Stephen Knight
This
essay was written as an illustrated talk after the publication of my book on
Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages
in 2009. I felt both that Myrddin/Merlin’s link to nature had not
emerged satisfactorily as a connected theme in the book, as it had different
valencies in different periods and contexts, and I also felt that the rich
illustrations of the figure deserved
showing on a larger screen than available in the book – and I also wanted to
begin and end with the image of Merlin as a
stag visiting Rome, which I had wanted to have on the cover, but the
publishers preferred Howard Pyle: I am not sure whether the cheapness of black and white or the patriotic Americanness
of this image was its main attraction for them. In appropriately Merlinesque
mode the paper has been given around the world, Houston, Perth, Sydney, Bologna,
as well as back home in Cardiff. As I had the references available in the book,
I put them in here as footnotes: I have thought it (and the pix) would make a
good piece for a festschrift for someone I really like and admire, and am
waiting for Tom Hahn’s to be proposed.
In a recent book I have argued that in the stories about him Merlin
consistently represents knowledge, but a
knowledge that not only changes its nature in terms of changing understandings
of what knowledge it, but also a knowledge whose evaluation changes quite
radically through consistent encounters with power, especially the power
of secular authority. Whether he is an
early Celtic mocker of heroic society, a Christian critic of medieval
secularity, or an idealistic opponent of modern materialism, Merlin is
consistently at odds with the power structures of a period and so his myth
realises central concerns and problems of those periods.
The book argues that out in some detail and I hope with some
credibility. Here I want to turn to something else which is at time represented
in the book, but is never followed up
there because it seemed a different, if inherently interwoven, story about the
meaning of the Merlin myth. This is the curious, even compelling, fact that
Merlin consistently has a relationship with what we now tend to call the
environment, the natural world and its implied values, rather than with the
created world, social and material, of human society. But here too his meaning
and its relationship with its opposites is neither stable nor consistent
through time, and so tracing its path can offer an understanding of changing
relationships between knowledge and the environment, and of their opposites -- the environmental
ignorance and destructivity that are today
all too evident and deeply problematic.
1. Apple Tree and Little Pig
We first hear of Merlin under the name Myrddin, in early Welsh poetry,
set in early Cumbria, still Celtic, recorded by about 1000.[i] In “Apple-Tree”, Myrddin speaks:
Sweet apple tree, growing in a glade,
a treasure hidden from the lords of
Rhydderch.
With a crowd round its base, a host around
it,
a delight to them, brave warriors.
Now Gwenddydd loves me not, nor welcomes
me,
and I am hated by Gwasawg, Rhydderch’s
ally.
I have destroyed her son and daughter,
death takes everyone; why does he not
welcome me?
After Gwenddolau, no lords revere me,
no sport delights me, no lover seeks me
out.
In the battle of Arfderydd, my torque was
gold,
today I am no treasure to a swan-like girl.
(Apple Tree, 35-46)
Myrddin is an exile, in the forest. The story is that
after the battle of Arfderydd in 573, just north of Carlisle, he suffered what
we now call war trauma, having seen friends and relatives die, some apparently
at his own hands. This was a real battle: maybe he was a real lord of Celtic
Cumbria. But the point of the poems is the distance between Myrddin and the heroic
court.[ii] The “Apple Tree” poem indicates clearly
the power of nature: each stanza starts by invoking a “Sweet apple tree”: with
its “tender blossoms” (47). The tree’s “special virtue” (83) is evidently a
symbol of Myrddin’s desocialized natural wisdom. His only associate is another
other worldly feature, the `Little Pig’ he addresses, in another poem.
Oian little pig ! It is clear day.
Hear the voice of the water birds, sad voices.
Years and long days will be ours,
and unjust lords, fruits withering
and bishops will support thieves, churches be vile,
and monks will earn their load of sins.
The poems clearly deplore the result of heroic action and a question asked
a bout Arfderydd -- “where is its cause” (23) -- itself points to a critique of
heroic society: Welsh tradition records the view that this battle was fought
for no good reason.[iii] The idea of a prince who has been
traumatized in battle and takes to the wild, even to madness, is well-known in
Celtic tradition, and the Myrddin story seems the earliest known. A well-known
variant is the Irish story of Suibhne Geilt, “Sweeney the Wild.”
These poems offer the original Myrddin. He is not a prophet: he merely
lives in alterity, and so implicitly criticizes heroic society, occasionally
explicitly. As these stories were remembered in Wales, under Anglo-Saxon
attack, the figure of alteritous knowledge becomes a voice for Welsh resistance,
prophesying a British triumph. That is the second Myrddin, who is worked into
the Cumbrian Myrddin texts in the process of transmission. When speaking of war
in Wales Myrddin 2, is also place-linked, but now not outside the battle but at
its Welsh locations:
And I will prophesy the battle on the Iddon,
and the battle of Machafwy, and the battle of Afon,
and the battle of Cors Mochno, and the battle in Môn,
and the battle of Cyminod, and the battle of Caerleon,
and the battle of Aber Gwaith, and the battle of Ieithion
and when Dyfed may be made a borderland for stags
a youth will rise, good for the Britons. (Little Pig, 174-80)
For Myrddin the environment can be a place of alterity or a heartland,
or both.
2. Stag, leaf and maritime science
Geoffrey of Monmouth, a
twelfth-century Welshman writing in Latin, first dealt with Merlin his Historia Regum Britanniae of c.1138, more
interesting in this context is his later Vita
Merlini, “The Life of Merlin” (c.1150) starts in touch with the Cumbrian material:
after the battle Merlin went mad and took to the woods. In winter he suffered, and
addressed a wolf, his “dear companion”. Then comes a newly recorded but surely
old story.
Merlin returned to court but the
crowds drove him mad again. The king detained him in chains, and tried to calm
him with music. One day the queen entered, and the king took a leaf from her
hair. Merlin laughed. The king pressed him for an explanation, and in return
for a promise of freedom, he explained – the leaf was there from the queen’s
encounter with her lover in “the undergrowth” (p. 67). He reads the natural signs to uncover social
disorder. The queen was angry, and he
left after saying his wife could re-marry, if the husband avoided him, and he
would attend the wedding “with fine gifts” (p. 73). Back in the forest Merlin
realized from the stars and planets that his wife was re-marrying. He mounted a
stag, drove stags, does and she-goats in three lines before him and went to
court. The bridegroom laughed at the
sight: Merlin ripped off the stag’s horns and threw them through the man’s
head, killing him. Here Merlin is aggressively natural –but he is not so
always. He leaves for the woods, despite his sister’s pleading him to stay. He
asked her to provide for him a house with seventy doors and seventy windows so
he could watch the stars, and seventy secretaries to record his words.
