![]() ![]() Merlin, Arthur's adviser, prophet and magician, is basically the creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in his twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain combined the Welsh traditions about a bard and prophet named Myrddin with the story that the ninth-century chronicler Nennius tells about Ambrosius (that he had no human father and that he prophesied the defeat of the British by the Saxons). Mark Twain, parodying Tennyson's Arthurian world, makes Merlin a villain, and. In The Idylls of the King, Tennyson makes him the architect of Camelot. He figures in works from the Renaissance to the modern period. In the modern period Merlin's popularity has remained constant. Sir Thomas Malory, in the Morte d'Arthur presents him as the adviser and guide to Arthur. He is central to a major text of the thirteenth-century French Vulgate cycle, and he figures in a number of other French and English romances. Merlin became very popular in the Middle Ages. These led to a tradition that is manifested in other medieval works, in eighteenth-century almanac writers who made predictions under such names as Merlinus Anglicus, and in the presentaion of Merlin in later literature. The Prophecies were then incorporated into the History as its seventh book. Geoffrey also wrote a book of "Prophecies of Merlin" before his History. Geoffrey gave his character the name Merlinus rather than Merdinus (the normal Latinization of Myrddin) because the latter might have suggested to his Anglo-Norman audience the vulgar word "merde." In Geoffrey's book, Merlin assists Uther Pendragon and is responsible for transporting the stones of Stonehenge from Ireland, but he is not associated with Arthur. ![]()
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