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The
legends of the Arthurian cycle have been subject to continuous revision
over the centuries, the most famous of which is Malory’s Morte
D’Arthur (probably written in the early 15th century).
That work will not be considered here, as it mostly an exposition of
Plantagenet aspirations and moralities.
The
Arthurian legends are in large part expressions of earlier stories and
mythic relationships, descended from the Druidic Bardic culture of
pre-Roman Britain. In Arthurian form the stories have been rendered
palatable to the early Celtic and English Christian churches. The
Arthurian cycle is traditionally placed in the second half of the fifth
century, and it expresses a Celtic aspiration against the Anglo-Saxon
invaders. It is a tribute to the mythic quality of the stories that they
were adopted by those invaders as part of their own legendarium.
The
Merlin-Vortigern myth considered here can be summarised as follows:
According
to the 9th Century Nennius, Horsa fell in the ensuing battle, but as his
compensation Vortigern gave Hengist the Isle of Thanet. It was not
sufficient, and the Jutes became ever more importunate, until the hapless
Vortigern realized he was fighting, instead of only Picts and Scots, the
Jutes as well. Too tired for war, he fled westwards and built himself a
citadel in Wales.
It
is at this point, that according to Nennius, the first of the major
characters of the Arthurian story makes his entry. Determined to make his
citadel impregnable at all costs, Vortigern consulted his magicians. They
advised him to enlist the benevolence of the gods by sacrificing an orphan
child and burying this body in the foundations. The victim finally
selected was, says Nennius, a little boy called Ambrosius, the Welsh form
of which is ‘Emrys’, son of a Roman couple of consular rank.
The
boy saves himself by displaying a gift for prophecy so spectacular the
king reprieves him. Three centuries after Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth
gives substantially the same account, but with one significant change: the
child-victim’s name has become Merlin, or in Welsh “Myrddin”.[1]
Thus
we have two written sources for the legend: Nennius, writing in the 9th
century, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 12th century.
However, Nennius acknowledges the earlier source of Gildas, who wrote in
the late 7th or early 8th centuries. Of the
characters in the story, Hengist and Horsa are attested in other,
unrelated tales; so, at the least, they represent a composite of
Anglo-Saxon leaders, and may be actual historical people. Vortigern is
probably a composite character, the name coming from fawr (great)
+ tygwy (meaning something like chief),
but he is usually considered historical. Merlin is the only character
which has no direct historicity, but may be a merging of a 5th
century hero, Emrys, and a 6th century bard, Myrddin, both of
which are separately attested historically.
However,
Rutherford’s tale has been stripped of all mythic significance, in an
effort to cast his book as a historical account rather than a mythic or
social commentary. A more measured view of the legend is as follows:
How
the Red Dragon became the emblem of Wales is explained by the legend of
NANT GWYNANT, near Caernarvon. The Romano-British king, Vortigern, decided
to re-fortify an Iron Age hill fort at Dinas Emrys, near Snowdon, but the
building materials he assembled by day disappeared by night. He consulted
his soothsayers who declared that the site must be sprinkled with the
blood of a boy born to a virgin. The boy eventually discovered proved to
be the equal of all the magicians, for he was none other than Merlin. He
told the king that beneath the hill was an underground lake in which two
dragons, one red and one white, were asleep. When the lake was drained,
the dragons awoke and began to fight. After a long and fierce conflict the
red dragon, representing Wales, beat the white one, representing the
Saxons, and so the delighted Welsh adopted the red dragon as their emblem.
The king never did manage to build his castle on Dinas Emrys so he settled
for one on neighbouring Nant Gwynant instead.[2]
This
version, though, is still missing certain parts of the myth. To be fair,
this account is concerned with the dragon aspect of the story – it is
part of a section on “Dragons,
water beasts, giant worms, cockatrices and other monsters”. A fuller
account, still from a historical point of view, is given below:
The
retreating king [Vortigern] made for the fastnesses of North Wales, that
bulk of scrub and crag which was to be the last-stand refuge for later
independent princes too, and there, under Snowdon, he tried to build a
castle. But as much as he built during the day disappeared during the
night. The king consulted his wise men — an implication, perhaps, of the
heathen, perhaps Druidical surroundings of the story — who directed him
to sacrifice on the spot a boy without a father. Suddenly we are into
myth. The world in which one negotiates with invaders has rolled away, and
that in which the mystery of supernatural conception and the ritual of
child-sacrifice are dominant themes replaces it.