Taliesin, the famous bard and visionary, visits Merlin and, at his
request, explains wind and rain, the sea, types of fish, then the topography of
Britain and, briefly, other places. After the environment they briefly discuss history
for a while, but hear a new spring has broken out; they go to it. Merlin is
made sane by the spring. Taliesin explains types of health-giving waters around
the world. Chieftains and leaders come to see the new spring, and Merlin is
asked to resume his kingship. He says he is too old and will remain happily in
the forest of Calidon and . explains the nature of types of bird.
The natural world is elevated with classical learning, but there are
still Welsh connections. The horn-throwing Merlin seems linked to Cernunnos,
the Celtic stag-horned god, represented on a silver cauldron preserved in
Denmark as himself bearing horns and having as his animal familiar a stag with
the same horns. It may not be accidental that the horned god's other animal
familiar is a serpent, representing wisdom, a figure which may, as I will suggest,
be partly implied in Geoffrey’s deployment of the name Merlin.
In his earlier Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey does
deploy some environmental elements, still in awkward relation with political
life: this interface is a normal feature
of Merlin and the environment. The new name has some environmental features: in
early Welsh spelling Myrddin is represented as “Merdin”, and to Latinize this
as “Merdinus” would produce a name redolent of the French word merde, “excrement”, as Gaston Paris long
ago noted.[iv] Avoiding this earthiness, Geoffrey neatly revised the name as “Merlinus”
to fit his new sociocultural context – and perhaps a little more positive environmentalism.
While most feel that the name refers to the merlin, smallest of the European
hawks, it is not evident that this meaning was then known: the Latin world merula, which is probably the source,
means both bird and fish (modern French merle,
blackbird and merlan, whiting, are
both derived from it). I suggest Geoffrey found a name that suggested both
natural liberty and wisdom. Geoffrey may even have imagined Merlin’s animal
avatar as a winged serpent, the epitome of wisdom, and so even a dragon, the
creature he first encounters and recognizes, deep beneath the ground when
Vortigern’s tower collapses. Maybe that was a family matter.
Environmental connections continue among the politics. Merlin is found
among the Gewissei, at Galabes Spring “where he often went” and suggests that as Aurelius wishes to build
a monument to the men fallen in the war he should bring from Ireland “the choir
of the giants” from Mount Killare, valuable healing stones, moved in the past
from Africa by giants. Uther and an army
go for the stones, with Merlin’s advice. They defeat the Irish but cannot move
the stones. Merlin laughs and “with his own machinery” moves the stones to
Amesbury. A knowledge versus power moment, showing. Merlin is not simply at the
beck and call of a king, however powerful, this also has natural force, not
magical. Much the same is true when Uther becomes Gorlois to conceive Arthur. According
to Geoffrey, the solution is more a matter of natural knowledge than magic: “By
my drugs I know how to give you the precise appearance of Gorlois” (pp. 206-07)
and so the king becomes identical to his enemy.
In the History Merlin has come close to royal power – though he never
meets Arthur, just arranges his conception. He is also centrally involved in
royal and national prophecies. He is not really in a state of alterity now. The
next few centuries will make it very clear that political Merlin, as grand
vizier to feudal monarchs, is not just environmental Merlin – or as I put it in
my book Advice displaces Wisdom.. But just as natural Myrddin engaged with
social politics, so socio-political Merlin has clear memories of his natural
force, constrained as it might be.
3 From Nature to Grand Vizier
Geoffrey’ story became the structure against which detailed thirteenth-century
French accounts of Arthur developed. At first Merlin became a Christian authority
figure, the prophet of the grail who advised Uther and then Arthur to improve
themselves. But this Christian-critic Merlin faded away: I think his natural
connection made him too unorthodox for this kind of knowledge, though Robert
tried to rechannel this alterity by making Merlin the son of the devil rescued
for the church. In the massive prose Vulgate Merlin acted as in fully secular
mode, as adviser and guide to Arthur, including in military terms. But both his
natural connections and the early Celtic stories haunted the texts and unsettled their
secular certainty.
One figure is located in the distant country – usually Northumberland,
is Blaise, who writes down the stories Merlin tells him. Some feel this name
comes from Welsh blaidd, Breton bleizh,
meaning wolf, and they relate this to the old grey wolf that Merlin befriends
in his Vita.[v] But environmentally attractive as this
might be, it is very unlikely: the name comes from a natural but different
source: from Bleddri, in French Bleheris, a real oral story-teller. He is
clericised as a scribe – and very often illustrated. He is like a hermit, that environmentalised
church source of wisdom, used very much in the Grail stories to oppose secular chivalry.
Another figure has also been wrongly traced to Welsh roots: Vivien, the
main figure who stops Merlin’s activities. Wisdom has to leave the story,
presumably so it can end badly, though sometimes he returns for a rueful final
comment. Some thought her name come from the word chwifleian in the Myrddin
poems. An attractive idea, and it will recur in the 19thC, but not true. It is a noun for `pale wanderer‘:
her name is just a misreading, and misgendering, of the British saint Ninian.
Her impact is the reflex of Blaise: where he trains and records Merlin she
learns from and silences him. But she too is environmentally linked: Melrin
ends up in a tomb or a cave, somewhere in a forest. She is also of course natural
in her beauty and sensuality – though it is Merlin’s brains not body she wants.
Merlin does not always disappear from the story: he
can retire, as in the Vita, but this is in my view only in the texts
where he does not confront secular power too directly. In the Perceval written or inspired by Robert
de Boron, when the grail quest is over Merlin takes to a tower outside the
castle, called an “esplumoir”. The word, it is generally agreed, refers to a
moulting cage, as would be inhabited by a real merlin in its inactive time.[vi] Nature is often disconcertingly close to the
surface of the text, challenging the power of society.
