Prophecies of Merlin

Step into the mist-shrouded world of medieval magic, forbidden love, and forgotten prophecies. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by renowned Arthurian expert John Matthews to explore The Prophecies of Merlin — a long-lost medieval text finally translated into English after more than 500 years. This extraordinary book, first published in Paris in 1498, reveals a darker and lesser-known side of Britain’s most famous wizard. From Merlin’s demon-born origins and his entrapment by the Lady of the Lake, to his chilling prophecies of kings, crusades, and the end of days, the text uncovers secrets long hidden from the Arthurian tradition. Whether you’re fascinated by Arthurian legend, intrigued by medieval prophecy, or curious about how forgotten manuscripts reshape our understanding of history, this episode will transport you deep into the enchanted — and unsettling — world of Merlin. More: Legend of William Tell https://open.spotify.com/episode/1VpIwnwLln0mtQPchy7NjT Legends of Robin Hood https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tLzhQrtde6INLRw925dRk Gone Medieval is presented by Dr Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Janiger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr Eleanor Janiger, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

• 1:19Eleanor Janega?

  Let me tell you a story. It's a tale that begins with love, turns to betrayal, and ends in the silencing of Britain's most fabled wizard.

• 1:32Eleanor Janega?

  Merlin had guided kings, brokered peace, and shaped the rise of King Arthur. But even a wizard can't foresee everything. Or at least, he can't escape fate once it's set in motion. Merlin spoke often of a white serpent, a woman of beauty and power who would be his undoing. That woman was the Lady of the Lake, foster mother to Sir Lancelot, mistress of hidden magic, and, important in this version of the story, Merlin's lover. At least for a time.

• 2:09Eleanor Janega?

  Merlin and the Lady of the Lake met in the forest of Avosan. He is besotted. She... Isn't. She smiles, accepts his company, even shares his bed. But in her heart, she despises him. She has never forgotten their first encounter, when, as she tells it, he used enchantment to take her virginity in exchange for teaching her magic.

• 2:36Eleanor Janega?

  Now she's resolved to turn his own arts against him. For fifteen months, they live together in a hidden dwelling deep in the forest. Merlin, blinded by desire, teaches her everything. How to work with herbs and gemstones, how to weave words into spells, how to lock a place so that no one can open it.

• 2:58Eleanor Janega?

  He believes he still knows more than she does, but he does not.

• 3:04Eleanor Janega?

  Her plan is simple. Trap him somewhere he cannot leave. Not in death, but in a prison of stone where only his spirit can speak.

• 3:15Eleanor Janega?

  One day, she coaxes him to lie inside a tomb-like chamber, under the pretext of resting together when they're happiest. Merlin knows, he even says it aloud, that he cannot escape his fate. And yet, he still agrees to it.

• 3:33Eleanor Janega?

  The lady lowers the cover, seals it with magic that cannot be broken, and tells him exactly why.

• 3:41Eleanor Janega?

  She says: "This is revenge. You taught me the spells, the locking enchantment. You took what was mine to give. Now you will die here, and your prophecies will be a ghost's echo."

• 3:57Eleanor Janega?

  Merlin's body would rot, he warns, but his voice would remain. And indeed, he continues to speak from the tomb to chosen visitors, delivering visions for centuries. The lady sails away, tells the Bishop of Wales what she has done, then returns to her lake to raise Lancelot and his kin.

• 4:18Eleanor Janega?

  She has removed Britain's greatest sorcerer. A deliberate retribution for deceit and magical coercion. And so Merlin's prophecy of his own downfall comes true. Even his greatest magic cannot save him from the consequences of the past.

• 4:38Eleanor Janega?

  This version of The Legend of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake is not quite the usual one we know from Mallory's La Mort d'Arthur. It actually comes from a largely forgotten, and until now, untranslated, book about Merlin and King Arthur, which includes much that is new and exciting about the legendary king and his magical advisor. This discovery was made by the late Martin Haverkamp, a lecturer and researcher at the Hague University of Applied Sciences. An avid collector of rare medieval books for more than 20 years, he acquired a French book from 1498 titled The Prophecies of Merlin that claimed to be prophecies given by the legendary magician.

• 5:22Eleanor Janega?

  The book was really a compilation of documents collected by an unknown 13th-century monk. Working with Arthurian expert John Matthews, Martin spent five years translating the mysteries hidden in this obscure book, which has culminated in the completion of the first English translation of a rare text nearly forgotten for more than 500 years. And it's full of surprises. It includes the story of Merlin's birth as the son of a demon, how he was born already able to speak, how his magic ensured that he wasn't killed by his babysitter, and details of that fatal attraction to the Lady of the Lake.

• 6:04Eleanor Janega?

  It shares stories of Sir Percival's first contact with the Holy Grail and King Arthur's connection with the legendary mystical king Prester John. And it includes early Welsh prophecies attributed to Merlin, prophecies compiled by historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. I'm delighted that John Matthews is joining me for this episode of Gone Medieval to tell us all about the prophecies of Merlin. John has authored more than 100 books and teaches and lectures around the world. On a more somber note, I noted very briefly above that Martin Haverkamp, who found and translated the prophecies, has passed away.

• 6:45Eleanor Janega?

  It bears mentioning that his loss was incredibly recent and rather sudden, which is a great loss to scholasticism as well as his loved ones. And I'm very, very excited that John has been able to join me to celebrate their work together today.