Messengers,
the Nennius story continues, were sent out. In the south of Wales they
found a boy who claimed to have no father, and they brought him north to
Snowdon. Confronted on the hilltop with his imminent death, he demanded to
question the wise men. What was it, he asked, that was hidden under the
paving on the hill’s summit? They did not know, but he did. There was a
pool there. They opened the paving, and found the pool. And what was in
the pool? he asked. To their ignorance he replied that there were two
containers; on separating the containers they would find a wrapping —
literally a ‘tent’ between two ‘vases’; and in the wrapping two
serpents, one of them white, the other red. All this was discovered as
predicted, and when they then unfolded the cloth and released the serpents
he told them also what would happen next. The serpents began to fight each
other, the white one at first winning, and then, after the third near
defeat, the red one recovering and finally driving out the white. The king
and his magicians stood astonished as the prophetic boy explained all this
to them. The pool, he told them, was the world, the tent Vortigern’s
kingdom. The two serpents were the dragons of two nations, the red one
that of the natives of Britain, the white one the invading Saxons. In the
end, he said, our people will drive out the Saxons and send them back to
where they came from. But as far as Vortigern was concerned, there was no
future for him on this hill. It was he, the boy, who should have control
of the castle to be built there. He gave his name then: Ambros.[3]
This
version gives a whole new set of significances to the legend. First, the
sacrifice of the child was not to make the fortress impregnable but to
stop it from falling down. Second, the child was not to be an orphan, or
born of a virgin, but a boy without a father. The other significant events
of the myth are also present: a hidden pool, two gourds or vases; the tent
or wrapping cloth; the two dragons, one red and one white; the prophecy of
Emrys-Merlin; and the confounding of the wise men by a pre-pubescent
youth. Although this extract does not name the site of the castle, it is
mentioned later in the book, in the following extract:
In
the centre of the summit plateau of Dinas Emrys is a deep hollow, almost a
glade, boggy and tangled with clumps of reed. During the excavations, a
square depression in this miniature marshy valley was found to be a
man-made pool, a cistern, probably cut during the early-Roman period of
the hill’s occupation; pre-Ambrosius, pre-Vortigern, and certainly long
pre-Nennius and Gildas. On the banks of this pool and over an area of the
pool where it had silted, a paved stone platform was discovered, thought,
this time, to belong to the Dark Age period. Under the circumstances one
can hardly resist the speculation that paving would have covered the whole
pool and the rest of it had been removed by Vortigern’s magicians in
their earlier excavations carried out under the direction of Emrys-Merlin.[4]
Here
we see that the myth is based around a real pool, which probably had
cultural significance long before the legend began. As this pool has been
enshrined in legend and associated with magical events, it is likely that
this is a site of ancient ritual significance. The name of the place (Dinas
Emrys – the fortress of Emrys or Merlin) is also significant. There
appears to be no sign of a fortress having been built there, and a boggy
hollow would seem to be both a foolish and unhealthy place to build one.
However, it may be stretching matters to link the word Dinas
to the word dineis (strange).
However,
the myth of a pool with two dragons is more ancient than the Arthurian
cycle. An example occurs in the Mabinogion, in The
Tale of Lludd and Llevelys:
‘The
second plague in your realm,’ said Llevelys, ‘is a dragon. A dragon of
another race, a foreign one, is fighting with it and struggling to
overcome it, and therefore your dragon screams horribly. This is how you
can see for yourself: when you arrive home measure the length and breadth
of the island, and where you find the exact centre have a pit dug; in the
pit place a vat full of the best mead that can be made, with a silk sheet
over the vat, and guard all this yourself. You will see the dragons
fighting in the shape of monstrous animals until they finally rise into
the air as dragons, and when they have wearied of their horrid and
frightening combat they will sink onto the sheet in the form of two little
pigs; they will drag the sheet to the bottom of the vat, and there they
will drink the mead and fall asleep. When that happens you must wrap the
sheet round them and lock them in a stone chest, and bury them in the
earth within the strongest place you know of in the island. As long as
they are within that strong place no plague will come to Britain.[5]
The
earliest text of the Mabinogion still extant dates from about 1325, but
this is a copy of a manuscript with a long tradition. In written form it
is believed to go back to at least the 6th century, and in the
spoken, bardic form it is likely to be much older. Thus it encapsulates an
ancient mythic structure for the Celtic Britons. The tradition of warring
dragons associated with a pool would seem to be a part of that structure.
