Scotland's Merlin E-Book

Tim Clarkson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Who was Merlin? Is the famous wizard of Arthurian legend based on a real person? In this book, Merlin's origins are traced back to the story of Lailoken, a mysterious 'wild man' who is said to have lived in the Scottish Lowlands in the sixth century AD. The book considers the question of whether Lailoken belongs to myth or reality. It looks at the historical background of his story and discusses key characters such as Saint Kentigern of Glasgow and King Rhydderch of Dumbarton, as well as important events such as the Battle of Arfderydd. Lailoken's reappearance in medieval Welsh literature as the fabled prophet Myrddin is also examined. Myrddin himself was eventually transformed into Merlin the wizard, King Arthur's friend and mentor. This is the Merlin we recognise today, not only in art and literature but also on screen. His earlier forms are less familiar, more remote, but can still be found among the lore and legend of the Dark Ages. Behind them we catch fleeting glimpses of an original figure who perhaps really did exist: a solitary fugitive, tormented by his experience of war, who roamed the hills and forests of southern Scotland long ago.

Leseprobe

SCOTLAND’S MERLIN

First published in Great Britain in 2016 byJohn Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 906566 99 9eISBN 978 1 907909 38 2

Copyright © Tim Clarkson 2016

The right of Tim Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, EdinburghPrinted and bound in Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

CONTENTS

List of Plates

List of Maps and Genealogical Table

Introduction

1   Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin

2   Myrddin Wyllt

3   Lailoken

4   The Battle of Arfderydd

5   Christianity and Paganism

6   Wild Man and Seer

7   Arthuriana

8   Scottish Merlins

9   Scotland’s Merlin: Fact or Fiction?

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PLATES

1. The former Powsail Burn (now Drumelzier Burn) running towards the River Tweed

2. The present-day confluence of Tweed and Powsail

3. Merlin’s Grave. This thorn-tree beside the Powsail Burn is a popular destination for modern visitors

4. Local tradition places the original site of Merlin’s Grave in this field near the old course of the Powsail

5. Drumelzier Kirk

6. Tinnis Castle: probable site of Dunmeller, the fortress of King Meldred

7. The Altar Stane, partially hidden in undergrowth on the roadside near Altarstone Farm

8. Stobo Kirk

9. St Kentigern and the wild man Myrddin depicted in a window at Stobo Kirk

10. Stobo Kirk: an alternative ‘Altar Stone’ in the north aisle

11. Upper Tweeddale from the road between Stobo and Dreva, looking south-west towards Drumelzier

12. Alt Clut, Dumbarton Rock, ancient stronghold of the Clyde Britons

13. The Clochoderick Stone. According to legend, this marks the grave of Rhydderch Hael, king of Dumbarton

14. Old churchyard at Hoddom, Dumfriesshire, on the site of a monastery said to have been founded by St Kentigern

15. Aerial view of Liddel Strength, one of the candidates for Caer Gwenddolau

16. Hartfell Spa, suggested by Nikolai Tolstoy as the site of Merlin’s cave

MAPS AND GENEALOGICAL TABLE

Maps

1. Wales and the Merlin legend

2. St Kentigern and Strathclyde

3. The Old North

4. The battle of Arfderydd

5. Upper Tweeddale: Drumelzier and Stobo

6. The legend of Suibhne Geilt

7. The search for Arthur’s battles: some Scottish locations

8. Scotland and the Merlin legend

Genealogical table

Pedigrees of the Arfderydd protagonists

INTRODUCTION

Few characters from the legendary lore of Britain are more recognisable to a modern audience than Merlin. Like King Arthur and Robin Hood, he is both familiar and mysterious – an enigmatic figure who seems to stand on the shadowy frontier between history and myth. In common with Arthur and Robin, he has made the transition from medieval folklore to modern popular fiction, and from page to screen. Indeed, it is through cinema and television that most people probably encounter Merlin today. Such media usually visualise him as a wizard at King Arthur’s court – a trusted counsellor and mentor. On screen he is frequently portrayed as an old man with white hair and beard, like Tolkien’s Gandalf, but the most popular characterisation of recent years shows him as a young sorcerer at the start of his career. Both images can be traced back to different strands of a richly layered medieval legend.

