A To Z Blogging Challenge 2020: M Is For ... Merlin!

Today, we will be checking out Merlin - Merlin the Magician, Merlin the Enchanter, Merlin the Wizard, even Merlin the phony... 

Merlin more or less first appears as a character in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History Of the Kings Of Britain (late12th century). He is not the old man with the long beard later imagined, but a boy. 

His Welsh name was Myrddin, but Geoffrey Latinised it to “Merlinus”. There is a suggestion that he chose Merlinus rather than Merdinus because that name sounds too much like the French word merde, as in shit! 

Traditionally, he is supposed to have been the son of a mortal woman and the Devil. This is important for his portrayal in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book, because there is a story in which King Vortigern is trying to build a tower, which keeps falling down. He is told that it will only stand if he sacrifices a boy who never had a father. The boy is Merlin, but Merlin is quick witted. He says that the real problem is under the tower. 

The problem is soon revealed. It’s two dragons fighting, a red one and a white. The red dragon is a symbol of Britain, the white of the Saxons. The white dragon wins.

The young Merlin was also believed to have built Stonehenge, bringing the stones from Ireland. In Mary Stewart’s Merlin novel,The Crystal Cave, it is, in fact just one stone brought from Ireland, and it’s a feat of engineering bringing it to Britain and setting it up, not a feat of magic. 

The boy Merlin building Stonehenge. Public Domain 

Malory’s Merlin is probably the old white-haired one. He looks after Arthur from the very beginning. When Uther Pendragon lusts after the Duchess of Cornwall,  it’s Merlin who arranges what he wants, provided that the child conceived that night is put into his care, and takes him to Sir Ector, father of Kay.

Later, he arranges the whole sword in the stone thing - and goes to the Lady of the Lake with Arthur when the silly young man goes adventuring, nearly gets killed and breaks the sword from the stone. The new sword - Excalibur - comes with a scabbard, and Merlin warns Arthur not to lose that, because it will stop him from bleeding to death.

That Merlin ends up locked in a cave, or a tree in the Forest of Broceliande. He is put there by his apprentice Nimue(more of her tomorrow), after he annoys her by being a dirty old man chasing after a young woman.

This has been dealt with in different books and films. Mary Stewart’s Merlin has been a virgin, because it was a choice between having love or having power. When he is ageing, he is losing the power anyway, and decides on love. In fact, she doesn’t lock him up at all. He simply gets a stroke that makes him seem dead. He is laid to rest in his “Crystal Cave”, which fortunately has air and food supplies he put there before, and dripping water. When he recovers he manages to cope until a passing knight hears him and lets him out. His beloved pupil has married by this time, and he wishes her well. 

 Edward Burne-Jones. Public Domain

T.H White’s Merlin does know he is going to be locked up, because he is living backwards, so he remembers things that haven’t yet happened. 

There seems to be an assumption in much fiction that this is traditional - it’s not. But because of it, Peter David’s Merlin(Knight Life) manages to escape from his cave as an eight year old boy(only physically, he still thinks like an adult).

In Dan Simmons’ science fiction novel, Hyperion, there is a dreadful condition called Merlin’s Syndrome, in which a young woman doing an archaeological dig on a far planet starts to live backwards, becoming ever younger until her desperate father takes his baby daughter back to the planet in hopes of finding a solution. 

Bernard Cornwell’s Merlin is portrayed as a crazy old Druid. 

Mark Twain’s Merlin is the fake. He was big at Camelot before the Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, came along, so becomes Hank’s enemy. He does get in one bit of magic - he puts Hank to sleep for twelve hundred years, so he wakes up back in his own time. In fact, it’s he, not Merlin, who sleeps in that cave! 

In recent years, the Merlin portrayed in films and on TV has no longer been the old man with the starry robes. (In The Hollow Hills, by Mary Stewart, the newly crowned Arthur offers Merlin a robe with stars on it, asking if he would wear it for him. “Not even for you, Arthur!” he says). The TV series featuring Colin Morgan shows a young man who is about the same age as Arthur, who is the Crown Prince with a living father, not Sir Ector’s ward. 

There is another TV series about Merlin, in which the role is played by Sam Neill, an actor I think would have made a very good Mary Stewart Merlin, if they had ever gone past The Crystal Cave, which was turned into a children’s mini series starring young actor George Winter. It went as far as burying Merlin’s father, the warrior Ambrosius, at Stonehenge. (In that story, he is Arthur’s cousin; his mother made up the story about the demon lover in order to protect him from Vortigern, but it backfires, because it suggests the “boy without a father” thing is correct.) 

The Sam Neill version included the Vortigern story(Rutger Hauer was Vortigern), but Merlin is a grown man. He and Nimue are the same age. The cave is where she is living. As an old man, he returns and uses his last bit of magic to restore their youth. 

Mary Stewart’s Merlin is my favourite. What about you?