• 7:03Eleanor Janega?

  John, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Thank you. Hello.

• 7:06Eleanor Janega?

  So excited about this one because I, as you know, someone who is quite interested in prophecy and preaching, have been a long time admirer of the prophecies of Merlin. I'm wondering, just to start us off, for those who are not giant nerds like me, can you tell us a little bit about the prophecies of Merlin? What do we know about the origins of this tradition?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  You have to begin a little bit by looking back at the origins of Merlin. So if that's okay, I'll start with that.

• 7:35Eleanor Janega?

  Yes.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  And that in itself is interesting because there's not one Merlin, but at least three, possibly more. But it starts off with the very earliest version that we know of, which is approximately 6th century, around about the same time when King Arthur was around. At that point, there was a real character who lived on the borders between Wales and Scotland, whose name was Muthin, which is the Welsh spelling Merlin. And he was known as Muthin Merlin the Wild. Because what happened was, and this is historically true as far as I know, there was a great battle, and he saw a lot of his friends and relatives being killed, and it drove him mad.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  So he ran off the battlefield into the forest nearby, the Caledonian forest. And he lived there for, we don't quite know how long, but quite a while, we think, just living on whatever he could catch. And he stayed that way for quite a long time. And in the process, he wrote poetry, which has survived amazingly. And in his poems, he spoke to wild animals. He had a wolf. He had a pig. He spoke to a tree. He wrote poems. And the poems started out as, "I'm lost in the wilderness, everything's terrible." And then very gradually, they began to be, "I see this, I see that." And that was the beginning of the prophecies. And some of them have still have survived, as I say, from that period.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  And they were mostly, as in, a lot of the prophecies are and were, things that had actually already happened. This is the big trick about the prophecies for this kind. They're not usually looking ahead to a time where you can then say Merlin's foretold that. But that is what people were saying. But the point is that a lot of times they were being written of the event. So the first version that we have that's actually called The Prophecies of Merlin is a 13th century one, 1279 to be precise, which was gathered, material gathered together anonymously in a manuscript and released, and it caused a lot of interest.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And medieval writer called Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is famous for having wrote something called The History of the Kings of Britain. And he compiled some more prophecies and it became a sensation. It was the medieval bestseller. There were people were making copies of the manuscript and passing them around. And so when he did his king, his history of the kings of Britain, he included the prophecies in there and told the whole story of how they came about. It's a long story, so I'll just be brief and say that he was believed to be a prophet and proved himself to be one, basically. So that story gathered momentum from the after the 13th centuries,

• 10:30Speaker 02

  when the first official collection called Prophecies of Merlin was published. And that was very successful too. And thereafter, through the years, people kept on bringing out another volume. So it'd be like an anorak. It was like Merlin's Prophecies for this year, Merlin's Prophecies for that year and so on.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And by the time we get to the 15th century, which is when our version that in the book that we're going to be talking about came along, it was, it was a kind of standard thing. It was Prophecies of Merlin, Prophecies of Merlin, Prophecies of Merlin. What makes this one so different and why we were so excited by it? Was the fact that it was compiled by an anonymous scribe. We think a monk, probably from Venice. And it became one of the first printed books, the first in Canabula. And it was printed, I've got the exact date written here because I keep forgetting it, in 4398

• 11:30Speaker 02

  in Paris by a very famous French bookseller called Antoine Verar, who had a shop on one of the bridges over the Seine. And he put this together. And it, again, it became very successful. And then gradually, as we get into the later periods, once we get into the 16th, 17th century, there was much more hard headedness. Oh, prophecies, nah, rubbish. We don't want anything about those. Merlin, who's that? Never existed. So they gradually lost interest in it, if you like. And then if you jump forward a long way to our own time, around about nineteen, the nineteen forties and fifties,

• 12:12Speaker 02

  there was an interest because the 13th century manuscript came to light. And one or two scholars looked at it. And then one of them did an edition, but in this, she said, this is rubbish. It isn't worth reading. I don't even know why I'm making all this translation. Look at it. It's rubbish. Don't bother. And everybody believed her. And so nobody bothered to reprint it. Nobody bothered to translate it into English. Until our version, there had been no modern English translation of the prophecies of Merlin, apart from the ones in Geoffrey Monnet, which are completely different. So then what happened was that my co-author, Martin Havacamp, who was a collector of medieval manuscripts,

• 12:55Speaker 02

  went to Paris to buy a book or manuscript on Charlemagne. And when he got to the store, the guy in the store said, really sorry, it's gone. But would they disinterest you? And he handed him the prophecies of Merlin. Ah. The person went, yes, okay, I'll take it. Then he came back, and this was in 2017. He came back and he, and then he got in touch with me. And he said, look, I've been translating some of these. What do you think? And I thought, it's prophecies of Merlin. We've all heard that they're not worth bothering with, but in fact, they were very interesting and not so much for the prophetic part as the additional material.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Because as if you've looked at the book, then you know that it's not so much the prophecies, but the stories around them, which were completely new. Now, I've spent most of my life studying the Arthurian legends. I've written a great deal about it. I thought I'd seen and read everything, but these were completely new. And that was what got me excited. And so eventually, Martin and I agreed to work on this together. And hey, Presto, there's the book. But and it was full of amazing stuff.

