The True History of Merlin the Magician by Anne Lawrence-Mathers (review)

One of the Arthurian legend’s most notable aspects is the perennial fascination with the luminal figure of Merlin: sage, soothsayer, and magician. Anne Lawrence-Mather’s book is the latest in a line of English-language monographs in the last thirty years treating what might be called ‘the whole Merlin.’ Their scholarship ranges from pseudo- to solid. Excluding those devoted to the esoteric, Neo-Celtic reinterpretation of Merlin, these studies have usually swung from attempts to identify an historical, real-life Merlin to explorations of Merlin’s narratological roles and ideological impact through the ages. The former camp includes Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin (1985) and Norma Lorre Goodrich’s Merlin (1987), the latter Christopher Dean’s A Study of Merlin in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (1992) and Stephen Knight’s Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (2009). To the latter group one should also add a collection of key scholarly essays, Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond S. Thompson’s Merlin: A Casebook (2001). Because the results of the (pseudo)historical approach have been so questionable, most current scholarship no longer refers to them, and Merlin’s actual existence has remained at best an open question that underlines (rather than undermines) his symbolic importance. Despite periodic attempts to revisit Merlin’ historicity, articulations of his figure’s literary development and iconic qualities have held sway for the last twenty years.

The eight chapters plus Introduction and Conclusion of Anne Lawrence-Mathers’ book take the unusual approach of attempting to split the difference. Rather than attempting to authenticate a living, historical figure, it authenticates a figure who is actually a documentary construct, but presumed by most medieval people to have had a ‘true’ bodily existence to document. Through this sleight of mind, Lawrence-Mathers revisits the medieval texts about Merlin with the question, ‘What sort of person did the writers and readers of these texts believe him to be?’ Although the earliest mention of Merlin in courtly romance (in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide) is scarcely a generation after his popularization by Geoffrey of Monmouth, she delays overt examination of the mage’s ‘nonhistorical’ treatment until the final chapter, which focuses on his treatment in courtly romances and concludes that in fictional treatments ‘Merlin was not rejected but simply remodeled’ (215). Despite her claim to ‘take seriously the importance of Merlin’s mediaeval existence as a historical figure, separate from his fictional representations’ (4), Lawrence-Mathers’ thorough examination of both historical and fictional documents repeatedly demonstrates how difficult it is to separate ‘historical personage’ from ‘legendary archetype.’ As a result, the author frequently puts the reader in the awkward position of seeing the words ‘historical Merlin,’ signaling the inference of a real figure behind the legend, only to discover that it really is the legend after all, not the supposed person, that is being discussed. Because history and historical fiction are usually so thoroughly intertwined in medieval texts, a project that ‘challenges the established tradition of treating Merlin as an archetypal figure’ by distinguishing ‘histories’ from ‘historical fictions’ (4) is indeed an ambitious but fraught enterprise, at which the book has limited success. No ‘true’ historical personage is unearthed—only the fascinating constructs of one.

In the main, Lawrence-Mathers confirms the findings of other literary scholars (many of whom, with the exception of Stephen Knight, remain unmentioned in her bibliography because of the bias described above): ‘This historical Merlin was an embodiment of all the major types of magician: a seer, an inspired prophet, an astrologer, a proto-alchemist, an expert in natural magic, and an adept in cosmology ….He embodied the cutting edge of mediaeval science, and his powers were convincingly real’ (6). It is the affective ‘realness’ of these powers for the medieval audience that the author most seeks to establish. Although her approach itself is not as revolutionary as...