by a “charmed looking glas.” Mirrors, as Spenser is continually reminding us, may work for good or ill. His treatment of Merlin’s mirror is part of a larger design in which Spenser explores the proper function of art itself. We may not always make the best use of the mirrors we have. Una, for example, is described as a “mirrhour rare” (I, vi, 15).45 The Fauns and Satyrs, who do not understand the relationship between the ideal pattern and its earthly reflection, “made her th’Image of Idolatryes.” When Una tries to restrain them, “they her Asse would worship fayn” instead (I, vi, 19). Spenser puts the case less comically in his Proem to Book Six, where he says “the trial of true curtesie” has been so distorted That it indeed is naught but forgerie, Fashion’d to please the eies of them, that pas Which see not perfect things but in a glass: Yet is that glasse so gay, that it can blynd The wisest sight, to thinke gold that is bras. (VI, Proem, 5) Instances of blindness and “forgerie,” of brass taken for gold, abound in the poem. All art, all the images man makes, are inherently ambiguous. But we cannot live without such images. In An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie, Spenser praises the truth and love and wisdom of God; these qualities “that Highest farre beyond all telling,…daily doth display” As in a looking glasse, through which he may Be seene, of all his creatures vile and base, That are vnable else to see his face…. (ll. 113–17) The glass of art is essential to us; as fallen creatures vile and base, we need images of the transcendental and the divine.46 This is emphasized in the Fourth Book of the poem, where, “Right in the midst” of the Temple of Isis, we find an artifact reminiscent of Merlin’s mirror; “the Goddesse selfe did stand/Upon an altar” Pure in aspect, and like to christall glasse, Yet glasse was not, if one did rightly deeme But being fair and brickle, likest glasse did seeme. (IV, x, 39) This juxtaposition of a goddess and a substance “like to christall glasse” inevitably points us to the Mutabilitie cantos, inviting us to speculate on the connection between Merlin’s magic mirror (which is first mentioned in the poem as “Venus looking glas”) and a true sight of Dame Nature, the great goddess whose “face was hid, that mot to non appeare” (Mut, vii, 5).

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In the Mutabilitie cantos, we find ourselves in a landscape twisted and distorted— and familiar. The Christian sees a fallen world; the Neo-Platonist sees a failure of transcendental form to dominate terrestrial matter. Spenser’s Mutabilitie all which Nature had establisht first In good estate and in meet order ranged She did pervert and all their statutes burst And all the worlds faire frame (which none yet durst) Of Gods or men to alter or misguide) She alter’d quite, and made them all accurst That God had blest…. (Mut., vi, 5) The divine pattern for earthly life has been all but forgotten. Mutabilitie bases her claim to universal dominion on the evidence of our senses, demanding, “What we see not, who shall us perswade?” (Mut., vii, 49). She appeals with confidence to the perfect tyranny of the visible;47 nothing less will deter Mutabilitie than “to see that mortall eyes haue neuer seene” (Mut., vi, 32). To fallen creatures like ourselves, Mutabilitie may indeed appear to be the goddess of the natural world. But Dame Nature demonstrates that Mutabilitie is herself part of the divine pattern, and that the triumph of Mutabilitie is apparent, rather than real: all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be; yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate, But by their change their being doe dilate And turning to themselves at length againe Do worke their owne perfection so by fate. (Mut, vii, 58) So the poem gives us one final moment of true vision, a moment in which we comprehend something of the relationship of our world to the world of eternity. But such brief glimpses are all The Faerie Queene allows us, for we are fallen creatures; once in a lifetime may the veils be lifted for us, if at all. How shall we be persuaded of what we cannot see? Spenser reminds us that, when we cannot look upon the goddess, art preserves her lesson; Nature’s face, like the Sunne, a thousand times did pass Ne could be seene, but like an image in a glas. (Mut, vii, 6) These lines recall one of Spenser’s favourite metaphors for sound art, Merlin’s magic glass, the mirror that shows things truly. In the absence of the goddess, art reminds us that chaos is only apparent, and that Mutabilitie is “firmely stayd/Upon the pillours of Eternity” (Mut, viii, ii). Art can reveal this truth because, like man himself, art is a point of intersection between mutable time and eternity. So, in the midst of chaos, art affirms the unchanging, persuading us of what we cannot see, and so Spenser’s

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final plea is to be granted “that Sabaoths sight” (Mut., viii, 2). For only that which is beyond time can redeem the world of time; the most Merlin’s glass can do is point to “that same time when no more Change shall be” (Mut, viii, 2). Spenser would have us realize when it is we can do nothing, when, as she must, the goddess “selfe did vanish, wither no man wist” (Mut., vii, 59). It is at these times that we most need Merlin’s mirror, that we most need to see things truly and as they might be. So Spenser directs us back to the poem, this “continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” and the true mirror Merlin has set at its heart. We shall not need his mirror forever; as fallen creatures, “now wee see in a glasse, even in a dark speaking: but then we shall see face to face.”48 But, until that same time when no more Change shall be, Spenser has left in our keeping his own “worthy worke of infinite reward” (III, ii, 21); until we see the face of God, we may, in the “fair mirrhour” of his poem, learn to see something of our own.49 Notes Reprinted with permission from Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réformé 4 (Fall 1980), pp. 179–98. 1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (III, ii, 18). All citations to Spenser are to The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. E.Greenlaw, C.G.Osgood, F.M.Padelford, et al, 9 volumes (Baltimore, 1934–49; rev. ed., 1958). 2. See A.O.H.Jarman, “The Welsh Myrddin Poems,” in the collaborative history Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R.S.Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 20–30, and also Richard Barber, King Arthur (Ipswich: Boydell, 1973), pp. 1–34. 3. Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–c. 1223) in his Itinerarum Cambriae (c. 1216) distinguishes two Merlins—Ambrosius (the prophet of King Vortigern in the Historia Britonum) and Celidonius (or Sylvestrus), a recluse in the forests of Scotland. In the crucible of romance, this distinction soon disappeared. 4. See Nennii Historia Britonum, ed. J.Stevenson (London, 1838; rpt. Vadus: Kraus, 1964), XXXI–XLIII. The child identifies himself as Ambrosius (“Ambrosius vocor”) and says of his paternity only “unus est pater meus de Consulibus Romanicae gentis” (XLIII). The mystery of Merlin’s begetting was to inspire fruitful speculation in many later writers. 5. Historia, VII, iv. See The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 176. The Historia was first printed at Paris, 1508. 6. JJ.Parry and R.A.Caldwell in Arthurian Literature, ed. Loomis, p. 79. It is a measure of their enduring popularity that the Prophetiae were put on the Index by the Council of Trent (1545– 63), and that they were reprinted in Germany as late as 1608. They were also sufficiently prominent to be mocked by Rabelais in Gargantua (1534), chap. 58. Greene, in his “Epistle” to the prose romance Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), mocks “mad and scoffing poets that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race….” On Merlin as a prophet, see F.Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète (Lausanne, 1943), R.H.Taylor, Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911), and Barber, pp. 37–8. 7. “Merlinus, qui et Ambrosius dicebatur” Historia, VI, xix. See Thorpe, p. 169

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8. Loomis, p. 83. The suspicions of Polydore Virgil and others finally triumphed. Few now credit Geoffrey’s claim that his principal source was a book in the Welsh (or Breton) tongue given him by Walter of Oxford, a fellow clerk. On Geoffrey’s sources, see Loomis, p. 81 ff. (“the Historia as it stands…is Geoffrey’s own creation”), Barber, p. 39 ff., and Thorpe, pp. 14–19. 9. Historia, VI, 18–19; Thorpe, pp. 167–68. The courtship of Merlin’s mother recalls that of Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass. 10. Few medieval historians after 1150 do not show extensive traces of the influence of Geoffrey’s Historia; he was not decisively discredited until late in the sixteenth century; v. Loomis, pp. 88–89. The best single summary I know of the story of Merlin (marred only by its condescension to Mark Twain) is that of H.B.Wheatley and W.E.Mead, eds., Merlin, or the Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1899), vol. I. See also G.S.Haight, “Tennyson’s Merlin,”Studies in Philology, 44 (1947), pp. 549–66. Also useful is G.D.West, An Index of Proper Names in French Arthurian Verse Romances 1150–1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). 11. In the Historia, Merlin performs only two acts of magic: he moves the Giant’s Ring from Ireland to Salisbury Plain (VIII, xiii) and transforms Uter into the likeness of Gorlois (VIII, xx), after which he vanishes from Geoffrey’s chronicle. In Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini (c. 1149), Merlin is a king who goes mad after seeing his three brothers killed in battle and flees to the woods. The poem recounts his family’s efforts to persuade him to return to civilized life, and his eventual reversion to sanity. In this poem Merlin performs no acts of magic whatsoever. The Vita seems to have had little influence on subsequent accounts of the magician, though it may have contributed to the tradition of Merlin as a recluse, “li homs saluages” of the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin. For text, see The Vita Merlini, trans. and ed. John Jay Parry, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, X, no. 3 (August, 1925), pp. 243–380. 12. Wace is the first known writer to mention the Round Table (II, 9747–60)—an addition elevated to prominence by Robert de Boron and later writers. His work is also the source of the thirteenth-century prose Lancelot, which presents Merlin as the victim of a woman who learns his magic and then imprisons him. Except for one trifling detail (1.23845), Layamon adds nothing to the story of Merlin. Robert Mannyng retells Wace’s version of the Merlin story, vss. 12884–19961. 13. See Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, eds., Merlin, roman en prose de XIIIe siècle, publié avec la mise en prose du poème de Merlin de Robert de Boron d’après le manuscrit appartenant a M. Alfred H.Huth. Two vols. Paris, F.Didot, 1886. Société des anciens textes français, no. 23. For the surviving fragment of Robert’s poem (Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. no. 20,047), see the editions of F.Michel (Paris, 1841) and F.J.Furnivall (1861). Robert’s Merlin ends with Arthur’s coronation. The source of Malory’s Merlin is the Suite du Merlin in some manuscript closely akin to the Huth Merlin. On Malory’s sources, see Loomis, p. 544 ff. 14. For the influence of the Gospel of Nicodemus and tales in oral circulation, as well as popular speculation pertaining to the coming of Anti-Christ, on Robert’s treatment of Merlin, see Paris and Ulrich, pp. xii-xx. 15. For a text of the Estoire de Merlin, see vol. II of H.Oskar Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances (Washington, 1908; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969), 8 vols. See also Jean Frappier, “The Vulgate Cycle,” in Loomis, pp. 295–318. So it is Robert de Boron, a lesser writer than Chrétien de Troyes (the Johnny Appleseed of Arthurian romance, who

