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erlin makes his literary debut on a Welsh hill, usually identified as dinas emrys on the fringe of Snowdonia. He is not, of course, an old man with a long white beard. He is a youth, a teenager in fact, and he has been brought there as a human sacrifice. but he saves his life by outwitting his would-be sacrificers. Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History of the Kings of Britain introduced Merlin to the public, was (as the place-name “Monmouth”suggests) a Welshman, or possibly a son of breton parents living in Wales. born about 1100, he taught at an oxford college—the university did not exist yet—from 1129 to 1151. After that, he was consecrated bishop of St. Asaph in Wales but may never have taken up the appointment. He died in 1155.1 The Historia regum Britanniae had been completed about 1138. Geoffrey’s main purpose in writing it was to give the depressed Welsh a magnificent past,one they could be proud of.elaborating a time-honored legend,he made out that they were the true britons,descended from migrant trojans,aristocrats of the Homeric world.Their ancestors had formerly held the whole of britain.Invaded and almost crushed by Anglo-Saxons (ancestors of the english) in the fifth century Ad, they had made a glorious recovery in the reign of King Arthur, but then lost ground till only Wales remained independent. Geoffrey’s History became one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages, with a readership far outside Wales. It supplied the primary framework for Arthurian romance, and it was generally accepted as factual—as real history. While that view ceased to be tenable, it can be said, even today, that Geoffrey was more conscientious in his use of sources than skeptics were once willing to admit.2 While he was working on the book, and had perhaps got as far as the end of Roman rule in britain, he was turned aside by an unforeseen intervention. The Prophecies of Merlin: Their Originality and Importance Geoffrey Ashe, MBE M 71 There was a growing interest in the Welsh tradition of supposedly inspired bardic poetry and prophecy, with a remote ancestry in Celtic druidism. “Prophecy” could mean foretelling the future, but not necessarily.The word could apply simply to supernatural insight or vision which bards possessed. bishop Alexander of lincoln, who was Geoffrey’s ecclesiastical superior, invited him as a wellqualified scholar to explore the topic. He was amenable and shelved the History for a while to do so. not much of this prophetic material had survived. It would be natural to suspect that when Geoffrey produced the resultant booklet—it was of modest size—he was simply obliging Alexander by fabricating bardic matter out of nothing at all. to a large extent he was, but that was not the whole story—not quite. He had noticed, for instance, a genuine and recurrent theme: the hope of a Welsh revival and a revanche against the english. A poem composed about 930 entitled Armes Prydein, “The omen of britain,” foretold this reversal of fortune. It had turned out to be too optimistic: the english king Athelstan routed the Welsh in 937. but it was always possible to take the poem up again and reinterpret it, and it was still known in the twelfth century.3 Some of the Welsh matter,including the Armes Prydein,was associated with what appeared to be a personal name, Myrddin. bishop Alexander had noticed this and expressed interest. “Myrddin” is linked etymologically with Carmarthen in southwest Wales. It is also, confusingly, the name or sobriquet of a semilegendary wanderer through the Forest of Celidon in Scotland, an inspired madman. At this point Geoffrey found little about its significance in either context, but since the bishop was familiar with it, he employed it as a title for the whole miscellany he had assembled. His booklet should be known as “the prophecies of Myrddin,” conjuring up, with or without justification, the figure of a prophet so named. Though he had written most of it himself, to eke out the genuine items (and even those were freely paraphrased), “Myrddin’s Prophecies” it should be . . . with one adjustment. “Myrddin,” latinized in his text as Merdinus, would suggest merde, a distasteful word for potential readers among the ruling Anglo-normans.Geoffrey expurgated “Myrddin” by changing one letter, and the work that the bishop had commissioned went out to the world as The Prophecies...

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