One related feature is what most call disguise, and I call transformation:
there is no original Merlin to be disguised, he always just symbolizes knowledge
and has many versions. He takes many forms – but not courtly or aristocratic
ones. He transforms as an ugly
deformed herdsman from Northumberland, an old white-haired man, Uther’s
mistress's serving boy, a small boy, a blind beggar with a dog: this too
is a knowledge power element, in that his knowledge surpasses social power, but
it is environmentally linked, as in the big boots of the peasant, the animals
he handles when transformed and, the one I like most, the club he bears as a peasant
boy.
Merlin is very rarely magical: his prophecies are in French linked to
the narrative, but that is probably because they weren’t interested in the British
political future. But his magical powers are distinctly environmental, especially
the way he deals with Arthur’s enemies. He sets their tents on fire, then ine then the major battle that follows,
the king’s enemies faced “a great wind and storm that Merlin sent against them
and a fog” (I.229). Later he raises a river and also a fog to help
defeat the ten thousand Saxons who have renewed their attack on Britain in
Arthur’s realm (I.298). When
Merlin brings the Breton army to Arthur
he, in the spirit of those famous
warrior-priests, “led them riding in front on a great black horse” (I.228).
With
the same mix of older patterns and new commitments, he says to Arthur, after
telling him the story of his own birth:
“I want to keep going back to the woods; and this is by the nature that
came to me from the one who sired me, for he does not seek out any
companionship that might come above from God. But I do not go into the wood for
fellowship with him, but to keep company with Blaise, the holy man.” (I.221)
As
clearly in contact with the Celtic trickster are some digressions later in the
Vulgate version, where the author seems to be amusing himself and his audience
with exotic stories. The longest begins with him suddenly appearing in “the
wide and deep forests of the country around Rome” (I.323) as a “black-skinned
wild-haired, bearded and shoeless” and in “a ragged tunic” (I.324): shortly he
will run into Julius Caesar’s palace in
the form of a stag and interpret his dream about a sow and twelve wolf-cubs.
Following this startling opening comes a summary of the plot of the romance Silence, only found today
in one manuscript, from the later thirteenth century[vii] about a young woman disguised as a man who is desired by the
lascivious empress. Merlin, in human shape, with satiric laughter at various
ironic situations, explains all and the empress is executed, along with her
twelve lovers – the sow and the wolf-cubs from the emperor’s dream.
A
retrospective digression involves Merlin
taking Arthur, on his anti-Roman European tour, to Lausanne, where he tells him
about the devil cat of that region – a story itself reminiscent of the giant
Cath Palug of Welsh tradition which survived in French and Creole myth as “le
chapalu” and made a reappearance in film in 1965 in the form of Jane Fonda as Cat
Ballou, the female gunslinger.
Merlin’s
end also has an environmental development. Vivien leave him entombed in some way, and this becomes
dynamised in Christian form, much as Blaise was. There develops a recurrent
story motif about a knight finding by accident Merlin’s grave and receiving advice
and prophecies. One story called La Conte
del Brait (“The Story of the Cry”),[viii] has not survived in French, but has a
major development in Il Baladro del Sabio
Merlino, (“The Cry of the Wise Merlin”), a late medieval story in both
Spanish and Portuguese.[ix] The grave-voice story is in Christian
terms a version of the Cumbrian exile, alone, wretched, speaking truth to
power. It is an image, that will show renewed power in the nineteenth century.
But before that both Merlin’s power to use knowledge critically
and also his environmental connections were largely sidelined in the late medieval
and early modern centuries when royal power
came to dominate his treatment. This is true of the English reworkings of the
story, where Arthur becomes a figure of national leadership – English now
rather than British and definitely rather than Welsh, his only function is as a
prophet of Arthurian grandeur and eventual tragedy, and this pattern runs right
through to Malory.
4. Merlin versus the Renaissance
In Book Three of Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso Merlin prophesies from his tomb about Bradamant and the grandeur of
the D'Este family.[x] This aggrandises the medieval single
knight receiving advice, and then the idea of a cave is massively amplified: here Merlin
… in milke white marble did engrave
Strange stories which things future strangely taught.
The verie images seemd life to have,
And saving they were dumbe, you would have thought
Both by their looks and by their lively features
That they had mov’d and had bin living creatures. (XXVI.30, 3-8??)
Advice from the grave goes further politically upmarket in Book 33 when
Bradamant sees murals about the future
wars of France painted by “the British Merline”: (XXXIII.3,7):
He made by Magicke art that stately hall,
And by the selfe same art he causd to be
Straunge histories ingraved on the wall (XXXIII. 4, 1-3)
Merlin as a renaissance mage serving royal power is developed by Edmund
Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590-96). Merlin made Arthur’s shield:
But all of Diamond perfect pure and cleene
It framed was, one massie entire mold,
Hewen out of adamant rocke with engines keene.[xi]
He made a magic mirror for King Ryence, and his daughter Britomart sees
her future husband Artegall through a magic glass he made. Merlin’s cave is
like an industrial hell:
And there such ghastly noise of yron chaines,
And brasen Cauldrons thou shalt rombling heare,
Which thousand sprights with long enduring paines
Doe tosse, that it will stonne they feeble braines,
And oftentimes great grones, and grieuous stoundes,
When too huge toile and labour them constraines: (III.3.9,2-7)
They were building “brazen walle” around Carmarthen. This is a strange
sequence. Both Ariosto and Spenser see Merlin as mage and artificer, but both
impose limits on his power, his enviromentally empowering knowledge. Ariosto
uses Melissa like a classical Vivien, Spenser just makes Merlin see his
terrifying end. This period does the same with prophecy: renaissance Merlin only
prophesies up to the present, to back-validate the present ruler. He would be updated
about every generation to add more grand monarchs, but never into: time had stopped
with god’s anointed.
Merlin’s natural connections were now forgotten, but they were
marginalised. Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion
(the 1612 first version) locates Merlin in Monmouth, Carmarthen and
Snowdon, but with little interest in prophecy disseminate his power in a
folkloric way, treating him like a tutelary deity of the British landscape.
Of Merlin and his skill what Region doth not heare ?
The world shall still be full of Merlin everie where. (p.101, 159-60)
That environmentalised demoticism is matched by the
now discernible popular Merlin.
A pamphlet by Richard Johnson survives from 1621 about
Tom Thumb. In King Arthur’s time an old man sent his elderly barren wife to
Merlin in quest of a child, even a tiny one: Tom is born and has a lively
career at Arthur’s court. This story
will be persistent, and have special anti-heroic, even anti-liberal, political
meaning in the eighteenth century, but here it just indicates the cross-cultural
potential of popular Merlin in the early modern period.