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

mentions Merlin only once, in the Roman d’Erec et Enide, the oldest Arthurian romance to have survived in any language), who gives Merlin his definitive shape. Working from a confused version of Geoffrey (“des souvenirs confus d’une traduction du livre de Gaufrei de Monmouth,” Paris and Ulrich, p. xii), Robert creates a magician free of any taint of witchcraft. His accomplishment has a considerable influence on later writers, and is at least as important as his development of the Round Table mentioned in Wace. The voice from the tomb recurs in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (III, 16 ff.), one of the primary sources of Spenser’s Merlin. Of Robert de Boron, Paris and Ulrich note that “Tout ce qui concerne la conception supernaturelle de Merlin lui appartient” (p. xii), and also that “toute l’histoire de sa mère, des circonstances de sa naissance, de ses premières divinations, appartient a Robert de Boron” (p. xiv). Merlin’s writ was soon extended beyond prophecy and magic. The Prophetiae were seriously cited in support of astrology; see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), 8 vols., IV, p. 586. On Merlin as an authority on alchemy, see Thorndike, III, pp. 99, 629. On Malory’s French and English sources, see Loomis, p. 544 ff. and Barber, p. 125. Vinaver thinks that the source of Malory’s “Tale of King Arthur must have been a more authentic version of the French romance than either the Huth Merlin or the Cambridge Ms. of the Suite du Merlin” (Loomis, p. 549). “Authentic” is, in this context, a particularly unfortunate adjective. For a detailed description of the fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman ms. in the Cambridge University Library (Add. 7071) discovered by Vinaver in 1945, see Eugène Vinaver, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford, 1947), III, 1277–80. On Malory’s additions to his sources, see idem., III, 1267. On the other versions of the Merlin story, and references to Merlin in the Latin chroniclers, see R.W.Ackerman in Loomis, pp. 485–89 and p. 485, n. 2. All references to Malory, unless otherwise noted, are to the Caxton text as rendered in Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. Janet Cowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 2vols. On Malory’s scepticism, and his suppression of supernatural elements—his Merlin is a mere shadow of the Merlin of the Estoire—see Vinaver in Loomis, pp. 546–47. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), 2 vols., I, pp. 115–16. On Spenser’s familiarity with other romances, and with Ariosto, see Variorum, III, 401–02, and also note 26 infra. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, first published by Caxton in 1485, was reprinted four times within the century. During Ariosto’s lifetime, the Orlando went through three editions: 1516, 1521, 1532. “Demonio figlio,” Orlando Furioso, XXX, ix. All citations to Ariosto are to Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, I Cinque Canti e una Scelta delle Altere Opere Minori, ed. G.Muscetta and L.Lamberti, 2nd ed. (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1962), 2 vols. Ariosto prudently reserves judgment on the orthodoxy of Merlin’s magic; Merlin’s “vivo spirito” will remain in his tomb until the last trumpet “che dal ciel lo bandisca o che ve l’erga” (III, iii). The best modern translation, with excellent notes and apparatus, is Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin; vol. I, 1975; vol. II, 1977). On Merlin reduced to a voice, cf. Ovid’s story of the Sibyl, Metamorphoses, XIV, 132–53. Classical models also seem to influence the treatment of such figures as Atlante and Melissa. On this point see Reynolds, I, 65 ff.

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22. The paintings are explicated in XXXIII, vi–xxiv; xxxi–lvii. According to Ariosto, no one should boast of such talents as Merlin’s, for

e ceda pur quest’arte al solo incanto del qual trieman gli spirti de lo’nferno. (XXXIII, iv) Furthermore, such knowledge is now extinct: Quest’arte, con che i nostri antiqui fénno mirande prove, a nostra etade è estinta. (XXXIII, v) 23. On Spenser’s knowledge of the Arthurian material, see Variorum, III, 402 et passim; C.B.Millican, Spenser and the Table Round (Cambridge, Mass., 1932; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1967), and A.Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 53–63. 24. See Variorum, III, 226; C.H.Whitman, A Subject-Index to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 154; James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1976), p. 444. Geoffrey’s Historia identifies Merlin’s mother as a daughter of the King of Demetia (VI, 18). Most writers follow the example of Robert de Boron and the Vulgate Estoire in leaving Merlin’s mother nameless. In Layamon’s Brut, Merlin’s grandfather is “King Conaan,” in the Estoire, “Merlinus.” 25. Variorum, I, 30–54. For possible sources in Virgil and Ovid, see Aeneid, VII, 785; XII, 87, and Metamorphoses, IV, 782. On Merlin and swords, see the Estoire, ed. Sommer, pp. 81 ff., 251, and Malory, II, xix. None of these swords bears any marked resemblance to Arthur’s sword in The Faerie Queene. 26. On Atlante’s shield, see Orlando Furioso, II, lv-lvi; XXII, lxxxi-lxxxvii. R.E.Neil Dodge observes that “Spenser has added a number of details to this, it cannot be said felicitously”; see “Spenser’s Imitations from Ariosto,” PMLA, 12 (1897), pp. 151–204. The passage cited is on p. 188. See also D.C.Allen, “Arthur’s Diamond Shield in The Faerie Queene” JEGP, 36 (1937), pp. 234–43. On Spenser’s debt to Ariosto, see Walters, I, pp. 78–81; Spenser: The Faerie Queene, A Handbook, ed. Peter Bayley (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 58–101; and Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, ed. Thomas P.Roche, Jr. (Princeton, 1966), Chap. V. 27. Spenser seems to follow Malory in some details, as in making Merlin’s faithless lover one of the Ladies of the Lake (III, iii, 10; cf. Malory, IV, 1). But Malory identifies Arthur’s tutor as Sir Ector. It is unlikely that the original of “Timon, to whom he [Arthur] was by Merlin deliuered to be brought up” (Spenser’s letter to Raleigh) was Timon, the celebrated misanthrope made famous by Plutarch. Spenser could have known Plutarch’s Timon from his own studies, or from North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579; see the Lives of Marc Anthony and Alcibiades) or the twenty-eighth novella of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure. Upton (1758) suggests that the name “Timon” signifies “honour” and is thus particularly appropriate as the name of Arthur’s tutor (see Variorum, I, p. 264). This may well be, but the alteration still shows Spenser’s independence of old books. On King Rions, see the Vulgate Estoire, ed. Sommer, pp. 232–35, 412–19. Rions is the possessor of a magic sword made by Vulcan, a sword belonging formerly to Hercules and to

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28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

Jason. This king is called Ryence in Malory, as in Spenser (cf. Arthur’s mother, who is Igrayne in Spenser and Malory, Ygerne in the Estoire). In both the Estoire and Malory (I,26), Ryence wants Arthur’s beard to trim his mantle. Spenser keeps the story of the mantle “with beards of Knights and lockes of Ladies lynd,” but assigns it to one Briana, mistress of Crudor (VI, i, 13 ff.), not to Ryence. Ascham’s objection to the Morte d’Arthur on the grounds that “the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye” may have helped persuade Spenser not to make much use of Malory; see Millican, pp. 3–4, 194. Quoted in Variorum, I, 251. Barber contends that “The Faerie Queene borrows only the person of Arthur and some few trappings from the world of romance…. Spenser’s sources are the Italians, and the whole concept owes much to the cult centred on Elizabeth herself as Gloriana, whose knight Arthur is. The use of this or that detail from romances, whether Malory, Libeaus Disconus or Arthur of Little Britain, does not make it a true piece of Arthurian literature; rather, following the fashion for Arthurian references in pageantry, Spenser has borrowed the name of Arthur for his character Magnificence” (King Arthur, p. 138). Barber may well be right—though I believe he over-estimates Italian influence on Spenser. But this does not alter the fact that Spenser was not attempting to continue the romances in the same way in which the Suite du Merlin continues Robert de Boron. On Spenser’s adaptation of Ariosto in such a way as to create a situation “manifestly the exact reverse of Ariosto’s,” v. Variorum, III, 213. On the influence of the Italian poets in Spenser’s decision to use the Arthurian material, see Millican, pp. 114–15. Ariosto attributes Merlin’s prophetic powers to his demon father (XXXIII, ix); Spenser seems to reflect the medieval romance tradition. In the Estoire, Merlin owes his knowledge of the past to demons, but his knowledge of the future to God; he also advises Vortigern’s clerks to abandon necromancy (Sommer, II, 34). We might say the same of Morddure, the sword Merlin makes for Arthur. It will neither break nor bend; it too is proof against enchantment, and it may never be used against its rightful owner (ii, viii, 20–21). That the sword, shield, and mirror are all impervious to enchantment and deceit is, in the context of the poem’s opposition of true and false magicians (and “makers,” and poets), of considerable importance. The Squires Tale, 131–35; see The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F.N.Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). On Virgil’s mirror, see e.g. the ninth tale of the Roman des Sept Sages, ed. K.Campbell (Boston, 1907), or Gower’s Confessio Amantis, V, 2031 ff. On Virgil’s reputation as a magician, a reputation based in large measure on his “prophetic” fourth eclogue, see D.Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E.F.M. Banecke, 2nd ed. (London, 1908), and J.W.Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). For magic mirrors in the Epistola Presbyteri Johannis ad Emmanuelem regem Graecorum (c. 1165), as well as other analogies in Chaucer and Lydgate, and the general influence of popular knowledge of Arabic science, see Robinson, pp. 717–19. See also W.F.Bryan and G.Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), p. 358 ff; the Variorum, III, 216–17, and W.A.Clouston, Magical Elements in the Squire’s Tale (Publications of the Chaucer Society, 1899). Another magic mirror is the “prospective glass” of Greene’s Frier Bacon and Frier Bungay (publ. 1594, acted c. 1590)—but this too simply shows distant scenes. It is in no sense a microcosm and Bacon himself breaks it when he decides to renounce magic altogether. Bacon’s mirror, unlike Spenser’s, does not escape the general censure of magic.

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34. Stanza 114. For text, see R.M.Bender, ed., Five Courtier Poets of the English Renaissance (New York: Washington Square, 1969), pp. 562–96. Subsequent citations to Fulke Greville are to this edition. 35. On the contrast of the “eternal glass” of Truth and “vantieis’ false glass,” see also Caelica, nos. 61, 87, 91, and Treatie, st. 10. Fulke Greville also tells one story of Merlin found in the Vulgate Estoire (pp. 29–30) in Caelica, no. 23. 36. For text see The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth Century Verse, ed. R.S.Sylvester (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 275–315. On The Steele Glas and the use of mirrors in Gascoigne’s other works, see C.T. Prouty, George Gascoigne, Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), esp. pp. 241–51. 37. The translations and commentaries of Ficino lent Plato’s authority to this conceit and spread it throughout Europe. Ficino paraphrases the Phaedrus in his In Convivium (II, viii): “a lover imprints a likeness of the beloved one upon his soul, and so the soul of the beloved becomes a mirror in which is reflected the image of the loved one.” See Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Genève: Droz, 1960; rpt. Folcroft, Pa. 1969), passim, esp. pp. 32– 34, 49–50, 134. Ellrodt quarrels with Lotspeich’s contention (v. Variorum, III, 217) that “the Platonic meaning of the mirror is intended,” since Plato offered a theory of reminiscence, not foreknowledge. But this rather short-sighted view ignores the entire tradition of Merlin as a prophet. On love and mirrors in Spenser, see The Shepheardes Calendar, “October,” 93–94; Amoretti, XLV: An Hymne in Honour of Love (1.196), and An Hymne in Honour of Beavtie (1.224). 38. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 94. 39. As it likewise does in the story of the brasen wall (III, iii, 10–11), which Spenser could have found in Giraldus Cambrensis or Camden; see Variorum, III, 224–26. In terms of the poem as a whole, this is a detail of minor importance—though it does help establish Merlin as a magician free of any suspicion of sorcery. 40. On Renaissance magic as a quest for Protean transformation, see W.Blackburn, “‘Heavenly Words’: Marlowe’s Faustus as a Renaissance Magician,” English Studies in Canada (Spring, 1978), pp. 1–14. 41. On Archimago as a type of the poet, see Giamatti, Play, pp. 118–19. On the poet as Proteus, see idem, pp. 118–33. Archimago as poet-magician is also suggested in the “charmed speeches” (I, ix, 30) of Despair, who disperses the manly powers of Red Crosse “as he were charmed with inchaunted rimes” (I, ix, 48). 42. Archimago “well could file his tongue as smooth as glas”; the monster ridden by Duessa (I, vii, 17 ff.)—an echo of Revelation 12. 3–4—has eyes which “did shine as glas.” On the mirror as an instrument of deceit (associated in E.K.’s gloss with Papist deception), v. The Shepheardes Calendar, l. 247 ff. 43. On Merlin as “no creator of false images, but of true reflections—from another perspective, the poet par excellance” see Giamatti, Play, pp. 119–20. On Merlin as a foil to Archimago, see Nohrnberg, p. 759. Merlin is also cited in “The Rvines of Time” as the creator of an earthly paradise (519 ff.). 44. The contrast of the two cities, in which the earthly city is seen as an image or reflection of the Heavenly City, is a Christian commonplace, but the fact that the tower is made of glass points directly to Spenser’s mirror and to a Neo-Platonic view of art. Ellrodt’s rather extreme contention, that “the contrast of the two ‘cities’ is a Christian—and Augustinian— idea, without the slightest infusion of Renaissance Platonism” (Neoplatonism, p. 50), rather begs the question of Neo-Platonist influence on, among others, Augustine and Saint Paul.

