Merlin

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Merlin is the prophet and enchanter of Arthurian legend: counselor to kings, deviser of marvels, and the seer through whom the British future is spoken. He is not the invention of any single author, and he was never a historical person; the figure who reaches later readers was assembled from older material by a twelfth-century writer with a gift for it. To trace him is to watch a name gather episodes the way a riverbed gathers stones — each carried from somewhere upstream, each settling into a shape no single source intended.

Vortigern watches the red and white dragons battle beneath his collapsing tower — illumination from a 15th-century manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Lambeth Palace Library MS 6, f. 43v. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The two strands

That assembling writer was Geoffrey of Monmouth, a cleric working in Oxford in the 1130s. In the Historia Regum Britanniae (the History of the Kings of Britain, completed around 1136 — Geoffrey’s own preferred title was De gestis Britonum) he fused two earlier strands into a single character. One was Myrddin, a north-British prophet and wild man of the woods preserved in a handful of medieval Welsh poems — Yr Afallennau (“The Apple-Trees”), the Cyfoesi (“The Conversation of Myrddin and his Sister Gwenddydd”), the Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin (“Dialogue of Myrddin and Taliesin”), and others surviving in the thirteenth-century Black Book of Carmarthen and the fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest. In these poems Myrddin is driven mad by a battle — the Battle of Arfderydd, which the Welsh annals fix at 573 — and flees into the Caledonian Forest, where he laments his ruin and utters oracles about the fate of the Britons. He is a figure of grief and second sight, not of contrivance.

The other strand was a fatherless boy from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, the compilation associated with the name Nennius. There the boy is called Ambrosius. The British tyrant Vortigern, building a tower that inexplicably collapses each night, is told by his magicians that the foundations must be sprinkled with the blood of a child who has no father. The boy is found, brought to the site, and instead of dying he exposes the magicians’ ignorance: beneath the foundations lies a pool, and in the pool two sleeping dragons, one red and one white, whose nightly combat is heaving the tower down. He reads the dragons as the British and the Saxon peoples and the long war between them. (This Ambrosius, the boy-seer, is a wholly separate figure from Ambrose of Milan, the Latin Doctor of the Church; the names coincide and nothing else does.)

Geoffrey took this prodigy of the Historia Brittonum, gave him the prophetic voice and the woodland uncanniness of Myrddin, and named the result Merlinus. The Latinized form itself carries a small linguistic accident: the expected rendering of Myrddin would have been something close to Merdinus, and as the philologist Gaston Paris observed, Geoffrey appears to have shifted the consonant to avoid an unhappy resemblance to the Anglo-Norman word merde. The Celticist A. O. H. Jarman argued, further, that the prophet’s very name and character grew from speculation on the place-name Caerfyrddin — Carmarthen — which in fact derives from a British word for “sea-fort” rather than from any person called Myrddin; the man, on this reading, was conjured out of the town. Geoffrey also issued the political oracles separately as the Prophetiae Merlini (“Prophecies of Merlin,” circulating from around 1135 and folded into the Historia), a sequence of obscure, beast-laden predictions that became one of the most copied prophetic texts of the European Middle Ages, read and reread for centuries as a coded map of things to come.

Merlin dictating his prophecies to his scribe Blaise — a French miniature (c. 1300) from the prose Estoire de Merlin in the tradition of Robert de Boron. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The forest madman returns

Roughly fifteen years later, around 1150, Geoffrey returned to the character in a long Latin poem, the Vita Merlini (“Life of Merlin”). It is a curious work, because it leans away from the kingmaker of the Historia and back toward the Welsh wild man — almost as if Geoffrey, having met the older Myrddin tradition more fully in the interval, wanted to set the record straight. Here Merlin is a king of South Wales who goes mad with grief after a battle and lives as an outcast in the Caledonian wood (Calidon), watching the seasons, conversing with his sister Ganieda and with the bard Taliesin, recovering and relapsing into his sorrow. He is given an observatory of seventy doors and seventy windows from which to read the heavens — an emblem, as the medievalist Monika Otter has read it, of a mind open on every side, its very madness the condition of its sight. Madness and prophecy are not opposed in this Merlin; they are the same faculty seen from within and without. This is the figure closest to the poetic root: a seer the world has broken open.

The architect of Arthur’s reign

What Geoffrey set in motion the romancers expanded, and they pulled Merlin decisively away from the forest and toward the court. In the thirteenth-century French cycles — above all the verse romance attributed to Robert de Boron, composed around 1200 and surviving chiefly through its early prose recasting — Merlin acquired an origin story that the Welsh and Latin sources never gave him. He became a cambion: the child of a demon, an incubus, on a virtuous and unwitting woman, conceived by the powers of hell as a counter-messiah, a kind of Antichrist meant to undo the Incarnation. The plan fails. The mother confesses to her priest, Blaise; the child is baptized at once; and the infernal inheritance — preternatural knowledge of all things past, the gift of prophecy for things to come — is turned to good. Merlin keeps the powers and loses the malice. It is one of the most economical conversions in medieval narrative: the devil’s instrument, redirected, becomes God’s.