Did Merlin really exist? Many people who are fascinated by his legend see this is an important question, yet the answer is not a straightforward Yes or No. The question itself is too simple, for the legend of Merlin is complex and multilayered. As a major component in the broad genre of Arthurian literature, Merlin’s story has a long pedigree reaching back nearly a thousand years. As a subject for serious academic study, it has generated a lot of discussion and a large number of scholarly publications. How Merlin has been represented in various literary forms, from the Middle Ages to our own era, is a large topic in itself. Much of it lies outside the scope of this book, which is chiefly concerned with the origin of the legend. Here, the question of Merlin’s historical existence is seen as having three parts: When did the Merlin legend begin? To where can its roots be traced? Is Merlin based on a real person? All three are explored in the following chapters. They are discussed against the backdrop of a widely held belief that the legend originated in the story of a real person who lived in Scotland in the sixth century AD.

Terminology: chronology and geography

Throughout this book, the term ‘medieval’ is used in relation to a period known as the Middle Ages. In its broadest sense, and in a European context, this period encompasses one thousand years of history from c. AD 400 to c. AD 1500. The first six centuries to c.1000 are often described as the Dark Ages, a label coined to reflect the decline of Roman civilisation in western Europe and the resurgence there of indigenous ‘barbarian’ cultures. Although not a particularly accurate term it is at least a familiar one and is therefore used in this book. Many historians prefer the less judgmental ‘early medieval’ and this term also appears here. For the twelfth century onwards, as far as the beginning of the modern era in the sixteenth, the term High Middle Ages is used.

The book’s geographical terminology is intended to avoid ambiguity and anachronism. Here, the name ‘Britain’ has no political connotation and refers solely to the island of Britain and its associated smaller isles (though not, of course, the separate land-mass of Ireland or any part of it). ‘British’ is here used mainly of the Britons, the native Celtic people who once inhabited the whole island. In the early medieval period or Dark Ages, they increasingly lost control of their ancestral territory to other peoples such as the Scots and Anglo-Saxons. By c.800, at the start of the Viking Age, the territories under British rule had been reduced to three enclaves in the far west: Cornwall, Wales and the valley of the River Clyde. The original homeland of the Scots lay in north-west Britain, in modern Argyll and the neighbouring isles, in a region they called Dál Riata. They spoke Gaelic, the language of the Irish, with whom they had long had a close relationship via the narrow seas that connected rather than divided them. Like the Britons, the Scots were a Celtic people. The same cannot be said of the Anglo-Saxons or English, whose ancestors had arrived in Britain from the North Sea coastlands of Continental Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries. They were a Germanic people, speaking a language very different from the native Celtic tongues of the island. Their takeover of much of the south pushed the frontier of British-ruled territory westward. By c.800, a small group of powerful English kingdoms controlled a very large area. One of these, Northumbria, stretched from the Firth of Forth to the Humber and Mersey estuaries and from the east coast to the west. Its northern neighbours were the still-independent Britons of the Clyde and also the Picts, another Celtic people who inhabited much of the highland region of the far north-east. As the ninth century progressed, the Picts began to merge with the Scots to form a single people – the embryonic Scottish nation – living within a single, Gaelic-speaking kingdom called Alba. Before c.900, however, the terms ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’ did not exist in any meaningful political sense. Not until the Viking Age got well under way in the tenth century did the idea of two large, unified realms begin to emerge. Both terms are therefore used cautiously throughout this book, usually in reference to broad geographical topics such as ‘the landscape of Scotland’, with no political connotation unless required by the context. The more neutral terms ‘northern Britain’ and ‘southern Britain’ tend to be preferred. Another term used here is the Old North, a translation of Welsh Hen Ogledd, this being a useful umbrella label for the lands of the North Britons in the Dark Ages. The region itself corresponds roughly to what is now southern Scotland below the Forth–Clyde isthmus, together with some adjacent parts of what is now England. It was the homeland of the aforementioned Clyde Britons and their compatriots in other northern kingdoms until the latter were absorbed into Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (a process completed before AD 700).

Terminology: literature and language

At the heart of this book is an investigation or quest: the search for the origins of Merlin. This is primarily a journey through the literature of the legend in the hope of tracing its roots. The key objective is to identify the ‘real’ Merlin, the historical figure upon whom the original version of the legend was based. The prime candidate was first put forward in the Middle Ages, in a Latin text called Vita Merlini Silvestris, ‘Life of Merlin of the Forest’. His name, however, was not Merlin, even though the Vita observes that he was already regarded in medieval times as the original figure behind the legend. The Vita instead calls him Lailoken, a name that many readers of this book will find strange and unfamiliar. More will be said of him later but, in the meantime, we can call him a ‘Merlin-archetype’.

