Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/315

Rh that of the coming of Ambrosius as king. At a later time he advised Ambrosius, who wished to erect a memorial for native heroes, to send for the "Giants' Dance" to Ireland, whither African giants had carried it; and by Merlin's Ingenuity the stones, which had healing and magic virtues, were removed to Stonehenge. Geoffrey then recounts how Merlin transformed Uther so that he might gain access to Igerna.$50$

In Welsh literature Merlin or Myrddin is connected with the Britons of the north. Whether this Merlin is the same as Geoffrey's is uncertain, the former being called Merlin the Wild or Caledonius, but at all events the two are combined in later literature. He is a bard and prophet who fled frenzied to the Caledonian Forest after learning of his sister's son's death; and there he prophesied to his pig under an apple-tree and had a friend Chwimbian, the Viviane of romance. The later chroniclers and romantic accounts develop Merlin's magic, e. g. his shape-shifting, the removal of the stones here becoming supernatural; while his birth is ascribed to demoniac power, and but for his baptism he would have been a kind of Antichrist. He took the child Arthur; and when, as King, Arthur unwittingly had an amour with his sister, he appeared as a child and revealed the secret of the king's birth, after which, as an old man, he disclosed to Arthur how he had sinned with his sister in ignorance. In the Triads he and his nine bards went into the sea in a glass house, or he took with him the Treasures of Britain to the isle of Bardsey. In other accounts, however, his disappearance was caused by his fairy mistress's treachery, for she learned the secret of his magic power and how to imprison a man in a wall-less tower; in which she shut him up, visiting him daily, while it appeared to others as a "smoke of mist." Another version describes him as enclosed in a rocky grave, whence perhaps the phrase of a Welsh poem—"the man who speaks from the grave"—and in yet another tradition he retires from the world in an Esplumeor, which he made himself.$51$