Vita Merlini
Vita Merlini, or The Life of Merlin, is a Latin poem in 1,529 hexameter lines written around the year 1150. Though doubts have in the past been raised about its authorship it is now widely believed to be by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It tells the story of Merlin's madness, his life as a wild man of the woods, and his prophecies and conversations with his sister, Ganieda, and the poet Taliesin. Its plot derives from previous Celtic legends of early Middle Welsh origin, traditions of the bard Myrddin Wyllt and the wild man Lailoken, and it includes an important early account of King Arthur's final journey to Avalon, but it also displays much pseudo-scientific learning drawn from earlier scholarly Latin authors. Though its popularity was never remotely comparable to that of Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae, it did have a noticeable influence on medieval Arthurian romance, and has been drawn on by modern writers such as Laurence Binyon and Mary Stewart.
Synopsis
The author briefly addresses the dedicatee of the poem, Robert de Chesney, Bishop of Lincoln, then begins his story. Merlin is introduced as being a prophet and king of Dyfed, who takes part in an unnamed battle alongside Peredur, king of Gwynedd, and Rhydderch, king of the Cumbrians, against Gwenddoleu, king of Scotland. Gwenddoleu is defeated, but three brothers of Peredur are among the slain, and Merlin so grieves at their deaths that he goes mad and runs off into the Caledonian Forest, where he lives on grass and fruit. News of Merlin's whereabouts eventually reaches his sister Gwenddydd, wife of Rhydderch, and she sends an emissary into the woods to find her brother. He finds Merlin lamenting the harshness of the winter, and responds by singing about the grief of Gwenddydd and Merlin's wife Gwendolen. The sweetness of this song soothes Merlin so effectively as to bring him back to lucidity, and he is persuaded to visit his sister at Rhydderch's court. Once he is there the strain of facing crowds brings on a relapse, and Merlin has to be chained to prevent him returning to the woods. When Merlin sees a leaf in Gwenddydd's hair he laughs, but refuses to explain his laughter unless he is freed. When this is done he tells Rhydderch that the leaf got into Gwenddydd's hair when she lay outdoors with her lover. Gwenddydd then seeks to discredit Merlin by a trick. She produces a boy on three different occasions, dressed in different costume every time to disguise his identity, and asks her brother each time how he will die. The first time Merlin says he will die in a fall from a rock, the second time that he will die in a tree, and the third time that he will die in a river. Rhydderch is thus persuaded that Merlin can be fooled, and that his judgement is not to be trusted. Merlin is asked if his wife can marry again, and he consents to this, but warns any future husband to beware of him. The author now explains that in later years the boy fell from a rock, was caught in the branches of a tree beneath it, and being entangled there upside down with his head in a river he drowned. Back in the woods Merlin reads in the stars that Gwendolen is remarrying, so he attends her wedding mounted on a stag. Wrenching the antlers off his stag he throws them at the groom and kills him, but failing to make good his escape he is captured and taken back to Rhydderch's court. There he sees first a beggar and then a young man buying leather to patch his shoes, and he laughs at each of them. Rhydderch again offers Merlin his freedom if he will explain why he laughed, and Merlin answers that the beggar was unknowingly standing over buried treasure and that the young man's fate was to drown before he could wear his repaired shoes. When Merlin's words are confirmed Rhydderch lets Merlin go.Back in the woods Merlin watches the stars in an observatory Gwenddydd has made for him, and prophesies the future history of Britain as far as the Norman kings. Rhydderch dies and Gwenddydd grieves for him. Rhydderch's visitor Taliesin goes to the woods to see Merlin, and there he talks to him at length on a variety of learned subjects: cosmogony, cosmology, the natural history of fishes, and finally a survey of the world's islands, including the island of apples where Morgen tends King Arthur. Merlin prophesies a little more, then reminisces about the history of Britain from Constans's reign to Arthur's. A new spring of water miraculously appears, and when Merlin drinks from it his madness lifts and he gives thanks to God for his cure. Taliesin discourses on notable springs around the world. On hearing that Merlin has been cured a number of princes and chieftains visit him in the woods and try to persuade him to resume the governance of his kingdom, but Merlin pleads his advanced age and the delight he takes in nature as reasons for refusing. A flock of cranes appears in the sky, prompting Merlin to teach them about the habits of the crane, and then those of many other kinds of bird. A lunatic appears, and Merlin recognizes him as one of the friends of his youth, Maeldinus, who had been sent mad by eating poisoned apples that had been intended for Merlin himself. Maeldinus is cured by drinking from the new spring, and it is resolved that he, Taliesin, Merlin, and Gwenddydd will remain together in the woods, in retirement from the secular world. The poem ends with a prophecy from Gwenddydd detailing events in the reign of King Stephen, and a renunciation by Merlin of his own prophetic gift.
