Merlin - WikiHQ

Merlin () is a mythical figure prominently featured in the legend of King Arthur and best known as a prophet and a magician, along with several other main roles. The familiar depiction of Merlin, based on an amalgamation of historical and legendary figures, was introduced by the 12th-century Catholic cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth and then built on by the French poet Robert de Boron and prose successors in the 13th century. Geoffrey's account presented Merlin as a prophet and royal advisor to Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon.

Geoffrey seems to have combined earlier Welsh tales of Myrddin and Emrys (Ambrosius), two legendary Briton prophets with no connection to Arthur, to form the composite figure that he called Merlinus Ambrosius. His rendering of the character became immediately popular, especially in Wales. Later chronicle and romance writers in France and elsewhere expanded the account to produce a more full, multifaceted character, creating one of the most important figures in the imagination and literature of the Middle Ages. Today, he continues to be highly popular in the modern era (see also the article fiction featuring Merlin).

Merlin's traditional biography casts him as an often-mad cambion, born of a mortal woman and an incubus, from whom he inherits his supernatural powers and abilities. His most notable abilities commonly include prophecy and shapeshifting. Merlin matures to an ascendant sagehood and engineers the birth of Arthur through magic and intrigue. Later stories have Merlin as an advisor and mentor to the young king until he disappears from the tale, leaving behind a series of prophecies foretelling events to come. A popular version from the French prose cycles tells of Merlin being bewitched and forever sealed up or killed by his student, Lady of the Lake, after having fallen in love with her. Other texts variously describe his retirement, at times supernatural, or death.

Name

The name Merlin is derived from the Welsh name of the legendary bard that Geoffrey of Monmouth Latinised to in his works. Medievalist Gaston Paris suggests that Geoffrey chose the form rather than the expected *Merdinus to avoid a resemblance to the Anglo-Norman word (from Latin ) for feces. Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville reduced it to the result of the "tendency of d to change into l in Indo-European languages."

'Merlin' may also be an adjective, in which case he should be called "The Merlin", from the French meaning common blackbird (Turdus merula). An association with this bird in French was deemed logical by Philippe Walter. According to Martin Aurell, the Latin form Merlinus is a euphony of the Welsh form Myrddin to bring him closer to the white blackbird (merle blanc) into which he could metamorphose through his shamanic powers, as was notably the case for Merlin's Irish counterpart. Folklorist Jean Markale proposed that the name of Merlin is of French origin and means 'little blackbird', an allusion to the mocking and provocative personality usually attributed to him in medieval stories. According to Jean-Charles Berthet, however, the analogies between Merlin and the blackbird are more akin to a later establishment than to a real etymology, since the French name of Merlin is later than the other forms.

Myrddin may be a combination of *mer (mad) and the Welsh (man), to mean 'madman'. It may also mean '[of] many names' if it was derived from the Welsh , myriad. In his (1868), La Villemarqué derived Marz[h]in, which he considered the original form of Merlin's name, from the Breton word (wonder) to mean 'wonder man'. or Merlin's Enclosure is an early name for Great Britain as stated in the third series of Welsh Triads.

Celticist Alfred Owen Hughes Jarman suggested that the Welsh name () was derived from the toponym , the Welsh name for the town known in English as Carmarthen. This contrasts with the popular folk etymology that the town was named after the bard (Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, who questioned the historical origins of Merlin, concluded that the legend was fabricated to retroactively explain the name of the town). The name Carmarthen is derived from the town's previous Roman name Moridunum, Eric P. Hamp proposed a similar etymology: Morij:n, 'the maritime' or 'born of the sea'. There is no obvious connection between Merlin and the sea in the texts about him, but Claude Sterckx has suggested that Merlin's father in the Welsh texts, Morfryn, might have been a sea spirit.

The Welsh Myrddin could be also phonetically connected to the name Martin. Some of the powers and other attributes of the 4th-century French saint Martin of Tours (and his disciple Saint Hilaire) in hagiography and folklore are similar to these of Merlin (albeit coming from God). If a relationship between the two figures does exist, however, it may rather be a reverse one in which the Merlin tradition inspired the later accounts of the saint's miracles and life.