The name Merlin appears to be unknown before the twelfth century. It seems to have been invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a writer of Anglo-Norman stock, who essentially created the legends of both Merlin and Arthur in the forms we know them today. Geoffrey drew information on these characters from older traditions of Celtic (mostly Welsh) origin but distilled them into something new and different. His bestselling work Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) was completed c.1139 and provided a template for other writers to use and adapt. Through Geoffrey and those who came after him, Merlin became part of a much larger body of legend and pseudo-history known as the Matter of Britain, within which Arthur played a central role. In France, Le Matiere de Bretagne became a popular literary theme from the late twelfth century onwards. This was a period when French authors celebrated the ideals of chivalry and courtly love in ‘romances’ composed in verse or prose. They produced some of the greatest works of Arthurian literature and, in doing so, were instrumental in enhancing Merlin’s fame. Because their interpretation of Britain’s legendary history owed so much to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the romances and the later works derived from them are sometimes referred to as ‘post-Galfridian’ (i.e. after Geoffrey) to distinguish them the older ‘pre-Galfridian’ material that included Geoffrey’s own Celtic sources.

In this book, the term ‘Celtic’ is mostly used in a cultural sense, primarily with regard to the languages and literatures of the Celtic regions of the British Isles. It is rather less useful as an ethnic label, except in broad contexts where, for example, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultural zones need to be distinguished from one another. The Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland can be described collectively as Insular (from Latin insula, ‘island’) to distinguish them from Continental Celtic languages such as Gaulish. Modern, still-active Insular Celtic languages fall into two groups: Goidelic (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic) and Brittonic or Brythonic (Welsh and Cornish). To the Brittonic group also belong an active Continental language (Breton) and two dead Insular ones (Cumbric and Pictish). Cumbric was the language of the North Britons but it had completely disappeared by c.1200, being displaced north and south of the Solway Firth by Scottish Gaelic and English respectively. Pictish, although usually assigned to the Brittonic group, might actually have been a separate language. It, too, was displaced by Scottish Gaelic and had died out before the end of the first millennium.

Overview

The first chapter of this book looks at the development of the Merlin legend in its familiar guise, as an element within the large corpus of Arthurian literature. Geoffrey of Monmouth provides the starting-point and his influence on later writers is duly acknowledged. The chapter then follows the Merlin legend to the end of the Middle Ages when Sir Thomas Malory’s monumental Le Morte d’Arthur conjured a vivid picture of the world described in the French romances. At the beginning of Chapter 2, the focus returns to Geoffrey of Monmouth and, more particularly, to his Celtic sources. Here we encounter a mysterious character called Myrddin Wyllt, ‘Wild Merlin’, who appears in a group of old Welsh poems that seem to have their roots in the Dark Ages. Chapter 2 ends by looking behind the poems to gain a glimpse of the equally enigmatic Lailoken upon whom Myrddin seems to be based. A closer look at the Lailoken legend and its connection with St Kentigern of Glasgow is the main theme of Chapter 3. Both Myrddin and Lailoken are part of an ancient story about a great battle fought on what is now the border between Scotland and England. In Chapter 4, this battle is studied more closely and its location is pinpointed. In Chapter 5, the reasons behind why it was fought are discussed. One popular theory interprets it as the climax of a religious war between Christians and pagans, seeing the real Merlin or ‘Merlin-archetype’ as a pagan druid and as one of the leaders on the losing side. This theory is questioned and challenged. The sixth chapter considers the fate of the Merlin-archetype in the aftermath of the battle, from which he is said to have fled in madness and terror. His subsequent existence in the deep forests of southern Scotland as a ‘wild man of the woods’ is discussed, as is his similarity to other ‘wild’ figures in Celtic literature. The narrative of the book then takes a short detour as Merlin’s traditional companion King Arthur steps into the foreground. Just as Merlin’s historical and geographical origins form the main topic of the book as a whole, so Arthur’s roots in a real time and in a real landscape become the main topic of Chapter 7. A case for seeing the legends of both characters as originating in Scotland is made, although the question of Arthur’s existence is left open. Merlin returns to centre stage in Chapter 8, which looks at how both his legendary and historical manifestations have been represented by various ‘Scottish Merlins’ over a broad span of time, from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. This theme carries over into the final chapter, which draws all the threads together to conclude that the roots of the Merlin legend do indeed lie in Scotland.