• 14:07Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, it really is. And if you know, from my standpoint as a social historian, that's, that's exactly what really sets me on fire is seeing what the prophecies are embedded in. And you've got this really unusual mix of different types of texts. Cause you know, there's the prophecies and there's the Arthuriana, which I expect to see. But you also have things like crusade narratives and you have polemics about politics and you have varying religious allegories.

• 14:38Eleanor Janega?

  Why do you think we see this, this really interesting, I guess, melange of ideas here?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  One of the things that you have to understand about the prophecies generally, or about the prophetic literature at this time, from about, let's say thirteenth to fifteenth century, they were seen because they were anonymous, except attributed to Merlin. You could say what you liked and that gave you an excuse to be able to attack your nobles, your kings, your emperors, your churchmen, and say all kinds of things that would have got you into a lot of trouble. So this is one of the reasons why you get this huge thing. You'll have realized that in the underlying material of the book, there's a lot about the Antichrist. Now, at that time, everybody was expecting the Antichrist to show up any day and that would be it.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  We wouldn't have battle on earth between heaven and hell and probably hell would win. And they believed that certain people had all the qualities and aspects that made them represent the Antichrist. So one of the main contenders, if you like, for being identified with the Antichrist was Frederick the first and then Frederick the second, who was the Holy Roman Empire at the time. And they, both of them, didn't like the church.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And they stood up against the Pope and they pointed out a lot of the things that were going on, that undoubtedly were going on. And so suddenly, in the middle of all these prophecies, you'd suddenly get, the Antichrist is coming and it's probably him. This sort of thing is there all the way through. This is why you get Merlin having conversations with prelates who start off by being, oh, he's nasty pagan, he must be evil, and end up going, actually, he's quite wise. And the nice thing is that all the people who write down his prophecies, the ones that he addresses throughout the whole of the text, in every single set, every single paragraph starts with, listen,

• 16:36Speaker 02

  take this down, write this, and listen to what I'm saying. And it makes it very real, of course. It sounds like a real person really talking to you. And then he'll say, right, now, listen to this. And he'll say anything. And of course, it can all go in there. And one of the things that I liked most about this, one of the things that really excited me was the way it presented Merlin, not as this rather remote magisterial figure full of magic, a sort of Gandalf, a kind of Harry Potter kind of character, but as a real person, because he comes across as a real person. And he was a bit of a naughty boy, too. What openly and flagrantly teaches magic to various young ladies in return for their favors.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  There's no question of that. It's stated quite clearly by one person at least, and there are lots of hints and flues. And of course, one of the really interesting stories is the one where he has a relationship with this Morgan le Fay, who, for those who don't know Arthur in legend, is one of the big bads. She's one of the one, she's Arthur's half-sister. She hates him and she does her best to bring down the kingdom. And in various versions, there are different aspects of her that get associated with Merlin. So sometimes she's called the Lady of the Legs, sometimes she's called Nimway, but in this version, it's Morgan. And she really gets everything she can out of, squeezes every drop of knowledge and information out of Merlin,

• 18:04Speaker 02

  but really hates him. She pretends to love him. She obviously sleeps with him, but she really hates him. And and then in the end, she's got so much magic that she's able to lock him up in a cave under the ground where he'll be left to die. But of course, being Merlin, his body may just decompose. And he even tells us at one point that my body is turning to dust, but my spirit lives on and his spirit continues to prophesy and to speak words of wisdom. So everybody wants to try and get find Merlin's tomb. And that's another whole story. But a lot of it is just this incredible, rich resource of knowledge and information that comes across as being Merlin's words,

• 18:49Speaker 02

  whether they were or not, of course, is open to your own intonation.

• 18:56Eleanor Janega?

  I love this idea that they were Merlin's words. That's fantastic. I'm particularly struck by the Antichrist things within here because I guess I'm expecting to see Morgan le Fay or King Arthur show up in myths like this. But references specifically to Antichrist are a lot less usual. And I'm also really struck by the way that they get used here because so there's a very technical distinction within eschatological research where we say there's a difference between Antichrist narrative and Antichrist language. So ordinarily, you're allowed to sort of say, oh, Antichrist might be coming and the world is going to get very sinful and we should all be good. That's fine.

• 19:40Eleanor Janega?

  But if you say Antichrist is coming and he's the Pope or Antichrist is coming and he's the king, that'll get you nicked. Because A, you're telling truth to power to very powerful people. And B, it makes the church look silly. Because then when Antichrist doesn't come or the end of the world doesn't happen, then it calls into question whether or not there is an end of the world. And here we're getting to see Merlin deployed to point those fingers and use that Antichrist language because you can't get mad at Merlin. I mean, like, what are you going to do? Hunt him down in the cell that Morgan le Fay created for him? No.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. No, that's exactly the kind of use that the prophets were put to.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I said it wasn't about genuinely saying this is gonna happen next week and you'd better look out. It was much bigger than that. And the fact that they, as you say, they were able to get away with saying stuff that would have had them up in front of a tribunal and probably burnt at the stake in five minutes. But, but because of that, people and people believed it and they understood it. And of course, you have to remember that at the time, not many of the ordinary people could read. So this was passed on mostly through the nobility. Not even most, quite a lot of them couldn't read either, but it was still passed on in generally at the higher level, shall we say. So it was clearly aimed at church fathers,

• 21:03Speaker 02

  at kings and emperors. So yeah, that's, it's an important part of it, certainly.

• 21:08Eleanor Janega?