Another instance is The Birth of
Merlin, a play by William Rowley
written by 1612. A major figure is the clown, Merlin’s doltish peasant uncle. Merlin
is young and both a patriotic-historic seer and the folkloric comic trickster.
They cross Britain in a comic and melodramatic narrative mixing up a playful
devil and the Saxon invasions –some thought Shakespeare was involved, and it
has his kind of multi-tonality, if not his skill and creative judgement. The popular
and environmental Merlin is also found in the royalist pamphlet of 1641 Thomas
Heywood, The Life of Merlin Sirnamed
Ambrosius.[xii] Merlin could offer at Vortigern’s court aerial
hunting, with flying hares and dogs, and a tournament enlivened by pigmy
archers, but he was seen as firmly set in a Britain both natural and mythical.
Equally localized and demotic were the very popular Merlins, tiny paper
almanacks with sunrise and sunset, tides, phases of the moon and a record of
market prices: in a popular and everyday way, deeply environmental. These
certainly grounded Merlin and were even involved in civil-war politics,. William
Lilly’s Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a
collection of new prophecies, sold out in a week in 1644 in 1647 and he started
a long-running series of Merlini Anglici
Ephemeris, and had many rivals and successors, into the eighteenth century.
At a loftier level Merlin was cut adrift both from political prophecy
and popular locational energy but still as in Ariosto and Spenser had some
esoteric link with the natural world. Where Ariosto’s Merlin created prince-pleasing
frescoes in his cave and Spenser’s Merlin built a defensive wall of brass,
Dryden’s genius of the British resistance – and also the Stuart symbolic
revanche -- has contact with Philidel, an “Airy Spirit”
… I have view’d thee in my Magick Glass,
Making thy moan, among the Midnight Wolves,
That Bay the silent Moon: Speak, I conjure thee.
`Tis Merlin bids thee, at whose awful Wand,
The pale Ghost quivers, and the grim Fiend gasps. (II.1, 7-12)
But this royally servile Merlin
lacks nature-connected powers:
There’s not a Tree in that Inchanted Grove
But numbred out, and given by tale to Fiends;
And under every Leaf a Spirit couch’d.
But by what Method to resolve those Charms,
Is yet unknown to me. (III.1, 26-30)
But Dryden’s Stuart faith embraces Whig business practices as Merlin
finally predicts to Arthur as he enfolds Saxons vigour and future mercantile exploitations
of the environment:
Behould what Rouling Ages shall produce:
The Wealth, the Loves, the Glories of our Isle,
which yet like Golden Oar, unripe in Beds,
Expect the Warm Indulgency of Heav’n
To call ‘em forth to Light (V.2,
76-85)
That multifarious Merlin did not survive: for the Tory Fielding he was
a comic buffoon, in both the 1730 Tom
Thumb: A Tragedy, and its 1731 sophistication into The Tragedy of Tragedies: The Life and Death of Tom Thumb.[xiii] “Merlin by name, a Conjuror by Trade” he
sings about “the mystick getting of Tom Thumb” (p. 50). He can have natural
powers: in the musical version by Eliza Haywood, The Opera of Operas of 1733 he addresses the “rav’nous Cow” which has swallowed Tom in one of the great
comic couplets of the British stage:
Now, by emetick Power, Red Cannibal,
Cast up thy Prisoner, England’s Hannibal. (p. 217)
5.Gothic Merlin
Fielding’s Tory mockery of natural wisdom was almost immediately
contradicted. George II’s queen, Caroline of Anspach, a Whig intellectual,
established in 1732 at Richmond, a “Hermitage” dedicated to learning with busts
of Newton, Boyle and Locke. By summer 1735 she had built nearby a cottage with
gothic windows and thatched roof, set into a hill, and known as “Merlin’s
Cave”. Its six life-size wax images are Merlin and his male secretary, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII’s queen Margaret,
and two wise women, one renaissance, either Britomart or Bradamante, one
classical, Minerva or Melissa. Reclaiming the cave from the renaissance as
natural, modest and, intriguingly, gender-aware, the cave it is knowledge-linked, and the first instance of Gothic
Merlin. Very shortly a new element was added. Celebrating the cave the Welsh
poet Jane Brereton, herself writing as Melissa, sees Merlin in part as a
forerunner of modern science like Newton’s, but also as a sort of Celtic bard
who himself declaims:
I study’d Nature, through her various Ways;
And chaunted to this Harp, prophetick Lays (p. 7)
Thomas Gray’s poem The Bard and Thomas Jones’s very influential
painting `The Bard’ were to disseminate this figure. They did not name him
Merlin: I think he had become too much mocked and too popular for that. But the
Celtic-Gothic link (in the 18thC the two were close) was of interest to some
opinion-makers: Thomas Warton’s “The Grave of king Arthur,” tells how an “elfin
queen” bore Arthur’s body to Avalon:
In Merlin’s agate-axled car
To her green isle’s enamel’d steep
Far in the navel of the deep.[xiv]
The young Cornish-raised scientist like Humphrey Davy, himself a master
of cleverness, wrote in a poem of about 1795 about “mighty Merlin”, “The Master
of the spell”, a figure of “anguish” with a “dull dark eye” at his highly
gothic death in “a dark cave upon the flinty rock”.[xv]
But these were only forerunners, and Merlin’s return to the cultural
mainstream would be by a much more roundabout route. Mainstream English Romanticism
is not at all favourable to Merlin – or indeed, for that matter to Arthur,
although their narratives were readily available in selections and editions.[xvi] Their preferred medievalism was the plain-man
long-suffering moralism of the ballads, and they basically agreed with the renaissance
view of Merlin as mere cleverness, but could see no use for him as such.