1

GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH’S MERLIN

Historia Regum Britanniae

The traditional image of Merlin as the great wizard of Arthurian legend can be traced back to the twelfth century when he appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’), a work that quickly became a medieval bestseller. Geoffrey was a cleric – later a bishop – and a native of Wales, although his ancestry was most likely Norman or Breton rather than Welsh.1 He was born c.1100, possibly at Monmouth in south-east Wales, but spent much of his life in England. In the early 1130s he published his earliest known work under the title Prophetiae Merlini (‘The Prophecies of Merlin’). This marked the beginning of the Merlin legend in the form familiar to most people today. It is essentially a collection of obscure prophecies supposedly uttered by Merlin, some of them predicting events that had already happened in Geoffrey’s own lifetime. Merlin was partly based on the young prophet Ambrosius or Emrys who appears in Historia Brittonum, a ninth-century ‘History of the Britons’ written in Wales. Ambrosius was in turn based on an even earlier figure – a historical military leader called Ambrosius Aurelianus who defended Britain against Anglo-Saxon invaders in the late fifth century. In a preface to the Prophetiae, Geoffrey claimed that Merlin and Ambrosius were one and the same, although his reasons for conflating the two are unclear. He first introduced this composite character in a story about the native British ruler Vortigern, another historical figure from post-Roman times who may have been a genuine contemporary of Ambrosius Aurelianus.2 According to Geoffrey, Vortigern grew angry when his attempts to construct a new fortress were mysteriously thwarted. Each night, the newly-built foundations mysteriously disappeared. Vortigern was told by his counsellors that the problem could only be solved by locating a fatherless child and pouring its blood over the site. A suitable sacrifice, in the person of ‘Merlin Ambrosius’, was duly found at the town of Carmarthen in Wales and brought before Vortigern. Merlin, here depicted as a youth, informed Vortigern that the source of the problem was an ongoing fight between two dragons – one red, the other white – in a subterranean pool beneath the fort’s foundations. He further explained that the red dragon represented the Britons while the white represented their Saxon foes, before prophesying that the Saxons would ultimately emerge victorious as conquerors of Britain. The core elements of this episode were not invented by Geoffrey but were already well-known in Wales from a story about Vortigern and the boy-prophet Ambrosius. A version of this older tale had appeared in Historia Brittonum (hereafter HB), in which Ambrosius was found not at Carmarthen but in the kingdom of Glywysing (now Glamorgan).3HB did not mention Merlin but provided a storyline for Geoffrey who borrowed it for his Prophetiae.

Prophetiae Merlini was distributed widely, gaining popularity not only in Britain but in Continental Europe. Many of the prophecies alluded to twelfth-century politics and were much discussed by Geoffrey’s contemporaries at home and abroad. It is little surprise that he incorporated the same material into his larger work Historia Regum Britanniae (hereafter HRB) where it appears as part of the narrative in Book VII.4HRB gave additional information on Merlin, crediting him with magically transferring Stonehenge from Ireland to Britain and assigning him a role in Arthurian legend. This marked an important stage in his evolution as a literary character, for it connected him to King Arthur for the first time. His involvement with Arthur in HRB was, however, indirect: he used sorcery to enable Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon to spend a night with another man’s wife. The lady in question was Igerna, a Cornish noblewoman. She was unaware that she was sharing her bed with Uther, whom Merlin had cunningly disguised as her husband Gorlois. From this deceit the mighty Arthur was conceived. However, Merlin made no more appearances in HRB and is thus absent from the main Arthurian section which takes up a large part of the book.

Geoffrey’s skill as a writer, coupled with his ability to weave fragments of folklore into a dramatic story, made HRB an instant bestseller. It has been described as ‘the most influential book ever to have come out of Wales’.5 To the medieval reader it offered an exciting account of two thousand years of British history, presented as a narrative peppered with all kinds of political intrigue. Among the kings whose exploits it describes are Brutus the Trojan (from whom Britain was supposedly named), the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, the tragic King Lear of Shakespearean fame and, of course, the mighty Arthur himself. The reader soon realises that this is not history but pseudo-history, a work of imagination in which the real and the legendary are seamlessly interwoven. However, while its value as a historical source might be minimal, HRB’s impact on medieval literature cannot be overstated. Geoffrey’s colourful version of Britain’s early history was eagerly received and widely disseminated by the literate circles of the day. The fact that more than 200 medieval copies of HRB still survive is a testament to its popularity. In the mid 1150s, Geoffrey’s original Latin text had become the basis for another work, the Roman de Brut (‘Romance of Brutus’), a verse chronicle in French composed by the Norman poet Wace. This held particular appeal for twelfth-century audiences by highlighting virtues such as chivalry and courtly love, hence its influence on later Arthurian romances. Wace also introduced significant new elements such as King Arthur’s Round Table but chose to omit the prophecies of Merlin. His work provided the basis for Layamon’s Brut, an adaptation written in English in the early years of the thirteenth century. Layamon added more new material to the story devised by Geoffrey but neither he nor Wace developed the character of Merlin much further.6