  When you were working on this, did you find it difficult to sort of disentangle these various threads of narrative? You know, it's written for a very particular political milieu. There's a lot of moving parts here. There's a lot of varying characters. How did you make sense of all of this?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  It wasn't easy, I have to say. Martin, bless him, did a great job with the translation, given that he was Dutch and his wasn't English, wasn't his first language. He did a pretty good job with, with 15th century French. But, once you got past that, then of course, whoever compiled it probably had a pile of manuscripts right in front of him. A lot of Arthurian ones, because he obviously was very interested in the Arthurian stuff. And I feel he pushed it in there because he loved it. So there, it's complex. There, there are references that made no sense for a long time. We had to do a lot of background research. As I said, having spent most of my life studying and working with medieval stuff, I knew a

• 22:08Speaker 02

  lot of it, but it still took me out a bit outside my comfort zone a few times to have to work on it. But it, in a way... And there were chapters that seemed to be misplaced. So you'd get to a bit and you'd see this bit and you'd think that that doesn't follow. And then you'd get on another fifteen chapters and there was the missing bit. So we had to do some reorganization as well to get it all together. But in the end, I felt that it's it is a complex one. And this is why we did such a large commentary. We deliberately put the whole text in first on its own with just footnotes for the really difficult bits. And then the whole of the commentary followed because I wanted people to be able to read it as it was read at the time.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And then after that, they could look and see what the detail was in the background. And I hope made it clear enough.

• 22:56Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, I I loved that. You know, for me, obviously, again, you're preaching to the choir here, you know, the target audience as can be, you know. But I think it is really nice to have that because even if you have these very well clued in, well-connected people who would in theory be readers in the past. Even then, there are going to be some things that they don't quite get or they don't quite understand. So it allows you to interface with the text much in the way that medieval people would have done. And I thought that that was really a joy of it, if that makes sense.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. That was as much as possible what we wanted to do. We wanted to give them an experience as Martin himself had of holding in his hands a book from the fifteenth century that had this incredible text. You know, we couldn't do that exactly, but we did the very best we could by giving them that text as fully as possible. And we did leave out some of the more bizarre prophecies because they just didn't make any sense. It didn't matter what you did, how you looked at them, how often you retranslated them. There were some that defeated us.

• 24:09Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  And I began to understand why that scholar in the forties and fifties had said, oh, this is all rubbish, don't bother with it. Because obviously she hadn't been able to make any sense of it either. There's but there's a great humanity in it somehow. And and a real sense of both the time and the place. There's the and the mysterious forest of Brasiliand where Merlin's tomb is supposed to lie. Was invoked. And then there's that marvelous story, my favorite in the whole book about the monk who wants to go and visit and hear the voice of Merlin himself. And he's told, get on, go and stand on this stone and say these words. And when he does, the stone rises into the air and flies around the world.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  And it's just so good. And you know immediately where he's going because he keeps mentioning little things that he's seen, like carvings on the side of the cathedral in Venice, which are still there. So we know that he really has seen them. And that's why we think that the man who compiled them was from that area. But it's just that kind of, it's that human level. And some of it's quite funny as well. I always find that there are a lot of magical stones in the various stories. And there's a lovely one where Merlin and Morgan le Fay go off into the forest and find a nice house that suits them. Sounds just like today, you know, I'm, oh, that's a nice house. Let's move in.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  And when they move in, it says, she didn't get very much sleep because he had these stones that shone in all night. And I thought, that's such a human sort of comment, isn't it? The stones are magical. So one level of you going, wow, magic stones. But on the other hand, you're going, yeah, that would keep me awake. It's lovely.

• 25:50Eleanor Janega?

  The practicalities of living with a bunch of glow in the dark stones, you know, people.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Or with a Merlin, for that matter, who you never knew what he was going to do. Arthur himself comes in at one point. There's a story about a fairy woman coming from the other world to tell him about his own future. And of course, she's been sent by Merlin. And in the process, she tells us that Merlin spent some time in India with Prester John, which is another aspect that we'll come back to. And all the way through, there are these little points where you think, ah, okay, so you knew those stories so well. It is primarily Merlin, Morgan le Fay. Arthur gets a look in, you get one or two other mentions of the ladies of the lake, some of the knights Garean gets mentioned, one or two other characters.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Percival, there's a whole section about Percival's quest for the Grail, which is interesting because it's a slight variant on all the other versions of Percival's quest for the Grail. So once again, however he did, it's this guy had had a connection to other manuscripts that have probably since vanished.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  So that all makes it very interesting.

• 26:58Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I thought that that was what was really exciting about this collection as well. You know, apart from the prophetic stuff, which I'm I'm a sucker for the politics. But you get all these lovely details that are really unique, very specifically to this collection. And indeed, I suppose people riffing off of the traditions. So you've mentioned, you've mentioned Prester John here, legendary Christian king, who is somewhere in the East, maybe Ethiopia, maybe India, who knows? Are there any other characters that you were really happy to come across here that usually don't show up in our Theoriana?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Not particularly, I don't think. Prester John was for me very interesting because he connects the Grail legend. And the Grail legend is my speciality, if you like, of all of it. And I'd been looking for ages to find a reference to a connection with Prester John that had been suggested by a much more modern writer, Charles Williams, one of the the Inklings groups from Oxford that include Tolkien and St. Louis, that he'd written a novel called War in Heaven about the quest for the Grail in the present tense. And happened to say that it happened to have in it a young man dressed in a grave who said he was Prester John, and that he was the guardian of the Grail for our time. Then I discovered that there was a magical group called the Order of the Golden Dawn

