Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle]
MERLIN’S CAVE, TINTAGEL
[To face p. 70
The Merlin of King Arthur was reputed to be a native of Carmarthen among other places, and at three miles’ distance from the town may be seen “Merlin’s Cave,” one of the traditional places of his mysterious entombment. Merlin’s birth formed the subject of one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare: the weird magician and worker of enchantment would have been worthy of the masters’ own depiction. In the romances he comes with mystery and awe, and he departs with mystery and shame. “Men say that Merlin was begotten of a devil,” said Sir Uwaine; and the maid Nimuë (Vivien) on whom he was “assotted,” grew weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, “for she was afraid of him because he was a devil’s son.” In that wondrously rich drama of 1662, “The Birth of Merlin,” the popular tradition is taken up that the arch-magician was the son of the arch-fiend. The story introduces Aurelius and Vortiger (Vortigern), the two Kings of Britain; Ut(h)er Pendragon, the brother of Aurelius; Ostorius, the Saxon general; and other historic characters of the era. The chief point of the plot is the search for and identification of Merlin’s father; and, that matter settled, the dramatist treats of Merlin’s supernatural skill, his prophecies, and his aid of Vortiger in building the castle which hostile fiends broke down by night as fast as it was built by day. Merlin is represented as born with the beard of an old man, able to talk and walk, and within a few hours of his birth explaining to his mother that he reads a book “to sound the depth of arts, of learning, wisdom, knowledge.”
“I can be but half a man at best,
And that is your mortality; the rest
In me is spirit. ’Tis not meat nor time
That gives this growth and bigness. No, my years
Shall be more strange than yet my birth appears.”
He prophesies forthwith, recognises his father, the Devil, at a glance, gives proof of his miraculous powers in many ways; and proceeding to Vortiger’s court baffles the native magicians, and shows the king why his castle cannot be built by reason of the dragons in conflict. He foretells that the victory of the white dragon means the ultimate victory of the Saxons—“the white horror who, now knit together, have driven and shut you up in these wild mountains,” and that the king who won his throne by bloodshed must yield it to Prince Uter. The prediction is verified, and after Vortiger’s death Merlin is sent for to expound “the fiery oracle” in the form of a dragon’s head,