Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind the Legend of the Great Arthurian Mage

Drawing on what he claims has been a history of suppression by England’s political and religious authorities, Scottish writer Ardrey says Merlin did indeed exist but that our image of him is a myth: Merlin wasn’t a wizard and King Arthur’s “avuncular” counselor but a revered scholar, politician and military commander in central Scotland in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Merlin was a Celt, Ardrey claims, not an Anglo-Saxon, and was not Christian but adhered to the old ways of the druids, who sought to live harmoniously with others and with nature. Together with the great warlord Arthur Mac Aedan, son of the king of Scots, Merlin led the Britons and their Scots allies against the Angles. Ardrey takes aim at Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint and Merlin’s archenemy, depicting him as the ruthlessly ambitious head of a group of Catholic fundamentalists “akin to the twenty-first-century Taliban,” whose exploits were distorted by his 12th-century hagiographer, Jocelyn of Furness. Merlin is an enticing biographical subject, but Ardrey’s pedantic style, his dull dissection of Jocelyn, and his long-winded digressions into the cross-dressing of Mungo’s father or why Merlin couldn’t have built Stonehenge don’t enhance his argument. (Sept.)