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Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages. By Stephen Knight. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
There is every likelihood that Stephen Knight has read all the works about Merlin-poetry, prose, and drama- ever written in the English-speaking world, plus a number of those in French and German. Most of them are in his treasure-trove of a study, Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages. From the earliest surviving Welsh poems to today's fantasy bestsellers, the aptly named Knight examines the hold that King Arthur and his principal sage, Merlin, have had on Western thought and literature for centuries.
Knight's theory is that, generally, Merlin has represented an ages-old conflict between knowledge and power and that he embodies this conflict in different guises throughout time: as a wise prophet in earlier British/ Celtic poems and tales who foretold victory against the Saxons; as an advisor of kings in later medieval writings; as a clever technician in Renaissance works such as Spenser's The Faerie Queene; and as a teacher and source of individual enlightenment in the nineteenth century and thereafter. Knight makes many convincing points in support of this thesis. Even better, his book is a tremendous resource that tracks Merlin's likely origins and the growth of his legend.
When I studied Arthurian literature in college, I was surprised to find that many of Camelot's main characters didn't start out as part of King Arthur's story at all. Round Table stalwarts such as Lancelot were originally local or regional heroes (Lancelot in France) who entered Arthur's orbit because Arthurian lore had such a powerful gravitational pull. It turns out that Merlin is another character who began as the star of his own stories. Moreover, as Knight demonstrates, in some of the earliest surviving Welsh poems, Myrddin...