A fatherless boy about to be sacrificed to stop a king's tower from collapsing
Vortigern's masons are told the foundations need a fatherless child's blood.
Myth · Celtic & Arthurian
Merlin
Arthurian legend — prophet and enchanter
The wizard of Arthurian legend: prophet, engineer, kingmaker and, in the end, a fool for love. Geoffrey of Monmouth built him out of the Welsh bard Myrddin and the fatherless boy Ambrosius of the Historia Brittonum, gave him a book of prophecies and a mad life in the woods, and made him the maker of kings. He ends his career shut up for ever by the pupil he could not refuse.
How to spot them
- ▸A prophet begotten, in the legend, by a demon on a nun
- ▸Kingmaker and engineer rather than a mere spell-caster
- ▸Ends imprisoned in a tree, a cave or a tower of air by his own pupil
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Myrddin', 'Vortigern's tower', 'the red and the white dragon', 'the Lady of the Lake'
Stories & episodes
Revealed a red dragon and a white one fighting in a pool under the foundations
The red stands for the Britons, the white for the Saxons — hence the Welsh flag's dragon.
Disguised a lovestruck king as another man's husband so a child could be conceived at Tintagel
Uther takes the shape of Gorlois to lie with Igraine.
Said to have shipped the stones of Stonehenge from Ireland and raised them on Salisbury Plain
The Giants' Dance, in Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Set a sword in a stone so that the rightful king would reveal himself
From the Vulgate cycle and Robert de Boron.
Taught his magic to a young woman who used it to shut him up for ever
Nimue or Viviane, the Lady of the Lake.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a book of his prophecies, then a Latin verse life of his madness in the forest
Prophetiae Merlini (c. 1135) and Vita Merlini (c. 1150).
T. H. White made him live backwards through time, remembering the future
The Sword in the Stone, 1938.
Quick-fire facts
- •His Welsh original is the bard Myrddin; Geoffrey Latinised it as Merlinus, supposedly to avoid the French word merde
- •The tower episode is told of a boy called Ambrosius in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum
- •Geoffrey's Prophetiae Merlini circulated separately and was hugely influential in medieval politics
- •Robert de Boron's verse Merlin made him a Christian prophet and the founder of the Round Table
- •The woman who entraps him is variously Nimue, Viviane or Niniane, identified with the Lady of the Lake
- •In the Vita Merlini he goes mad after a battle and lives wild in the Caledonian forest
- •He is not in the earliest Welsh triads as Arthur's adviser — that role is Geoffrey's invention
- •Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970) retells the legend in his own voice; T. H. White's Merlyn is spelt with a y
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Geoffrey of Monmouth — The History of the Kings of Britain
- Peter Goodrich (ed.) — The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology