The legendary wizard, featured as the King Arthur's mentor was created out of several historical and legendary figures.
He symbolizes the knowledge, and today can be seen as a comprehensive father-figure, having the ability to lead and inspire.
He symbolizes the knowledge, and today can be seen as a comprehensive father-figure, having the ability to lead and inspire.
To our present knowledge he was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a clergyman, who lived in Wales in 12th century. Merlin is mentioned for the first time in his Prophecies of Merlin, being part of Historia Regum Britaniae. The book is considered unreliable in terms of historical facts and events; nevertheless it gained wide publicity in Middle Age Europe and was one of the strong influences behind the romantic notion of that time.
While Geoffrey was spinning pseudo-history out of unpromising matter, he was also taking an interest in prophecy - specifically, Welsh prophecy. In his time the Welsh were unique among Western nations in having a lively prophetic tradition, not necessarily of prophecy as prediction, but of prophecy as inspired utterance, which might or might not be predictive.
It had a recognised kinship with the poetic inspiration of bards, called awen. Men and women who had the gift, went into trances and poured out oracular sayings. These might be simply response to inquirers, making the activity a kind of fortune-telling, but sometimes they did foreshadow the future, even the political future. Occasionally such prophecies, however cryptic, were remembered and recorded.
A famous poem composed about 930, and preserved in writing, treated this public prophecy with special respect. Called Armes Prydein, 'The Omen of Britain', it put together various hopeful forcasts of English decline and British recovery. In the upshot it turned out to be too optimistic.
Geoffrey read 'The Omen of Britian' and noted that one of its prophecies was attributet to someone called Myrddin, who plainly had a long-standing reputation. There was nothing in the poem to show who Myrddin was, but he was understood to have lived several centuries before.
Other prophecies, mostly obscure or fragmentary, also had his name attached to them. Geoffrey made a collection of Myrddin material, with prophetic items from other sources.
Setting the history aside for a while, he combined his collection with a large body of 'prophecy' that he made up himself, and gave the results to the public in 1135.In the course of doing so, he took a momentous step. He realised that 'Myrddin' would be rendered 'Merdinus' in Latin, which for many prospective Norman-French readers would suggest merde, a dirty world. So he changed 'Myrddin' to 'Merlin'.
In this almost accidental way, a new name entered literature, one that was destined to have an impact that neither Geoffrey nor anybody else could have anticipated.
Merlin The Prophet And His History by Geoffrey Ashe
Image: The Beguiling of Merlin by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), National Museum of Liverpool - Lady Lever Art Gallery.
