Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 37.djvu/300

 leg in Monmouthshire). The child was brought before the king, and proved himself a match for the wise men. Vortigern inquired his name, and the boy answered, ‘I am called Ambrosius.’ But in response to a further inquiry he added, in manifest contradiction to the first description given of him, ‘My father is one of the consuls of the Roman race.’ Vortigern thereupon surrendered to him the city on the summit of Mount Heremus, in the province of Guenet (Snowdon in North Wales), and all the western part of Britain. The name Ambrosius is explained as being in the British tongue ‘Embries Guletic,’ meaning the King Ambrosius (, pp. 31–4).

Geoffrey of Monmouth appears to have perceived the incongruity in Nennius's account, but though he makes use of Welsh legends his main authority seems to be Nennius. Geoffrey first supplies the name Merlin, and represents the child playing with his companion Dabutius at Kaermodin or Caermarthen (of which Merlin or Myrddin is the eponymous hero). He is made to describe his mother as a daughter of the king of Demetia, dwelling with the nuns in the church of St. Peter. Merlin, ‘qui et Ambrosius dicebatur,’ is then brought before Vortigern, and foretells the king's death and the triumph of Aurelius Ambrosius. Aurelius, when anxious to erect a memorial of his triumph, is advised to consult Merlin. Merlin bids him send for the stones called ‘Giants' Dance’ out of Ireland, and accordingly the enchanter is despatched with Uther Pendragon [see under ] to fetch them. By Merlin's arts the Irish are defeated and the Dance brought over to be set up at Stonehenge. After this Aurelius dies, and is succeeded by Uther Pendragon, who, with the aid of Merlin, is successful in a love-suit to Igern, and so becomes the father of Arthur (, Hist. Brit. vi. 17, viii. 19).

Giraldus Cambrensis, in the ‘Itinerarium Cambriæ,’ definitely distinguishes between Merlin Ambrosius and another later Merlin Celidonius or Silvester, or Myrddin Wyllt [q. v.] (Opera, vi. 133), but makes no addition to the story.

Geoffrey and Giraldus were no doubt familiar with the ancient national legends of Wales, but the extant references to Merlin in Welsh literature are very much later than Giraldus or Geoffrey. In the ‘Triads’ Merlin Ambrosius, who is distinguished from Myrddin Wyltt (Myvyrian Archaiology, pp. 65, 401), is described as the bard of Aurelius Ambrosius, and is named with Taliesin and Myrddin Wyllt as one of the three Christian bards of Britain. In the ‘Triads’ also figures the legend that Merlin went to sea in a vessel of glass with his nine scientific bards, and was never heard of again. Another Welsh legend, however, represents Merlin as confined with the thirteen treasures of Britain in a glass house in the island of Bardsey, where he lay in an enchanted sleep, from which he was to awake when the time came for the reappearance of Arthur (cf., Hibbert Lectures, pp. 155–6). A Breton form, which was adopted in many mediæval romances, represents him as sleeping under the spell of Vivien in an enchanted bower in the forest of Broceliande.

Welsh tradition thus recognises two Merlins, Merlin Ambrosius, the bard of Aurelius Ambrosius, and Merlin Silvester, or Myrddin Wyllt, who lived some hundred years later, about 570, in the time of the Cumbrian chief Rhydderch Hael. Stephens, in his ‘Literature of the Kymry,’ argues that in reality there was but one person, pointing out that Merlin Ambrosius was but a boy when he appears before Vortigern, and that therefore he might well be identical in very old age with Myrddin Wyllt, who was in the service of Rhydderch Hael. Mr. Nash maintains the separation, arguing that Myrddin Wyllt is probably an actual person, and that Merlin Ambrosius was in the original form of the legend no other than Aurelius Ambrosius himself (he is called Guletic, or royal, and Vortigern gives him a province to rule). Mr. Nash would accordingly regard Merlin in his rôle of enchanter as a ‘pure work of fiction woven in with the historical threads which belong to the epoch of the Saxon wars in Britain.’ From this legendary Merlin the characteristics of prophet and magician were transferred to Myrddin Wyllt at some period previous to the time when Geoffrey wrote. Professor Rhys finds in Merlin or Myrddin Emrys ‘an adumbration of a personage who was at once a king and warrior, a great magician and a prophet—in a word, a Zeus of Brythonic paganism.’ M. Hersat de la Villemarqué, regarding the whole of the Merlin legends as relating to a single personage, is ready to accept Merlin as a Christian priest and the bard of Aurelius Ambrosius. This last theory, however, depends on giving the extant references in Welsh literature, and especially the ‘Triads,’ an antiquity and importance which they do not possess. In the legend of Merlin Ambrosius as it has come down to us there are certainly no historical incidents, and some such theory as that given by Mr. Nash appears to be the most acceptable (cf. Cymmrodor, xi. 47–9).

Whatever element of reality there may be