Merlin

The teaching

Taught from the Welsh poems of Myrddin, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Robert de Boron, the French romances and Malory.

Myrddin in the forest

The Welsh poems give the oldest voice. Myrddin fought at the battle of Arfderydd, where his lord Gwenddolau fell, and lost his wits in the horror of it; now he lives wild in the forest of Celyddon, hunted by the men of King Rhydderch, sleeping out in the snow, speaking to an apple tree whose fruit is sweet and to a little pig that shares his hiding. From the forest he prophesies: battles to come, the fortunes of the Welsh against their enemies, kings who are not yet born.

The boy without a father

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History brings him into the story of the kings. Vortigern, the British king who let in the Saxons, tries to build a tower in the mountains of Snowdon, and each night the day's work sinks into the ground. His magicians tell him to find a boy who has no father and sprinkle his blood on the stones. At Carmarthen his men hear a boy taunted for having no father and bring him with his mother, a king's daughter living among nuns, who tells them that someone in the form of a handsome young man used to come to her, embrace her and vanish, and speak to her unseen; a sage explains that spirits who live between the moon and the earth, the incubi, can father children so.

The boy, Merlin, mocks the magicians and tells the king what lies beneath the tower: a pool, and at the bottom of it two hollow stones, and in them two sleeping dragons. When the pool is drained the dragons wake and fight, one red and one white, and Merlin weeps and prophesies: the red is the people of Britain, the white the Saxons who will overrun them, and so on through the long prophecies that made his name across Europe.

The stones and the birth of Arthur

Merlin's arts serve the kings who come after. When Aurelius Ambrosius wants a monument for the British nobles the Saxons murdered at a meeting of peace, Merlin brings the Giants' Dance from Ireland and sets it up at Amesbury, the story told on the branch Stonehenge and the stone circles. When Uther Pendragon burns with love for Igerna, the wife of Gorlois of Cornwall, kept safe in Tintagel, Merlin changes Uther by his drugs into the likeness of her husband, and himself and Uther's friend into the likenesses of the duke's men; Uther passes the guards and lies with Igerna, and that night Arthur is conceived, while Gorlois falls in battle.

The wild prophet and his sister

In the Life of Merlin he is a king in south Wales and a prophet who goes mad after a battle in which he sees his companions die, and flees to the forest of Calidon to live among the beasts. His sister Ganieda, the wife of King Rodarchus, sends a singer who soothes him with the lyre and brings him to court, but the crowds drive him wild again. He laughs at a leaf caught in his sister's hair, and so betrays her to her husband; to discredit him she brings a boy before him three times in three disguises, and he foretells for him three deaths, by a fall, by a tree and by water, and all three come true at once when the young man falls from a cliff, is caught by his foot in a tree and dies with his head under the river.

At last the bard Taliesin comes and teaches him the order of the world, and a new spring breaks out whose water heals his madness; but he will not go back to rule, and stays in the forest, where his sister becomes a prophetess beside him.

The devil's son

Robert de Boron gives him a stranger birth. Furious that Christ had harrowed hell and freed the souls they held, the devils plotted a prophet of their own, a man born of one of them and a woman, to undo the work of Christ. A devil lay with a devout girl in her sleep; but she confessed at once to her confessor, Blaise, and the child was baptised. So Merlin has from his father the knowledge of all that has been done and said, and from God, for his mother's sake, the knowledge of things to come, and he turns both gifts to God's side.

As an infant he speaks to save his mother from the judges, and later he dictates to Blaise the history of the Grail. He tells Uther of the table Joseph made for the Grail and bids him make a third, the Round Table, with one seat left empty; he carries the newborn Arthur away to be raised in secret, and at Christmas, when no lord can draw the sword from the stone, the boy draws it, and is king.

The lady of the lake

The French prose romances and Malory tell his end. In age he falls into a dotage on a young girl of the forest, Viviane or Nimue, one of the damsels of the lake, and teaches her his arts for love of her; she learns all he knows, and fears and loathes his desire. Last of all she asks how a man may be shut away for ever without walls or chains, and he teaches her that too, knowing what she means to do with it. In one telling she weaves the spell round him as he sleeps with his head in her lap in the forest of Broceliande, and he wakes in a tower of air that he can never leave; in Malory she persuades him under a great stone to show her its wonders, and works her craft so that he never comes out for all his own.

What the story teaches

Merlin is the man who knows and cannot save. From childhood he knows the end of every king he serves; he foretells his own end to Arthur and walks into it; and in the Life of Merlin and the romances alike his foreknowledge is a burden as much as a gift, which makes him laugh aloud at a man buying shoes to last for years on the day he is to die.

The French romances teach a second lesson through him, the danger of giving the whole of an art to one who wants it for herself: the master who taught everything is bound by the last thing he taught. And from Robert de Boron comes a third, the gift a devil meant for ruin, turned by a mother's prayer and baptism to the service of the kingdom and the Grail.