However, the Mabinogion and Arthurian tales are closer than that. When the
two little pigs had fallen asleep:
Lludd
wrapped the sheet round them and locked them in a stone chest in the most
secure place he could find in Eryri, and thereafter the place was called
Dinas Emreis.[6]
It
is tempting to say that the dragons freed by Emrys-Merlin are the same
dragons imprisoned by Lludd, but The
Tale of Lludd and Llevelys follows The
Dream of Maxen in the Mabinogion, implying Lludd came after Maxen.
Maxen is traditionally identified with Magnus Maximus, a Roman soldier who
was declared Emperor by the British legions in 383CE. He conquered Gaul,
Hispania and Northern Italia before being captured and beheaded in 388CE.
For the Lludd legend to precede the Dinas Emrys legend it would have had
to happen between 388 and about 450CE. While this is certainly possible,
it is also reasonable to consider the Emrys-Merlin story as a mirror-image
of the Lludd story.
However,
one final feature of the Dinas Emrys story is still missing, and this
appears in the following extract. In this case the full story is given,
from Vortigern’s flight into Wales to Merlin’s prophecy:
At
last he took the advice of his wizards, who told him that he ought to
build an exceedingly strong tower, since he had lost all his other
castles. He searched everywhere to find a suitable place, and at last came
to Snowdon. Here he assembled a great gang of masons from various
countries, and ordered them to build the tower. The stonemasons began to
lay the foundations, but whatever they did one day was swallowed up by the
earth the next, so they did not know where their work had disappeared to.
Vortigern, when he heard about this, once more asked his wizards to tell
him the reason for this. They said that he must search for a boy who had
never had a father; and when he had found him, he should kill him and
sprinkle his blood over the mortar and the stones. This, they said, would
make the foundation of the tower hold firm.
Messengers
were sent everywhere to look for such a boy. When they came to Carmarthen,
they saw some lads playing before the gate: they sat down, weary with
travel, and looked round them in the hope of finding what they sought.
Towards evening, a couple of youths whose names were Merlin and Dalbutius
suddenly quarrelled; and as they argued, Dalbutius said to Merlin: ‘What
a fool you are to think you are a match for me! I come from royal blood on
both my mother’s and father’s side, but no one knows who you are,
because you never had a father!’ At this the messengers pricked up their
ears, and asked the bystanders who this Merlin might be. They told them
that no one knew his father, but that his mother was daughter of the king
of Dyfed, and that she lived with the nuns in St Peter’s Church in that
same city.
The
messengers hurried off to the reeve of the city, and ordered him in the
king’s name to have Merlin and his mother sent to the king. When he
learnt of their errand, the reeve at once sent Merlin and his mother to
Vortigern for him to do whatever he wanted with them. And when they were
brought into his presence, the king received the mother with due respect
knowing that she was of noble birth. Then he asked her who the father of
her son might be.
She
replied: ‘On my soul, my lord king, I know of no man who was his father.
All I can tell you is that once, when I and my attendants were in our
chambers, someone appeared to me in the shape of a handsome young man, who
embraced me and kissed me and stayed with me for some time. Then he
suddenly vanished and I never saw him again: he often spoke to me when I
was alone, though I never saw him. When he had haunted me in this way for
a long time I conceived and bore a child. This is the truth, my lord king,
whatever you may make of it; I know of no one who is the father of this
boy.’
Amazed
by her words, the king asked for Maugantius to be brought; and when the
latter had heard the story from first to last, he said to Vortigern: ‘In
books and histories written by wise men I have found that many men have
been born in this way. Apuleius says that there are certain spirits
between the moon and the earth, which we call incubi. Their nature is
partly human, partly angelic, and they take on the shape of men at will
and associate with mortal women. Perhaps one of these appeared to this
lady and is the father of the youth.’
When
Merlin heard all this, he came to the king and said: ‘Why have my mother
and I been summoned here?’
Vortigern
answered: ‘My wizards have declared that I should seek out a boy who
never had a father, because when I have sprinkled his blood upon the
foundation of the tower I am building it will stand firm.’
Merlin
said: ‘Summon your wizards and I will show that they are lying.’
