Chapter I

 

Two Merlins

 

The Arctic wind howled around the cramped cabin of the tiny fishing boat, tossing us mercilessly on the deadly winter seas.  Outside, icy spray had frozen to the safety rails and fixed ropes and tackle immovably to the deck.  Once more, a huge wave rocked the vessel almost onto its side, as the grey waters swirled and foamed, seeming to breathe, as if about to finally embrace us to their ocean grave of bitter cold.

“Hang on,” screamed the skipper.  Too late!  I was slammed against the chart wall, only to be hurled to the floor as the boat somehow managed to right itself.

The roar of the storm powering down from Canadian Tundra did hold one macabre blessing: it drowned out the menacing sound of the waves that crashed over the deadly, jagged rocks that loomed from the water just a few terrifying feet from the starboard bow.

“If we can make it round the point we’ll have a chance of making land,” the skipper shouted.

I looked ahead of him at the cliffs of the snow-covered headland that occasionally appeared between the relentless sheets of the driving blizzard.  But just as I thought there was hope, my stomach leapt as the boat dropped suddenly, deeper into the violent sea.  For a few brief seconds there was an icy calm.  The howl of the wind became a dull moan and the freezing torrent no longer pounded the windows.  Then the terror hit me.  The vessel had sunk into the trough of an enormous wave; its dark crest towering before us momentarily shielded the boat from the relentless storm and shrouded us in a cold shadow of impending doom.   We were directly in its path and it was heading right for the rocks.   As the dreadful wall of water drew closer and the vessel began to rise, the captain span the wheel furiously in an attempt to turn the bow into the oncoming wave.

One of the crew shouted something and we braced ourselves for the assault.  In an instant that freezes into memory, my mind flashed back to how it all began.  The quest that had led me to face what now seemed a certain death in the bitter waters of the North Atlantic had started as an innocent search for the origins of the Merlin legend.  That had been one hazy summer afternoon, six months earlier in a sleepy British town.

 

 

*  *  *

 

 

The sun rays fell in bright shafts through the leafy trees that grew around the beer garden of the old country inn.  On one of the tables Glynn Davis had spread out a map of Britain, held down by glasses to prevent it being blown away by the occasional summer breeze.  Glynn was an amateur historian in his late sixties who had spent many years investigating the King Arthur legend and had written me asking to meet up and discuss his theories on the mystery of Merlin.  Having written a couple of books on the Arthurian mystery, I was happy to oblige.   The pub was an appropriate place for the meeting, as this was in Carmarthen in Wales on the western side of Britain.  It was here that legend said that Merlin was born.

“You say very little about Merlin in your books,” said Glynn, looking thoughtfully around at the drinkers on the table next to us whose children were climbing in the branches of the trees.

“I couldn’t find anything to show that he was an historical figure,” I said.

I had found evidence that King Arthur existed, however.  Not, though, in the way that most people imagine.  The story of King Arthur, as we now know it, comes from the work of the English writer Thomas Malory who wrote in the mid 1400s.  This is the Arthur who becomes king by drawing the sword from the stone, founds the fabulous city of Camelot at its Knights of the Round Table, and rules Britain with his beautiful queen Guinevere.   This story, in turn, had been taken from older, medieval tales known as the Arthurian Romances that were written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which King Arthur and his knights fight dragons, rescue damsels in distress and search for the Holy Grail.  These were clearly romantic inventions but there was much earlier evidence that this King Arthur figure was based on a real warrior who had lived centuries before.

According to the Arthurian Romances, Arthur ruled Britain around AD 500 and the work of a ninth-century British monk named Nennius records a warrior called Arthur fighting in Britain at that time.   In Nennius’ work that survives in the British Library in London, Arthur is recorded as one of the last native British leaders to make a successful stand against the Anglo-Saxons who invaded the country from their homeland in Denmark and northern Germany in the late fifth and early sixth centuries AD.  This was during the British Dark Ages: an era of feuding and warfare that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and lasted for some 400 years until the Saxon king Athelstan became ruler of all England in 927.  It is appropriately called the Dark Ages, not only because it was a time when civilization collapsed but it is an era from which very few records survive.  (It is for this reason that so little is known about the period in which Arthur is said to have lived and why there is such debate concerning his historical existence.)  Unfortunately, Nennius says little about Arthur, nor does he reveal where he originated, but he does list twelve of his battles and the last of them, the battle of Badon, is datable from a separate historical source: the work of another British monk named Gildas who wrote within living memory of the event.  In his On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, dating from the mid-sixth century, Gildas makes reference to the event occurring around AD 500.  There does, therefore, appear to have been an historical British leader named Arthur who lived at the time the King Arthur of the Arthurian Romances is said to have lived.