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45. Cf. Belphoebe as a “glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace” (III, iii, 25), and Elizabeth as “a mirror sheene” of “Princely curtesie” (VI, Proem, vi). See also C.G.Osgood, A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), sub Glass, Looking-glass, Mirror, Mirrors. The implications are clear; the beloved is the earthly reflection of divine beauty. To confuse the reality with the image which reflects it is idolatry; cf. the “fowle Idolatree” of Cupid in the House of Busyrayne (III, xi, 49). Thanks to Merlin and his mirror, Britomart is not dismayed by the distorted view of love in Busyrayne’s Ovidian glass. 46. A Humanist commonplace; cf. Ben Jonson: “Poesy is…the Queene of Arts: which had her originall from heaven, received thence from the ‘Ebrewes, and had in prime estimation with the Greeks, transmitted to the Latins, and all Nations that profess’d Civility. The study of it… offers to mankinde a certain rule, and Patterne of living well, and happily; disposing us to all Civill offices of Society” (Discoveries, 2381–88). 47. Cf.

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is, but that which he hath seen? (II, Proem, 3) 48. I Corinthians 13. 12, the Bishop’s Bible (1568; rev. 1602); cf. the King James version: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face….” 49. II, Proem, 4; on the entire poem as a mirror, see II, Proem, 4, and III, Proem, 5.

CHAPTER 15 Druids, Bards, and Tennyson’s Merlin CATHERINE BARNES STEVENSON

Tennyson began his composition of the Idylls of the King with the tale of the “fall” of the mythic necromancer of Arthur’s court, with an account of the vision, the despair, and the retreat from society of a character who is, as several recent critics have argued, a type of artist.1 The Merlin of the 1856 “Merlin and Vivien,” however, is not only an artist but also a prophet/bard, a member of a family of such figures who appear in Tennyson’s poetry for fifty years. A product of Tennyson’s reading in the 1840’s and 50’s about Druids, bards, and the legendary wizard of Camelot, this 1856 Merlin embodies Tennyson’s reflections on the aesthetic limitations of bardic art on the personal costs of prophetic vision. Moreover, when Merlin reappears in the idylls of 1869 and 1872, his character and the nature of his artistry have been subtly modified in accordance with Tennyson’s reading and his evolving ideas about the function of art and the relationship between the gifted artist and his often unreceptive society. In 1856 Tennyson depicted Merlin as …the most famous man of all those times, Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts, Had built the king his havens, ships, and halls, Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens; The people called him Wizard; (11. 165–68)2 Vivien adds to this description the fact that “the people” call Merlin “a prophet” (1. 315). Thus, the “Mage at Arthur’s court” who knows all arts joins a long tradition of prophets in Tennyson’s works. In the Juvenalia, a figure emerges which combines the characteristics of the Old Testament prophet, the Romantic inspired poet of, say, “Kubla Khan,” and the legendary Welsh bard, particularly as he was depicted by Gray. The persona in early works like “God’s Denunciations Against Pharaoh Hophra,” “The Fall of Jerusalem,” “The High Priest to Alexander,” and “Babylon” are, like Old Testament prophets, divine mouthpieces who pronounce an authoritative judgment on the evils of society and also prescribe the punishment for those evils— almost always the destruction of the prevailing order through some catastrophe willed by God. In these early poems, which evidence a providential view of history,3 the prophet is clearly the agent of the controlling order. Tennyson seems to consciously

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identify himself with this prophetic persona.4 For example, in the autobiographical “Youth,” not published during Tennyson’s lifetime, the speaker reviews his early days: The months, ere they began to rise, Sent through my blood a prophet voice, (ll. 9–10) Again in an unpublished 1832 poem “What Thor Said to the Bard Before Dinner” Tennyson dwells with a certain relish on the denunciatory prerogatives of the bard/ prophet. In this work “Thor” urges the bard to “break through with the hammer of iron rhyme” the “evil customs” of the time, assuring him that “thy rhyme hammer shall have honour.” Hallam Tennyson believes that this poem was written to defy the “malignant censure of his critics,”5 but the invective is directed at all of society, not just the criticasters. There is a fiercely—even physically—vengeful ring to lines like: On squire and parson, broker and banker, Down let fall thine iron spanker, Spare not king or duke or critic, Dealing out cross-buttock and flanker With thy clanging analytic! If she call out lay harder upon her, Stun her, stagger her. (ll. 19–25) The hard “c’s” and the predominant dental sounds of lines twenty-one through twenty-five give a vituperative quality to this verse which is inconsistent with the insouciant title: the words “before dinner” seem to establish a casual social context in which Thor would be more likely to deliver some pleasant remarks than to launch this harshly vitriolic tirade. Is Tennyson striking out viciously at a society that has rejected his poetry, or is he engaging in consciously extreme, almost self-mocking, revenge fantasies? It is hard to say for sure, but the verse itself, considered independently of the title, reads without any hint of an ironic intention on Tennyson’s part. This poem notwithstanding, the bard’s primary role is not denunciatory; most often he is a visionary who looks to the future consequences of present actions, the destiny of his society. As Herbert Schneidau’s recent study argues, Old Testament prophets were the first critics of culture who, in their alienation from society, denounced the faithlessness of Jews and predicted inevitable punishment for these defections from Yahweh, but who also prophesied that such punishment would terminate in the future, that there were grounds for hope.6 Consistent with this characterization, the prophetic speaker of Tennyson’s “The Fall of Jerusalem” not only rnourns the city’s destruction and moralizes over the actions which precipitated such a catastrophe, he also foresees the future reconstitution of the Jewish nation:

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Yet an hour shall come, when ye, Though scattered like the chaff, shall be Beneath one standard once again united; When your wandering race shall own, Prostrate at the dazzling throne Of your high Almighty Lord, The wonders of his searchless word, The unfailing splendours of his Son! (ll. 96–103) Although lines ninety-six to ninety-eight sound Zionistic, the following lines make clear that the speaker is envisioning the millennium. The personae of “The Druid’s Prophecies” and “Lamentations of the Peruvians,” on the other hand, foresee the historical future: after lamenting the fall of their own civilization and cursing their conquerors, these prophetic speakers look forward to the retribution which will fall on those same conquerors. Instead of directing invective against their own societies, they offer consoling words to the fallen which are designed to engender hope for an improved future. The Druid who delivers “The Druid’s Prophecies” while watching the destruction of his sanctuary, Mona, is a direct descendant of Gray’s bard, that larger-than-life thunderer whose stance, whose actions, and whose words became paradigmatic for the Romantic bard. Identifying himself as the follower of the Druidical bard Taliesin, Gray’s bardic poet heaps curses on the tyrannical persecutor of the Druids, Edward I, and prophesies that the now victorious king will be plagued by future misery; moreover, before taking an Empedoclean plunge into the abyss at the poem’s end, this bard sees “visions of glory” of the “unborn ages.” Although Tennyson’s bards never indulge in this kind of spectacular self-immolation, they do often assume the composite bardic role of inspired speaker of hidden truth, chas-tizer/ consoler of society, and prophet of future hope or doom. According to Murray Roston, this blending of the characteristics of the biblical prophet and the primitive bard, which takes place in Tennyson’s early poetry, reflects a set of ideas which came into vogue at the end of the eighteenth century: “Parallel with the conception of the prophet as sublime poet, the ballad movement, fostered by the biblical interest, had begun to idealize the ancient bard It was inevitable that these two parallel concepts should fuse to form the composite image of the prophet-bard, which became the new ideal for the pre-romantics.”7 Tennyson’s early fascination with this personality was reinforced and his knowledge of it broadened by his reading in the late 1840’s of Edward Davies’ The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (1809), which, according to its inscription, was given him in 1846. An exponent of the Helio-Arkite interpretation of Arthurian legend,8 Davies influenced both Tennyson’s treatment of this material in the Idylls9 and his portrayal of the bardic speaker. Davies re-constructs the social and religious history of the Druids, argues that bards were one particular branch of Druids, and claims that the Welsh bards of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries consciously preserved the Druidic lore and traditions. In his view, Druids were magicians, poets,

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mystics, prophets, and also “the supreme judges in public and private matters in their society.”10 The title “bard,” he argues, signified eminence and dignity; it could be conferred only on men of distinguished rank who also held a sacred office.11 The social standing of these Druidical bards was enhanced, according to Davies, by their access to the esoteric rites celebrated in honor of the sun god, Hu, and to the stages of enlightenment through which an initiate would pass. Such mystical insights the Druids embodied in their obscure poetry: hence, Davies contends, many of Taliesin’s most famous poems are really narratives of the initiation rites of the Helio-Arkite cults. The myth of the Druid as an exalted figure, imbued with power by virtue of his arcane knowledge, began, according to Edward Hungerford, with eighteenth-century “speculative mythologists” like Bochart and Stukeley. These theorists argued that the Druids, who were the descendents of biblical patriarchs, had preserved the uncorrupted patriarchal religion of the Old Testament. As poet, prophet, priest, and social arbiter, the Druidical bard “with his flow-ing white hair, his harp, his impassioned…utterance” became the object of “veneration.”12 According to Hungerford, “the popular, as well as the poetic, imagination seized upon the patriarchal theory, the bards became repositories of ancient wisdom.”13 Moreover, as J.M.S.Tompkins has noted, authors like Thomson or Collins, who use “Druid” and “bard” interchangeably, portray this composite figure as the “poet-priest of Nature,” a member of “a select body of sages equipped with learning far above the reach of the common man, though ultimately beneficial to him.”14 Privy to the deepest secrets of the universe, the Druids acts as “enlightened educators of youth and ardent patriots enflam-ing their people in the struggle for liberty and heartening them with songs to cast back the unconquered Roman over the sea.”15 This prophetic Druid/bard figure still occupied an important place in the imaginations of writers in the first half of the nineteenth century: Southey in Madoc (1805), Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry” (published 1839–40), and Carlyle in “The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare” (1841) allude to versions of this myth.16 This image of the bardic poet is particularly important to Tennyson’s poetry of the 1850’s. When alarmed over the threat to England posed by Napoleon III (1852), Tennyson wrote three poems which he submitted to newspapers under the pseudonyms “Merlin,” and “Taliessin” (sic). The bard’s “rhyme hammer” clangs in the “manly”—or, in Tennyson’s own words, the “forcible”17—style of verse like “The Third of February,” “Hands All Round,” and “Suggested by Reading an Article.” Like a prophet, the speaker of these is a righteous individual who, seeing the dangers to which society is oblivious, attempts to rouse “Godlike men.” Like a Druidical bard, the persona evokes a quintessential national ideal of bravery and liberty. The speaker of “Suggested by Reading an Article” attacks the animalistic sensuality and materialism of contemporary England in the same caustically reproving tone employed by the “Thor” of 1832:

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I feel the thousand cankers of our state, I fain would shake their triple-folded ease. The hogs, who can believe in nothing great, Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace, Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine, With stony smirks at all things human and divine! (ll. 42–48) The bard still wants to “shake” or “spank” other men as he did in the earlier poems because he alone sees what they cannot—the “frightful omen of the future”: There hangs within the heavens a dark disgrace, Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race. (ll. 40–41) Even the diction in this passage—“Assyrian doom”—evokes the Old Testament and the prophets of the 1827 volume. Bardic poetry is the agent of the moral renewal of society; the bard himself is paradoxically both a solitary outsider and a man crucially involved in the fate of his society. He alone can …raise the people and chastize the times With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes. (ll. 5–6) II Merlin of the Idylls, the architect, the artist, the sage, the prophet of social doom, emerges only after Tennyson has reflected on the rich tradition about bardic poets, prophets, and Druids for a number of years. Tennyson’s Merlin of 1856 is closer to the Druids depicted by Davies with their social importance, their architectural skills, and their visionary powers than he is to Malory’s Merlin, that lascivious magician and astute politician who uses his prophetic powers and preternatural gifts to advance Uther’s lust and Arthur’s cause. In fact, in “Merlin and Vivien” (l. 495) Merlin explicitly refutes the title, “Devil’s son,” given him in Morte D’Arthur. Merlin, according to Davies, was “a supreme judge, a priest, and a prophet” who had secret knowledge of the mysteries of the divinities revered at Stonehenge.18 That Tennyson had Davies’ account of the Welsh Druids in mind in the mid-1850’s is evident from the poem “Harp, harp the voice of Cymry,” written in 1856 while Tennyson was touring Wales. This poem praises the Welsh bards “whose music yet prevails” and lists several figures discussed by Davies: Aneurin, Taliessin (sic), and Aedd the Great, “a mystical personage.”19 In “Merlin and Vivien,” “the great Enchanter of the Time” (l. 214), Merlin, is gifted with a vision of the future which enables him to foresee the “coming wave” that will destroy Arthur’s order (much as the speaker of the 1852 political verse could see the “vast Assyrian doom” which was poised over his nation). This privileged vision brings only melancholy, however, because with it comes a certain impotence; unable to act himself, the prophet/bard seems incapable of effecting action. The bard’s “rhyme

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hammer” can neither change history by “raising the people and chastizing the times” nor console the victims of impending disaster with the hope of an improved future. Seeing what others cannot, Merlin is appalled and flees from the inevitable doom: first, by physically deserting Arthur’s court; second, by turning away from social responsibility—“name and use and fame”—and toward the satisfaction of personal needs, “ease of heart” (1.890). Insofar as Vivien seems to offer him consolation by flattering “his own wish in age for Love” (1.814), she is the external agent of his “fall.” But Merlin, who is throughout the idyll aware of Vivien’s wiles, causes his own “fall.”20 His debates with Vivien about the proper social uses of one’s special gifts, for example, are really attempts to talk away what he most fears but feels happening to himself—the weakening of the will to act or to resist the demands of the body. Like the rotten bough at the idyll’s end, Merlin snaps under the pressure of the storm because he has been destroyed from within. Precisely the wisdom and the vision that make Merlin a great wizard and bard also doom him; he stands as an example of the particular frailties of spirit to which the prophet-bard is heir. The interpretation of the interlocking psychological, sexual, and social motives for Merlin’s surrender to Vivien in this idyll is complicated by three factors: the place of Merlin’s “fall” in context of the decline of Arthur’s power; the aesthetic implications of his surrender; and finally the fact that the Idylls offers two slightly different accounts of Merlin’s “loss of himself.” Seen as one of the four original idylls, “Merlin and Vivien” portrays a seduction that is parallel to the seduction of Guinevere. The song urging utter faith in love which Vivien sings to Merlin was originally, she claims, Lancelot’s carol to the Queen. When Merlin yields to Vivien’s fleshly lure, his blood is said to take on “gayer colours, like an opal warmed” at her touch; so too when Guinevere prefers Lancelot to Arthur she is indulging her yearning for “warmth and colour” (“Guinevere,” l. 642), for “the low sun that makes the colour” (“Lancelot and Elaine,” l. 134). Merlin’s fall resonates with the Queen’s: both he and Guinevere yield to the imperatives of the flesh rather than to the demands of intellect or duty; both place the satisfaction of personal needs before social responsibility; both desert Arthur. Tennyson stresses the parallel between Merlin’s defection and that of Guinevere in two scenes which are mirror images of each other. At the conclusion of “Merlin and Vivien,” the wily Vivien exercises the potent charm by waving her hands over the sleeping Merlin, thus imprisoning him in a state of self-indulgent passivity. Similarly, at the end of “Guinevere,” Arthur signals his forgiveness of the prostrate, penitent Queen through a benedictory wave of his hands which, in effect, releases her from her state of sin.21 But Tennyson also makes clear that Merlin’s surrender of his wisdom in the face of his spiritual malaise and physical need is an aesthetic act.22 Vivien’s “sweet rhyme” about the need for absolute faith in love is specifically identified with the charm of woven paces which undermines the individual’s social utility. Merlin comments: But, Vivien, when you sang me that sweet rhyme, I felt as though you knew this cursed charm,

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Were proving it on me, and that I lay And felt them slowly ebbing, name and fame. (ll. 432–435) The “cursed charm” of which Merlin alone has knowledge was designed to isolate a beautiful woman for the exclusive use and enjoyment of her husband; thus, it is associated with an obsessive devotion to physical beauty and the severing of the bond between the individual and the community. The lure of Vivien’s song then is the lure of a sensually pleasing art which, like the charm, captures its listener in a “hollow tower” (perhaps an image of the purely physical body). In yielding to Vivien, Merlin surrenders to this kind of art; yet ironically he is already the master of such an artistry since he is sole possessor of the charm before he reveals it to Vivien. In a sense, Merlin is destroyed by an aspect of his own artistry—perhaps its “fleshly” side which offers a tempting alternative to the grim rigors of prophetic art—and Vivien may be, as some critics have argued, a projection of a part of Merlin’s own aesthetic temperament. Seen in the context of Tennyson’s poetic endeavors in the 1850’s, “Merlin and Vivien” takes on a special significance. In the political poems of 1852 and in Maud, Tennyson employed a prophetic persona who denounced evils, prophesied social disaster, and often urged violent action to avert social catastrophe. The anonymity of the political verse shielded Tennyson from attack, but Maud drew fire—and even parody—for its social vision.23 Merlin’s outburst on the costs of Fame and on the consequences of trying to give men “greater wits” rings with the bitterness of personal experience: Use gave me Fame at first, and Fame again Increasing gave me use. Lo, there my boon! What other? for men sought to prove me vile, Because I fain had given them greater wits: ..................................................... Sweet were the days when I was all unknown, But when my name was lifted up, the storm Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it. (ll. 491–501) Jerome Buckley reads this passage as proof that Tennyson had established “an identity of sorts with the disillusioned Merlin.”24 If the political verse and Maud represent the public path that the prophet might take, “Merlin and Vivien” considers another course of action possible in the face of the horrifying vision of the collapse of society. Merlin, made melancholy by the imminent disaster he foresees, surrenders his will, abdicates his social conscience, and turns inward. The mad speaker of Maud and the “Mage of Arthur’s court” enact two sides of the same conflict: one shuns society, plunges into the “abysmal deeps” of personality, but eventually embraces his social calling— potentially suicidal action; the other flees society, surrenders his public personality,

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and sinks into a limbo of passivity akin to death. In either case, self-destruction seems to follow from prophetic vision. If the Merlin of 1856 represents the prophetic personality doomed by its own sensibility, the Merlin of the 1869 Idylls is a slightly different character—or at least a character who is viewed from a different angle. In “The Holy Grail,” for example, we are given another account of Merlin’s “loss of himself.” Recalling the inception of the Grail quest, Percivale tells of Merlin’s creation, which was partly responsible for the Grail mania: In our great hall there stood a vacant chair, Fashioned by Merlin ere he past away, And carven with strange figures; and in and out The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll Of letters in a tongue no man could read. And Merlin called it “The Siege perilous,” Perilous for good and ill; “for there,” he said, “No man could sit but he should lose himself:” And once by misadvertence Merlin sat In his own chair, and so was lost; but he, Galahad, when he heard of Merlin’s doom, Cried, “If I lose myself, I save myself!” (ll. 167–78) Malory’s Merlin fashions the chair but is not destroyed by it; Tennyson’s Merlin is here trapped by the precise skills that make him a wizard. Two sets of facts confirm an aesthetic reading of this narrative of Merlin’s “fall.” First, the “Siege perilous” with its “scroll of letters in a tongue no man can read” resembles in its inscrutability and potential hazardousness the magician’s book in “Merlin and Vivien,” which is written in a language no man can read (even Merlin can decipher only the marginalia). In addition, the chair, the product of Merlin’s ingenuity and special skill, is the agent of his “fall” just as the charm, of which he as a “Mage” alone has knowledge, is the ostensible cause of his “loss of himself.” Both the charm and the chair symbolize the esoteric, even lethal, knowledge that the prophet-bard possesses. Algernon Herbert’s Britannia After the Romans (1836), which Tennyson owned, explicitly connects the “Siege perilous” with the arcane knowledge to which the Druids had access: the seat, he claims, “signifies to us the private belief of the Druidists in a code of astronomy different from that which they published, but one of which they deemed the establishment essential to the secure enthronization of Apollos Belenus.”25 The literature about the Druids also connects the “chair” of the ancient bard with the public recognition of his professional status. Davies quotes a poem by Philip Brydydd (1200–1250) which alludes to this “chair of the Presidency”: “The chair of the great Maelgwn was publicly prepared for Bards; and not to poetasters was it given in compliment: and if, at this day, they were to aspire to that chair, they would be proved, by truth and privilege, to be what they really are: the grave Druids of Britain would be there.”26 Furthermore, according to Davies, an obscure, mystical poem by

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Taliesin called “The Chair of Taliesin” lists in a veiled form the apparatus needed to celebrate the rites of the goddess Ceridwen. Thus, the “chair” of the ancient bard suggests both his unique position in society and the private knowledge that comes with that status. But how do these facts influence our reading of Percivale’s narrative or how do they alter our retrospective interpretation of Merlin’s character as presented in “Merlin and Vivien”? In “The Holy Grail” Merlin seems to “fall” because he willingly immerses himself too completely in his private vision, becomes enrap-tured by his own artifact. Such a fall is, of course, in keeping with the insistence in this idyll on the dangers of private vision, especially when chosen at the ex-pense of public service. In “Merlin and Vivien,” on the other hand, the means of Merlin’s “fall” is the charm, while the motive seems to be the need for rest and solace in the face of despair. “The Holy Grail” omits the psychological motivation (“misadvertence” is the only cause that Percivale mentions) but clearly identifies Merlin’s own artistry as the means of his downfall. In some sense, the later idyll simplifies the task of interpreting Merlin’s actions by confirming what is only intimated in “Merlin and Vivien”: the bard becomes his own victim when he surrenders totally to the imperatives of his special vision, when he plunges completely into what Tennyson calls “spiritual imagination” (Ricks, p. 1666n). The effect of Merlin’s creation on Galahad and the rest of the Round Table is, then, instructive. When he sits in Merlin’s chair, Galahad “loses himself”: that is, he casts aside his social self, his personality, to find his spiritual exaltation and thus precipitate the decline of Arthur’s realm; Merlin’s loss of himself is but the first domino. Arthur, in his speech to Galahad at the idyll’s end, points to the ultimately private nature of the vision of “fiery prophet in old times,/And all the sacred madness of the bard” (ll. 872–73). As Arthur knows, the experience of a transcendent reality can be only partially and unsatisfactorily communicated within the limitations of the “framework” and the “chord” of the individual. “Divine madness” then, though it may be glorious, is socially disruptive and personally isolating. Tennyson’s analysis in 1869 of the perils facing the bardic personality is accompanied—paradoxically—by elaborate descriptions of the kind of art that Merlin created. It seems that the bardic artist, though he may destroy himself and though his art may have dangerous social implications, can also fashion works that lead to spiritual exaltation: his creations are perilous both for “good and ill.” In the art he produces for Arthur’s great hall, Merlin combines the characteristics of both the true pagan bard and the Christian moral artist. Merlin has chronicled the history of his realm in twelve great windows that recount Arthur’s battles. This realistic, historical art exists in time and thus can render only that which has taken place in time, past and present events. The future, the final Western-most window, is blank; only when the future becomes the present can its design be blazoned. In the sculptures he creates, however, Merlin is clearly a moral teacher who renders the ideal as the actual. The four zones of allegorical sculpture in the hall reify the ideal spiritual progress of Arthur’s realm and depict the as-yet-to-be-accomplished perfection of man:

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And four great zones of sculptures, set betwixt, With many a mystic symbol, gird the hall: And in the lowest beasts are slaying men, And in the second men are slaying beasts, And on the third are warriors, perfect men, And on the fourth are men with growing wings. (ll. 232–237) This creation enshrines the unrealized goal toward which the society and its individual members are striving; a goal, moreover, which is accessible only to the Arthurs and the Galahads of the kingdom. This presentation of a Janus-faced Merlin who is a traditional pagan bard and a latter-day Christian prophet can be traced to Tennyson’s reading of W.D.Nash’s Merlin the Enchanter, Merlin the Bard (1865), which was given to James Knowles by Nash and to Tennyson by Knowles sometime after their 1866 meeting. Nash, who stresses Merlin’s centrality in the Arthurian legend, also identifies him as a symbol of the intellect; Tennyson, in his later allegorical comments on his Idylls, similarly characterized Merlin as one of those “among the highest intellects” (Ricks, p. 1595n.). Nash points to a dual tradition in the legends about Merlin: one group of stories depict him as “a magician possessed of supernatural powers, if not given to diabolic arts.”27 Although Tennyson was clearly aware of this tradition even in “Merlin and Vivien,” he did not depict Merlin primarily as a wily wizard. The wording of the description in that idyll is indicative: “people called him Wizard” (l. 186, italics mine). On the other hand, as Nash observes, Welsh legends “ignore the magic and represent the enchanter as a pious Christian.” In fact, he continues, the French Arthurian scholar Villemarqué argues that Merlin was really an historical personage, an architect, a mathematician, a bard in the tradition of the Druids, and a Christian clergyman at the court of the king Aurelius Ambrosius. Villemarqué claims that “if any one in the British isles has represented in Christian times the vates of the olden time, if any one has enjoyed their privileges, known their secrets, preserved their traditions, led their mysterious life,—if any one can give an idea of these enthusiasts, at once pontiffs, sages, astrologers, magicians, poets, and natural musicians, it is incontestably the bard of Ambrosius Aurelianus.”28 Whereas “Merlin and Vivien” concentrates on the destructive side of Merlin’s artistry, “The Holy Grail” shows that, while Merlin’s art can be socially disruptive, it also can offer men spiritual consolation and hope in the face of the hardships of life. Crowning the allegorical carvings in Arthur’s hall is another of Merlin’s creations: And over all one statue in the mould Of Arthur, made by Merlin, with a crown And peaked wings pointed to the Northern Star. …and the crown And both the wings are made of gold, and flame

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At sunrise till the people in far fields, Wasted so often by the heathen hordes, Behold it crying, “We have still a King.” (ll. 234–245) Here the statue testifies to the permanence of Arthur’s ideal and keeps alive the hope represented in the sculpture that men can rise above the beasts, the “heathen hordes,” and “grow wings.” As a Christian bard, Merlin creates art that affirms the reality of a spiritual ideal. The idylls written between 1869 and 1872 show Tennyson’s growing preoccupation with Merlin as a Christian sage, as the religious mentor of the populace. In “The Coming of Arthur” (1869) and “Gareth and Lynette” (1869–72), where he makes his final appearance, Merlin is not so much the architect or the sculptor that he had been earlier, but the poet, the maker of riddles which tease their hearers into a new kind of knowledge. Merlin’s verses in these idylls take the form of the “tribanan” or triplet of the ancient Welsh bard, particularly as these were explained by Davies. These poems, in which each of the three lines presents a discrete thought, were used by the Druids as teaching devices to inculcate moral precepts in their hearers. Beginning with a seemingly trivial remark, the triplets move on to a further reflection, and conclude with a pertinent observation about morals or manners. Thus, according to Davies, they are designed as pedagogical tools to move the primitive mind from the “page of nature” to the “page of wisdom.”29 Like the sculpture in Arthur’s hall, these triplets lead the mind from empirical observations of life or history to a recognition of a larger and more complex pattern of meaning in the universe than can be deduced from individual experience. For example, when Bellicent demands to know the “truth” about Arthur’s birth in the “The Coming of Arthur,” Merlin answers her with the elliptical triplets: Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky! A young man will be wiser by and by: An old man’s wits may wander ere he die. Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea! And truth is this to me, and that to thee; And truth clothed or naked let it be. Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows: Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes. (ll. 402–410) These lines offer in veiled form an indirect prophecy of the course of Arthur’s kingdom and the pattern of all life. The first line of the riddle presents a progressive view of the natural phenomena—and, by extension, of history—similar to that implied by Merlin’s sculpture in which men rise above beasts and eventually above the earth itself. The second line of that same stanza, however, qualifies such optimism: young men may grow wiser but they will eventually return to a child-like state in old

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age. Progress is, at best, cyclic. The second stanza addresses the issue of perception from another angle. The same set of phenomena, “rain, rain, and sun “that produce the rainbow in the sky in stanza one here yield a different result, “the rainbow on the lea.” Cause and effect are as problematic as the progressive view of history; there is not a unique correlation between stimulus and response. Truth, as Merlin says, “is this to me, and that to thee” not because it is relative but because the human capacity to perceive truth is restricted by the individual’s mental “framework and chord.”30 The final stanza offers a cyclic view of nature and human life within which there is both variation (as stanzas two and three reveal, the cycle itself can take at least two different forms) and mystery (who is the “he” who knows? what is “the great deep”?). Because the riddle does not provide easily understood answers to her question, Bellicent is angered by Merlin’s response. But Merlin, like an oracle, uses riddles to suggest verities that are difficult for the human mind to grasp; his perplexing and elusive utterances force the individual hearer to evolve the truth of them for himself. Despite her anger at Merlin’s indirection, Bellicent herself affirms the value of an elliptical art which engages the imagination while offering tantalizing glimmers of a reality beyond human experience: …so great bards of him will sing Hereafter; and dark sayings from of old Ranging and ringing through the minds of men, And echoed by old folk beside their fires For comfort after their wage-work is done, Speak of the king; and Merlin in our time Hath spoken also, not in jest (ll. 413–419) Such “dark sayings” from the bard who sees beyond time empower their hearers to do the same. The verb tenses in this passage, as J.M.Gray has noted,31 testify to Arthur’s “time-transcending divinity.” He will be sung about in the future, he has been in the past, and he is spoken of in the present. All of these temporal dimensions meet in the verb “speak” (l. 418), which is the literary present tense referring to the continued existence of the “dark sayings from of old,” but which also carries with it the implied “will” of the first part of the clause. In “Gareth and Lynette,” Merlin offers a similarly veiled riddling answer to the queries of Gareth, another seeker of literal truth. When the naïve Gareth asks whether Camelot is real or visionary, Merlin “plays on him” by forcing him to question simple assumptions of what is “real.” Merlin then characterizes Camelot in a paradoxical statement: it is “building still” (in progress), “built to music” (completed in the present as an aesthetic creation), “never built at all” (timeless, never to be completed in history), and thus “built for ever” (an enduring ideal). Like Bellicent, Gareth is angered at what he regards as Merlin’s mockery and evasiveness; again Merlin uses a riddle to “teach” the uninitiated:

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But the Seer replied, “Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards? ‘Confusion, and illusion, and relation, Elusion, and occasion, and evasion’”? (ll. 279–282) The words “confusion,” “illusion,” “elusion” suggest the unreliability of the surface of reality, the perils involved in perception of the truth. “Relation,” “evasion,” and “occasion” (in the sense of that which gives rise to something else) have to do with the problem of making connections, of establishing logical or causal relationships. Like the earlier “Rain, rain, and sun,” this rhyme treats the difficulty of drawing conclusions about, or of forming a pattern of meaning from, the data of the senses. In this unreliable world what, then, can be trusted? The words of the bard, particularly the bard who has made all the peaks of Camelot “spire to heaven” (glossed by Tennyson in his notes as “symbolizing the divine,” Ricks, p. 1492n)? In the 1872 “The Last Tournament” (ll. 131–133) and an 1873 addition to “The Passing of Arthur” (ll. 444–445), Merlin’s gnomic statement about Arthur, “from the great deep to the great deep he goes,” acquires the status of eternal, indisputable truth. In the former case it flashes into Guinevere’s mind as she watches the king depart and presages the action of the next two idylls. In the latter instance, Merlin’s words echo in Bedivere’s mind as he watches the departure of the mortally wounded king. The riddle, suggestive of a cyclic process of departure and return, consoles the despondent Bedivere, who has just exclaimed, “The King is gone”; moreover, it seems to catalyze him into action: he ascends the crag “even to the highest he could climb” in order to catch a further glimpse of Arthur. The words of the bard cannot “shake society” and change the course of history as they did in 1830, but they can at least offer consolation to the despairing individual and keep alive the hope that the future may bring with it a revivication of the ideal. III In Tennyson’s late poetry, the fiery prophet/bard has indisputably become the religious teacher. For instance, “The Dead Prophet” (1882–83), which may be a tribute to Carlyle (Ricks, pp. 1322–23), uses an image similar to the one employed in the Idylls: the prophet’s function is to lift men “out of the slime” and to show them that “souls have wings” (ll. 11–12). Tiresias, the prophet figure who had been on Tennyson’s mind since 1833 (although the poem bearing his name was not published until 1885), resembles Merlin in possessing a future vision which brings pain and which isolates him from his fellow creatures. Like Merlin, Tiresias finds that he must pay a high price for his “gift”; as he explains to Menoeceus: …upon me flashed The power of prophesying—but to me

