http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bd5YUEOwlE
Kathryn Hughes reviews a new book debunking the historicity of Merlin, the English wizard. “He is, in fact, a big fat hoax, made up by a writer who had run out of things to say and was getting desperate”:
“Geoffrey of Monmouth” sounds as if he should be a bank manager of scrupulous honesty. A man you could imagine wanting to count the daily takings twice. In fact, he was a 12th-century churchman who pulled off a textual forgery bigger than anything dreamt up by Macpherson or Chatterton at their most high-handed.
By the 1130s Geoffrey clearly felt that he was getting too big for the Marches and decided to do something that would make the world take notice. His bright idea was to write a History of the Kings of Britain. Into the slightly dull chronicle of battles and land grabs he embedded a big dollop of fiction about a character called Merlin, doing that classic thing of passing off his work as a translation of a long-lost ancient text. According to this confection, Merlin was a boy magician at the court of Vortigern, king of the Britons. Later, as an adult wizard, Merlin changes Uther Pendragon’s appearance so that he can sleep with the wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Out of this moment of magical pandering King Arthur is conceived. But Merlin, in Geoffrey’s version, doesn’t hang around to act as twinkly tutor to the marvellous boy. You have to wait until Thomas Malory, writing on the brink of the Renaissance, before you get the whole lovely dreamscape that is Camelot. …
It is, though, what happens next that is really extraordinary. Having got himself embedded in everyone’s consciousness as the maker of Britain, Merlin then managed to slip the leash and started popping up in European chronicles as a kind of international Mr Fixit. In the Italian tradition he morphs into a sibyl and hands out helpful hints on the future of Tuscany and Lombardy. In France he becomes a kind of Time Lord, able to advise Julius Caesar on some of his more troubling dreams while simultaneously urging an Muslim king to convert to Christianity. He even becomes a bit of a romantic hero, succumbing to a doomed obsession with wily Vivien, a story that would be revisited more than six centuries later by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King.
Update from a reader:
Is this author serious? It is news that Geoffrey of Monmouth lied when he claimed to have based his Historia regum Brittaniae on an ancient British text? Geoffrey’s deception was well known in the twelfth century, let alone in later years. (See William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum.) And one has to wait until Sir Thomas Malory – in the fifteenth century – for the full story about Merlin to emerge? Has this author ever heard about Robert of Boron, who represents Merlin as advising Arthur and comes up with the story of the sword in the stone, in 1200? Or of the Vulgate Cycle Merlin of the thirteenth century, which Thomas Malory basically translated? Yes, people like Alfred Lord Tennyson may have preferred to read Malory because Le Morte d’Arthur is in English, but there were three centuries of Arthurian romances written in French – with all of the central legends developed between the 1180s and the 1230s – before Malory got around to picking up a pen.
The Dish 