However, if Arthur lived in the late fifth or early sixth centuries, as Nennius records, he would not have been a king in shining armor, living in a huge Gothic castle, but a Dark Age warlord with Roman-style armor and his fortifications would have been wooden stockades.  The reason that Arthur is now portrayed as a medieval-style king of many centuries later is that writers of the Middle Ages (the period from Athelstan in the ninth century until the Renaissance in the fifteenth century) tended to set ancient stories, such as the legends of Greece and Rome, in their own historical context - a context of knighthood and chivalry.

I was satisfied that Arthur had been an historical figure during these post-Roman Dark Ages, but I had found no similar evidence for the existence of Merlin. In the Arthurian Romances, Merlin is a mysterious figure who had once been a warrior himself, but eventually became a magician and King Arthur’s advisor.  In fact, he is portrayed as the real influence behind the throne.  Arthur’s success and the prosperity of his kingdom is deliberately contrived and orchestrated by Merlin with the magical and prophetic abilities he is said to possess.  When Merlin is young, Britain is a divided country, beset by squabbling between rival warlords who each desire the kingdom for themselves.   Knowing that there are two chief families with royal claims to the empty throne - the Pendragons and the Amlawdds - Merlin decides to bring them together with the birth of a son who will be the unifying king of all Britain.  The problem is that the Amlawdd heir, the princess Igraine, is already married to the Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain.  With a magic potion, Merlin turns the Pendragon heir Uther into the likeness of Gorlois so that he can make love to Igraine and thus Arthur is conceived.  When the child is born, Merlin takes him from his mother and raises him in secret until he is old enough to become king.  At the time, the symbol of British kingship is a splendid sword which Merlin thrusts into a rock, announcing that anyone who can remove it will become king.   Over the years, many try and fail as Merlin has cast a spell so that only the true Pendragon-Amlawdd heir can pull it out.  Eventually, of course, it is Arthur who succeeds and is accepted as king.

In the first year of his reign Arthur gathers knights from around his kingdom to keep the peace and Merlin makes a round conference table as a symbol of equality so that no man can sit at its head.   The magician then continues to advise Arthur on the running of his prosperous kingdom until barbarians from across the seas begin to raid and pillage the land.   To defeat the barbarians, Merlin gives Arthur a second, far more important sword than the one he drew from the stone - one which has the power to render its wielder invincible in battle.  This is Excalibur, the magical sword which Merlin has acquired from a far away land and was made by a mysterious water nymph called the Lady of the Lake.  With the sword, Arthur triumphs and peace returns, and Merlin sets sail for a mystical and secret island called Avalon.  Here he remains for many years, living alone with nine mysterious maidens.

During Merlin’s absence, everything falls apart.  Arthur’s favorite knight Lancelot has an adulterous affair with his queen Guinevere and the land is drawn into civil war.  When Merlin returns, he is distraught to find that the kingdom is in ruin and beset by plague and famine, while Arthur himself is sick and weak.  To put matters right, Merlin gathers the Knights of the Round Table and tells them to go in search of the Holy Grail.  This is the sacred chalice that once held the blood of Christ and is said to cure all ills.   Eventually the Grail is found and Arthur is returned to health and leads his army against the chief rebel, his nephew Modred.   Although Modred is defeated and killed, Arthur receives a mortal wound.  As he lies dying on the field of battle, he orders one of his knights to throw Excalibur, the source of all his power, into a lake where the hand of the Lady of the Lake rises from the surface to catch the weapon and take it down into the watery depths.  When the knight returns to where Arthur had been lying, he discovers that three mysterious maidens have taken him aboard a boat to sail him away to the isle of Avalon.

Like Arthur, Merlin could have been an historical figure upon whom later, fanciful legends where based.  He could have been a wise court advisor who was later accredited with magical powers.  However, I had found no contemporary evidence referring to anyone of this name.

“The name Merlin came from the Welsh name Myrddin and there is historical evidence that he existed in Wales,” said Glynn, after I explained my reservations.  This, I knew, but I had reason to doubt that the Welsh Myrddin had anything to do with the period in which the historical Arthur seems to have lived.