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No power—so chained and coupled with the curse Of blindness and their unbelief, who heard And heard not, when I spake of famine, plague, Shrine-shattering earthquake, fire, flood, thunderbolt ................................................................. This power hath worked no good to aught that lives, And these blind hands were useless in their wars (ll. 55–60; 76–77) Despite his sense of impotence and despite the fact that society rejects him, however, Tiresias does not, like Merlin, abandon his public role. Instead, he uses his privileged knowledge to teach Menoeceus his duty, thus effecting the salvation of Thebes. Similarly, the dying Merlin of “Merlin and the Gleam” (1889) addresses himself to a younger male who is capable of significant action; the young mariner is exhorted to take up the old visionary’s quest and “follow the Gleam,” or “the higher poetic imagination” (Ricks, p. 1413). Finally, “The Ancient Sage” (1889) engages in a dialogue with a despairing young lyricist whom he urges to “help thy fellow men,” “curb the beast” in himself, and “look Higher” for the spiritual truth that transcends human understanding. The prophet’s sphere of influence has narrowed from the whole society to the individual, and his message has become almost exclusively moral and spiritual as the “chair” of the bard has been replaced by the podium of the teacher. This complex, highly literary and traditional figure of the prophet/bard bestrides fifty years of Tennyson’s poetry like a colossus, expressing some of his most fundamental aesthetic concerns. That the character of Merlin as he evolves in the Idylls should embody various stages of Tennyson’s thought about the dangers of visionary art, the function of the contemporary artist, and the potency of his words is not surprising. After all, as Tennyson wrote in 1889: I am Merlin, And I am dying. I am Merlin Who follow The Gleam.32 (“Merlin and the Gleam,” ll. 7–10) Notes Reprinted with permission from Victorian Newsletter 57 (1980), pp. 14–23. 1. William Brashear, The Living Will: A Study of Tennyson and Nineteenth Century Subjectivism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 132, calls Merlin “the creative imagination, being seduced by the forces of chaos and nature”; Fred Kaplan, “‘Woven Paces and Waving Hands’: Tennyson’s Merlin as Fallen Artist,” Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), pp. 286–98, sees Merlin as an artist destroyed by his Romantic imagination as represented by Vivien; Gordon Haight, “Tennyson’s Merlin,” Studies in Philology, 44 (1947), pp. 549–566, identifies Tennyson with

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2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Merlin; and A.Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 214–241, argues that Merlin’s seduction is Tennyson’s seduction away from his youthful ideals to the writing of “tender rhymes” like Vivien’s. All textual quotations are taken from Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969). Hereinafter cited as Poems. Henry Kozicki, “Philosophy of History in Tennyson’s Poetry to the 1842 Poems,” English Literary History, 42 (1975), pp. 88–90. Elizabeth A.Francis, “Tennyson’s Political Poetry, 1852–55,” Victorian Poetry, 14 (1976), pp. 113–123, relates the prophetic voice in Tennyson’s early verse to the personae of his political poems: “Tennyson’s public voice, early and late, is one of declaration, exclamation, and authority through which the poet celebrates himself, vicariously, in celebrating or deploring a cause.” Ricks, Poems, p. 500n. Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976), p. 216. Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 156. Helio-Arkite mythology propounded by Jacob Bryant and George Stanley Faber reduced all pagan mythology to a basic paradigm which was a corruption of the patriarchal religion. The “Great Father,” the sun god, died yearly, was put into a boat or an ark, and was cast out to sea as a prelude to his resurrection. On Tennyson’s knowledge of this mythology, see W.D.Paden, Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery of His Earlier Works (Lawrence, Kansas: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1942), and Catherine Barnes Stevenson, “Tennyson’s Dying Swans: Mythology and the Poet’s Role,” Studies in English Literature, 20 (Autumn 1980), pp. 621– 36. Henry Kozicki, “A Dialectic of History in Tennyson’s Idylls” Victorian Studies, 20 (1977), p. 145, cites Davies’ influence on Tennyson, as does Hugh Wilson, “Tennyson: Unscholarly Arthurian,” Victorian Newsletter, 32 (1967), pp. 5–11. For a reply to Wilson and a discussion of sources of the Arthurian material available to Tennyson, see P.G.Scott, “Tennyson’s Celtic Reading,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, 2 (1968). J.M.Gray, Man and Myth in Victorian England: Tennysons The Coming of Arthur. Tennyson Society Monograph, No. 51 (Lincoln: Tennyson Research Society, 1969), also discusses Tennyson’s use of Celtic materials. Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London: J.Booth, 1809), p. 57. Ibid., p. 467. Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons (London: Longman, 1823), I, 72, claims that the Druids were “so honoured, that they decided almost all the public and private controversies and all causes” and that bards were branches of the Druids. Tennyson owned the 1807 edition of Turner’s work. Edward B.Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), p. 68. Ibid. J.M.S.Tompkins, “In Yonder Grave a Druid Lies,” Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), p. 14. Ibid., p. 2. Tennyson owned the 1853 edition of Madoc in which Southey speaks of the bards as inheritors of the lore of the Druids and as preservers of “the hidden wisdom of the years of old.” In this poem of the novice bard Caradoc sings an elliptical song about the mysterious fate of Merlin:

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…in his crystal Ark, Whither sailed Merlin with his band of Bards, Old Merlin, master of the mystic lore? Belike his crystal Ark, instinct with life Obedient to the mighty master, reached The land of the departed; there, belike They in clime of immortality, Drink the gales of bliss. (p. 22) He was also familiar with Carlyle’s notion that the vates, the poet-prophet, knows “the divine mystery” and “is sent hither to make it more impressively known to us,” Works, ed. H.D.Traill (London, 1896), V. 80–81, and with the stirring conclusion to “A Defense of Poetry” in which Shelley says that poets are “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present….” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E.Peck (New York: Gordian, 1965), VIII, p. 140. 17. In the opening stanza of “Suggested by Reading an Article” and in the letter to the editor of The Examiner which accompanied this poem, Tennyson praised the style of his own anonymously published works, “The Third of February” and “Hands All Round.” 18. Davies, p. 468. 19. Ricks, Poems, p. 1095 n. 20. John Reed, Perception and Design in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (Athens, Ohio: Univ. of Ohio Press, 1969), p. 54, sees Merlin as a type of intellect deprived of intuition and faith and reads the idyll as an allegory: “the besieged intellect is undone by a traitorous will that longs for the peace that surrender will bring.” 21. John Rosenberg, The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennysons “Idylls of the King” (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), p. 138, points to the parallelism of gesture as part of a larger pattern of correlations and transformations of phrases, characters, and actions in the Idylls. 22. Lawrence Poston III, “The Two Provinces of Tennyson’s Idylls” Criticism, 9 (1965), pp. 377– 78, argues that Merlin’s surrender is a withdrawal into a Palace of Art, an “entrapment by his own desire for beauty.” I would add to this that Merlin’s desire for beauty emerges under the pressure of the special vision given to the vates. 23. Edgar F. Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of His Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics on His Poetry, 1827–51 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 401, points out that Tennyson’s war philosophy, which drew the most hostile criticism from the reviewers of Maud, was most often regarded as “the poet’s own philosophy.” According to Shannon, the poem received more unfavorable than favorable reviews. The Christian Remembrancer, for example, queried: “What poem…was ever received with a louder outcry than ‘Maud’— with such regret, despair, even contempt?” (April 1856). For parodies of the social philosophy of Maud, see Punch, August 18, 1855, and November 3, 1855. 24. Jerome H.Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 162. 25. Algernon Herbert, Britannia After the Romans (London: Henry G.Bohn, 1836), p. 94. Herbert believed that the Druidic bards were actually priests who preserved in a Christian age “the errors, superstitions, and vile practices” of the pagans (p. xliv). He argues that

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26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Taliesin’s poem “The Throne or Royal Chair” is a veiled account of Arthur’s initiation into pagan mysteries. Davies, p. 21. A book that Tennyson might have known, Barddas by John Williams ab Ithel (London: Longman, 1862), p. lxxi, offers a slightly different, but nonetheless congruent, explanation of “the chair”: the Round Table was “an arrangement of the arts, sciences, usages, and privileges of the Bards and men of vocal song.” Thus it was the “chair” of the two Merddins, Taliesin, St. Mabon, and others. W.D.Nash, Merlin the Enchanter, Merlin the Bard, in Merlin, or the Early History of King Arthur, The Early English Text Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, 1899; rpt. New York: Greenwood Publications, 1969), 1. It is impossible to reproduce here the debate that raged among the students of Arthurian tradition about three figures: Aurelius Ambrosius, a prophetic child and king; Merlin Emrys, the enchanter and contemporary of Arthur; and Merlin Wyllt, Silvestris, or Caledonius, an historical Welsh bard. At the heart of this controversy are these issues: was Merlin the enchanter a historical personage? was he a Christian or a pagan? was he in some sense confused with Aurelius Ambrosius or with Arthur? Davies tries to resolve these issues by arguing for the latter position. See also, Robert D.Hume and Toby Olshin, “Ambrosius in ‘The Holy Grail’: Source and Function,” Notes & Queries, 16 (1969), pp. 208–09. Quoted by Nash, p. viii. Davies, pp. 75–77. See also J.M.Gray, who analyzes these triplets and discusses Davies’ influence on Tennyson in Man and Myth. Poston offers an important aesthetic reading of this riddle: “Art is a form of speaking by indirection. It creates an illusory world which is regulated by its own laws, in effect an ‘evasion’ of material reality, and yet it also requires ‘relation’: the awareness of an aesthetic order within the work and a definable relationship between the work and the reality it portrays,” p. 281. Gray, p. 423. I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers (1977–78) which supported this research and Prof. David De Laura for his encouragement and good counsel.

CHAPTER 16 Illusion and Relation: Merlin as Image of the Artist in Tennyson, Doré, Burne-Jones, and Beardsley LINDA K.HUGHES

In 1872, late in the course of publishing Idylls of the King (1859–85), Tennyson announced the aesthetic method of his Idylls in “Gareth and Lynette,” and when Tennyson did so, his mouthpiece was Merlin: “‘Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards? / “Confusion, and illusion, and relation,/Elusion, and occasion, and evasion’”?” (280–82).1 The lines comment on the Idylls’ linking device of intricate but oblique parallels and the poem’s indirect “parabolic drift” (A.Tennyson 3:258). That Merlin pronounces the lines suggests a “relation” between Merlin and the figure of the poet, as has often been noted (see, for example, Kaplan). But in the figure of Merlin Tennyson also provided an “illusion”; that is, Tennyson provided a verbal and also a striking visual image of the mage. His Merlin is venerable and ancient, with white flowing beard, and is not only bard but also scientist, architect, and artist. Merlin’s alignment with the artist figure and his existence as a visual image provide the impetus for this essay, for I propose to trace the interplay (“relation”) between visual (“illusion”) and verbal approaches to Merlin in the work of Tennyson, Gustave Doré, Edward Burne-Jones, and Aubrey Beardsley. The adaptations, translations, and metamorphoses of Merlin in this interplay are significant in two ways. First, these visual and verbal depictions of Merlin demonstrate the degree to which, for nineteenth-century artists, Merlin became a resonant personal symbol that tapped and expressed their deepest aspirations and ambivalences about their vocations as artists. Second, because these images of Merlin were also public images, they serve as a touchstone for the age’s concept of the artist’s role in society. In Tennyson a figure of power and wisdom who, if doomed, can work for the good of all society, Merlin gradually becomes ever more withdrawn and self-contemplating in the work of Burne-Jones and Beardsley. From his earliest days Tennyson had known the Morte Darthur, asserting that “when… little more than a boy…I first lighted upon Malory” (H.Tennyson 2:128; see also Martin 36). Malory offers few descriptive details of Merlin, who, in the Morte, is identified by his function more than by a distinctive physical embodiment. We know that Merlin is mage, seer, counselor, and engineer of sorts (for example, he causes a wondrous bridge to be built in the tale of Balin); but because of Merlin’s penchant for disguise, it is difficult to extract a precise visual image of Merlin from Malory’s text. Merlin once appears as an eighty-year-old man, but immediately before this materialization he appears as a fourteen-year-old child (Malory 20–21).