The major English Romantics all name-checked Merlin, but in narrative
he was negative: Scott’s The Bridal of
Triermain (1813) has him enchanting Arthur’s illegitimate daughter Gyneth
to sleep for malign purposes; in Wordsworth’s
1828 “The Egyptian Maid” Merlin is malign nature, sinking the maiden’s ship and
then, under pressure from Nina, Wordsworth’s version of Vivien, flying her to
Caerleon in “The very swiftest of thy cars” (109), drawn by “two mute Swans” (179, 177): it all
ends well, but not by Merlin’s hands. An equally malign Merlin appears in “The Masque of Gwendolen” by the much underrated
medievalist poet Richard Heber. Like a Celtic Lucifer, or a darkened version of
the renaissance Merlin, he offers Gwendolen:
… a regal throne
Of solid adamant, hill above hill,
Ten furlongs high, to match whose altitude
Plinlinmon fails, and Idris’ stony chair
Sinks like an infant’s bauble. (p. 207)
She rejects him; he turns her into a “ghastly spectre”, and the plot of
the Wife of Bath’s tale is used to frustrate his malice.
A curious aside to the romantics
negative and naturally evil Merlin is in the small group of minor poets who set
the story of Arthur in the north –the Arctic Arthur school as I call them in a
recent essay – and use Merlin as his benign helper, continuing the British
politicised grand vizier tradition, but in the context of Ossian and the notion
of the northern heroic world: I am referring to Richard Hole, 1789, John
Thelwall 1800 (check) and Henry Milman
1818 here, and the main figure, Bulwer Lytton’s 1848 stanzaic epic King Arthur.
Tennyson links back to this Romantic negativism. The first of the Idylls
of the Kings he wrote, apart from the previous `Morte D’Arthur’, became “Merlin and Vivien”[xvii] From the start, it is both fateful and
natural. It starts “A storm was coming”:
and that storm will finally see Merlin swamped by Vivien’s sexuality and yield
to her is knowledge. He is only a clever man of science with no moral wisdom –
Darwin is no doubt the model. Tennyson disposes of the man of natural wisdom in
order to persevere with his king of
moral value. He introduces him as
… the most famous man of all those times,
Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts,
Had built the King his havens, ships and halls,
Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens;
The people call’d him Wizard;
(164-8)
His failing is as natural as his skills, and Vivien gets him through her
own natural power:
The pale blood of the wizard at her touch
Took gayer colours like an opal warm’d. (947-8)
The myth that opals, through their color variation, are unlucky, is
behind the image.[xviii] Ss the storm rages, animality takes over:
Merlin’s wish for love in age is fulfilled in lust in a decidedly malign
environmental context:
… she call’d him lord and liege,
Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve,
Her God, her Merlin, the one passionate love
Of her whole life; and ever overhead
Bellow’d the tempest, and the rotten branch
Snapt in the rushing of the river-rain
Above them; and in change of glare and gloom
Her eye and neck glittering went and came;
Till now the storm its burst of passion spent,
Moaning and calling out of other lands,
Had left the ravaged woodland yet once more
To peace; and what should not have been had been, (951-62)
However, if this is Merlin’s nadir Tennyson will also finally advert to
his approaching zenith. He had never rejected Merlin’s role as a bard: in 1852
Tennyson had published two poems under the pseudonym Merlin.[xix] In what he meant as his only
autobiographical poem, “Merlin and the Gleam”(1889),[xx] a survey of his poetic life. Its opening
states:
I am
Merlin
And I am dying,
I am Merlin
Who follow The Gleam. (7-10)
Tennyson identified “The Gleam” with Nimue and “the higher poetic
imagination”, drawing on the Celtic tradition that Vivien was Myrddin’s `chwifleian’.
Cumbria was also the source of the important development of a new and old
Merlin, the man of nature, or, more correctly, Der Naturmensch..
6 Der Naturmensch
The German Romantics conceived from Celtic sources a modern Merlin, now
again positively set in the context of nature. The Celtic Myrddin found in
Ellis’s Specimens of Early English
Metrical Romances (1805) inspired Ludwig Uhland’s “Merlin der Wilde”
(1829). Merlin sits “In wooded isolation”,
on a mossy stone by a lake and listens to the “the spirit of the world”(“der Geist der
Welt”). This universalized version of
the Cumbrian Myrddin develops its source: a hart carries Merlin off to the
king’s castle. The king asks to have a demonstration of “die Spruche” (“the
wisdom”) Merlin has learnt in the wild, and asks him to explain something: last night the king thought he heard
whispering, like lovers, by the linden tree. The king's daughter comes in,
Merlin takes from her hair a linden leaf and explains that the voices were the
king's daughter kissing her lover – the ancient story is euphemised. Uhland
also stresses that it is nature that has answered the question, and Merlin
returns to the forest, lying on the moss, where his voice still sounds.
Karl Immerman’s early “Merlins Grab” (1818) celebrated Merlin as a “Naturmensch”. A young man goes to consult
the sage: the grave now has a romantic gothic setting, in the forest, by a
fast-running river, in a grotto, lit by a red glare. Merlin speaks about the
conflict on earth between the clear-sighted brave and the narrow-minded deaf:
to attain virtue requires hardship, faith, strength: essentially “All Happiness
comes from inside”.[xxi] Immerman's
major work, Merlin: Eine Mythe, is an
epic medieval Christian drama but in 1833
he wrote “Merlin im tiefen Grabe” (“Merlin in the deep grave”),[xxii] which seems in effect a second epilogue
to, almost an apology for, Merlin: Eine
Mythe as people do not hear his message from the grave.
Other nineteenth-century German Merlins following the Naturmensch concept
include: Heinrich Heine in saying his
“Romancero” (1851) “I envy you, dear
colleague Merlin, these trees and the fresh breezes blowing through them.”[xxiii] In the same spirit Nicolaus Lenau starts
one of his 1840s “Waldlieder”
(“Wood-songs”) sees Merlin as linked to the muse of poetry: “In the chalice of
finest moss, Sounds the eternal poem”.[xxiv]
French writers also developed a positive romantic Merlin. The Breton
Hersart de La Villemarqué included Merlin in his 1842 Contes populaires des ancient Bretons and Edgar Quinet’s long novel Merlin l’enchanteur (1860) represented Merlin
as the “patron of France”.[xxv]
Both are political-historical rather than natural, but do give Merlin a
sort of druidic leadership as well. That concept is celebrated by Guillaume Apollinaire in his potent prose
poem L’Enchanteur Pourrisant (“The
Decomposing Enchanter”), published in 1909 with superb illustrations in bold
black brush drawings by André Derain. PIC Apollinaire –Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky
-- worked on thiswhen living in the Ardennes forest[xxvi] and he transmutes the romantic druid and
the Naturmensch into the disembodied claims of art itself. He restated this in
one of his finest poems, “Merlin et la vieille Femme” (“Merlin and the Old
Woman”, 1912). Merlin explores the poetic process:
I made white gestures in the wilderness
Lemurs ran swarming through my nightmares
My leaps and twirls expressed that bliss
Which is an effect of art and nothing more (p. 97)
And he his own vitality with his art:
The lady awaiting me is called Vivian
And when comes a springtime of new sorrow
Couched among coltsfoot and sweet marjoram
For ever I live on beneath the hawthorn flowers (p. 99)
Ralph Waldo Emerson transplanted very influentially the continental
Romantic initiative, when he took Merlin as a figure of the poetic muse and its
transcendental power in his essay on “Poetry and the Imagination”(1841?) and in
`Merlin I’, published in Poems 1847:
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of supersolar blaze
Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate.[xxvii]
And more specifically in “Merlin’s Song”:
Of Merlin wise I learned a song, --
Sing it low, or sing it loud,
It is mightier than the strong,
And punishes the proud.
