The Quest for Merlin

Did Merlin really exist or is he a figure of legend? Where does myth end and history begin? Do Merlin's prophecies mean anything and how are they related to other ancient cults? Romantic, complex and far-ranging, The Quest for Merlin is a new and exciting work of detection and analysis. The wizard Merlin - trickster, prophet and enchanter - has always exerted a strange fascination. From Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain through to Malory and Tennyson to The Once and Future King and as Gandalf in The Hobbit, he has featured as the mastermind, the wise and mischievous magician, in the familiar stories of our legendary past. No less romantic than King Arthur and his Knights, Merlin is an infinitely more complex and challenging figure. Nikolai Tolstoy sets out to prove that Merlin did in fact exist (though not as a contemporary of Arthur). Through the literary sources, including the earlier Welsh manuscripts which he has carefully evaluated, and through his own study of the British countryside, he shows Merlin was indeed an historical figure, living in what are now the Lowlands of Scotland at the end of the sixth century A.D. HE believes Merlin was a druid, an authentic prophet, surviving in a pagan enclave of the North after the collapse of Christianized Roman Britain. He throws light on the mysteries of Stonehenge ; he has identified the scenes of battles and prophecies; and he has even found the sacred mountain spring where Merlin took refuge. The Quest for Merlin plunges deep into the remote past in order to explain that Merlin was the last heir of druidic tradition. For the roots of Merlin go back beyond Celtic heathendom in the "prehistoric night" of Iron Age and Bronze Age Britain. Merlin also represents an archetype, known to anthropologists as The Trickster, and buried in our unconscious mind since man first developed the power of rational thought. This is why Merlin's story has parallels with the shamanistic cults of Siberia, with Norse legends and even with the story of Christ. And it is also why Merlin (like some of the characters in the Book of Genesis in the Bible) can at the same time be a real historical figure and the stuff of myth.