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The first lines Tennyson ever devoted to Merlin—in a fragment around 1830 and never published in Tennyson’s lifetime—present a Merlin indebted to Malory, especially to the delight Merlin takes, in the Morte Darthur, in teasing Arthur and others through his disguises. Despite the absence of visual cues in Malory, however, Tennyson from the beginning envisioned Merlin as an ancient man with a long, flowing white beard. This first attempt at characterizing Merlin gives us a wizard quite different from the Merlin of the Idylls;2 rather than a magnificent figure of compelling power, this Merlin is a caricature of old age: They [Lancelot and Guinevere] came on one that rode alone, Astride upon a lob-eared roan, Wherefrom stood out the staring bone, The wizard Merlin wise and gray. His shanks were thin as legs of pies, The bloom that on an apple dries Burnt underneath his catlike eyes That twinkled everyway. High brows above a little face Had Merlin—these in every place Ten million lines did cross and lace; Slow as the shadow was his pace, The shade that creeps from dawn to dusk. From cheek and mouth and throat a load Of beard—a hundred winters snowed Upon the pummel as he rode Thin as a spider’s husk. (A.Tennyson 1:547n.) Merlin may be “wise and gray,” ay,” but he is also ridiculously thin, dry, and wrinkled, and he suggests mischief, with his “catlike eyes/That twinkled,” more than he suggests magic. We are aware above all of Merlin’s littleness, epitomized in the “little face” overpowered by a huge beard. Merlin is here neither an artist-figure nor a personal symbol of the poet. Why is Merlin so trivialized, and what accounts for the radical change between this Merlin and the one of 1859? The most immediate reason for Merlin’s trivialization is the poem into which Tennyson once thought of incorporating the lines on Merlin, “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” (published with the subtitle “A Fragment” in 1842). The published fragment glorifies Lancelot and Guinevere’s glamour and passion, and the apparent function of the lines which emphasize Merlin’s rather doddering old age is to give an excuse to lovers whose youth cannot last. J.M.Kemble, a college friend of Tennyson’s, wrote to W.B. Donne on 22 June 1833 about “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.” In the letter Kemble speaks of Merlin as a figure with “a forehead like a mundane egg,” and gives this allegorical interpretation of his character: “Merlin, who tropically is Worldly Prudence, is of course miserably floored” (A.Tennyson 1:545).

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A second explanation for Merlin’s trivialization may lie in a plan Tennyson projected for an Arthurian epic around 1833, approximately the same date of composition as the Merlin fragment. Tennyson’s notes on this plan allot to Merlin a narrowly allegorical significance: “Merlin Emrys, the enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred” (H.Tennyson 2:123). Tennyson was never an antagonist to science; as he writes in In Memoriam, “Let knowledge grow from more to more” (Prologue 25). However, he was ambivalent about the implications of certain scientific discoveries, and particularly distrusted the exclusively empirical, materialist epistemology that underlay the practice of science. Perhaps the dryness of the scientific method unleavened by emotional, intuitive, and spiritual bases for knowing accounts for the dryness of Merlin in the above fragment. More disturbing in the projected epic is the detail that Merlin betroths his daughter to Modred. Tennyson here suggests that science misused can become the ally of anarchy and evil. If in the 1830s Merlin was associated, in Tennyson’s mind, with such an unholy alliance, then the young poet’s trivializing of the famous magician is understandable. How Tennyson moved from the 1830 to the 1859 Merlin, who becomes an emblem of the poet himself, cannot of course be explained with certainty. A simple but important reason is surely Tennyson’s evolving poetic sensibility, and the greater ease with which a poet nearly fifty years old could identify with a “gray” wizard, as opposed to the youth barely more than twenty. Tennyson’s wide reading in Arthurian material prior to writing the Idylls would also have broadened his conception of Merlin and presumably would have underscored Merlin’s bardic associations.3 As for the evolving visual image of Tennyson’s Merlin, a possible source of the change may be the self-portrait of a Merlinesque artist himself, Leonardo da Vinci. Wallace J.Tomasini, former Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa and an expert on Leonardo, has remarked that Leonardo’s selfportrait seems to have provided the dominant image of Merlin in the nineteenth century. Certainly the connection Tomasini draws is suggestive, for in Leonardo’s self-portrait housed in the Royal Library in Turin (Figure 1), we might be seeing Tennyson’s own Merlin. Both have the same wise but melancholy eyes we expect in a mage who foreknows his own doom; “eyebrow bushes” which form “A snowy penthouse for his hollow eyes” (“Merlin and Vivien” 805–6); and “The vast and shaggy mantle of [a] beard,” “the hoary fell/And many-wintered fleece of throat and chin” (254, 838–39). Moreover, there is an intriguing congruence between the historical Leonardo in his astonishing range of knowledge, creativity, and power, and the tradition of Merlin. Leonardo, of course, is famous for his mastery of all the arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry—and his dual mastery of the sciences, including mathematics, engineering, anatomy, and astronomy. These achievements were well known to Victorian readers. Henry Hallam, father of the Arthur whose death inspired Tennyson’s 1842 “Morte d’Arthur” and the later In Memoriam, included the following passage on Leonardo in the Introduction to the Literature of Europe:

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Fig. 16.1 Leonardo da Vinci. Self Portrait. Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy.

his unpublished writings…, according at least to our common estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Maestlin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci, within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge…. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of Leonardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century,

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which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record. (1:222– 23) And later Hallam remarks on da Vinci’s involvement with “several great works of engineering[, so] wonderful was the variety of power in this miracle of nature” (1: 255n.). Similarly, Tennyson describes his 1859 Merlin as the most famous man of all those times, Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts, Had built the King his havens, ships, and halls, Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens; The people called him Wizard. (“Merlin and Vivien” 164–68) And just as Leonardo, according to Vasari, was “the best reciter of improvised rhymes of his time” (2:160), so Merlin practices “the Riddling of the Bards” (“Gareth and Lynette” 280), answering Gareth’s or his mother Bellicent’s misplaced questions with oblique rhymes that seem spontaneously devised. Both Leonardo and Merlin even have secret texts which only they can read. Leonardo kept anatomical notebooks in which “he wrote notes in curious characters, using his left hand, and writing from right to left, so that [they] cannot be read without practice, and only at a mirror” (Vasari 2:163), while Merlin inherited the text of a mage who had unlocked the secrets of nature and the charm of everlasting imprisonment, a text “Writ in a language that has long gone by,” with “every margin scribbled, crost, and crammed/ With comment, densest condensation,” and of which “none can read the text, not even I;/And none can read the comment but myself;/And in the comment did I find the charm” (“Merlin and Vivien” 672, 675–76, 679–81).4 Whatever the underlying causes, by 1859 Tennyson’s Merlin was no longer a withered and fey little wizard, but a grand and majestic presence, the Idylls’ premier artist figure. As such, Merlin is also a figure that serves as a ready conduit for Tennyson to represent his vocation and his performance within it. As noted at the outset of this essay, Merlin practices the same technique of indirection in his riddling triplets that Tennyson himself did in the Idylls and elsewhere; and just as Merlin says to Bellicent, “‘truth is this to me, and that to thee;/And truth or clothed or naked let it be’” (“Coming of Arthur” 406–7), so in propria persona Tennyson said regarding the Idylls that “‘Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet’” (H.Tennyson 2:127).

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Merlin’s remarks on fame and public report also resonate with Tennyson’s own sense of personal frustration and weariness in the wake of hostile attacks on Maud, which had appeared in 1855: Use gave me Fame at first, and Fame again Increasing gave me use. Lo, there my boon! What other? for men sought to prove me vile, Because I fain had given them greater wits: ............................................................ Sweet were the days when I was all unknown, But when my name was lifted up, the storm Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it. Right well know I that Fame is half-disfame, Yet needs must work my work. (“Merlin and Vivien” 491–94, 499–503)5 In these, the most closely autobiographical lines of the idyll, the central image is of a storm breaking on the mountain, just as a storm builds, breaks, and passes in the idyll itself, at which point Merlin has been imprisoned and lost to the world forever. In this respect, perhaps Vivien’s seduction of Merlin represents the poet’s potential seduction by a fickle public, deaf to the spirit, who can flatter and then banish the poet at whim.6 The poet is doomed if he believes the flattery instead of “working his work.” But if the figure of Merlin enables Tennyson obliquely to vent private frustrations, Merlin also represents Tennyson’s conception of the public role of the artist, a role heroic but increasingly threatened with doom. Merlin is literally a prophet, foretelling Arthur’s second coming (“Coming of Arthur” 418–21), and foreseeing his own and the kingdom’s destruction (“Merlin and Vivien” 289–302). But he is a prophet in the poetic sense as well in his ability to see through and beyond nature to the spiritual reality residing behind it. Thus he berates those who judge all nature from her feet of clay, Without the will to lift their eyes, and see Her godlike head crowned with spiritual fire, And touching other worlds. (“Merlin and Vivien” 833–36; Because of this transcendent knowledge by which Merlin sees the proper relation of sense and soul, Merlin is also able to play an active social role in shaping and guiding the kingdom; his “vast wit/And hundred winters are but as the hands/Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege” (“Coming of Arthur” 279–81). But he is also threatened, and doomed. If Merlin is a vital and compelling model in the exercise of his power, he is a warning to the age and its artists in his surrender of power to the seductive Vivien. Within Tennyson’s design of the Idylls as a parable

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“shadowing Sense at war with Soul” (“To the Queen” 37), Merlin’s fall is the surrender of the soul to the allures of the fleshly senses. But this surrender is never absolute; shortly before his fall Merlin sees clearly that Vivien is a harlot (“Merlin and Vivien” 810–20).7 Rather, his fatal weakness is mere weariness. In a neat reversal of Malory’s tale, where Nimue imprisons Merlin because she tires of his insistent attempts at seduction, in Tennyson it is Merlin who says, “‘I am weary of her’” (“Merlin and Vivien” 836). And in the end his weariness undoes him: “For Merlin, overtalked and overworn,/Had yielded, told her all the charm, and slept” (“Merlin and Vivien” 963–64). The greatest threat to the artist, Tennyson implies, is tiring of the repeated attempts of natures and visions lower than his own to bring him down to their level. The reign of Tennyson’s heroic artist ends not in cataclysm but banality, as Merlin, too tired to answer to the imperatives of a heroic vision, gives in to the triviality and spiritual obtuseness that surround him. Thus, as an index of the conception of the artist, Tennyson’s Merlin at once emphasizes the artist’s heroic powers in the service of society, and the forces arrayed against those powers, forces which, if unchecked, will inevitably undo them. Both Debra Mancoff (“Visual” 603) and David Staines (“Tennyson” 547–48) note Tennyson’s influence on Arthurian painting and illustration in England fol-lowing the Idylls’ publication.8 John Dixon Hunt further observes that “The debt of Victorian artists to Tennyson’s poetry seems to indicate the scope it offered for their painterly structures. And the poetry in its turn was obviously shaped in part by a painterly instinct” (180). If, as Tomasini proposes, the “painterly instinct” which informed Tennyson’s Merlin in the Idylls owed something to Leonardo da Vinci, it is particularly interesting to see how visual artists subsequent to the publication of “Merlin and Vivien” in 1859 approached the image of Merlin. Between Tennyson and the first of these artists I wish to discuss, Gustave Doré, a direct connection exists. Doré was commissioned to illustrate Tennyson’s Idylls by Moxon, Tennyson’s publisher, and his first assignment was “Merlin and Vivien,” which appeared in 1867. Though Doré was fascinated by the grotesque, his illustrations of Dante and the Bible demonstrate his equal preoccupation with the sublime and romantic. The latter qualities predominate in his illustrations for “Merlin and Vivien.” Dropping, with one exception, Tennyson’s focus on Merlin’s doom, Doré depicts a Merlin wholly heroic —and suggestively Leonardian (Figure 2).9 In this opening illustration to line 5 of Tennyson’s idyll, Merlin shares the same massive presence, flowing hair and beard, and wisdom of the laureate’s mage; his bardic status is underscored by the addition of a laurel wreath to his head. Of equal interest is the illustration’s focus. Though he must vie for attention with the overwhelming and brooding presence of nature (a recurrent feature of Doré’s work), Merlin is the real center of focus. He looms over Vivien and seems to instruct an adoring neophyte rather than listen to a siren. The next two illustrations of the idyll also show Merlin elevated over Vivien and leading her (Figures 3 and 4).10 The centrality of Merlin in these illustrations underscores Doré’s approach to Merlin as an heroic artist figure. Merlin leads or instructs and is highly romanticized, while Vivien is subordinate at best and at worst, as in the idyll’s opening illustration, poorly drawn and even ugly.11 One can hardly

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Fig. 16.2 Gustave Doré. Vivien and Merlin Repose. “At Merlin’s feet the wily Vivien lay.” Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

believe that this Merlin will succumb to Vivien’s (dubious) charms, or that Vivien has power enough to beguile the great wizard. This emphasis on Merlin to the neglect of Vivien is all the more striking because it is a clear departure from Tennyson’s text, in which Vivien is given approximately the same number of speaking lines as Merlin. The power and centrality of Merlin were sustained in Doré’s later drawings for the Idylls. In the frontispiece Doré designed for the volume he illustrated (Figure 5), Merlin, once again crowned with vine leaves, is the compositional balance to Arthur himself—as if to say that the powers represented by Merlin form a necessary complement to those of the realm’s secular leader. Vivien, not even fully visible, crouches at Merlin’s feet once more. Only Merlin’s downcast eyes and the

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Fig. 16.3 Gustave Doré. Vivien and Merlin Disembark. “And touching Breton sands, they disembark’d.” Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

positioning of his body away from the viewer (the only such figure in the illustration) suggest his ultimate eclipse in the idyll itself. But the suggestions of doom are firmly subordinated to the suggestions of artistic power, since Merlin visually parallels Tennyson as the poet is shown in the central roundel of the frontispiece: both figures, aligned in the same diagonal plane, are bearded and are shown in three-quarter profile.12 In keeping with Doré’s response to the powers of Merlin rather than to the powers of his seducer, Doré’s Merlin is still grand even at the moment of his downfall and entombment (Figure 6). He is not dead or literally laid low, and Vivien is still placed

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Fig. 16.4 Gustave Doré. Vivien and Merlin Enter The Woods. “And then she follow’d Merlin all the way, Ev’n to the wild woods of Broceliande.” Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

at a lower level within the illustration than he; he is simply immobilized and unable to move, forced to look down at the ground rather than at Vivien. Vivien’s triumph is indicated, to be sure, but qualified. As Merlin (Figures 3 and 4) earlier looked back at Vivien, so now she looks back at him, but in the process of fleeing rather than leading. Additionally, Vivien’s association with the serpent, so pervasive in Tennyson’s idyll, is imprinted on the landscape as if to echo her triumph: the boughs and branches of the fallen (presumably oak) tree writhe and entwine, and the small branch closest to Merlin looks like a literal snake moving toward him. This writhing

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Fig. 16.5 Gustave Doré. Frontispiece, Idylls of the King. Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

motion suggests the after-effects of the storm in Tennyson’s idyll; but it also implies nature’s protest at a heinous crime committed. Indeed, the large lopped limb in the left foreground culminates in branches shaped like jaws, and aimed at Vivien as if to snap at or devour her if doing so were possible. Nature’s sympathy with Merlin, rather than with Vivien, is also suggested in a careful echo of Figure 2. There the huge tree against which Merlin rested, and with which he seemed identified, had the same coiling limbs and roots, but was massive and upright. In the entombment scene the same tree’s roots are torn and the tree itself is toppled, appearing to have been ripped out of the ground in an act of baleful violence.

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Fig. 16.6 Gustave Doré. Vivien Encloses Merlin in the Tree. “For Merlin, overtalk’d and overworn, had yielded, told her all the charm, and slept.” Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

Insofar as Doré’s image of Merlin is a public image of the artist, then, Merlin is wise, majestic, powerful and allied with nature, perhaps gifted with power over it. He is the Romantic artist par excellence. Yet for Doré, too, the figure of Merlin carries a highly charged personal statement of the artist as well.13 Doré’s lifelong frustration was his failure to gain recognition as a great painter rather than as a gifted and popular illustrator. As Doré in later life lamented, “Long ago it was foretold that painting would bring despair into my life…. [The prophecy] has been terribly realised” (Jerrold 241).

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It is interesting to note, accordingly, that he seized on lines in Tennyson’s idyll which most readers pass over entirely and made these lines the basis for one of his finest depictions of Merlin. Tennyson’s Merlin, attempting to explain the proper relation between use and fame, tells how he came upon a young squire painting an eagle on his shield and the motto, “‘I follow fame.’” In response, Merlin took his brush and blotted out the bird, And made a Gardener putting in a graff, With this for motto, “Rather use than fame.” (“Merlin and Vivien” 474–78) The result, in Doré (Figure 7), was this illustration of Merlin the painter, a figure that seems distinctly Leonardian. Only in this illustration has Doré incorporated the “eyebrow brushes” of Tennyson’s Merlin, of the sort also found in Leonardo’s Turin self-portrait; and particularly because Merlin is in the act of painting, the illustration lends strength to Tomasini’s assertion that Leonardo’s self-portrait inspired the image of Merlin in the nineteenth century. The illustration breathes an atmosphere of plenitude (note the leaves in their full summer foliage, and the vegetation of the foreground), serenity, happiness, and quiet fulfillment as Merlin, at the very center, is wholly absorbed (like the squire, his immediate audience) in the results of his painter’s brush. The subject, hardly central to Tennyson’s poem, suggests that the illustration served as a form of wish-fulfillment for Doré. Merlin here is the artist Doré always wished to become, and the element of wish-fulfillment may explain the illustration’s edenic quality. To the degree, therefore, that Merlin functions as both private and public image of the artist in the work of Doré, he is an image of power and aspiration. Far otherwise is the Merlin of Edward Burne-Jones, always noted for his languorous, androgynous male figures. The difference between the Merlins of BurneJones and those of Tennyson and Doré is not due, however, to Burne-Jones’ opposition to Tennyson’s poetics. Burne-Jones was in fact a profound admirer of Tennyson. In 1853, during his student days at Oxford, he wrote to his lifelong friend William Morris, “I am well pleased that our taste in poetics is concurrent. If Tennyson afford you as many hours of unmitigated happiness—I speak without affectation here—as he has to me, you will look with gratitude to any who helped you to appreciate him. When I take up the works of any other poet, save Shakespeare only, I seem to have fallen from the only guide worth following far into dreamland” (Burne-Jones 1:76).14 The shared tastes of Burne-Jones and Tennyson are evident as well in the rather lengthy list of shared subjects to which they devoted their respective arts. Besides Arthurian subjects in general, they devoted pictures and poems to the Hesperides, Sleeping Beauty, Fatima, the Fair Rosamond, and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.15 But Burne-Jones responded to selective elements of Tennyson, appreciating him as artist, as a Lady of Shalott figure weaving beautiful tapestries of language, only so long as he remained aloof from the public world of Victorian England. Thus “Tears, Idle

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Fig. 16.7 Gustave Doré. Merlin Paints the Young Knight’s Shield. “And speaking not, but leaning over him, I took his brush and blotted out the bird.” Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

Tears” was dear to the painter as a poem that embodied the feeling of “Sighing After the Infinite,” giving “voice and form to what were otherwise painfully ineffable”; but he considered Idylls of the King a poem in which Tennyson had given the Victorian public “what they wanted” (Burne-Jones 1:76, 182). When Tennyson stood forth as a Victorian poet-prophet, Burne-Jones remained seated. And if Burne-Jones loved Tennyson, he loved Malory more. In 1855, according to Georgiana Burne-Jones, Morris and Burne-Jones discovered Southey’s edition of the

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Morte Darthur, “and,” she adds, “sometimes I think that the book never can have been loved as it was by those two men. With Edward it became literally a part of himself” (1:116).16 His 1861 watercolor entitled Enchantment of Nimue (Figure 8), then, is homage to Malory, part of whose text was quoted on the painting’s frame (Scherer 33–34). This painting was not Burne-Jones’ first treatment of the subject; earlier he had tried his hand at rendering Merlin’s imprisonment beneath the stone as part of the ill-conceived Oxford Union murals in 1857. But as the murals began to fade shortly after their execution due to the painters’ ignorance of proper technique, the 1861 watercolor is the first important image of Merlin we have from Burne-Jones. Though painted after Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” appeared, Enchantment of Nimue differs entirely from Tennyson’s approach to the story. No wily Vivien appears in the watercolor, nor is Merlin a grand old man. Rather, follow-ing Malory, BurneJones presents the fair damsel Nimue so wearied by Merlin’s insistent attempts at seduction that she works the fatal spell on him to escape. Nimue, in fact, is the central figure of the painting. Burne-Jones does take care to create a compositional relationship between the two figures: the colors of their robes are carefully harmonized, and the positionings of their hands form a visual parallel—except that Nimue, now in control, clutches Merlin’s book, while he, in the throes of the spell, clutches at his heart and throat. But the fair-haired Nimue (painted from the blonde Fanny Cornforth, also Rossetti’s model [Fitzgerald 83]),17 occupies the foreground, her sumptuous robes bil-lowing out to conquer additional space; and her lovely face is sharply delineated to show a slight backward glance, not of hatred, but of wary apprehension and melancholy resignation. Merlin, by contrast, as in the 1830s verse fragment by Tennyson, hardly seems a point of identification for the artist. He is consigned to the middle ground of the picture, looking frail and small compared to the blossoming Nimue, and his features are not sharply clear but blurred, as if he were fading away before our eyes. This dematerialization is echoed in the landscape itself, which has often been praised. In 1893 an anonymous article in the Atheneum averred, “the poetry of the drawing is most clearly manifest in the background, a weird landscape closed by gloomy purple hills, of which the ridges are sharply defined against the pallid gold of the sunset behind them, while evening shadows creep towards us over the vale and magic lake at its foot” (“New” 58). Shadows creep over the landscape to signal the eclipse of the wizard (just as, perhaps, the crowning gold of the sky may be an insignia for Nimue’s triumph, since it echoes the crowning gold of her hair); but Merlin, unlike Nimue and the rising stone of his prison, casts no shadow, drained of his material existence in the world already. Merlin’s slightness is underscored in a final way. If his dignity is lessened by his physical frailty, it is absolutely compromised by the absurd little dog on his left, who tugs at his mantle and is the lowly figure that completes the curve drawn across Merlin’s body. Perhaps Burne-Jones was prompted to this last, quaint detail by Merlin’s prophecy in the Morte that he will die a shameful death.18 At all events Nimue, not Merlin, seems the object of Burne-Jones’ fascination, and Penelope Fitzgerald accordingly identifies the picture’s theme as “the defence of the enchantress…. To Burne-Jones the enchantress was neither sinister nor depraved,

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Fig. 16.8 Edward Burne-Jones. Enchantment of Nimue. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.

but an aspect of the weakness of man. There are only two kinds of women, he said, those who take the strength out of a man and those who put it back; but the destructive ones are outside blame, since they are acting only in accordance with their nature” (84). By 1877, when Burne-Jones exhibited The Beguiling of Merlin (Figure 9) in the Grosvenor Gallery, his approach to Merlin’s imprisonment had changed entirely. Here he presents not the Morte Darthur, but the Morte d’Artiste, effected by a female figure who is a precise visual embodiment of Tennyson’s Vivien. Like Tennyson’s Vivien she wears a robe “that more exprest/Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs” (“Merlin and Vivien” 220–21). Again like Tennyson’s Vivien, who wears a

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Fig. 16.9 Edward Burne-Jones. The Beguiling of Merlin. The Board of Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside [Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, England].

“snake of gold” in her hair (886) and is throughout associated with a snake, so BurneJones’ figure wears a snake