I sing it to the surging crowd, --
Good men it will calm and cheer,
Bad men it will chain and cage.
In the heart of music peals a strain
Which only angels hear;
Whether it waken joy or rage,
Hushed myriads hark in vain,
Yet they who hear it shed their age,
And take their youth again. (p. 1222)
The transcendental druidic Merlin, linking nature and poetry returns to
Tennyson, as has been shown, and goes much further, as will be shown, but there
were still other versions. In A
Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889) Mark Twain makes
Merlin a dark force of the past as he had been for the English Romantics, and a
large number of poems and plays around the turn of the century rework the
medieval advisory Merlin: his role is usually to fail to avert the Arthurian
tragedy. But the wise Naturmensch
resurrected by the German Romantics was also the dynamo for the next, and still
current, major meaning of Merlin, strongly environmental in many ways, namely
Merlin the educator.
7. Professor Merlin
There had been traces of this idea in the past, but it had never
settled in a consistent formation. In Spenser Merlin supervised Prince Arthur’s education in north-east Wales
near the river Dee, but only by appointing a tutor. In Bulwer Lytton’s much
overlooked King Arthur of 1848 the
heavily-bearded Merlin is like a “wizard on a Druid throne” (I. 38 and 41), and
he has also been Arthur’s quasi-paternal educator in “the young hopeful day
When the child stood by the great prophet’s knee, And drank high thoughts to
strengthen years to be.” (I. 41).
America was more practical: as Alan Lupack has shown, Merlin as
educator was realized in the Arthurian boys’ groups, notably those founded by
William Byron Forbush well before the Scout movement took off in Britain in
1907.[xxviii] Boys were encouraged to join as “Knights
of King Arthur”; each group was called a “Castle”, led by an adult “Merlin”: a
guide for the guides was The Merlin’s
Book of Advanced Work [xxix]. Groups for girls, or “Queens of Avalon”,
were led by Ladies of the Lake.
A more sophisticated educational Merlin emerged in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s
lengthy and fine poem Merlin (1917).
He is just a clever insightful man: his strong connection with nature is
actually a withdrawal from the real troublesome world: he joins Vivien in
Broceliande rather than continue advising Arthur, but returns to see the final
disaster. This is a powerful and modernist realization of the failure of knowledge,
or now education, to change the tragic path of history: and the date 1917 is
crucial. For the world as well as Merlin, the final words are bitterly true:
Colder blew the wind
Across the world, and on it heavier lay
The shadow and the burden of the night;
And there was darkness over Camelot. (2623-6)
Poetry did not forget Merlin the visionary adviser to a world in
crisis. For a Georgian like Noyes he was limited to sentimental nature-loving:
Tell me Merlin – it is I
Who call thee, after a thousand Springs, --
Tell me by what wizardry
The white foam wake sin whiter wings,
Where surf and sea-gulls toss and cry
Like sister-flakes, as they mount and fly,
Flakes that the great sea flings on high,
To kiss each other and die ?
(p.247)
But stronger minded poets could see more in the potential of Merlin as
darkly educational voice: examples are
“Merlin” by Edwin Muir (1927):
O Merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam’s finger
Across the meadow and the wave ? (p.80)
Possibly more positive is Thom Gunn’s “Merlin in the Cave: He
Speculates Without a Book”[xxx] where Merlin reviews his life through
images of nature:
But I must act, and make
The meaning in each movement that I take.
Rook, bee, you are the whole and not a part.
This is an end. And yet another start. (p.84)
Gunn’s sense of the surviving value of nature and animal life is
recreated by Geoffrey Hill in “Merlin” [xxxi] and apparently spoken in his voice:
Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone
Among the raftered galleries of bone.
By the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn. (p.8)
A similar position is taken by the Leslie Norris, a Welsh poet, long
based in America, in “Merlin and the Snake’s Egg”, [xxxii] where he is actually – and referring back
to the Myrddin tradition -- become part of nature
Feathers sprout from his arms,
His nose is an owl’s hooked nose,
His eyes are the owl’s round eyes,
Silent and soft he flies. (p.45)
Yet it is the natural wisdom of his dog, Glain, who finds that totem of
true wisdom, the serpent’s egg.
For the major post-war Welsh poet
R. S. Thomas , in “Taliesin 1952”, [xxxiii] Merlin -- clearly here the Celtic Myrddin
-- is just one of the voices of his despair:
I have been Merlin wandering the woods
Of a far country, where the winds waken
Unnatural voiced, my mind broken
By sudden acquaintance with man’s rage. (p. 105)
The educational implications of natural Merlin in these poets was
fulfilled with some power and impact by a T. H. White, who combined being a
schoolmaster with deep dedication to nature, and condensed that with a deep
knowledge of Malory. There is no sign that White had read the Myrddin poems or
the German Romantics: rather, it is as if Tennyson and the Gleam and through
Emerson, English romanticism has caught up and can deploy Merlin as means of
educating the Wordsworthian child. But now in the 1930s the development of an
English Naturmensch has political as well as moral meaning:
what Wart, or Arthur, learns as a fish or a hawk is both to see the structures
of power in the social world and also to learn ways in which the individual can
gain personal authority and seek to improve social politics. The original story
was substantially different: in the 1938 The
Sword in the Stone Arthur met cannibals, a grass-snake and the comic, if
also unsettling, Madame Mim. This material was replaced in the 1958 four-book
version by more overtly political and moral sequences (the fascists ants and
the communal geese) from The Book of
Merlyn written in 1942 but not published until 1977.[xxxiv]
The natural wisdom Arthur learns from the animals is noble but
ineffective. The darker side of nature in human cruelty and violence, is also much
realized through the book, both personally and politically. In many ways White
magnifies the insights of Robinson, though there is no sign of a source relationship.
