Merlin

The tower would not stand. Each morning the masons climbed the hill in the mountains of Gwynedd to find the previous day’s courses collapsed into rubble, the mortar split, the great stones flung apart as though the ground beneath had shrugged them off in the dark. King Vortigern’s counsellors had an answer ready: the foundations wanted the blood of a boy born without a father, sprinkled on the stones. His men went hunting for such a child, and in the streets of Carmarthen they found a boy being jeered at for exactly that lack. They took him to the king to have his throat cut.

The boy did not run. He asked the wise men what lay beneath the foundations, and when they could not say, he told them himself: a pool, and beneath the pool two hollow stones, and inside them two sleeping dragons, one red and one white. They dug, and it was so. The dragons woke and fought, the white driving the red to the water’s edge before the red turned and forced it back, and the boy read the battle aloud. The red dragon was the Britons, the white the invading Saxons, and the struggle in the pit was the struggle for the island itself. In the oldest surviving version of that scene the boy is called Ambrosius. In the version that made him immortal he is called Merlin.

That second version was the work of one man. Around 1136 the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing his sweeping and largely invented History of the Kings of Britain, took the fatherless prophet from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and fused him with a figure out of Welsh tradition named Myrddin, giving the composite a Latinised name and a career at the elbow of kings. Nearly everything the wider world calls Merlin grows from that graft. It was a piece of literary engineering as bold as anything the character himself performs.

The Welsh Myrddin was a stranger and sadder thing. In the poems of the Black Book of Carmarthen he is Myrddin Wyllt, Myrddin the Wild, a man broken by the Battle of Arfderydd in the late sixth century. He had served a lord named Gwenddoleu; he watched that lord’s army destroyed; and he fled into the Caledonian Forest and lost his mind there. He spent years among the trees talking to a little apple tree and a grey piglet, shivering through the winters, remembering the warmth of a hall he would never enter again, and in his ruin the gift of prophecy came upon him. His sister Gwenddydd comes to him in these verses and he answers her questions with visions of the kings still to come. Geoffrey returned to this older, wilder Myrddin in a later poem, the Life of Merlin, as though uneasy about how far he had smoothed the figure down.

The stranger origin came later still. In the romances of the thirteenth century, beginning with the French poet Robert de Boron, the devils hold a council and resolve to make a man of their own to undo the work of Christ. One of them fathers a child on a virtuous sleeping woman, meaning to raise an Antichrist. The plan fails at the font. The child is baptised, and grace turns him, and what remains is a boy who keeps the devils’ gift of knowing all that is past and hidden, joined now to a God-given knowledge of what is to come. He is born already covered in hair and, in some tellings, able to speak from the cradle. He laughs at things no one else can see.

His powers are the powers of a man who knows too much. He raises the ring of giant stones that becomes Stonehenge, hauling them, in Geoffrey’s account, from a mountain in Ireland to Salisbury Plain as a monument to the British dead. He changes his own shape at will and turns up as a child, a ragged woodcutter, a stag crashing through the undergrowth, an old man bent over a stick. His most consequential trick is a disguise laid on someone else. When King Uther burns with desire for Igraine, the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, Merlin gives Uther the exact face and body of the duke, and in that borrowed shape Uther enters the fortress at Tintagel and lies with her. The child conceived that night is Arthur. Merlin takes the infant as his fee, has him raised in secret, and years later sets the test of the sword in the stone that lifts the unknown boy onto the throne. The cold water in the pit, the split mortar, the weight of the Irish stones, the false face at Tintagel: he arranges the world like furniture.

For all that foresight, the story of his end is the story of a man walking with open eyes toward the one door he cannot come back through. He falls in love with a young woman the romances call Nimue or Viviane, and he teaches her his craft, and she uses what he teaches to bind him. In one version she seals him beneath a great stone; in another inside a hawthorn or an invisible tower of air, from which his voice can still, on occasion, be heard. He saw it coming and went anyway. The prophet who could read the future in a pit of fighting dragons could not, or would not, save himself from a spell of his own instruction.

This is the shape of Merlin across a thousand years of retelling: too many beginnings to reconcile, a demon’s son and a mad hermit and a royal engineer all at once, undone in the end by the very knowledge he was so free in giving away. The traditions cannot even agree on how he looked or how he died, and the disagreement may be the truest thing about him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Merlin?

Merlin is the prophet, enchanter, and kingmaker of Arthurian and Welsh legend, best known as the wizard who guides Britain’s kings and engineers the rise of King Arthur. He first appears in his familiar form in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain around 1136, and grows over the following centuries into the archetype of the wise magician.

Where did the character of Merlin come from?

Merlin is a deliberate literary composite created by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who fused the fatherless boy-prophet Ambrosius from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum with an older Welsh figure named Myrddin. The Welsh Myrddin, or Myrddin Wyllt, was a wild prophet who went mad in the Caledonian Forest after the Battle of Arfderydd, and had no original connection to Arthur at all.

Who was Merlin’s father?

In the thirteenth-century romances of Robert de Boron, Merlin is the son of a devil who fathered him on a sleeping virtuous woman in a plot to raise an Antichrist. The child was baptised and turned to good, but kept a demonic knowledge of the past and hidden things alongside a divine gift of prophecy. Earlier sources simply call him a fatherless boy.

What did Merlin do for King Arthur?

Merlin made Arthur’s very birth possible by disguising King Uther Pendragon as the Duke of Cornwall so that Uther could father Arthur on Igraine at Tintagel. He then took the infant as payment, arranged for him to be raised in secret, and later set the test of the sword in the stone that revealed Arthur as the rightful king of Britain.

How did Merlin die?

Merlin does not truly die in most tellings; instead he is imprisoned forever by a young woman called Nimue or Viviane, whom he loved and taught his own magic. She uses his lessons against him to seal him beneath a stone, or inside a tree or an invisible tower of air, and he foresaw this fate yet walked into it anyway.

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