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Vita Merlini, or The Life of Merlin, is a Latin poem in 1,529 hexameter lines written around the year 1150. Though doubts have in the past been raised about its authorship it is now widely believed to be by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It tells the story of Merlin's madness, his life as a wild man of the woods, and his prophecies and conversations with his sister, Ganieda, and the poet Taliesin. Its plot derives from previous Celtic legends of early Middle Welsh origin, traditions of the bard Myrddin Wyllt and the wild man Lailoken, and it includes an important early account of King Arthur's final journey to Avalon, but it also displays much pseudo-scientific learning drawn from earlier scholarly Latin authors. Though its popularity was never remotely comparable to that of Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae, it did have a noticeable influence on medieval Arthurian romance, and has been drawn on by modern writers such as Laurence Binyon and Mary Stewart.
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Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer is an anonymous Middle Welsh poem of uncertain date consisting of 136 stanzas, mostly in englyn form. Myrddin, the legendary 6th-century North British bard and warrior, is depicted as being encouraged by his sister Gwenddydd to utter a series of prophecies detailing the future history of the kings of Gwynedd, leading up to an apocalyptic ending. The mood of the poem has been described as "one of despair and of loss of faith and trust in this world".
An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d'an Bretounet ha Guynglaff is an anonymous poem in 247 lines relating the apocalyptic prophecies which King Arthur extracted from one Guynglaff, a wild man, prophet and magician closely analogous to Merlin in the earliest Welsh tradition. It dates from about the middle of the 15th century, making it the oldest surviving work of literature in the Breton language.
References
- 1 2 MacQueen, W. and MacQueen, J. (eds.), (1989), Vita Merlini Sylvestris, in Scottish Studies 29, pp. 77 - 93, at 81
- ↑ Clarkson, T. (2016), Scotland's Merlin: A Medieval Legend and its Dark Age Origins, Birlinn, Edinburgh ISBN 978-1-906566999
- ↑ Veitch, John (1893), History and Poetry of the Scottish Border, Volume 1, William Blackwood and Sons, p. 224
- ↑ McGuigan, Neil (2021), Máel Coluim II 'Canmore': An Eleventh-Century Scottish King, John Donald, Edinburgh, pp. 74 - 79, ISBN 9781910900192