When the Anglo-Saxons eventually conquered much of Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries, the native Britons were driven into the mountainous country in the west of the British Isles.   The east ultimately came to be called Angle-land or England, after the Anglo-Saxons, while the west became known as Wales.  Two distinct languages also developed in Britain: English, which came from the tongue of the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, and Welsh, which developed from the original British language Brythonic.  As the historical Arthur was one of the native Britons, it was in Wales that the stories of his exploits survived and in the Welsh language that they were preserved.

The Britons had a tradition of composing poems about their battles and many survive from the Dark Ages which are collectively known as war-poems.  I knew of seven such works dating from before the Arthurian Romances which are thought to refer to Merlin under the Welsh name Myrddin.  Three of these are found in a collection of early Welsh poems known as The Black Book of Carmarthen, so called because of the color of its binding and a priory in Carmarthen in which the manuscript was once housed. Although the surviving manuscript was copied around 1250, linguistic analysis dates much of the poetry to as early as the seventh century.  One of the Black Book poems mentions Myrddin by name: The Conversation of Myrddin and Taliesin in which Myrddin and a poet called Taliesin discuss the battle of Arfderydd, a historical event which took place in northern Britain on the boarder of what is now Scotland and England in 573.  In the poem, following the battle, Myrddin has retired to a nearby forest to live a solitary existence, having been driven mad by the slaughter he has witnessed.  Two other poems in the manuscript, The Greetings and The Apple Trees also refer to the aftermath of this same battle in which an unnamed speaker is living a similar reclusive life.  The inference, therefore, is that all three works refer to Myrddin.

Four more poems relating to Myrddin are found in a manuscript known as The Red Book of Hergest, so called because of its red leather binding and the area of Hergest in the country of Herfordshire in southeast England where it was kept for many years.  Like the Black Book, it is a collection of early Welsh works compiled into one manuscript during the Middle Ages, but it contains poems and prose compositions dating from the earlier Dark Ages.  The Conversation of Myrddin and Gwenddydd is a poem about Myrddin’s talk with his sister Gwenddydd following the battle of Arfderydd after he has retired to the northern forest.  The Lament of Myrddin in his Grave purports to be the last words of the dying Myrddin, recalling the fate of the Britons at the hands of the Anglo-Saxons, and again appears to refer to a time after the battle Arfderydd and the words are spoken by the same figure who is leading a solitary existence in a forest.  A poem called Commanding Youth refers to the mad Myrddin living in northern Britain after the battle of Arfderydd, as does the a poem called The Prophesy of the Eagle, in which, although Myrddin is not mentioned by name, the speaker appears to be the same forest-dwelling recluse from the other works.

The historical existence of this figure seems to be supported by a manuscript known as the Welsh Annals.  Now in the British Library in London, the Welsh Annals were written down around the 950s and were a compilation of earlier records concerning Britain as a whole.  An entry for the year 575 says:

 

The battle of Arfderydd between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell and Myrddin went mad.

 

However, although this Myrddin may have been an historical figure, he cannot have been the Myrddin associated with King Arthur.  In the Arthurian Romances, Merlin is already quite old when Arthur becomes king around AD 500, which would mean that he cannot have been alive seventy-five years later when the Myrddin referred to in these war-poems appears to have lived.  I had, like many historians, reasoned who this particular Myrddin really was.

It was not only in Wales that Dark Age war-poems were preserved but also in the far north of Britain, in Scotland.  Here too, Dark Age poetry (recorded in a manuscript catalogued as the Cotton Titus A. XIX in the British Library) includes a mystic who went mad after the battle of Arfderydd and fled into a forest where he gained the ability to foretell the future.  These tales are preserved in detail in The Life of Kentigern by a monk called Joceline from Furness Abbey in Scotland who wrote during the mid 1100s.  Kentigern was the first bishop of Glasgow in the late sixth century and died in 603, so the dating of this reclusive prophet also tallies with the Myrddin mentioned in the Welsh Annals.  Joceline’s account of the bishop’s life includes his associations with the mad recluse, although he does not call him Myrddin but Lailoken.  Two of the Scottish works also refer to this reclusive prophet by the name Lailoken and in the final lines of one of these poems, Meldred and Lailoken, the author actually refers to Lailoken by the additional name of Myrddin.

 

Pierced by a spear, crushed by a stone,
And drowned in the stream’s waters,
Myrddin died a triple death.