• 28:18Speaker 02

  that also said this, and that put me on the trail. But I hadn't been able to find anything until this manuscript came along, mentioning Prester John and the connections with Merlin. And that led me to find another manuscript that had been somewhat ignored, one written in German called De Junge Tichere, which in fact says that at one point, the guardians of the Grail took the sacred vessel. They were taking it to Odessa, where it would supposedly be safe. And along the way, they bumped into a large cavalcade of warriors and their leader, Prester John. And he said, what's this Grail then? What's this object that you is so important to you? Oh, and when they explained it, he said, I'll look after it.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  So he took it and disappeared. End of story. But it's a variation that I love. And it's things like that, little clues that come out of the that take you off into other parts of the ancient legend, or indeed into the political times. The other one I like very much is where Merlin is summoned by this group of churchmen to answer all their questions and to be, obviously, in their opinion, to be shown to be a fake, a phony and a nasty pagan. And after they've been talking to him for a few hours, they're going, "Actually, he's quite..." And especially when he asks for the blessing of the Pope. What more could you ask? So it's a very interesting mixture of all these different aspects.

• 29:59Speaker 03

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• 31:18Eleanor Janega?

  With all of these variations on the sort of classic tales, do you end up finding any contradictions in this about the various accounts of Merlin's life?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Not so much contradictions. I think it boosts a lot what we know about him. The stories that have been circulating and continue to circulate for a long time show us this, you know, the magician. He's the one who can change his shape. He can make things happen. He built the round table overnight. He built Camelot out of nothing. And when he was trying to entertain one of his young ladies, he would get a whole troupe of magical people to walk through the room playing beautiful instruments. So all of that was, that was the Merlin of fantasy, if you like. And it's the Merlin that we all love. If you look at any of the modern retellings of the Merlin story, of which there are many, that's the side that people always look for.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  But underneath that is a genuine prophet and a real, a wise man, a wise man who advised the king, who brought about the idea of the round table, where all are equal and sit in a circle. All of those things are there. And I think they're stronger in this text than in any of the ones I'd seen previously. Always, it's always Merlin's going, oh yeah, I can do that. And Wang, it doesn't quite get how his magic won, but he does make things happen. Here, there's much more of a real person. And he goes through so many different people that he's relaying these in finitimation to. You know, he has his sort of a manuensis to take down everything he sells and everything he tells them.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  And there are different ones all the way through. Most of them are fictitious as well, and a couple that might not be, but we're not sure.

• 33:05Eleanor Janega?

  Speaking of... Who are the scribes that have written these down? Do we have any named individuals or real people, I suppose?

• 33:15Speaker 02

  The only one that we've been out of trace at all is Richard Cornwall, who seems to have lived in the 13th century. There are references to him in ancient documents here. And he seems to have made, perhaps, if not the first, then one of the first compilations of the prophecies. And in our text, he becomes one of the scribes who is taking down Merlin's instructions. The rest of them, there are, I think there are about six in all throughout the book. And they are pretty much all fictitious, as far as we know. They're just like, they're there just basically to represent whoever was putting these things together. You know, the source, if you like, they're the source.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  And I suspect that this may be a reference back to the number of different versions, the different volumes that came out over the years. I suspect each one was probably signed by one of these people. And therefore you use that name anyway. So, you know, they were kind, maybe they, maybe they really did exist.

• 34:19Eleanor Janega?

  Ah, well, you know, we, we need some mysteries, don't we? Or we'd both be out of a job, I suppose.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:25Eleanor Janega?

  Can we talk a little bit about characterization in this? Because you, you've just mentioned that Merlin is at his heart a counselor in a lot of these stories. As, as someone that you would actually want around court.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:39Eleanor Janega?

  Talking to a king and not just a deus ex machina. So what do you think this means in terms of how the Merlin prophecies are used? Is this representative of something?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  I think that people were always aware of him as being a figure of mystery, of magic, obviously, but also of wisdom. I think that's from right from the beginning. The very first story we have after the, after the story of him going mad in the wilderness. He is brought back to sanity by a saint who, Saint Kentigan, who is a Christian saint of Glasgow. And he's brought back by being taken to a shrine and drunk and given some water. And then he gets his, his memory back and remembers who he is. But he still retains his prophetic abilities.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  And I think that was passed on. I think people thought there had been a Merlin. There must have been someone called Merlin. And he seems to have been such a figure of wisdom. Of course, he must have had writings. He must have done things of that kind. And there, of course, there's Geoffrey Monmouth, and there are all these other anonymous ones. Of course, he did. Yes, and I've got this ancient book here that was given to me by somebody. And we're not sure if that person ever existed, probably didn't. But here's some prophecies of Merlin. Look, let me write them all down for you. And suddenly, he's got a bestseller.

• 36:08Eleanor Janega?

