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

Ever since Giraldus Cambrensis wrote about his journey through Wales in 1188, the British Merlin has been acknowledged as a composite figure to whose legend new attributes and interpretations have been continually added. However, his protean character has not prevented either medieval or modern people from investigating his historical roots in search of facts behind the fictions. In this book, historian Anne Lawrence-Mathers takes a fresh look at the historical side of the ledger, ultimately to confirm that history is rooted in human perceptions conditioned by time and place, creating currents of literary “fact” that become indistinguishable from fiction.

In the past thirty years, a postmodern wave of interest in the Arthurian legend and fantasy writing in general has fostered two approaches to Merlin’s supposed historicity. One sort is composed of literalist treatments, most prominently Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin¹ and Norma Lorre Goodrich’s Merlin,² both of which necessarily concentrate upon the medieval period of Merlin’s origins but have been pretty thoroughly debunked as credible scholarship. In response to the apparent unapproachability of a real-life, historically verifiable Merlin, the other sort have been predominantly literary studies that take what Lawrence-Mathers terms the “archetypal approach” to the figure’s development through the ages. The best examples are Christopher Dean’s A Study of Merlin in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present Day,³ Stephen Knight’s Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages,⁴ and a comprehensive anthology of scholarly essays, Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond S. Thompson’s Merlin: A Casebook.⁵ In contrast, Lawrence-Mathers hews to a middle path by arguing that whoever Merlin might have been, he was taken seriously by most medieval Europeans as a documentable historical figure and assumed to have been a real man. In order to reconstruct the degrees of belief that medieval people had toward this mysterious figure, she concentrates upon historical and theological writing (at least that which presented itself as such), not fiction. This is a task fraught with difficulty, since the understanding of history as a discipline has evolved considerably since the Middle Ages, making it hard for moderns to recover the medieval perspective. More obviously, even some historians following immediately upon Merlin’s primary popularizer Geoffrey of Monmouth considered Geoffrey’s brand of “history” more fictive than factual. However, Lawrence-Mathers succeeds in establishing that to most medieval minds, Merlin was believably real in the historical sense of having lived and performed actual marvels. She restates this thesis halfway through the book, arguing that “from the twelfth through the sixteenth century Merlin was a real historical figure first and foremost, whose magic and prophecy were both also real. This, however, did not make him unproblematic” (117). This “problematic” element underlies “Merlin’s own shift from historical personage to legendary archetype” (4).

The author’s “history of ideas” approach begins with an examination of Geoffrey of Monmouth, demonstrating that to him and most of his peers Merlin “embodied the cutting edge of mediaeval science” (6) and thereby raised theological dangers in the “three streams” of his historical, prophetical, and fictional character. Born from a period of dynastic insecurity for the Anglo-Norman realm, he plays a crucial role (now regarded as fictional) in the historians’ construction of Britain through his linkage with the legend of King Arthur, but also possesses an independent existence with scandalous connections to incubi, human sacrifice, and the destabilization of political power. As an international authority, he was mostly celebrated as prophet with astrological awareness carrying apocalyptic overtones, the theme that is reiterated in chronicle after chronicle. These capabilities spurred the assignment of others, making Merlin a polymath of natural philosophy taken seriously and endorsed in proto-scientific treatises from the twelfth century onward. As for his demonic heritage, Lawrence-Mathers argues that most...