, or The Life of Merlin, is a Latin poem in 1,529 hexameter lines written around the year 1150. Though doubts have in the past been raised about its authorship it is now widely believed to be by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It tells the story of Merlin's madness, his life as a wild man of the woods, and his prophecies and conversations with his sister, Ganieda, and the poet Taliesin. Its plot derives from previous Celtic legends of early Middle Welsh origin, traditions of the bard Myrddin Wyllt and the wild man Lailoken, and it includes an important early account of King Arthur's final journey to Avalon, but it also displays much pseudo-scientific learning drawn from earlier scholarly Latin authors. Though its popularity was never remotely comparable to that of Geoffrey's , it did have a noticeable influence on medieval Arthurian romance, and has been drawn on by modern writers such as Laurence Binyon and Mary Stewart.
Synopsis The author briefly addresses the dedicatee of the poem, Robert de Chesney, Bishop of Lincoln, then begins his story. Merlin (Merlinus in the Latin of the poem) is introduced as being a prophet (vates) and king of Dyfed, who takes part in an unnamed battle alongside Peredur (Peredurus), king of Gwynedd, and Rhydderch (Rodarchus), king of the Cumbrians, against Gwenddoleu (Guennolous), king of Scotland. Gwenddoleu is defeated, but three brothers of Peredur (or possibly of Merlin – the poem is ambiguous on this point) are among the slain, and Merlin so grieves at their deaths that he goes mad and runs off into the Caledonian Forest, where he lives on grass and fruit. News of Merlin's whereabouts eventually reaches his sister Gwenddydd (Ganieda), wife of Rhydderch, and she sends an emissary into the woods to find her brother. He finds Merlin lamenting the harshness of the winter, and responds by singing about the grief of Gwenddydd and Merlin's wife Gwendolen (Guendoloena). The sweetness of this song soothes Merlin so effectively as to bring him back to lucidity, and he is persuaded to visit his sister at Rhydderch's court. Once he is there the strain of facing crowds brings on a relapse, and Merlin has to be chained to prevent him returning to the woods. When Merlin sees a leaf in Gwenddydd's hair he laughs, but refuses to explain his laughter unless he is freed. When this is done he tells Rhydderch that the leaf got into Gwenddydd's hair when she lay outdoors with her lover. Gwenddydd then seeks to discredit Merlin by a trick. She produces a boy on three different occasions, dressed in different costume every time to disguise his identity, and asks her brother each time how he will die. The first time Merlin says he will die in a fall from a rock, the second time that he will die in a tree, and the third time that he will die in a river. Rhydderch is thus persuaded that Merlin can be fooled, and that his judgement is not to be trusted. Merlin is asked if his wife can marry again, and he consents to this, but warns any future husband to beware of him. The author now explains that in later years the boy fell from a rock, was caught in the branches of a tree beneath it, and being entangled there upside down with his head in a river he drowned. Back in the woods Merlin reads in the stars that Gwendolen is remarrying, so he attends her wedding mounted on a stag. Wrenching the antlers off his stag he throws them at the groom and kills him, but failing to make good his escape he is captured and taken back to Rhydderch's court. There he sees first a beggar and then a young man buying leather to patch his shoes, and he laughs at each of them. Rhydderch again offers Merlin his freedom if he will explain why he laughed, and Merlin answers that the beggar was unknowingly standing over buried treasure and that the young man's fate was to drown before he could wear his repaired shoes. When Merlin's words are confirmed Rhydderch lets Merlin go.
Back in the woods Merlin watches the stars in an observatory Gwenddydd has made for him, and prophesies the future history of Britain as far as the Norman kings. Rhydderch dies and Gwenddydd grieves for him. Rhydderch's visitor Taliesin (Telgesinus) goes to the woods to see Merlin, and there he talks to him at length on a variety of learned subjects: cosmogony, cosmology, the natural history of fishes, and finally a survey of the world's islands, including the island of apples where Morgen tends King Arthur. Merlin prophesies a little more, then reminisces about the history of Britain from Constans's reign to Arthur's. A new spring of water miraculously appears, and when Merlin drinks from it his madness lifts and he gives thanks to God for his cure. Taliesin discourses on notable springs around the world. On hearing that Merlin has been cured a number of princes and chieftains visit him in the woods and try to persuade him to resume the governance of his kingdom, but Merlin pleads his advanced age and the delight he takes in nature as reasons for refusing. A flock of cranes appears in the sky, prompting Merlin to teach them about the habits of the crane, and then those of many other kinds of bird. A lunatic appears, and Merlin recognizes him as one of the friends of his youth, Maeldinus, who had been sent mad by eating poisoned apples that had been intended for Merlin himself. Maeldinus is cured by drinking from the new spring, and it is resolved that he, Taliesin, Merlin, and Gwenddydd will remain together in the woods, in retirement from the secular world. The poem ends with a prophecy from Gwenddydd detailing events in the reign of King Stephen, and a renunciation by Merlin of his own prophetic gift.