Sometime around the year 1200, the Burgundian poet Robert de Boron used Wace’s Merlin for his own narrative poem Merlin, the second part of a verse trilogy on the legend of the Holy Grail. The first part, Le Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, tells of how the sacred cup that once held Christ’s blood was brought by Joseph of Arimathea to the ‘Vales of Avalon’. It is the only part of the trilogy that survives complete and was later rendered into prose with the new title Joseph d’Arimathie. Of the sequel, Merlin, only the first 504 lines have survived but the rest of the narrative is known from a prose version, perhaps written by Robert himself, which still exists in a number of manuscripts. Nothing of the third item in the original verse trilogy – an account of the Grail knight Perceval – has been preserved but it, too, was rendered into a prose version which is extant today. Although Robert’s Merlin has much in common with the character in HRB, he takes a more central role in Arthur’s story, becoming mentor and guardian to the young king.7 Robert developed Merlin’s personality more fully, giving him a somewhat light-hearted aspect and casting him not only as a master of prophecy but also as a trickster and shapeshifter. Throughout Robert’s work, the underlying theme is Christian, with Merlin being divinely appointed to encourage mankind’s obedience to God’s will. It is Merlin who initiates the holy quest for the Grail, the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. Familiar elements from HRB include the two dragons engaged in subterranean combat, the ruler Vortigern (here called ‘Vertigier’), the transfer of Stonehenge from Ireland and the conception of Arthur. Arthur’s father Uther (‘Uter’) also appears, becoming king after defeating the Saxons in battle and – at Merlin’s instigation – ordering the Round Table to be made. The new elements include a magical sword firmly embedded in an anvil on a block of stone. Fixed there by Merlin’s sorcery, the sword bore on its blade an inscription saying that only the rightful king would be able to draw it out. Despite many men taking up the challenge, only Arthur was successful. The episode of the sword in the stone marked the end of Robert de Boron’s original Merlin poem, but the narrative continues in the prose version. The contents of the final part of Robert’s verse trilogy, the lost Perceval, are similarly known from its retelling in prose. Perceval was a knight of the Round Table who embarked on a quest to find the Grail, having various adventures along the way. In some of these he was assisted by Merlin. Later, after Perceval had taken up residence in the Grail castle, Merlin told him about Arthur’s military victories and tragic death before he himself retired to a nearby forest.

Continuations of Robert’s works on the Matter of Britain included a retelling of the Perceval legend – possibly a prose version of his own Perceval poem – together with L’Estoire de Merlin, ‘The Story of Merlin’ (hereafter EM), the Suite de Merlin and Livre d’Artus, ‘The Book of Arthur’. However, in the Suite de Merlin and EM the Merlin story has a rather different ending. These two texts introduced a new female character, the wily maiden Viviane, with whom the wizard fell in love. Completely infatuated, the elderly Merlin divulged the secrets of his magic to his much younger lover, who then used her new-found skills to imprison him in an enchanted cave or tomb. EM represents one of the five volumes of the Vulgate Cycle, a major prose collection of Arthurian romance compiled in the early thirteenth century by one or more anonymous authors. The other volumes of the Vulgate are L’Estoire del Saint Graal, Queste del Saint Graal, L’Estoire de Lancelot and La Mort Artu.8 Written in French, the entire collection became hugely popular across Europe and survives today in more than 140 copies, not all of which are complete. In England, the Vulgate material on Merlin inspired home-grown adaptations such as Of Arthour and of Merlin – an anonymous poem of the late thirteenth century written in Middle English – and the prose Merlin (c.1450) which was essentially an English translation of EM. The publication of such works suggests that Merlin continued to attract interest as a significant character in his own right and had not been pushed into the background by King Arthur.9 He plays a significant role in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, an eight-part work written in Middle English prose and completed c.1470. What Malory gave his readers was an English version of the whole Vulgate Cycle, with additional material of his own. In 1485, some fourteen years after Malory’s death, the work was published by printing pioneer William Caxton. It went on to enjoy widespread fame and has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Arthurian literature.10 It nevertheless diminished Merlin’s role at Arthur’s court, turning the powerful wizard and prophet of the French romances into little more than an adviser. However, it is to Malory that we largely owe the portraits of Arthurian characters still recognisable today: the chivalric king, his wife Guinevere, Sir Lancelot of the Lake, Sir Gawain and other knights of the Round Table. Alongside them stands Merlin in what is, to the modern observer, his most familiar guise: a wise counsellor and minister, yet one somewhat reduced in potency. The mighty seer and sorcerer of the older tales seemingly had no place in Malory’s vision.11