The
king, amazed at his words, summoned his wizards so that Merlin could
confront them. Merlin said to them: ‘Don’t you know what is preventing
the foundation of this tower from being laid? You have advised that it
should be built with mortar mixed with my blood, to make it stand
securely. But ask yourselves what is hidden under the foundation, which
prevents it from standing?’ The wizards were frightened and said
nothing.
Then
Merlin (who was also called Ambrosius) said: ‘My lord king, call your
workmen and get them to dig, and you will find a pool under the tower that
prevents it from standing.’
They
did this, and a pool was indeed discovered.
Then
Merlin Ambrosius again questioned the wizards: ‘Tell me now, you liars
and flatterers, what is under the pool?’ But they were all dumb and said
not a word. He said to the king: ‘Order that the pool is to be drained;
in the bottom you will find two dragons asleep.’ The king did so, since
Merlin had been proved right about the pool; and once more, to his
astonishment, he found that it was as Merlin said. And after that, Merlin
prophesied the future history of Britain, to the amazement and bafflement
of his hearers.
When
Vortigern had listened to him, he wanted to learn what his own fate would
be; and Merlin’s answer was as follows:
‘Escape
from the fire of the sons of Constantine, if you can! At this very moment
they are fitting out their ships; at this very moment they are leaving the
coast of Brittany and sailing out into the open sea towards Britain, which
they will invade. They will defeat the accursed Saxons, but before that
they will besiege you in a tower and set fire to it. It was your actions
that brought this fate upon you when you betrayed their father and invited
the Saxons into Britain as your bodyguard; they will come over as your
executioners. Two deaths await you, and I cannot tell which of them you
will escape. The Saxons will lay waste your kingdom and will try to kill
you. And Aurelius and Uther Pendragon will invade your lands seeking
revenge for their father’s death. So take refuge if you can. Tomorrow
they will land at Totnes. The Saxons will suffer bloody injuries: Hengist
will be killed, and Aurelius Ambrosius will be crowned king. He will reign
in peace and will restore the churches, but he will die of poison. His
brother Uther Pendragon will succeed him, but his reign will also be cut
short by poison. Your descendants will be there when this happens, and
Uther’s son Arthur will revenge his father!’[7]
The
missing piece is that Emrys-Merlin does not meet Vortigern alone, he is in
the company (and solidarity) of his mother.
So
we have a real place, Dinas Emrys, with a real pool, and a cast of
characters which appear to have historical analogues. But the story itself
is mythic, unless belief in live dragons is permitted. We have a blood
sacrifice called for, and the death of one of the dragons then acts as a
surrogate for the death of Emrys-Merlin (the initiate). We have a two part
cycle of light (the white dragon) and blood (the red dragon). And, while
the victory of the red dragon should permit the castle to be built, no
work is done and no castle raised: Vortigern is forced away from Dinas
Emrys, which then becomes identified with Emrys-Merlin. There is also the
solidarity of the females (the mother and the initiate) being victorious
over the camaraderie of the males (the wizards and Vortigern), and there
are the incidental features of gourds and the tent, both images of secret,
secluded places. In addition, the pool itself, the heart of the mystery,
is hidden and has to be uncovered. The sleeping (silent) dragons are
juxtaposed with the fighting (noisy) dragons, and the fight itself should
turn the castle site from a raw (unbuildable) state to a cooked (solid and
safe) state. However, the victory of the red means that the site remains
undeveloped and does not move from the mystical realm into the mundane.
This failure to “cook” properly is a punishment on Vortigern for his
failure as a leader, which is in turn linked to the fact that he took the
sister of his people’s enemies (Rowena, sister of Hengist and Horsa) as
his wife. Instead of aligning with his blood (the Britons) during the dark
time he aligns with his wife’s kin – the Saxons, who are the white
dragon.
Finally,
there is the issue of food. Although this is not directly mentioned in the
Arthurian stories, there is mention in all the versions of the Saxons
ravaging the land and causing starvation and want. In the Mabinogion it is
much more explicit: the fighting dragons are one of three plagues. The
first is the invasion of the Corannyeid, who can hear everything, which
means that conversation must cease or secrets be revealed; the second is a
terrifying scream heard every May Eve in every house in Britain (this is
the dragons fighting); and the third is the carrying off of all food in
the palace every night, regardless of how much is laid up during the day.
Thus we have an end to normal discourse, external noise, and hunger as the
three plagues.
It
seems reasonable, therefore, to place the legend of Merlin and Vortigern
firmly in the tradition of lunar, matrifocal myths.
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