Composition
was a churchman and writer of uncertain ancestry who from 1129 to 1152 lived in Oxford. During the 1130s he wrote his first two works, the Historia Regum Britanniae or De Gestis Britonum, a largely fictional history of Britain from the time of the Trojans down to the 7th century, featuring significant appearances by Merlin and King Arthur, and the Prophetiae Merlini. Both works were sensationally successful and had the effect of turning Merlin and Arthur into internationally known figures of legend. Both were written in prose, though the Historia included two short poems which John Milton was to praise for their smoothness, and which both Milton and Alexander Pope translated into English verse. The last work generally attributed to Geoffrey was a much longer poem, the Vita Merlini. The attribution rests partly on the last lines of the poem, which have been translated thus:In the only complete manuscript of the poem these lines are followed by a note in a later hand identifying the author of the poem as Geoffrey of Monmouth. There is also the evidence of the Vitas dedication to a Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, usually identified as Robert de Chesney, in which the poet says that he had formerly dedicated another work to the previous bishop of Lincoln. Since Geoffrey did indeed dedicate his Prophetiae Merlini to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, Robert de Chesney's immediate predecessor, the case for Geoffrey's authorship of the Vita is strengthened. Some 19th and early 20th-century critics doubted or denied that Geoffrey was the author, alleging differences in style between that poem and the Historia, pointing out that some late 12th-century commentators on the Merlin legend do not mention the Vita, and interpreting the poem as alluding to events that happened after Geoffrey's death. However, Geoffrey's authorship is now widely accepted. Assuming that this view is correct the date of the poem can be estimated, since Robert de Chesney became bishop of Lincoln in December 1148, while Geoffrey died in 1155. Moreover, it has been urged that Geoffrey's election to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1151 would probably have freed him from the necessity of finding patrons like Robert de Chesney, and that one of the Vitas prophecies includes a likely reference to the battle of Coleshill in 1150. If both of these arguments are accepted then the poem was completed in late 1150 or early 1151.
Criticism
The Vita Merlini is written according to medieval ideas as to the proper structure and purpose of a poem, and is widely seen as presenting problems to the modern reader. Geoffrey invoked the musa jocosa, the playful muse, in the first lines of the Vita, and this has led most critics to see it as being intended as a light, entertaining poem, written, as F. J. E. Raby said, solely for the delight of the reader. However, some take a different view. Siân Echard has suggested that it might be "a cerebral game", sometimes grotesque but not light; Michael J. Curley considered it a reaction to the horrors of the period in which the poem was written, the Anarchy of King Stephen's reign, a picture of austerity and renunciation of the world undertaken for learning's sake; and Penelope Doob called it a "profoundly religious" poem, But A. G. Rigg found its religious outlook to be unconventional:There is no agreement as to which category of poem the Vita falls into. Mark Walker has written that as a Latin poem with a British subject, an epic which deals with personal problems and domestic situations rather than warlike deeds, it cannot be placed in any genre, Peter Goodrich saw it as a comedy remarkable for the number of medieval modes of literature it includes: "Celtic folklore, political prophecies, pseudo-scientific learning, catalogues of information, and set-pieces of medieval oratory"; altogether, "a crazy quilt of styles and subjects rather than a tightly plotted narrative". Carol Harding thought it a "secular saint's life", a blending of hagiographical and more secular traditions. J. S. P. Tatlock argued that, with its disjointedness, innovation, irresponsibility and stress on entertaining the reader, it constituted "a fumbling step toward medieval romance", but had to concede that unlike most romances it has "no characterization, no love, little feeling and instinctive human truth". He also, while acknowledging that the poem has no unity, praised Geoffrey's skill in organization, alternating description with exposition, picturesque detail with swift narrative. For Nora and Hector Munro Chadwick the Vita was merely "a typical production of a literary dilettante". Ferdinand Lot wrote of the elegance of its style and the facetious bizarrerie of some of its episodes, Nikolai Tolstoy noted that there were incongruities of plot and character, but admired the poem's drama and vividness, the feeling for nature and the lively and convincing character-drawing. Robert Huntington Fletcher thought it a work of vigour, grace and poetic feeling. Basil Clarke found such vitality in its characters as provoked him to wonder what Geoffrey could have achieved as a novelist.
Praise for the versification of the Vita has been qualified. John Jay Parry conceded that it "is good, by medieval standards, and in places rises to poetry", and likewise Peter Goodrich thought it "better than average Latin hexameter verse". Tatlock wrote that it is "a favourable specimen of mediaeval metrical verse", with few false quantities, no elision or hiatus, and a moderate use of verbal jingles, though he preferred the poetic form and style of the two short poems in Geoffrey's Historia.
The figure of Merlin in the poem is hard to pin down, and has been interpreted variously by different critics. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz saw him as a priestly figure, a kind of druid or medicine man who "in complete independence and solitude, opens up a direct and personal approach to the collective unconscious for himself and tries to live the predictions of his guardian spirit, i.e. of his unconscious". Nikolai Tolstoy found him to be delicately balanced between insanity and prophetic genius. Carol Harding compared Merlin to a Christian saint, learned, withdrawn from the world, a worker of healing miracles, a hermit who becomes an example to others, resists worldly temptations and possesses supernatural knowledge and powers of prophecy; the end of Merlin's life, she wrote, is "a holy one in the sense any monk's is". For Jan Ziolkowski his nature alternates between shaman and political prophet through the poem, ending up "as ascetic and holy as a biblical prophet". Stephen Knight's view was that Geoffrey makes Merlin a figure relevant to medieval churchmen, a voice "asserting the challenge that knowledge should advise and admonish power rather than serve it". Mark Walker has written of the Vitas Merlin as a figure at home in the romantic and humanist atmosphere of 12th-century thought, so sensitive that the death of his companions can bring on a mental breakdown, who eventually becomes "a kind of Celtic Socrates", so enamoured of scientific learning that he sets up an academic community where he can discourse with scholars of his own turn of mind.