Vita Merlini

The previous section considered Merlin’s popularity in medieval literature from the twelfth century onwards and noted his emergence as an important figure in the Arthurian legend. It brought the story up to the fifteenth century and to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. We saw that Merlin’s international fame can be traced back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae which lay at the root of subsequent retellings. We now turn to another of Geoffrey’s works, the Vita Merlini (‘Life of Merlin’), a narrative poem that failed to gain the same wide acclaim as HRB. It appeared a dozen or more years later, probably around 1150, and cast its central character in a different light. In HRB, the reader was presented with the prophet and sorcerer Merlin, a young Welshman from Carmarthen who performed such feats as moving Stonehenge across the Irish Sea and arranging King Arthur’s conception. In Vita Merlini (hereafter VM), we meet Merlin in later life, in a time when ‘many years and many kings had come and gone’.12 Moreover, with this new version of the legend Geoffrey introduced the concept of a northern Merlin, shifting the primary geographical setting from Wales and south-west England to the Forest of Calidon and the kingdom of Cumbria. These two places, as we shall see, lay in Scotland. How Merlin came to be involved in northern affairs is explained at the beginning of the poem. Indeed, VM is such a significant text for our present study that a detailed summary of its narrative is required here. Geoffrey’s verses not only tell us about his new ‘Scottish’ Merlin but give a number of important signposts to the original legend that lay in the background.

VM begins by telling us that ‘Merlin the Briton’ was famed around the world as a king and prophet. The geographical context is initially similar to that in HRB, for we are told that Merlin served the leaders of Demetia – the kingdom of Dyfed in South Wales – as their chief seer and law-giver. However, the focus soon moves northward, to a war between the Britons and the Scots. On one side of this conflict stood Peredur (Peredurus), ruler of the North Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd and paramount leader of the British forces. Against him marched Guennolous, the ruler of Scotland. A date and venue for a decisive battle was arranged and, when the time came, the opposing armies met on the field. The location is not named but it clearly lay somewhere in the North. Alongside Peredur marched his three brothers, together with his ally Rodarch (Rodarchus), king of the Cumbrians. In the same entourage was Merlin who, having left his home in Wales, had ‘come to the war with Peredur’. The ensuing clash of arms turned into a ferocious bloodbath, with heavy losses on both sides. Peredur’s brothers were slain during a brave charge through the Scottish line, while Peredur and Rodarch ‘killed the enemy before them with their dread swords’. Witnessing so much carnage proved too much for Merlin. Overcome by grief and horror, he lamented for the young warriors who had been cut down in their prime: ‘O glory of youth, who will now stand by my side in battle to turn back the princes who come to do me ill and their hordes that press upon me?’ The slaughter ended when the Britons eventually chased the Scots from the field. Merlin, now weeping inconsolably, ordered his companions to bury Peredur’s brothers in a chapel. This did nothing to assuage his grief. Indeed, he became even more distraught. ‘He threw dust upon his hair, tore his clothes and lay prostrate on the ground, rolling to and fro.’ No comfort would he take from anyone, not even from Peredur and the other leaders.

Merlin’s grief continued for three days, until ‘a strange madness’ compelled him to seek solitude in the forest. Alone and in secret, so that his departure went unobserved, he vanished among the trees. There he began to live as a wild creature, foraging for roots and berries and observing the ways of animals. ‘He became,’ wrote Geoffrey, ‘a Man of the Woods, as if dedicated to the woods [. . .] forgetful of himself and of his own, lurking like a wild thing.’ For an entire summer, Merlin dwelt in the forest, surviving on plants and fruit, until the onset of winter deprived him of food. He lamented the fact that he could no longer pick apples from the trees that had formerly sustained him. Even the leaves that had previously sheltered him from the rain were now fallen. Wild pigs and boars snatched freshly-dug turnips out of his hands. He compared his plight to that of his ‘dear companion’, an old grey wolf so weakened by hunger and age that it could no longer hunt for meat. Eventually, the sound of Merlin’s mutterings reached the ears of a traveller passing through the forest. This fellow attempted to make contact, but Merlin evaded him and disappeared.

