Dark Merlin

Everybody's second-favorite avuncular wizard has a few skeletons in his closet

I just realized it’s been ten days since I substacked. I apologize. There are many causes but one is the trip from Sydney to the U.S., which I just made, and which always leaves me with near-terminal jet lag.

A lot of the narrative architecture of the Arthurian tradition as we know it comes from one single writer about whom we know almost nothing: Geoffrey of Monmouth. He was a 12th-century bishop. He may or may not have been Welsh. He definitely wrote a History of the Kings of Britain, which became the medieval equivalent of a runaway bestseller.

The History is long, and much of it is made-up, and my hat is off to anybody who’s read the whole thing. But everybody’s favorite part is the part about King Arthur, which collects and combines a lot of the mythology up to that point and synthesizes a lot more, creating a major inflection-point in the Arthurian tradition. One of Geoffrey’s key additions is a wizard named Merlin.

Merlin is one of those Arthurian figures whose roots go back all the way. Before Geoffrey he had his own tradition in Welsh mythology, entirely independent of Arthur’s, in which he was known as Myrddin. Myrddin was madman with a tragic past who spent his time wandering in the woods uttering prophecies—there’s an entire poem that consists of Myrddin’s conversation with his sole companion, a piglet. Geoffrey restored Myrddin to sanity, got rid of the pig and renamed him Merlin.

From then on everybody loved Merlin and did their own versions of him. French writers gave him an elaborate backstory, whereby he was the offspring of an innocent woman who was impregnated by a devil—he was essentially supposed to be an anti-Christ, who would undo Jesus’ good works on earth, except that the woman baptized her devil-child, thereby purifying him like a Shadow Pokemon and ruining everything.

(Even though he was purified Merlin kept his inherited devil-powers. So if you’re wondering where Merlin’s magic comes from, it comes from Hell.)

Emil Johann Lauffer, Merlin Presenting the Future King Arthur, 1873

Over the centuries Merlin became less and less of a mad prophet and more of a kind of stock sorcerer character, who often turned up in contexts that had nothing to with Arthur. By the 17^th century Merlin is showing up in a story about Tom Thumb as a man “cunning in all Arts and Professions, all sciences, secrets and discoueries, a coniurer, an inchanter, a charmer, hee consorts with Elues and Fayries” and so on. For me the most indelible modern Merlin is the Merlin of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, who tutors Arthur, lives backwards in time and chews on his beard when he gets upset. As the book goes on and Arthur grows up, Merlin become a kind of magical Cromwell to Arthur’s Henry VIII.

White’s Merlin is lovable—I love him!—but there’s a thread of darkness in Merlin that even White never quite refined out of him, and it’s not just the devil-stuff, it’s his treatment of women. It’s hard to get away from the fact that Merlin used his magic to help Uther rape Igraine, thereby conceiving Arthur. (I wrote a version of this scene for The Bright Sword, but it was so repellent I had to leave it out.) In most traditions Merlin also “falls in love” with his apprentice Nimue, who then “betrays” him and imprisons him in a tree (or under a hill); somehow this is supposed to be Nimue’s fault, for beguiling Merlin with her feminine wiles, but it always reads to me like Merin harassed her, and she fought back, and she beat him.

There are some wonderful Merlins out there too, like Mary Stewart’s version in The Crystal Cave. The Matter of Britain is a hall of mirrors, where every figure has a thousand reflections. The writer who taught me the most about Merlin—and most heavily influenced the Merlin of The Bright Sword—was probably C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength. One of Lewis’s characters remarks:

Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil: yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid: yet he knows all about the Grail.

It's hard to unsee it once you’ve seen it. Of course Merlin was a Druid—a practitioner of the indigenous magical arts of Britain. But what would a druid be doing serving an arch-Christian king like Arthur? Does he resent Arthur as a colonizer? Is he a mercenary who’ll serve any master? It makes Merlin even more interesting.

In fact Merlin and Arthur are shadows of each other. Arthur’s world is a woven one, where the warp is Rome and Christianity and the weft is paganism and magic and fairy. Merlin crosses between those worlds, and so does Arthur, whose father was a Christian king but his mother, Igraine, was duchess of the decidedly pagan Cornwall. Also like Arthur, Merlin was a child of rape.

And like Arthur, Merlin falls, but does not die. Which means that one day he could return.