  Can I ask you a little bit about one of, I would say, a fan favorite character? Because the Lady of the Lake does show up here. Can you tell us a bit about her and her involvement in the book? Where does the Lady of the Lake come from?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Well, Lady of the Lake comes out of the fairy tradition. That is a very, a very big part of the Arthurian legend, even although it's quite well disguised. You don't, one doesn't realize, I think, until you've read through the odd hundred stories produced during this period, all of which I have. You start seeing these references to fairy women. They're not just, they're not just human. In fact, they're not human at all. And one of the ones that's most significant is called Argante, which means the silver one. And she is the Lady of the Lake. That's the only time she's named. Most of the time, she's just Lady of the Lake. But her original name was Argante. And she herself became something of a reference point, I suppose you'd say, for

• 37:11Speaker 02

  the magical side of the Arthurian legend, because there's a lot of evidence within the stories, and it's one of the things that I've spent a lot of years studying, is that there's a kind of warfare, almost, a rivalry perhaps, between the fairy kingdom and the Arthurian kingdom. So people often say about the Arthurian world, it's all about men. It's always the boys going off in adventure and having a great time, rescuing ladies. But what a lot of people don't remember is that almost always these stories begin with a mysterious lady turning up at the court and saying, I need some help, please. My mistress has been kidnapped, or something like that.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  And a lot of these ones were either court ladies of the lake or were servants of the lady of the lake. And they were often fairy. And those are the ones that kind of guided guided a lot of the knights to their adventures, to their lives in a way. So to have Merlin and the lady of the lake in a kind of rivalry. Sometimes it's all right. Sometimes they are both on the same page, if you like, and they're broken together. But more often than not, they're rivals. So again, it sets up this struggle that's going on between the two worlds. I think for however we think about this now, remember that at that time.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  The whole idea of a fairy world was absolutely real. They didn't see that as something weird and made up. They saw it as an absolute possibility. And this is why so there are so many stories and so much folklore about this thing.

• 38:50Eleanor Janega?

  Um.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  So Merlin is at the center of all this and the lady of the lake is the feminine representative. I don't almost go as far as to say she's like the female Merlin because again, she has wisdom. She knows what's going on. She does. She's always trying to test Arthur. Uh, or trying to make him understand that Lannister and Grinevere are a bit more friendly than they should be. Or whatever, they they're always something like that going on. And there's a whole bunch of them and quite a few of them appear in this text and they're always against Merlin. And this is where Morgana Fay comes in because although she is. Part human at least possibly has fairy blood too.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  She is very much allied to the uh, to the lady of the lake and her kin. There are supposed to be nine. Ladies, nine women who are possibly a mem- a memberance of Celtic goddesses. Who again have great power and great ability and do know things. And they show up a lot during the context of the of the prophecy stories. And there are lots of references to that.

• 39:56Eleanor Janega?

  I think this is a really interesting point because. I think for modern audiences, we assume that there would be some form of tension between the other world, the idea of fairies. And this very Christian context that allows us to talk about Prester John, for example. But it does not appear that the people writing these things have any such qualms at all.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  No. No, the whole thing about Prester John is that, just very quickly, if people don't know this, that letters pertaining to be from Prester John were sent to the crowned heads of Europe at the time in the 14th century, saying, "I'm the king of this enormous kingdom in the East. I'm here, I'll help you, I'll help you defeat the invading hordes, whatever it is that you need, and I've got a huge army." And the thing is, everybody believed this. The kings all sent letters back by messengers who vanished and were never seen again. There are several possible characters who might have been, have inspired him, shall we say, but as far as we know, there was no such person.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  But it's from that that you get this sense that there's a use to this. There's a sense that we are living in a time when anything could happen, the Antichrist could come. Merlin himself, in an interesting aspect that's more focused in this than any other text about him, is the son of a devil, it's said. And we're even told this in graphic detail. And it's something that tended to be more or less ignored later on. You get it in some of the stories, but there's this whole idea that, in fact, Merlin was intended to be the Antichrist. And that the idea was that this, his mother, who was a princess of Wales, was visited

• 41:44Speaker 02

  by a demonic presence, or, if you prefer, a fairy being, which it is in some of the stories. And the outcome is Merlin. And Merlin is born quite normally, but covered in hair, thick, shaggy hair. And fortunately for him, there happens to be a priest on hand, the priest baptizes him, immediately all the hair falls off and he's fine. So Merlin is then, right from the beginning, you have, "Oh, Merlin, oh, could be the Antichrist, could be dangerous, could be pagan, could be monstrous." Suddenly, he's okay, because he's been baptized. So that lovely division that's still going on. We make a lot of assumptions when we assume that Christianity simply swept the board.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  I'm sure as someone who's studied this, that didn't happen entirely. There were plenty of underground groups that were still continuing and were still believing what they'd always believed, if you like. And that gives something of the underlying energy, I think, to this idea of the opposition between those two sides, those two approaches. On the face of it, when you look at it, Merlin is a pagan. That's the thing that you always kept. But then, in this text particularly, and in one or two of the others, but mostly in this one, you suddenly find him talking to monks and priests and archbishops and having an archbishop.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Actually, one of his own scribes becomes an archbishop, the Archbishop of Wales. So it's like suddenly the gap between the two sides is reduced considerably. Now, you might say this is a later text. It's at a time when you could talk about these things a little more comfortably than you had in the 12th century, for instance. But even so, you still had to be careful. Hence, again, the anonymity of so many of these texts.

• 43:49Speaker 04

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• 44:33Eleanor Janega?

  I think this is a really interesting one because do you think that perhaps the inclusion of figures like Prester John also is there not just to move the story forward, but perhaps to run some cover? You know, it's okay that we're doing things talking about demons or fairies because look, we've got, we've got the good Christian king in here. It's all happening within this, this nice, familiar context. You can't be mad. Prester John is here, kind of the thing, you know?