The long-unpublished fifth book returns to a world of animals in a badger’s den
which is just like a Cambridge dons’ common room, and all the wise analysis
just boils down to Arthur’s human courage in the face of violence.[xxxv] A fair position for 1942, and there is a
resonance here with Clemence Dane’s contemporary radio drama series, The Saviours, where Merlin supervises a
parade of British heroes through history, from King Arthur to the Unknown
Soldier.
In White the educator Merlyn returns to supervise in natural mode the tragic
outcome, and this has become a common feature found in the film Excalibur, where Merlin is a national Naturmensch
bearing a new age mantra that the land and the king are one.
A stronger version of the educational Naturmensch is in the major German performance piece Merlin oder Das wüste Land Tankred Dorst
and Ursula Ehler (1981).[xxxvi] Merlin is the central figure,
re-energizing the sage’s knowledge and values as democratic principles in a
world seen as ravaged by capitalist imperialism and so brought to tragedy.
Merlin’s final return or, as in Robinson, his survival to the gloomy
end is also common in a whole range of historical novels, which have become the
dominant mode of disseminating the stories of Arthur and Merlin and routinely
show Merlin as Arthur’s tutor. They are often child-oriented like White, and
they recurrently assert the value of nature. Merlin can be stigmatized as too
Welsh to be of value as in the English writers Godfrey Turton, The Emperor Arthur (1968) by and John
Gloag, Artorius Rex (1977). But it is
more normal for his Celticity to be celebrated as both natural and essentially wise,
as in Merlin (1988) by Stephen Lawhead
and Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicle
trilogy and especially in Mary Stewart’s trilogy starting with The Crystal Cave, one of the few to
offer a saga like account of Merlin. American novels tend to stress youth: in Jane
Yolen’s trilogy, Passager (1996), Hawk (1996) and Merlin (1997) she represents Merlin as boy with special skills, looking
forward to the recent television series. Yolen also looks back to Emerson,
saying she understands the inner meaning of Merlin as “a metaphor for the
Maker”.[xxxvii] A consciously localised variant is Steel
Magic (1967) by “André Norton” (i.e. Alice Norton) where Mr Brosius (i.e.
Ambrosius/Merlin) welcomes two ordinary kids into an American Avalon where
Arthur fights with local and environment-friendly help from a Native American
named Huon.
Another localized wise natural Merlin is in recent French novels, where
he is both localized as Breton and his love affair has a happy ending. Naturellement.
Theophile Bryant’s Le Testament de Merlin
(1975) is about “Merlin, l’immortel commandeur de la Celtie”.[xxxviii] Michel Rio’s novels make central the
Arthurian traditions in the French traditions of Merlin as the figure of love,
subtlety and artistic insight.[xxxix] René Barjaval’s L’Enchanteur (1984) is a full medieval story ending blissfully in
Brocéliande.
8. A force of nature
Merlin, and Myrddin, began in and was validated by nature:
environmental authenticity remained intrinsic to the figure even as the cultural
forces of political power brought him into their difficult embrace, and he emerged
as poet and naturalised educator to reassert the critical values of nature and wisdom. But it is not a simple or
triumphant story: it is consistently and sometimes dramatically dialectical. In
both Robinson and White it is clear that war has once more forced its way into
the world of the Merlin myth, and the myth has responded strongly, if also
darkly, and always dialectical. In the Battle of Britain the salvation of the Spitfire
was driven by an engine named Merlin: the positive side of natural knowledge, honorably serving power. Then in
the lead-up to the Iraq war, a scientist called David Kelly, of Irish origin
brought up in Wales, like the exile myth itself, found that his knowledge as a
weapons inspector was at odds with the requirements of current political authority,
and he was found dead, in a wood, outside Oxford. Knowledge versus power – in
the environment.
[i]Comment and translations of the Myrddin poems
can be found in John K. Bollard “Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition”, in The Romance of Merlin, ed. Peter
Goodrich (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 13-54. The translations used here are
more literal and closer to the original.
[ii] These
titles, like so many in early poetry, are generated by later editors sometimes
from manuscript titles but often from the opening of the text itself. The
titles have no real status, and can vary – “Apple Tree” is given in Welsh as
the plural “Afellenau” and “Little Pig” is
“Yr Oianau” (“The Greetings”), as each stanza begins with “Oian”,
“greeting”. The dates are early. Rachel Bromwich states
that “Myrddin and Taliesin”, “The Song of Myrddin in the Grave” and “Myrddin
and Gwenddydd” were “certainly composed before 1100” and adds that “At least the
nucleus of the Afallenau (“Apple Tree”) and the Oianau (“Little Pig”) are probably as old” (see Trioedd
Ynys Prydein, Triads of the Island of Britain, Cardiff, University of Wales
Press, revised ed., 1978, p.470). A. O.
H. Jarman agrees, saying that the oldest part (lines 35-65) of Afallennau “might be dated in the ninth
or tenth centuries” and “Myrddin and Taliesin” was written down “during the
second half of the eleventh century, 1050-1100.” (see `Rhagmadroddiad’
(Intoduction) to his edition of Llyf Du
Caerfyrddin, Cardiff,University of Wales Press, 1982, p. xxvi and `Rhagmadroddiad’ to his edition of Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin, Cardiff,
University of Wales Press,1951, p. 53).
[iii] The
Triads, a rhyming repository of
condensed commentary on Welsh events, record it as one of “The Three Futile
Battles of the Island of Britain”, and elsewhere it is said to have been
“brought about by the cause of a lark’s nest”, which may simply explain the
idea of futility through the name of the fortress Caerlaverock, meaning “lark’s
castle” in Welsh, which is not far away.
Line 24, “All their lives they prepare for it”, makes a classical
statement of heroic training – the warband achieves meaning in its military
moment – but that ideal has bitter meaning against the brutal, even futile
nature of this battle: the tone is a negative version of the elegiac Gododdin, and the heroic tradition is
rejected from the standpoint of the knowledge of the northern wise men,
Taliesin and Myrddin.
