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  • Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages
  • Raluca L. Radulescu
Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages. By Stephen Knight. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. xx + 275; 25 illustrations. $27.95.

Stephen Knight’s new monograph focuses, as the title indicates, on the legend of Merlin, the wizard who has fascinated audiences since the Dark Ages. The scope of this book is vast, but its structure is tight and the style is engaging. Knight presents his choice of thematic approach in his introduction, where he states that “when knowledge is most important, most close to taking control, that is when it is most vulnerable to some form of limitation or repression from power” (p. xi). He argues that Merlin’s multiple representations, and in particular his “comic hat, the druidic beard, the entanglement with Vivien,” resist Michel Foucault’s theory of knowledge and power seen as “mutually interwoven.” Instead, Knight contends, Merlin’s agency will “expose the limits of the power of the powerful” (p. xii). In this section, Knight also explains the thematic titles of each chapter—Wisdom, Advice, Cleverness, and Education—which acronymically make up, by some “tricksterish force in the material,” the name of one of the most well-known writers of Arthurian literature in medieval Europe, the twelfth-century French poet Wace. In fact, the chapter titles correspond to themes Knight identifies in each of the periods and [End Page 528] geographical locations he focuses on. However, while Merlin is shown to become more popular as centuries of literary output give him an enduring appeal across continents, his power and place in the service of the great are gradually reduced to that of (merely) Arthur’s educator.

The first chapter, titled “Wisdom,” starts with an analysis of Merlin’s earliest roots in Wales and southern Scotland. Here Knight revisits some of the earliest Welsh poems (among which is one about the battle of Arfderydd, ca. 573), Y Gododdin, Armes Prydein (ca. 930), and the material in the poems contained in the Black Book of Carmarthen (ca. 1250), the fifteenth-century Red Book of Hergest, and the fourteenth-century White Book of Rhydderch. According to Knight, “the Cumbrian Myrddin opposes the values and power of his own heroic social context, while the early Welsh Myrddin espouses that Welsh warrior culture and defends it against Anglo-Saxon incursion” (p. 6). Knight characterizes the Cumbrian Myrddin as an exponent of “natural wisdom” who “offers a critique of secular power” (p. 7) and is associated with prophecy. It is these features that are developed further in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini. While the Welsh Myrddin was “a politicized and nationally focused version of the Cumbrian exile and thinker, both of them negative in their different ways,” Geoffrey’s Merlin, Knight argues, “has become closer to royal power itself” (p. 30). Knight provides a knowledgeable and detailed analysis of some of the details of Geoffrey’s sources and highlights Merlin’s transformation from a Welsh prophet into a post-Conquest counselor to kings.

As the title of the second chapter reveals (“Medieval Merlin: Advice”), Merlin’s knowledge is harnessed in the service of power and in particular the advancement of the most celebrated legendary king of medieval times, Arthur. Merlin becomes the “grand vizier” reshaped in the French language by Wace, whose work is deeply indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth. All subsequent literary and chronicle retellings of the Arthurian story take their cue from this work and develop an image of Merlin that is in consonance with the interests of the ruling elites who represent the audience for these texts. Wace’s Merlin is less of a wizard and not so much of the prophet, while Robert de Boron’s Merlin acquires the role of a Christian prophet of sorts, via his involvement in the Christian scheme of salvation developed in the verse romances Joseph of Arimathea and Merlin. The latter acquired significant popularity, attested to by the prose versions written immediately after his poems. Knight notes that, where past scholars have partially ignored Boron’s originality because of their narrow interest in either the Grail or Arthur, his...

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