Becoming the archetypical Wizard

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, legends

The brief version is this: In about the year 540 AD, twins were born near where Glasgow lies today. Their names were probably Langoureth, a girl, and Lailoken, a boy. The twins were scholarly kids, very bright. In her teens, the girl was married to Rydderch (sometimes called Roderick), who became king of Strathclyde, an area from Partick (now a suburb of Glasgow) northward. At about the same time, the boy was sent into battle, where he did not distinguish himself, but at least survived. He was a scholar, not a fighter, and came under the training of Druids, who were the intellectuals of the time. Though his sister became an outward Christian, he never strayed from the "old ways".

A turning point in Lailoken's life was his participation in the disastrous battle of Arderydd, 573 AD. He is said to have gone mad with grief, and at least he self-exiled to the woods north of Partick for about seven years. During those years, his sister, now queen, met him a few times in the woods, and eventually he was persuaded by emissaries of king Rydderch to return to court. Among those emissaries was one Mungo, a "Christian" priest (I use those quotes advisedly), who was nothing if not a psychopath in his hatred of the Druids and the old way. It must have galled him to "make nice" to the king's Druid brother-in-law. The two fought one another for decades.

One attempt by Mungo to surmount Lailoken's opposition was to accuse the queen of adultery. Though the accusation was true, the king was tolerant and unwilling to judge her. Her brother brokered a deal to save her and shame Mungo. Mungo, now revered as St. Kentigern, patron of Glasgow, went for about thirteen years to Rome, from which he returned with great authority and riches bestowed by Pope Gregory the Great. In his absence, Strathclyde prospered.

By the year 600, the twins were sixty years old, the "Mungo Christians" were gaining in power, and Lailoken retired, a pensioner of the king, to a hilly area west of Partick. There he had built, among other things, what people thought of as a great hall with seventy doors and seventy windows. It was probably a wooden henge, built in a circle, used by the old Druid for astronomical observations. He had a large staff to keep his records and assist his studies. During this time he was again considered a madman.

In 612 AD Mungo died, the king died, and the queen retired to her brother's complex. A rival king, known today as Mordred, had taken over the Dunipace area next to Strathclyde in 596. Rydderch's younger son Constantine was briefly king of Strathclyde, but turned out to be the Scottish Caligula and was deposed.

War with the Angles was looming, and Mordred summoned Lailoken to Dunipace to arrange some kind of truce between the Christian forces and those of the old way. He was briefly imprisoned and starved to induce compliance, but did not submit. He tricked his way to freedom and returned to Partick. However, in about 618 AD he was asked to return to Dunipace, and along the way, was assassinated at Mordred's command, instigated by his wife, who hated the old Druid even the more. He was hastily buried near the place he was ambushed, on a hilltop some 30 miles from Glasgow. The hill is no longer there. It was gradually removed in the 1830s to make a quarry for road building stone. A single grave was discovered during the excavation, containing bones and, oddly enough, rotted papers in a jar.

We don't know this man by his given name today. For much of his life he was called a madman, and the nickname stuck. A common Gaelic word for madman is Myrddin, with the "dd" having a soft "th" sound. Over time, that sound shifted to an "L" sound, and we know him today as "Merlin."

This is a summary of the content of Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind the Legend of the Great Arthurian Mage by Adam Ardrey. Historian Ardrey had a hard job: a thousand years of labor to hide Merlin's true nature and history, and to move both him and Arthur hundreds of kilometers to the south, have yielded a written record in which reading between the lines is a bit like uncovering Troy; the archaeologists had to dig through a dozen later cities to get a few artifacts of Homeric age, and the author of Finding Merlin had to dig away religious romance, hagiography, anti-Druid prejudice, and sundry miracle stories to unearth the sparse facts that limn the remarkable old Druid.

Sadly, I must comment that the author uses terms like "this sound like that" and "it must be supposed" in such profusion that the book would be a quarter shorter without them. I'd prefer that he state once, like Sherlock Holmes, "Once you have excluded the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth," then get on with straight narrative.

Why have I written nearly nothing about Arthur? Primarily because Ardrey is at work on the title Finding Arthur, and the only clue I can offer at this point is that Arthur, a military genius of Napoleonic stature, lived but 37 years before being betrayed by Mordred and killed in 596 AD. The modern portrayals of both Arthur and Merlin are composites, as are most of the other figures in the stories.

What has made Lailoken/Merlin the prototypical wizard? Why is he not forgotten like the rest of the Druids? In spite of the best efforts of medieval Catholic writers, his character could not be completely hidden. None of them can make a credible claim that he ever converted, though there are a very few overly fantastic stories to that effect. But as the brother-in-law to a powerful king, and for a short while an advisor to a great general who is now thought of as a king also, and as a leading scholar of the first two decades of the Seventh Century, he became a figure that could not be ignored.

Yet he was no lightning-throwing mage. People tend to think of Merlin these days as a cartoonish figure like the one shown here. Many even profess to wish that such things could have some reality. I don't know about you, but I am very, very glad such powers are beyond the reach of mere humans.

The powers of the medieval-romantic Merlin were much more restrained: primarily a facility with herbal remedies and the ability to prophesy, though he had the Cassandra-like curse that he was seldom believed.

The real abilities of Lailoken were founded in scientific knowledge and a keen understanding of human nature. When he retired, a few years after the death of Arthur, he could see the writing on the wall; fanatical "Christians" were growing in power, the king was aging, he himself was weakening and had never been much of a warrior anyway, and the likely successor to the king was a psychopath as evil as Mungo. By retiring away from the citified areas, he placed himself in the protection of a popular majority of non-Christians, who revered him as a scholar of the old ways.

So, by one means or another, once the story of Arthur was romanticized (and moved a lot closer to London), his trusted advisor had to become a figure of similar majesty, and the romantic wizard "Merlin" was created (the "madman" meaning had been forgotten).

In reality, I suspect Merlin/Lailoken looked a lot more like this old photo of John Muir. He enjoyed the woods as much as Muir did, and for similar reasons he opposed the encroaching cities that have, in the centuries since, seen the removal of all the old forests.

The popular imagination has turned Merlin into a Gandalf or Saruman, or even an avuncular Dumbledore. Were he around today, Lailoken would be a professor of geology or astronomy, dragging telescope or gravimeter hither and yon in an unending quest to find out what makes the universe tick. It's nice to see a scientist make good.

I just had a by-the-way thought: The new PBS series, "NOVA ScienceNOW", stars a favorite writer of mine, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who likes to wear a vest with alchemical and astrological signs on it. He, a real scientist, is taking advantage of Merlin's image also, and I reckon he knows it. I wonder if he knows just how deep his kinship with Merlin really is.