[iv] Gaston Paris,
Review of Arthur de la Borderie, Les
veritable Prophéties de Merlin
[v] For the argument that Blaise’s name comes
from wolf in Celtic, see Philippe Walter,
Merlin ou le Savoir du Monde (Imago, Paris, 2000), p. 138, and
Robert Baudry, “La Vita Merlini ou les Métamorphoses de Merlin”, in fils
sans père, pp. 175-89, p. 179.
[vi] William A.
Nitze, “The Esplumoir Merlin”, Speculum 18 (1943), 69-79; Helen
Adolf saw connections with Jewish mystical tradition in the image: “The Esplumoir Merlin: a Study
in its Cabbalistic Sources”, Speculum 21 (1946), 172-93.
[vii] Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French
Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1992).
[viii] Some scholars felt the post-Vulgate author
was inventing a text to avoid elaborating his story, and a Spanish author later
provided it, but recent scholarship tends to assume there was a now lost French
version. See Fanni Bogdanow, “The Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal”, pp.342-2.
[ix] See William J. Entwistle, The Arthurian
Legend in the Literature of the Spanish Peninsula (London: Dent, 1925).
[x] Peter H. Goodrich, “Introduction”, to Merlin: A Casebook, ed. Peter H.
Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson (New
York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1-102, p. 20.
[xi] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene in The
Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1912), see I, 7,
33, 5-7.
[xii] Thomas Heywood, The Life of Merlin Sirnamed Ambrosius (London: Emery, 1641); pp. 1-41, up to the death
of Arthur, are reprinted in Peter Goodrich, ed., The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1990), Chapter
8, pp. 206-17.
[xiii] Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb: A Tragedy (London: Roberts, 1730) and The Tragedy of Tragedies: The Life and Death
of Tom Thumb the Great (London: Roberts, 1731).
[xiv] Thomas Warton, Poems. (London: Becket, 1777), pp. 63-72, p. 65.
[xv] The
poem, “The Death of Merlin”, is printed by Roger Simpson, “An Unpublished Poem
by Humphrey Davy: Merlin in the Late Eighteenth Century”, Notes and Queries, new
series 35 (1988), 195-6.
[xvi] The medieval
Merlin material, like the Arthur material was readily available in the wealth
of selections like George Ellis’s Specimens
of the Early English Metrical Poems of 1805, and John Dunlop’s long popular
History of Fiction of 1814: they offered
selections from Geoffrey’s Historia
and Vita and the Vulgate. The Preface
Robert Southey wrote for the splendid Malory of 1817 added Robert de Boron’s Merlin and gave in detail the Vulgate
story of Merlin and Nimue, as well as Heywood’s Life.
[xvii]
Alfred Tennyson, “Merlin and
Vivien” in The Poems of Tennyson, ed.
Christopher Ricks, second edition, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1987), pp.
393-422.
[xviii] The
idea was common in the period: Scott refers to it in Anne of Geierstein (1829) by making the ill-fated Lady Hermione
wear a great opal; Queen Victoria was considered to have favoured them in order
to rebut the negative connections of the stone in order to help the new
Australian opal trade.
[xx] Tennyson, Poems, ed. Ricks, vol.3, pp. 205-10, 7-10.
[xxi] Karl Immerman, “Merlins Grab” in Werke, ed. Harry Maync, 7 vols (Leipzig: Bibliographischen
Institut, 1936), vol.4, pp. 433-8.
[xxii]
Immerman, “Merlin im tiefen Grab”, Gedichte,
pp. 439-40.
[xxiii] Heine, Heinrich, “Postscript to the
Romancero” in The Complete Poems of
Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version by Hal Draper (Berlin:
Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), pp.693-8, p.693.
[xxiv] Nicolas Lenau (= N.F. Niembsch von Strehlenau), Waldlieder und Gedichte (Stuttgart:
Gotta’schen, 1878), pp. 393-5, p. 393.
On Lenau see Weiss, pp 128-131.
[xxv] Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Le Mythe Romantique de Merlin dans l’oeuvre
d’Edgar Quinet (Paris: Champion, 1999), p. 14; Geoffrey Ashe, Merlin: The Prophet and His History
(Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 186.
[xxvi] See Jean Burgos, “Introduction”’ to Guillaume Apollinaire, L’enchanteur
pourissant, ed. Jean Burgos (Paris: Minard, 1972), p. IX.
[xxvii]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Merlin I”, in Poems
(1847)in Collected Poems and
Translations, ed. Harld Bloom and Paul ane (New York, Library of America, 1994), p.1141-3, p.1141.
[xxviii] See Alan Lupack, “Visions of Courageous Achievement:
Arthurian Youth Groups in America”, in Medievalism
in North America, ed. Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 50-68,
see p. 53.
[xxix] Lupack, “Visions”, pp. 54 and 56.
[xxx] Thom Gunn, “Merlin in the Cave: He Speculates
Without a Book”, in Collected Poems
(London: Faber, 1993).
[xxxi] Geoffrey Hill, “Merlin”, in New and Collected Poems, 1952-92
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p.8.
[xxxii] Leslie Norris, “Merlin and the Snake’s
Egg”, in Merlin and the Snake’s Egg
(New York: Viking, 1978), p. 45.
[xxxiii] R. S.
Thomas, “Taliesin, 1952” in Song at the
Year’s Turning (London: Hart-Davies, 1955).
[xxxiv] For
a discussion of these changes see Elisabeth Brewer, T. H. White (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp.33-44.
[xxxv] T. H.
White, The Book of Merlyn (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1977); complete version of The Once and Future King (London:
Voyager, 1996).
[xxxvi] Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler, Merlin, oder Das wüste Land (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981).
[xxxvii]
Rozalyn Levin, Tom Holberg and David Bachi , “Dream Weaver: An Interview
with Jane Yolen”, Avalon to Camelot 2
(1987), 20-3, p. 21; the interview was conducted from readers’ questions,
edited by those named here.
[xxxviii] Théophile
Bryant, Le Testament de Merlin
(Nantes: Bellanger, 1975).
[xxxix]
Michel Rio, Merlin (Paris:
Seuil, 1989); Morgana (Paris: Seuil,
1999)