Legend

Overview

{| class="wikitable"

|+ Select stories and the earliest known sources

! Episode !! Text

|Vortigern seeks a "fatherless child" for a blood sacrifice to strengthen his castle's tower.

| Historia Brittonum (c. 828)

|The first mention of Merlin's Welsh prototype, Myrddin the Wild.

|Annales Cambriae (est. 10th century)

|Merlin's birth from a union of a virgin and a demon. <hr> Merlin organises the construction of Stonehenge. <hr> Uther Pendragon takes on the appearance of the Duke of Cornwall through a spell by Merlin and conceives Arthur with Igraine.

|Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136)

|Blaise's intervention redeems Merlin from his intended role of the Antichrist. <hr> Merlin selects the fifty original knights of Uther's Round Table. <hr> Merlin-directed Excalibur-pulling contest proves the young Arthur's divine right to the throne of King of the Britons.

|Merlin (c. 1200)

|Merlin sets up the search for the Holy Grail by Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.

| (c. after 1200)

|Merlin aids and advises the young King Arthur in his early wars and adventures. <hr> Merlin associates with Arthur's sister Morgan and tutors her in magic. <hr> Blaise writes down the story of Merlin.

|Vulgate Merlin Continuation (c. before 1235)

|Arthur is warned by Merlin of Mordred's birth and the coming fall of his kingdom. <hr> Entrapment of Merlin by the fairy Viviane.

|Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation (c. 1235)

Commonly in his medieval appearances, Merlin guides, helps, saves, predicts, and judges through his great wisdom. According to Gaëlle Zussa, "Merlin's literary legend presents itself as a sort of great dump in which pieces of the myth are scattered. Contemporary authors come to draw their ideas and recycle this debris to recreate an ever new Merlin, in motion." Villemarqué attempted to synthesize the known information around Merlin, beginning as a figure of bard gifted with prophecy. While Merlin's prototypes were originally these of both poet and warrior king, the familiar character from the French romances became the master of amazing magical knowledge. According to a summary of the legend by Danielle Quéruel of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,

R. Howard Bloch described Merlin's character throughout the legend:

Geoffrey of Manmouth's composite Merlin, imagined primarily as a prophet, is fundamentally based on the North Brythonic poet and seer Myrddin Wyllt, that is Myrddin the Wild (known as Merlinus Caledonensis or Merlin Sylvestris in later texts influenced by Geoffrey), in turn inspired by either real or legendary figure from the Welsh oral tradition that appears in 12th-century written poems such as "Afallennau Myrddin" ("Myrddin's Apple Trees") or "Yr Oianau" ("The Piglet"). and with Buile Shuibhne, an Irish tale of the wandering insane king Suibihne mac Colmáin (often Anglicised to Sweeney), set after the 637 Battle of Moira. in addition to helping the young Arthur in other ways. Eventually, he arranges the reconciliation between Arthur and his rivals, and the surrender of the defeated Saxons and their departure from Britain.

This extended prose rendering of Merlin was incorporated as a foundation of the Lancelot-Grail, a vast cyclical series of Old French prose works also known as the Vulgate Cycle, in the form of the Estoire de Merlin (Story of Merlin), also known as the Vulgate Merlin or the Prose Merlin. There, while not identifying his mother, it is stated that Merlin was named after his grandfather on her side. The Vulgate's Prose Lancelot further relates that after growing up in the borderlands between 'Scotland' (i.e. Pictish lands) and 'Ireland' (i.e. Argyll), Merlin "possessed all the wisdom that can come from demons, which is why he was so feared by the Bretons and so revered that everyone called him a holy prophet and the ordinary people all called him their god." In the Vulgate Cycle's version of Merlin, his acts include arranging the consummation of Arthur's desire for "the most beautiful maiden ever born," Lady Lisanor of Cardigan, resulting in the birth of Arthur's illegitimate son Lohot from before the marriage to Guinevere.

A further reworking and an alternative continuation of the Prose Merlin were included within the subsequent Post-Vulgate Cycle as the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin or the Huth Merlin, the so-called "romantic" rewrite (as opposed to the so-called "historical" original of the Vulgate). The work contains a series of prophecies entrusted by Merlin to Blaise, and presents the Grail as the central point of all of them. It adds some content such as Merlin providing Arthur with the sword Excalibur through a Lady of the Lake, while either removing or altering many other episodes. Merlin's magical interventions in the Post-Vulgate versions of his story are relatively limited and markedly less spectacular, even compared to the magical feats of his own students, and his character becomes less moral. In addition, Merlin's prophecies include sets of alternative possibilities (meaning that the future can possibly be changed) instead of sure outcomes.|group="note" including transformation stories since the early tale of Suibhne.

| caption2 = Through his life as a hermit monk close to nature and in an association with the animal world, Saint Anthony the Great is comparable to Merlin.

