Merlin is on the telly; Merlin is in comics; Merlin is the prototype for Gandalf and Dumbledore; Merlin is the wizard whose name is synonymous with prophecy and, of course, with King Arthur. Everyone has heard of Merlin
The real Merlin was a historic figure, Myrridin to the Welsh, Lailoken to the Scots, a Druid or bard at the court of one of the small Brythonic kingdoms under attack from, and eventually being subsumed by, the Anglo-Saxons from the eastern seaboard and the Scots from their Gaelic domain to the northwest. It is said he went mad after the defeat of the pagan Britons at the Battle of Arfderydd (Arthuret 573 A.D. ) on the edges of what is now Cumbria and fled back to “live with beasts in the Forest of Caledon”.
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| The Tweedsmuir hills where Merlin sought refuge in the Forest of Caledon |
He also appears in the hagiography of St Kentigern otherwise known as St Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow. Kentigern is said to have met Myrriden and found a kindred spirit but the old Druid could not give up his ancient beliefs and the saint in a gesture of tolerance blessed him.
“As old Druid wisdom taught me, I have lived and I will die”
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| The window in nearby Stobo Kirk |
The seer then foretold of his own threefold death by being clubbed speared and drowned. This strange ritualistic death is echoed in the Norse tales of Odin and, perhaps, by the injuries to some of the sacrificed bodies found in peat bogs.
Merlin is said to have been struck on the head whereupon he fell into the river and was impaled on a stake set for fishing nets and thus, drowned.
His burial site is said to be
“not far from the green chapel where the brook Pausayl flows into the Tweed”
At the little village of Drumelzier, sheltering beneath the Tweedsmuir hills not far from Hart Fell, the Powsail Burn meets the Tweed.
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| The confluence of the Powsail and the Tweed |
The tradition has it that Merlin/ Myrridin/ Lailoken was buried here at the foot of a thorn tree.
Merlin appears again in the fragmentary Life of St Kentigern where the saint is the grandson of King Lot of Lothian and the nephew of Sir Gawain who in the Arthurian legends fights the gigantic Green Knight. The Green Knight cannot be slain despite having his head cut off and demands that Gawain meets him again at his castle in a year and a day to receive a similar stroke. The Green Knight like the greenwood can be cut down but will always recover.
All these stories seem to reflect the struggle for survival of the Druidic, shamanic religion with its emphasis on trees, waters and wild Nature - the Green Man -against the organised power of the Christian church.
Sir Gawain sets off north to meet the Green Knight in his castle but the knight doesn’t kill him. The old religion yields to the new.
Merlin is said to have been buried “hardly two miles from the castle of the Green Knight.” There is an Iron age fort on Vane Law above Drumelzier. Vane Law means Green Hill. Maybe this was the castle of the Green Knight, the embodiment of the greenwood.
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| Vane Law |
Are the tales of the death of Merlin; the blessing by St Kentigern; the triumph of Sir Gawain, all folk memories of the supplanting of the naturalistic Druidic religion by Christianity in late fifth and sixth centuries as the petty tribal chiefdoms themselves were overcome and merged into larger kingdoms?
After sixteen hundred years, Merlin the wild prophet, the magician, the green man, still holds our attention. Things have come full circle and his identification with the wild and the natural would now be seen as part of green eco-politics. Just like the Green Knight and the greenwood, Merlin cannot be killed off. Known as a shape-shifter in his lifetime, capable of assuming different forms, he is still capable of survival in many guises.
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| The Greenwood always blooms again |
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