Meanwhile, a number of men from King Rodarch’s court were scouring the countryside in search of Merlin. They had been sent out by Ganieda, the king’s wife, who was Merlin’s sister. Understandably concerned for her brother’s welfare, Ganieda hoped to bring him to the safety of her house. One member of the search-party encountered the traveller who had seen Merlin and learned that the crazed fugitive was lurking ‘in the dense-wooded valleys of the Forest of Calidon’. The searcher at once headed off into the trees, eventually finding Merlin on top of a mountain. There, among a dense growth of hazels and thorns, he saw the wild man sitting on the grass beside a spring, bemoaning the cold grip of winter and wishing for a change of season. Keeping hidden from view, the searcher began strumming a guitar and singing a lament, hoping this might soothe Merlin’s strange mood. He sang about the grief of Guendoloena, Merlin’s wife, for the husband whom she missed. He compared Guendoloena’s tears to those of Ganieda, who likewise wept for a beloved brother. The tactic worked, for Merlin gradually emerged from his madness and ‘recollected what he had been’. He wished then to be escorted to King Rodarch’s court, where both his wife and sister were waiting for him. There was much joy and celebration at his arrival, which VM describes as a ‘homecoming’. The nobility turned out in great numbers to welcome him. Unfortunately, the clamour and the crowds completely overwhelmed him, pitching him back into madness. He felt an urge to return to the woods, so Rodarch ordered that he be put under secure guard to prevent his escape. The king begged Merlin to calm down ‘and not hanker after the forest and an animal life under the trees, when he might wield a royal sceptre and rule a nation of warriors’. Lavish gifts of clothes, horses and treasure were presented as inducements, but Merlin refused them all, insisting that they should be given instead to poorer men than he. Then he said: ‘But I put above these things the woodland and spreading oaks of Calidon, the high hills, the green meadows at their foot – those are for me, not these things. Take back such goods, King Rodarch! My nut-rich forest of Calidon shall have me. I desire it above all else.’

Frustrated by Merlin’s stubbornness, the king clapped him in chains. The additional restraint only served to increase Merlin’s despondency. He did, however, laugh unexpectedly when he saw the king remove a leaf that had got caught in Queen Ganieda’s hair. Rodarch insisted on knowing the cause of this sudden mirth, but Merlin refused to explain. Only when his chains were removed and he was granted permission to go back to the woods did he give the reason for his laughter. To the king’s dismay, Merlin explained that the leaf in Ganieda’s hair had come from the undergrowth in which she had met an illicit lover for a tryst. Upon hearing this, Rodarch cursed the day that he and his wife had been wed. She, however, ‘hid her shame behind a smile’ and calmly protested that her brother’s accusation was false. Seeking to demonstrate that he was accustomed to telling lies, she devised what she thought would be a clever trap. First, she pointed out a young boy and asked Merlin to foretell the manner of his death. ‘He will die by falling from a high rock,’ came the reply. Next, she sent the boy away, but secretly told him to return in disguise, whereupon she asked her brother to predict ‘what the death of this one will be’. After Merlin replied that this boy would suffer a violent death in a tree, Ganieda felt that she had sufficient proof of his false prophesying. To convince her husband, however, she offered a third demonstration, this time presenting the same boy disguised as a girl. Once more she asked Merlin to foretell the manner of death. King Rodarch laughed when he heard that the child would die in a river. Three different prophecies for the manner of one boy’s death were enough to persuade him of Merlin’s falsehood – and of Ganieda’s faithfulness.

Having already been given permission to leave, Merlin now headed for the gates, only to find his sister blocking the exit. She did not want him to go and tried to persuade him to stay, even summoning his wife Guendoloena to implore him with an extravagant display of grief. ‘I shall remain clear of both of you and undestroyed by love,’ said Merlin, adding that he hoped his wife would one day remarry. Then he went out into the wild lands. His three prophecies about the death of the boy were at first dismissed as proof of his deceitful nature. Surely, if his words were to be trusted, he should have prophesied only one death, for nobody dies thrice? He was eventually vindicated when, in adulthood, the same boy suffered a triple demise. Falling from a cliff into a river, he caught his foot in a tree in such a way that his head went under the water, which caused him to drown. He thus perished by rock, tree and river – the threefold death foretold by Merlin.

And so the years passed. Merlin still dwelt in the Forest of Calidon, living like a woodland beast, ‘yet that satisfied him more than administering the law in cities and ruling over a warrior people’. News eventually reached him of Guedoloena’s betrothal to another, so he assembled a herd of deer and goats and set off to attend the wedding. When he reached the venue, riding on a horned stag, the bridegroom laughed at him. Merlin promptly wrenched the antlers from his steed’s head and hurled them at the bridegroom, killing him outright. He then turned about and rode with all speed back towards the forest, pursued by a posse of servants. While crossing a river he fell off the stag and was taken captive, being brought back to Queen Ganieda as a bound prisoner. As before, however, he refused to abandon his yearning for the wild woods. This made the queen and her husband sad, for they both wanted him to stay at their court by his own volition. Instead, he spurned the fine food laid before him and sank into a sullen mood. King Rodarch thought a walkabout in the bustling royal city might help, but even this failed to lift Merlin’s spirits. The forest-longing remained as strong as ever. For Ganieda, a particular concern was the coming winter, for then the trees would be bare and her brother would be at the mercy of cold and hunger. Merlin responded by saying that he was happy to endure such hardship, for which the delights of summer were more than adequate reward. In the end, a sort of compromise was worked out: Merlin asked his sister to build him a woodland hall and to provide him with servants who would keep him well-fed. He also asked for a team of secretaries ‘trained to record what I say, and let them concentrate on committing my prophetic song to paper’. Ganieda agreed to these requests and a hall was duly built. Merlin then returned to the forest, but dwelt in the open until winter began to bite. When the weather worsened, he moved into his new hall, where Ganieda often visited him. There he wandered through the rooms, gazing out of the windows at the stars, and singing ‘in the manner of the future that he knew would be’.