 

The reason why Lailoken is also called Myrddin seems to be that the name is some sort of epithet or title.  The precise origin of the name Myrddin is a mystery but it appears to have been derived from Brythonic words meaning something like “voice of the Eagle” – the eagle being a bird that was associated with foresight in ancient British tradition.  This can be gathered from the poem, The Prophesy of the Eagle in The Red Book of Hergest in which the speaker, Myrddin, is the Eagle in question.

“I know all about Lailoken: an historical Myrddin who was attributed with the gift of prophesy,” I informed Glynn.  “But he lived three quarters of a century after Arthur’s is said to have lived.”

Glynn smiled and shook his head.  “I don’t mean that Merlin,” he said.  You know that the name Myrddin appears to have been a title meaning the Eagle or something along those lines.  Well, there does seem to have been another important figure accredited with prophetic powers that lived in the late four-hundreds, a century before Lailoken, who also bore the name.  There survives a Dark Age reference to a Myrddin who was alive at the very time of Arthur.”

I listened with interest to Glynn’s argument that there were two separate Merlin’s, both said to have had the ability to foresee the future.  He explained how the theory was supported by a work entitled The Great Prophesy of Britain.   Dating from around 930, it is a war-poem preserved in a manuscript catalogued as MS Peniarth 2 in the National Library of Wales in the town of Aberystwyth.  The poem concerns a period some five centuries earlier when the Anglo-Saxons first began arriving in around the year 450 and includes a British king called Vortigern who ruled shortly before the time Arthur appears to have reigned.

“The prophet in the poem is a Myrddin of the Arthurian period, so cannot have been Lailoken who lived well over a century later.”

For some time we discussed Glynn’s idea that the two Myrddins seem to have been confused as one in the Arthurian Romances which began with the works of a Welsh bishop named Geoffrey of Monmouth in the mid 1100s.  In 1135, Geoffrey wrote a book entitled The History of the Kings of Britain in which the story of King Arthur and his advisor Merlin was first popularized.  In this book, Merlin seems to have been the same character as the Myrddin in The Great Prophesy of Britain as it includes an episode in which Merlin as a young man comes face to face with the British king Vortigern as he does in the poem.  In Geoffrey’s History, Merlin makes his first appearance when he is captured as a boy by Vortigern who intends to use him as a sacrifice.  Merlin manages to save himself when he impresses the king by revealing his prophetic powers.  Below Vortigern’s fort there is said to be a pool in which two dragons dwell, one white the other red.  Merlin not only knows of the story of the dragons but explains its symbolic meaning: they represent the Britons and Saxons who will soon be drawn into a devastating conflict.

The Merlin depicted in Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain is clearly associated with characters such as Arthur and Vortigern who lived in the late 400s.  However, about fifteen years after he wrote his History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey composed a further work concentrating on Merlin’s life after Arthur’s death.  In his Life of Merlin, written around 1150, Geoffrey’s portrayal of Merlin is often at variance with his earlier work. The Merlin here is clearly the same person as the Lailoken of the Welsh poems: both are wild men of the woods who have lost their reason in battle and subsequently live in a forest in the north of Britain.  It appeared, then, that there could then have been two prophetic figures that held the same title, Myrddin, and Geoffrey of Monmouth confused them as one.

“Interesting, but one reference written in the tenth century associating Merlin with the fifth does not prove he actually existed,” I said.

“Alone, is shows that Geoffrey of Monmouth didn’t invent him as many historians believe,” said Glynn.  “However, this is just one of a number of references to the same character that date from well before Geoffrey’s time.”

“You’ve found others?” I said with interest.

“Dig deeper and you’ll find them,” he answered, obviously not wanting to reveal his research to a rival.  Conversely, Glynn appeared to have no such problem trying to get information out of me.

“Would you show me the sword?” he said, changing the subject.  Glynn had asked be to bring along a replica of Excalibur that had been made for me a few years before.

In the Arthurian romances Excalibur is often depicted as a medieval broadsword.  However, if Arthur lived around AD 500 then his sword would have been of a very different design. Military leaders of this era would have used the spatha, a cavalry sword originally designed by the Romans. It would have been around two feet long with a stunted cross guard.  In 1993, with co-author Martin Keatman, I had written King Arthur: The True Story, in which we examined the history behind the Arthurian legend.  As part of the research we wanted to re-create what the historical Arthur’s sword might really have looked like.  We consequently approached one of Britain’s leading authorities on the weaponry of the period, author and Dark Age military expert Dan Shadrake, to design a genuine fifth-century sword.  Dan’s overall pattern was based on archaeological finds from the period, but the hilt design took into account the oldest surviving description of Excalibur in a medieval Welsh war-poem called The Dream of Rhonabwy.  In the poem Arthur’s sword is described as having been decorated with “two serpents upon its golden hilt”.  When Dan’s drawings were complete we decided that the most appropriate people to make the replica would be Wilkinson Sword, the company who now make ceremonial swords for the British military.  Excalibur had been made for a British monarch and Wilkinson’s Sword still make ceremonial swords for the British Queen.  Although the company is now more famous for making razors, they have been in the sword-forging business since the eighteenth century and they came up with truly spectacular re-creation.  Its shining steel blade was decorated with Celtic scrolling of the period and the gold hilt was created from two gold serpents coiled around one another; their bodies forming the hand-grip and their heads, with teeth exposed, forming the cross-guard.