As the Arthurian myths were retold, Merlin's prophetic "seer" aspects were sometimes de-emphasised (or even seemingly vanish entirely, as in the fragmentary and more fantastical Livre d'Artus In the romances, he may take refuge from Arthur's court to live with Blaise in a forest in Northumberland, Through his ability to change his shape, he may appear as a "wild man" figure, evoking his prototype Myrddin Wyllt, as a civilised man of any age (including as a very young child), or even as a talking animal. His guises can be highly deformed and animalistic even when Merlin is presenting as a human or humanoid being.

Both Merlin and its continuations have been adapted in verse and prose, translated into several languages, and further modified to various degrees by other authors. Notably, the Post-Vulgate Suite (along with an earlier version of the Prose Merlin) was the main source for the opening section of Thomas Malory's English-language compilation work Le Morte d'Arthur which formed a now-iconic version of the legend. Compared to some of his French sources (such as the Vulgate Lancelot which described Merlin as "treacherous and disloyal by nature, like his [demon] father before him"), Malory limited the extent of the negative association of Merlin and his powers. He is relatively rarely condemned as demonic by other characters such as King Lot; instead he is presented as ambiguous.

The earliest English verse romance concerning Merlin is Of Arthour and of Merlin of the late 13th century, which drew from the chronicles and the Vulgate Cycle. In English-language medieval texts that conflate Britain with the Kingdom of England, the Anglo-Saxon enemies against whom Merlin aids first Uther and then Arthur tend to be replaced by either the Saracens or unnamed heathen invaders. The earliest Merlin work written in Germany was Caesarius of Heisterbach's Latin theological text Dialogus Miraculorum (1220). Among other medieval works dealing with the Merlin legend is the 13th-century French romance Roman de Silence, and the 13th-14th Italian story collection Il Novellino that pictures him as a righteous seer chastising people for their sins.

Conversely, the Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, which sympathizes with Mordred as usual in Scottish chronicle tradition, particularly attributes Merlin's supernatural evil influence on Arthur to its very negative portrayal of his rule. He is also a villainous figure, opposing Arthur's daughter, in the late Irish romance Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando. Merlin is presented as inherently evil in the so-called non-cyclic Lancelot, in which he was born as the "fatherless child" from not a supernatural rape of a virgin but a consensual union between a lustful demon and an unmarried beautiful young lady, and was never baptised. It even says that he never did anything good in his life. Wilhelm von Österreich by Johann von Würzburg (1324) paints a villainous portrait of Merlin as a magician born of a devil in an otherwise non-Arthurian story.

In the Second Continuation of Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written around 1210, a young daughter of Merlin called the Lady of the High Peak of Mont Dolorous, appears to guide Perceval towards the Grail Castle. Merlin's usually unspecified mother is sometimes called Adhan or Aldan, or Optima, as in Bauduin (Baudouin) Butor's 1294 romance known as either Les Fils du Roi Constant or Pandragus et Libanor. Paolino Pieri's 14th-century Italian La Storia di Merlino, which invents a new version of the story of Merlin's youth, names his mother as Marinaia. Ulrich Füetrer's 15th-century Buch der Abenteuer, in the section based on Albrecht von Scharfenberg's lost Merlin, turns Merlin into father of Uter, effectively making Merlin's grandson Arthur a part-devil too. One version of the Prose Tristan also makes Merlin essentially a "half-brother" of the monster known as the Questing Beast.

thumb|Witches' Tree (c. 1882–1898, printed 1905) by [[Edward Burne-Jones]]

In much of the prose tradition, Merlin has a major weakness—young beautiful women of femme fatale archetype. This is what eventually leads him to his doom by a Lady of the Lake. Besides her, Merlin's apprentice in chivalric romances is often King Arthur's half-sister, Morgan, who is sometimes depicted as Merlin's lover and sometimes as just his unrequited love interest. Contrary to many modern works in which they are archenemies, Merlin and Morgan are never opposed to each other in any medieval text, other than she forcibly rejecting him in some of them. Merlin's love for Morgan is so great that he even lies to the king to save her in the Huth Merlin, which is the only instance of him ever intentionally misleading Arthur.