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, I would agree. I think that's a distinct possibility. We obviously don't know for sure. We think that this was, that this guy was a monk, probably in an abbey on one of the islands in the lagoon at Venice, which I have visited and which has a very large, extensive library of medieval manuscripts. And it would be nice to think that maybe he was there and he was just thinking, I'm not going to do any more Bible today. I'm gonna do something else. Oh, what about that incredible manuscript? And some of those stories, there's a great anecdote that I've always loved about, I set a group of monks, they're in the dining hall at their abbey,

• 45:40Speaker 02

  and the abbot is reading to them from the Good Book. And, and then he looks down, he looks to see them at the table and they're nodding a bit, not really paying attention. So he stops and he said, "In the time of King Arthur," and immediately everyone woke, next to the story. So even monks were enjoying that side of it. And there's just enough of the spiritual and moral and all the rest of it in this, I think, to tell you that the man who compiled it was, probably was a Christian monk, but he also obviously had a great love for these naughty Arthurian stories.

• 46:15Eleanor Janega?

  One of the things I really liked about Prester John showing up as well is it kind of repositions where we could be thinking about searching for the Holy Grail. And that reminds me rather a lot of, for example, when we think about Mapamundi, especially towards the end of the medieval period, you know, when, for example, You know, the Blemie are supposed to be living in Africa. And then when you learn a little bit more about Africa, you're like, oh, okay, it doesn't seem like they're around about Ethiopia. They go further and further out. You know, the dog-headed people start out around in Sweden and then they end up over in Mongolia. When you learn more and more and you have to keep repositioning them. And to me, it seems almost like we're playing

• 46:56Eleanor Janega?

  the same game with the Grail as we run out of European positions for its locality.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Yes, there are so many, there are so many different locations and so many. I've written a book about temples of the Grail and I'm doing a follow up to that called Guardians, which is looking at all of these different things, obviously, including Prestor John, but lots of others. And there were obviously places, there are places still to this day. Everyone has heard of Glastonbury, probably, and there's supposed to be a Grail there. But they're all over the place. I've seen personally about five different objects that I've been assured were the Grail. My answer to that is it's a Grail, but it's not the Grail, if there ever was such a thing. And it changes all the time. And people also tend to forget that it started out as a cauldron of inspiration in Celtic times and then moved

• 47:48Speaker 02

  from that into Christian symbolism and developed along the lines. But it's looking for it in different places. The Prestor John thing's interesting because it brings us, in some cases, as in this story, into India. And we do know that, of course, St. Thomas was supposed to have gone to India and founded a Christian community there. And as far as I know, that's real. That's historically attested. And in the manuscript, we hear about Merlin spending time in India with Prestor John and obviously learning from him. So one of the sources of the Prestor John story could have been that Thomist theology

• 48:29Speaker 02

  of the time. Again, you would probably know that one better than me. But there are elements always, certainly. And I think that whole thing that the Grail is a quest, isn't it? That's what it's about. It is a quest. And it takes you into all these different places and times. And and people are still hunting today. I think you always need to have something to focus on because if it's a if it's simply a story. If you read a story about the Grail, fantastic, very nice, magical, powerful, Christian mystery, full of everything that you might want to get from it. But suppose you want something else. Suppose you want something that might take you into fairy.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Suppose you want something that might lead you into a different kind of spiritual experience. Then I think that's where these things come in. And you mentioned Morgan le Fay's jewel, which I think this is another story that does not appear anywhere else. And what's so interesting is that the context of this is that Guinevere has a dream. And it's a very interesting dream about a dark child that is somehow implanted in Arthur. And of course, she goes, ah, yes, no problem there. That's Mordred. That's your illegitimate son, who will one day kill you. Immediately, there's this magical element that Lady of the... And it takes about three different women to interpret it. Because the Lady of the Lake goes, Morgan le Fay goes, can't be bothered.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Lady of the Lakes, maybe later. And then they found someone and another C R S who who says, yes, this is obviously what it means, and tells you. But again, the focus on an object is so interesting.

• 50:09Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I was really struck also by the preponderance of objects, interesting objects in this. You know, you've got the Grail, obviously, that's one. But you've already mentioned the magic stones, you know, and you've got these stones that they glow or they can bring you around the world. You've got the Lady of the Lakes virtuous gem. There are all these really interesting magical objects that show up. And so if the Grail is about the quest of the Grail, what's the significance of these other magical objects?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  This is why in The Lord of the Rings, everybody has magic swords. There's the ring itself. These are mythical objects. Tolkien knew everything there was to know about myth and legend. And although his books are modern fiction, they're still based very firmly on very great and ancient traditions.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  So in a sense, all of this, there's always this, the object brings into a sense of reality. It's something that if you're really lucky, you might be able to touch, you might be able to find. Who knows? In the most famous grail story of all, the story of Galahad, when Galahad finally gets to get the grail, which is very much, in this instance, the cup of the Last Supper, he looks within it and what he sees in there is so profound that he begins, his spirit leaves him, begins to die. So there's always this sense that there is something here in this world, solid, touchable, findable. And that, of course, is immensely important.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  It's an adjunct to spiritual belief that I think is never quite enough understood or how important it can be. When you are in a, when you're in a church, if you're in Mass, in a Catholic church, you are seeing the elements of the, the passion there in front of you and they are, they're not. This is where I have to be careful. When I say they're not real, I mean, they are obviously manufactured today. That's what I'm trying to say. But what they represent brings them to the, the people who believe that their faith is, is augmented by this. And I think it's very, that's one of the things that makes the grail so powerful.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  And why so many people to this day still are still seeking it and expecting to find it. And I, as I said, I've seen a few of these objects. I've stood in front of them and I've looked at them and I thought, yes, this is a grail. Because probably several thousand people have stood where I'm standing and gone, that's the grail. If they believe it, it becomes real in that sense.

