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Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). xvii + 275 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4365-7. £18.95.
Each era creates its own Merlin: a figure for mysticism and magic, or a guardian of dangerous knowledge about the future and the past. In this ambitious and attractive book, Stephen Knight traces the literary history of Merlin from the Myrddin of early medieval Welsh poetry, and the sage in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, to the magician's twenty-first-century avatars. Knight constructs a developmental account of the Merlin tale, organizing his material into four geographically distinct and chronologically consecutive sections, each characterized by a different element of Merlin's legendary knowledge. In this way, for Knight, the Merlin of early Celtic Britain incarnates Wisdom; the medieval western European Merlin dispenses Advice; the early modern English Merlin demonstrates Cleverness; and the Merlin of globalized modernity embodies Education. (In his introduction,...