PART ONE

THE HISTORY OF THE PROPHECIES AND THE MAKING OF THE TRANSLATION

The book you are about to read contains most of the surviving text of a fifteenth-century incunabulum, produced in Paris in 1498, by the publisher Antoine Vérard, possibly copying from an even older text written in circa 1270–1278, which now exists only in fragments. It has been largely ignored by interpreters of the Arthurian myths due to the often confused nature of the text.

Much of the material is indeed, at first glance, wildly confused, but repeated reading and checking of details has resulted in a surprisingly rational text, which both the authors felt was more than worthy of sharing.

Here you will read detailed accounts of the famous liaison between Merlin and the Lady of the Lake as well as an early glance at the Grail quest; a deep review of the imminent coming, at the time the manuscript was written, of the Antichrist; several interesting and mysterious adventures, hitherto unknown; a list of the various scribes responsible for writing down Merlin’s prophetic utterances— and much more. We will also demonstrate an extraordinary connection between King Arthur and Prester John, the semi-mythical ruler of a forgotten kingdom in the Far East and possibly the last recorded guardian of the Grail after the ending of Arthur’s reign.

Much of this was difficult to uncover and required a considerable amount of research, based upon an already detailed understanding of the Arthurian mythos. We will explain how we arrived at the text you are about to read more fully below. For the moment, we need to look more closely at the figure of Merlin himself and how his prophecies survived for so long and were so often copied and recopied, and at the way in which these writings attracted so much additional material, which was only tangentially connected with the prophecies themselves.

THE ORIGINS OF MERLIN AND THE PROPHECIES

Really, there are several Merlins. To begin with, we have Welsh and Irish analogues, who bear all the characteristics of the seer, and then we have versions in the romances of the Middle Ages that range from the heroic to the demonic—depending on which version you follow. However, one aspect is largely unvarying: the seership and wisdom that permeates the stories that feature Merlin either as central or subsidiary figure.

The Welsh analogue is Taliesin the bard, reborn from the womb of the Goddess Cerridwen, cast adrift on the sea—much like Meliadus, who appears in our text and who, as an infant, was cast adrift on a boat. Taliesin speaks his first poem to the man who finds him while still an infant. The birth of Aí (the name means "poetry"), a less well known Irish divinity, is announced by a gust of wind, which brings with it a prophecy that the baby will come to equal his uncle Fiachu, a king of the magical race of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Fiachu at once demands the child to be killed, but Aí speaks a poem from his cradle, demanding his recognition as a bard, who under Irish law was a sacred personage.

Neither Taliesin nor Aí are Merlin exactly, though in the twelfth-century Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin) Taliesin visits him in the forest to which he has escaped in his madness, and the two have a discussion of the cosmos every bit as erudite as anything in the Prophecies. Both are bards, both are prophets, and both spoke wisdom as infants.

The earliest written references to Merlin come from the bardic literature of the Celts and from the life of the seventh-century Celtic saint Kentigern. Both refer to the figure of a wild man living alone in the woods, driven mad by his witnessing a battle in which his friends and kinfolk were slain. In the Vita Sancti Kentigerni (Life of Saint Kentigern), a hagiography of Kentigern written by Joceyln of Furness (c. 1200), we hear of the madman Lailoken who is brought back to sanity through the actions of the saint. In a handful of poems attributed to Merlin himself (here called Myrddin Wyllt; for a translation of these poems see appendix 1), there appears a fragmentary story in which the seer appears to be living alone in the woods, half mad and half inspired, occasionally attended by his half-sister Gwenddydd.

Because none of this material was written down before the Middle Ages, it is difficult to say with any certainly how old the stories are. It was the pseudo-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1095–1155) who, circa 1134, made the Latinised name Merlinus into a household name by compiling his version of the Prophecies. When, in 1138, Geoffrey published his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), he included the prophecies again and added a version of the story of the wondrous child Merlin, probably taken from the earlier writings of a ninth-century monk named Nennius. Geoffrey’s work rapidly became one of the most famous and popular books of its time, something, indeed, of a medieval "bestseller," and the name and character of Merlin were forever after inseparably connected with those of Arthur, whose deeds Geoffrey also chronicled.

The earlier figure of Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin the Wild) was soon further immortalised by Geoffrey in his Vita Merlini in which the story of the king driven mad by the sight of the death of his friends and family is repeated and elaborated. His sources for this story were almost certainly founded on earlier Welsh legends and traditions relating to the figure of the Wild Man of the Woods or, as he is termed in Irish tradition, the Gelt. A description of this character, from the thirteenth-century Norse Speculum regale (The King’s Mirror) describes him thus:

It happens that when two hosts meet and are arrayed in battle-array,
and when the battle-cry is raised on both sides, that . . . men run
wild and lose their wits. . . . And then they run into a wood away
from other men and live there like wild beasts, and shun the meet-
ing of men like wild beasts. And it is said of these men that when
they have lived in the woods in that condition for twenty years then
feathers grow on their bodies as on birds, whereby their bodies are
protected against frost and cold.1

In fact, Merlin and Taliesin have much in common. Both are the product of mysterious births, both possess prophetic abilities, and both are connected to the Arthurian court, Merlin as Arthur’s adviser, Taliesin as court poet. Their prophecies also have many points of similarity. They appear to be largely made up of compilations based on much earlier, genuine prophetic material, mostly anonymous, to which later generations have added stanzas in the style of the original bards. Myrddin’s prophecies are contained chiefly in dialogues either between himself and Taliesin, or himself and his sister, Gwenddydd, who was herself recognised as a prophet. These prophecies are, for the most part, of a general kind, referring to battles, political events, other known events, and people. They are identifiable as separate from the underlying matter of the poems, which deal with the story of Myrddin’s madness and of the period he spent in the wilderness attended by a pig (a creature sacred to the Celts) and remembering the terrible battle in which he lost his reason. He thinks also of his sister, Gwenddydd, who has deserted him because he (apparently) killed her son, and of his enemies, who seek his destruction. Interspersed with this are prophecies of events that took place long after—probably in the eighth or ninth centuries, when heroes like Cynan and Cadwallader had replaced Arthur as the expected deliverer of the Cymry.

That some of the material relating to Myrddin has been suppressed is beyond question, so we have little or no chance of establishing a full text of the remaining Myrddin poems. At one time these may have formed verse interludes of a longer prose account of Myrddin’s life—such as that one that evidently formed the basis of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Vita Merlini, which tells the story in full and makes use of the poems attributed to Myrddin Wylt (see appendix 1) as well as others that belonged to the ancient saga of Myrddin.