Composition
Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100 – c. 1155) was a churchman and writer of uncertain ancestry (Welsh, Breton and Norman have all been suggested) who from 1129 to 1152 lived in Oxford. During the 1130s he wrote his first two works, the (History of the Kings of Britain) or (Of the Deeds of the Britons), a largely fictional history of Britain from the time of the Trojans down to the 7th century, featuring significant appearances by Merlin and King Arthur, and the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin). Both works were sensationally successful and had the effect of turning Merlin and Arthur into internationally known figures of legend. Both were written in prose, though the Historia included two short poems which John Milton was to praise for their smoothness, and which both Milton and Alexander Pope translated into English verse. The last work generally attributed to Geoffrey was a much longer poem, the . The attribution rests partly on the last lines of the poem, which have been translated thus:
In the only complete manuscript of the poem these lines are followed by a note in a later hand identifying the author of the poem as Geoffrey of Monmouth. There is also the evidence of the Vitas dedication to a Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, usually identified as Robert de Chesney, in which the poet says that he had formerly dedicated another work to the previous bishop of Lincoln. Since Geoffrey did indeed dedicate his Prophetiae Merlini to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, Robert de Chesney's immediate predecessor, the case for Geoffrey's authorship of the Vita is strengthened. Some 19th and early 20th-century critics doubted or denied that Geoffrey was the author, alleging differences in style between that poem and the Historia, pointing out that some late 12th-century commentators on the Merlin legend do not mention the Vita, and interpreting the poem as alluding to events that happened after Geoffrey's death. However, Geoffrey's authorship is now widely accepted. Assuming that this view is correct the date of the poem can be estimated, since Robert de Chesney became bishop of Lincoln in December 1148, while Geoffrey died in 1155. Moreover, it has been urged that Geoffrey's election to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1151 would probably have freed him from the necessity of finding patrons like Robert de Chesney, and that one of the Vitas prophecies includes a likely reference to the battle of Coleshill in 1150. If both of these arguments are accepted then the poem was completed in late 1150 or early 1151.
Sources and analogues In the Geoffrey presented Merlin as a south Welsh prophet who gives advice to the 5th-century kings Vortigern, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, but the Merlin of the Vita seems to be a significantly different figure, still a prophet but also a warrior-king turned madman active in the 6th-century Hen Ogledd (Old North). Geoffrey explicitly identified the two Merlins by making the hero of the Vita a king of Dyfed in south Wales and by having him reminisce, as a preternaturally long-lived man, about his career in the previous century as recorded in the Historia, but the poem nevertheless gives the impression that two different legends have been with some difficulty yoked together, a south Welsh one and a north British one. The Celticist A. O. H. Jarman proposed in the 1950s that the south Welsh legend concerned a prophet called Myrddin, associated with the town of Carmarthen (in Welsh Caerfyrddin) and named after it, while the northern legend was about a wild man called Lailoken who took part in the battle of Arfderydd in 573. These two stories, argued Jarman, became fused into one composite legend long before the was written, and Geoffrey simply used different parts of the story in the Historia and the Vita. This theory was accepted by most late-20th century scholars, but has been challenged by Rachel Bromwich and Oliver Padel, who have each proposed the possibility that Geoffrey himself was responsible for uniting the southern legend of Myrddin and the northern legend of the wild man.
Among the most important analogues of the are a small number of Middle Welsh poems. Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer ("The Conversations of Myrddin and his Sister Gwenddydd") consists mainly of questions by Gwenddydd and prophecies in response by Myrddin, who is represented as a madman. Rhydderch and the battle of Arfderydd are mentioned. Yr Afallennau ("The Apple-trees") is a poem containing much prophecy and also a lament by the narrator over his own circumstances. He has spent fifty years wandering, a madman among madmen, in the Caledonian Forest, having survived the battle of Arfderydd. There are references to Gwenddolau, Rhydderch and Gwenddydd. In Yr Oianau ("The Greetings") the narrator lives in the wilds with a little pig, both suffering from the persecution of Rhydderch. At one point he mourns the death of Gwenddolau. Finally, Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin ("The Dialogue of Myrddin and Taliesin"), includes a prophetic description of the battle of Arfderydd, but does not otherwise contain much legendary material.
The figure of Lailoken appears in three Latin sources: a Life of St. Kentigern written by Jocelin of Furness at some point between 1175 and 1199 but containing material that may derive from a lost 11th century Life, and two short narratives, not easily dateable, called Lailoken A and Lailoken B. The Life of St. Kentigern includes an episode in which a homo fatuus (meaning either idiot or jester) called Laloecen at the court of Rhydderch correctly prophesies the king's death. In Lailoken B the hero detects the queen's adultery by a leaf caught on her shawl, but is discredited when he predicts his own death in three different manners, only to be vindicated when he is beaten, transfixed by a stake, and drowned in the river Tweed. Lailoken A has the threefold death story without the adultery, and also presents him as a wild man of the woods whose misfortunes are a punishment for his having caused a battle easily identifiable as the battle of Arfderydd; he is also explicitly identified with Merlin (Merlynum).