I handed the Excalibur replica to Glynn who examined it closely for a few moments before speaking.  “The serpents: where did you get the exact design?” he asked.

“They were copied from an illustration in a fifth-century Roman military manual called the Notitia Dignitatum,” I said.  “Evidently, they were the insignia of a Roman legion garrisoned in Britain earlier in the same century Arthur lived.   The twin-serpent motif may have been adopted from them by the post Roman British kings.”

Glynn shook his head but said nothing.  We sat in silence as he held up the sword by the blade and examined the hilt from various angles.  “You’re wrong about the Roman legion,” he said, eventually. “But the design fits the period.  Do you know what the double serpents really mean?”

“Tell me,” I said, but once again he changed the subject. 

“What I wanted to ask you was if you had discovered anything linking Merlin with Shakespeare?” he said.

“Shakespeare! But he was born in the sixteenth century…”

“I don’t mean that Shakespeare knew him,” Glynn interrupted.  “Have you found anything Shakespeare wrote about him?”

I had researched the life of William Shakespeare some years earlier for a book in which I examined his private life, but knew of nothing he had written about Merlin.

“Not that I can think of,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

It was then that Glynn hit me with his bombshell.  “I believe Shakespeare was killed because of what he knew about Merlin and the two serpents on Excalibur’s hilt.  Serpents exactly like those,” he said, tapping the hilt.  I didn’t quite know how to handle that one.  As far as I knew Glynn was a sensible and respected historian but this sounded not only off the point but decidedly odd. “You do think that Shakespeare was murdered?” he said, when I looked at him bemused.  In my book I had suggested that Shakespeare was killed because of what he knew about an anti-government conspiracy.

“There are mysterious circumstances surrounding Shakespeare’s death which might imply that someone murdered him, but I can’t see how that could have anything to do with Merlin,” I said.

“I think you were right about Shakespeare’s death.  You said you thought Shakespeare knew about plots against the English government but the whole thing was bigger; much bigger than you ever considered.”  Glynn’s easy-going and cheerful expression had dropped from his face and he looked positively concerned.  He even glanced around at the drinkers on at the other tables as if to make sure they could not hear what he was saying.  “There are still people today who would kill to find out what Shakespeare knew.”

“Sorry, I’m not with you.” I said.

Glynn looked down to the map of Britain he had been using to point out various locations associated with the Merlin legend and stabbed his finger in the area of Stratford-upon-Avon in central England where Shakespeare had lived.  It seemed he was about to say something but decided against it.

“I thought someone like you might have arrived at the same conclusions, independently,” he said, ignoring my question.

“Someone like me?”

“A person who’s researched both the Arthurian legend and the life of Shakespeare.”

“Sorry,” I said, now having difficulty disguising the fact that I thought Glynn was acting a bit weird.  “I don’t know what you mean. Not unless you explain.”

It seemed that Glynn had decided he’d said enough.  Apparently, he had assumed that I must have known what he was talking about and as I had no idea it was best I didn’t know.  He changed the subject back to the literary evidence for an historical Merlin and returned to his usual self.

When we parted company that afternoon I had not changed my opinion of Glynn as a knowledgeable historian who had some interesting ideas about Merlin, but I did decide that he was somewhat eccentric and even paranoid about his theories.  I didn’t give his notions about Shakespeare and Excalibur a second thought at the time, but I was impressed by his theory that there was an historical Merlin during the Arthurian period.  I knew of Myrddin’s mention in The Great Prophesy of Britain but had always assumed that this was yet another reference to Lailoken.  Perhaps Glynn was on to something.  He had mentioned that there was other evidence for an Arthurian Merlin and I decided to take his advice and dig deeper.  I could never have predicted where the investigation would lead me and how dangerous it would eventually turn out to be.