• 52:54Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's such an important and complex interplay. There's this desire on our part to the 21st century. Of course, we can all laugh about how there's seven heads of John the Baptist out there, for example. And, and indeed, it is very funny, but it sort of doesn't matter. Because what, what is important is the belief that people have in these things, you know. Yeah, there are, there are four extant spears that pierced Christ's side. And every one of them, I would say, is a legitimate relic, certainly, you know, because what's important is the way that they're used. But I suppose I'm quite interested in how there's this tension there where I think medieval

• 53:39Eleanor Janega?

  people also, you know, they've got, they've got a pretty good handle on when you have an allegory, when you're telling a story, and they can choose, they can kind of pick up or put down the belief aspect of it. As a part of this, do you get a sense that any of the readers of these prophecies really thought that they were being fulfilled? You know, I remember the 90s, for example, when everyone would talk about like Nostradamus' prophecies, for example. Is there a kind of similar desire to really say this is a definitive document that is making these? Or is it a bit of fun?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's definitely, people believed it in many ways. The sheer success and the multiplicity of volumes of Nostradamus' work, not all of which, of course, was written by him, but once again carried on it. So it's a very good parallel because people are still exploring them to this day. I was involved in a TV series on it not that long ago and trying to persuade everyone that he wasn't always talking about the end of the world. But in the same way, I think that if you, it's not always a matter of belief, it's a matter of feeling what you are, that feeling you're part of something that is real, that has a substance in a way.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  You know, we live in a physical world, we are physical beings, and there's only so far, I think, that you can go into the spiritual realm without beginning to feel as though you're losing something, you're leaving something behind. And I think that when those elements come into the world in the same way as they do in the Arthurian stories and in other, the other great epic things of that kind, you get that feeling of connection. It really is an entree, if you like, into a real world. And people were thinking, Merlin said that. If Nostradamus said that, you know, it must be happening. Look how things were in our old millennial period when we came up to the year 2000. We had all this thing about there going to be some thing that would sweep through the entire internet

• 55:42Speaker 02

  and probably just make it disintegrate or disappear and it wouldn't work anymore. And a lot of people really believed this and were very seriously frightened by it. And this wasn't a spiritual or mystical thing. It was just, it's gonna happen. And people didn't really know. And then I remember still talking to people and a couple of days after we go into 2000 and I said, well, it's still here. But it's like that sense of belief that you have at turning points in time. And this, remember that these go through five or six millennia, in which the same again, always the world's coming to an end tomorrow. Oh, it didn't. And it'll come to an end at the next hundred years, but ever, whenever.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  And so this is why the stories of the Antichrist kept on going and kept being retold again and again.

• 56:36Eleanor Janega?

  I suppose here the story of Merlin's baptism is instructive, right? Because here's a possible Antichrist who's headed off at the pass. So it's nice to have little stories like that because it shows you, well, okay, yes, we said that Antichrist was coming 100 years ago and it didn't happen. But maybe there was a strategic baptism that saved the day and now we can do it again.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly, yes. It was often as an excuse, I think, as well. If you really felt you were being overlooked by some noble lord who wasn't treating you well, then hearing a story about how he might have been actually a demon in disguise or something like that, that made you feel as though there's not much I can do about that, except you might pop down the church and ask your local priest to say some more magical words.

• 57:24Eleanor Janega?

  I suppose as a, as a little treat while we wrap up here, what for you were some of the most surprising features of the stories that you found in these prophecies? Was there anything particularly that grabbed you?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  As I mentioned, my favorite story was about the monk who flew around the world on the magic stone. And I forgot to say that the reason the stone flies is because the spirit of Merlin's demonic father is entrapped within it. So, still happening, you see the magic. For me, what really excited me was the fact that this presents Merlin as much more of a human being. Where, as I said earlier, we're so used to the kind of, this kind of distant, verified being. This one has feelings. He hurts. He's killed, physically. So, he is in all, to all intents and purposes, human. Maybe half-human in this case. And I still prefer half-fairy to half-demon, but that's personal opinion.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  But it shows that there's something much more human about him. And for most of the stories that I'd read, I was less so. In this case, I really felt he was being presented in a way that made me able to relate to him in some way. I felt almost I could sit down with him, maybe. Not sure. I probably wouldn't know what to say.

• 58:42Eleanor Janega?

  I suppose I would like just the opportunity to listen where I presented with Merlin myself. But, well, I've had the next best thing today. But, John, thank you so, so much for coming by. This has been an unmitigated pleasure.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Me too. Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

• 58:58Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks to John Matthews for joining me. And once again, my condolences to Martin Haverkamp's loved ones. He's leaving behind an incredible legacy that I am honoured to highlight today.

• 59:09Eleanor Janega?

  And of course, thanks to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. And there's plenty more where that came from. In the next episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis will be delving deeper into the legend of King Arthur. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.