At this point in the narrative, VM includes a list of prophecies in the form of a lengthy quote attributed to Merlin. The list takes up more than a hundred lines of verse and most of the prophecies relate to political events. Among them are predictions of war between rival groups of Britons – such as the Welsh and Cornish – and of the deaths of contemporary kings, one of whom is Rodarch. Events on a more distant horizon are also foretold: the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, the Viking raids in the ninth century and the Norman invasion in 1066. The list concludes with a reference to the prophecies of Merlin Ambrosius whose story Geoffrey had already told in HRB: ‘All this,’ said Merlin, ‘I once predicted to Vortigern when I was explaining to him the mystic battle of the two dragons as we sat on the bank of the drained pool.’ Ganieda, who had been visiting him, returned home, having learned that Rodarch was dying. Before she left, Merlin asked her to summon Taliesin (Telgesinus), a figure not previously mentioned. ‘I have much I wish to discuss with him,’ said Merlin, ‘since he has only recently returned from Brittany where he has been enjoying the sweets of learning under the wise Gildas.’ Taliesin duly arrived in the forest, whereupon Merlin asked him to explain what had caused the wind and rain. What follows is another lengthy interlude, a blend of science and superstition, attributed to the wisdom of Taliesin. This includes a description of various islands: Britain ‘first and best’, Thanet off the Kentish coast, Orkney, Ireland, Sri Lanka (Taprobana) together with some that remain unidentifiable such as Thule (Iceland?) and Insula Pomorum (‘Island of Apples’, also known as Fortunata, ‘Fortunate Island’). Taliesin observed that Insula Pomorum was ruled by nine sisters, one of whom was Morgen, a renowned healer and shape-shifter. He went on to say that ‘it was there we took Arthur after the battle of Camlan, where he had been wounded’. Merlin’s reply indicates that the period since Arthur’s fall has not been a happy one: ‘how great a burden has the kingdom borne since then’. Britain was now being ravaged by Saxon invaders who ‘violate God’s law and his house’. In fact, as he points out, these depredations were allowed by God because of the wickedness of the Britons and ‘as a punishment for our folly’. Taliesin hoped that the mighty Arthur would recover from his wounds and return from the Island of Apples to defeat the Saxons, but Merlin foresaw that the enemy would eventually conquer Britain and retain it for a long time. Merlin then gave an account of how the Saxons came to Britain as mercenaries invited by Vortigern, consul of Gwent in South Wales, against whom they subsequently rebelled. They were opposed by Vortigern’s son, Vortimer, who drove them back to their homelands in Germany, but this was only a brief respite before they once again invaded Britain. Leadership of the Britons had then been taken up by the brothers Uther and Ambrosius, returning from exile. Rivals of Vortigern, they slew both him and the Saxon warlord Hengist. Ambrosius then became king of Britain and, for a while, there was an uneasy peace. When Ambrosius died, the kingship passed to Uther, who soon had to face a new Saxon invasion. Once again, the invaders were defeated and expelled. Uther’s son, Arthur, eventually became king. He, too, defeated the Saxons, and also the Scots, Irish, Norwegians, Danes, French and Romans. During his overseas campaigns he left Britain in the care of his nephew, Modred, who treacherously began an affair with the king’s wife. Returning in wrath, Arthur defeated Modred, who promptly mustered an army of Saxons. In the ensuing battle, Modred was slain by his own troops. Arthur, mortally wounded, was borne to the Fortunate Island. The kingdom then fell into turmoil, as Modred’s two sons fought one another for the crown. They were eventually destroyed by Constantine, another nephew of Arthur, who in turn was overthrown by his kinsman Conan. Merlin ended this survey of recent history (or, rather, pseudo-history) by noting that Conan was still in power, though his rule was ‘weak and witless’.

This conversation between Merlin and Taliesin was interrupted by the news that a new spring had appeared at the base of a nearby mountain. When Merlin went to drink from it, he found that his madness was miraculously gone. He felt like his old self again. After praising God, he asked Taliesin to explain how the