Merlin in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

A thousand years ago, at the start of the second millennium, Merlin was an obscure Welsh bard and seer reputed to be a wild man of the Caledonian forest. To the Welsh, he had already become a romantic figure more than four hundred years in their past, whose story was rooted in Strathclyde, by then separated from British Wales by alien Norse and English settlements stretching from Carlisle to Chester. Known as Lailoken in the northern, proto-Welsh homelands of Strathclyde and Reged by virtue of his attachment to Saint Kentigern’s legend, and as Myrddin, son of Morien or Morfryn, in the south, he was nonetheless already millennial in his close association with the aspirations and declining political fortunes of the Britons. He was known in oral tradition from the early seventh century on, but registered by no surviving written sources prior to mid-twelfth-century manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136-8) and Vita Merlini (ca. 1150) and late thirteenth-century Welsh manuscripts of the Goddodin (composed ca. 600) and the Black Book of Carmarthen. It is unlikely that any earlier documents will come to light in the twenty-first century, but we can hope.

What a difference a millennium makes! Supported by the manuscript tradition just mentioned, the transition from oral to alphabetic literacy simul- taneously confirmed the figure of Merlin in his original roles of wild man, prophet, and poet, and introduced a series of transformations in his character and extensions of his abilities. His triple roles in early Welsh poetry had already established his talent of mediation between alternative perceptual realities; to these roles the Latin and vernacular literatures of Geoffrey and his successors in Arthurian legend-making added an open-ended yet frequently apocalyptic elaboration. Today, as we enter the third millennium of the Gregorian calendar, Merlin has become not only an internationally renowned figure of the British tradition and Arthurian legend but also a figure capable of surviving independ- ently from them. He so occupies the semantic space between the signifier “Merlin” and its variants and their multiple wizardly signifieds that he constitutes a universally recognized sign for insightful consciousness. His own legend informs thousands of documents in all forms of media, where he has become an object even of mystical veneration by contemporary Neo-Pagan cultists and a marketing icon for high-technology commodities and services.