Merlin and stories involving him have continued to be popular from the Renaissance to the present day, especially since the renewed interest in the legend of Arthur in modern times. During the French Renaissance, Merlin would continue to be uniquely appealing figure of theater and ballet even after the interest in Arthur himself had already waned. In William Rowley's play The Birth of Merlin, or, The Child Hath Found his Father (1622), for instance, Merlin is a son of the Devil that becomes an adviser to Uther, the young King of Britain. Since the Romantic period, Merlin has been typically depicted as a wise old man with a long white beard, creating a modern wizard archetype reflected in many fantasy characters, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Gandalf who also use some of his other traits. As noted by Arthurian scholar Alan Lupack, "numerous novels, poems and plays center around Merlin. In American literature and popular culture, Merlin is perhaps the most frequently portrayed Arthurian character."

According to Stephen Thomas Knight, Merlin embodies a conflict between knowledge and power: beginning as a symbol of wisdom in the first Welsh stories, he became an advisor to kings in the Middle Ages, and eventually primarily a mentor and teacher to Arthur and others in the works around the world since the 19th century. While some modern authors write about Merlin positively through an explicitly Christian world-view, such as Stephen R. Lawhead in The Pendragon Cycle, some New Age movements instead see Merlin as a druid who accesses all the mysteries of the world. For instance, Merlin appears in the teachings of the Montana-based New Age religious-survivalist group Church Universal and Triumphant as one of their "ascended masters". Francophone works since the end of the 20th century have tended to avoid the Christian aspects of the character in favor of the pagan aspects and the tradition sylvestre (attributing positive values to one's links to forest and wild animals), thus "dechristianising" Merlin to present him as a champion for the idea of return to nature. Other authors may make Merlin obsessed with the quest for knowledge through astrology and alchemy, or highlight the duality of the character from a demonic father. Diverging from his traditional role in medieval romances, Merlin is also sometimes portrayed as a villain, as in Mark Twain's 1889 classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The British-made Merlin helicopter has been in use by the armed forces of Britain, Denmark, Portugal, and others under the name Merlin instead of its original AgustaWestland AW101 designation.

He was one of eight British magical figures who were commemorated on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail in 2011, and one of the three Arthurian figures (along with Arthur and Morgan) commemorated on the gold and silver British pound coins issued by the Royal Mint in 2023. Universal Islands of Adventure used to have a medieval section called Merlinwood which held the Flying Unicorn and Dueling Dragons roller coasters and also featured the Enchanted Oak Tavern, a restaurant located inside a giant tree-stump with a face of Merlin on it; this area has since been demolished for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and its attractions incorporated into the Harry Potter universe as Flight of the Hippogriff and Dragon Challenge. Merlin's Marvelous Miscellany, opened in 2022 as a tribute to Merlin's Magic Shop of the 1950s, is a souvenir shop in Fantasyland at Disneyland; several Disney Parks also feature The Sword in the Stone Ceremony hosted by Disney's Merlin from the 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone.

Contrary to a popular belief among the Royal Air Force pilots and general society at the time (and also later), the Merlin engine that powered several types of British aircraft during the Second World War (including the famous Spitfire fighters that helped to win the Battle of Britain) was not named after the Arthurian legend figure, but after the bird, as dictated by the Rolls-Royce company naming policy. That coincidence nevertheless had a positive effect on British war morale.

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

Merlin: Texts, Images, Basic Information, The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester. Numerous texts and art concerning Merlin
Timeless Myths: The Many Faces of Merlin
BBC audio file of the "Merlin" episode of In Our Time
Merlin — The Legend , a Chronicle documentary on YouTube
Prose Merlin, Introduction and Text (the University of Rochester TEAMS Middle English text series) edited by John Conlea, 1998. A selection of many passages of the prose Middle English translation of the Vulgate Merlin with connecting summary. The sections from "The Birth of Merlin to "Arthur and the Sword in the Stone" cover Robert de Boron's Merlin
Of Arthour and of Merlin translated and retold in modern English prose, the story from Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck MS) (from the Middle English of the Early English Text Society edition: O D McCrae-Gibson, 1973, Of Arthour and of Merlin, 2 vols, EETS and Oxford University Press)
Phillip Walter (ed.), LE DEVIN MAUDIT Merlin, Lailoken, Suibhne — Textes et études by Philippe Walter, Christine Bord, Jean-Charles Berthet and Nathalie Stalmans. Moyen Âge européen, 1999. Earliest Merlin texts and studies on them, available to read for free at OpenEdition Books (in French)