Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Ashe Geoffrey
Title : Merlin The prophet and his history
Year : 2006

Link download : Ashe_Geoffrey_-_Merlin.zip

Introduction. Merlin is an enigma. He is one of the strangest characters in legend and literature, and all the more enigmatic because there is nobody else like him, no basis for comparison or classification. He changes shape and he darts about. The obvious thing to say, the starting-point for any discussion, is that he is King Arthur’s court wizard. But that is no more than the beginning of an account of him, and even the story of his association with Arthur, at least in its most familiar form, is briefer than anyone would suppose without actually looking it up. Yet for someone so elusive, he has had an extraordinary impact. In the Middle Ages and long afterwards, almost everyone who knew about him at all believed that he was a real person and had lived in the fifth century. That was the case not only in England. His fame was international. Copies of prophecies he was said to have uttered on a hill in Wales were passed around and interpreted. French commentators tried to fit them to facts and show that they had been fulfilled; Italians had the audacity to put him on a level with biblical prophets, such as Isaiah. Actually, no one understood the alleged prophecies, and it is an open question whether there was much to understand. Yet they revolutionised thinking about prophecy in general, giving it a new kind of status, and the revolution continued. Without Merlin’s lingering presence in European imagination, there would very likely have been no Nostradamus. People believed something else about Merlin: he was a magician as well as a prophet. They were less interested in him in that capacity. His most notorious feat of magic, at Tintagel in Cornwall, verged on the ludicrous. Yet by common consent it had laid the foundation of a glorious age in British tradition, the age of King Arthur. ...