So equipped, the de Boron Merlin and his successors in the vast Vulgate (and later post-Vulgate) prose cycles became the architect of Arthur’s whole reign. He contrives the king’s begetting at Tintagel, disguising Uther Pendragon as the husband of the woman he desires. He institutes the Round Table in imitation of the table of the Grail and the table of the Last Supper, building the third into a Christianized history of the world. He sets up the sword that only the true-born king can draw, and so reveals the boy Arthur as rightful heir. He counsels, prophesies, vanishes and reappears, shifts his shape. And he comes, in nearly every telling, to a melancholy end: undone by his own arts, he falls in love with a younger enchantress — Nimue in some texts, Viviane in others — teaches her his secrets, and is sealed away by them in a cave, a tree, or an unbreakable tower of air, alive but immobilized, the maker of the kingdom outliving his own usefulness in a prison of his own making. By the time of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, completed around 1469 and printed by William Caxton in 1485, this Merlin — demon-born, Christianized, kingmaking, and at last entrapped — was fixed for the English-speaking world, and it is substantially the Merlin everyone afterward inherited.

Merlin entrapped by the enchantress he taught — Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin (1872–77), Lady Lever Art Gallery. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The three registers, kept apart

It is worth holding the three layers separate, because they answer to different questions. The Welsh Myrddin is a prophet of lament, attached to a real sixth-century northern battle and to the politics of a conquered people; his gift is grief turned to sight. Geoffrey’s Merlinus is a political oracle and a mover of marvels, the engineer who shifts the great stones of the Giants’ Dance to Salisbury Plain (Geoffrey’s etiology for the monument) and who reads the dragons under the tower. The French and English romance Merlin is a providential agent within a Christian salvation-history, his demonic birth the hinge that lets a pagan-feeling wonder-worker operate inside a Christian frame. Each is a coherent figure; flattening them into one loses what each was built to do.

Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, which Geoffrey’s Merlin is made to raise as the transported “Giants’ Dance” — watercolor by John Constable, 1835. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The magus overlay

The reading of Merlin as a magus — a master of natural and celestial magic, kin to the learned magicians of the Renaissance — is largely a later overlay rather than anything the medieval texts assert outright. In them his power is prophetic and uncanny more than systematic: he foresees, he transforms, he raises stones and begets kings, but he does not work from a doctrine of correspondences, a celestial physics, or a recoverable art that another adept could learn. The medieval Merlin commands wonders; he does not teach a method.

That distinction is exactly what the Renaissance blurred. When humanist learning recovered the texts of Hermes Trismegistus and built around them a philosophy of the magus as a pious operator drawing down the powers of the cosmos, it acquired both a genealogy and a vocabulary into which Merlin could be read backward. The operative magus of Renaissance Hermetism — Cornelius Agrippa systematizing the three worlds of magic in his De occulta philosophia (final text Cologne, 1533), John Dee assembling at Mortlake one of the great libraries of Europe and turning, after his mathematics, to converse with angels — gave the older British wonder-worker a frame he had never originally inhabited. Dee, of Welsh descent and steeped in the matter of Britain, is in some sense Merlin’s nearest historical analogue: the learned counselor to a monarch (Elizabeth I), the reader of the heavens, the figure suspected of conjuring. The pattern of the sage who commands hidden knowledge runs back through such figures to Simon Magus at the edge of the New Testament; Merlin, retrofitted, took his place in that line. This is how he entered the Western esoteric imagination: as a native British emblem of the adept, the home-grown counterpart to the imported sages of antiquity. The identification belongs to the history of divination and learned magic in their reception, not to the medieval sources themselves.

John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer, and counselor often read as Merlin’s nearest historical analogue — portrait by an unknown artist, c. 1594, Ashmolean Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The medieval texts offer a prophet and a maker of wonders. The wizard of the modern picture is a portrait painted over them, and worth keeping distinct from the figure beneath.

Texts and scholarship

The standard critical edition of Geoffrey’s history is Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of the De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], edited by Michael D. Reeve and translated by Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, Arthurian Studies 69, 2007), which collates the most important manuscripts and restores Geoffrey’s own title; its publisher record is at Boydell & Brewer. An accessible scholarly translation with source-appendices — including a rendering of the Life of Merlin — is Michael A. Faletra’s The History of the Kings of Britain (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2008). The lyrical Latin poem is edited with facing English in Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini, edited and translated by Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), building on John Jay Parry’s earlier collation of 1925; the catalog record is held at HathiTrust. For the Welsh prophetic material behind Myrddin, the foundational study is A. O. H. Jarman’s work on the legend’s origins; for the interpretation of the Vita Merlini as a poem about an open and prophetic mind, see Monika Otter’s essay Merlin’s Open Mind in Cultural Inquiry 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), available open access. The afterlife of Merlin as a Renaissance-style magus belongs to the historiography opened by Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which reconstructed the figure of the learned magus into which later readers assimilated him.

→ Related: Prophecy · Divination · Middle Ages · Magic · Renaissance Magic · Renaissance Hermetism · Esotericism · Hermes Trismegistus · John Dee · Cornelius Agrippa · Simon Magus