Logres
Book I: The Devil's Son
The Trojan Brutus and, later, the Romans, descendants of the Trojans, come to Britain. Seeing the darkness of the world, the Devil intends to initiate the reign of Antichrist; to this end, the demons begin to harass a family in Armorican Brittany. The oldest daughter, who is raped and becomes pregnant with the Devil's intended Antichrist, receives the help of a hermit, Blaise. The child, named Merlin, is baptized by Blaise, and thus is given a new destiny. Merlin's mother is brought to trial, but is defended by the infant Merlin. Blaise agrees to write the deeds of Merlin in a book. -- Vortigern usurps the place of Constans and brings the Saxons and Jutes to Britain in order to consolidate his position. To protect himself from the Saxons, Vortigern attempts to build a powerful tower, but it keeps falling down. Vortigern, convinced that the death of a boy without a human father will save his tower, begins looking for Merlin, who is seven years old. Ulfius and others discover Merlin. Merlin knows things it seems he could not know, and he gives the true explanation of the mystery of the tower. He prophesies that the sons of Constans are even then on their way to retake their father's kingdom.
Ambrosius and Uther, the sons of Constans, arrive in Logres with their foster brother Ector. Ulfius recommends to them the help of Merlin. Ambrosius and Uther seek for Merlin. Merlin gives them victory by facilitating the arrival of an ally, Urien. A great battle is fought near Sorbiodunum; the brothers are victorious, but only Uther survives. Uther becomes Pendragon. The barons, afraid of Merlin, convince Uther to test him. Uther is anointed King of Logres, and with Merlin's magical help memorializes the Battle of Sorbiodonum and his brother. On Merlin's advice, Uther founds the Round Table, on the model of the tables of Simon the Leper and of Joseph of Arimathea; at the table there is a Perilous Seat.
The barons defy Merlin's instructions about the Perilous Seat, resulting in a death. Discontented groups of Saxons attempt to invade and lay siege to Eboracum. Uther arrives to aid them, but the battle is fierce and nearly disastrous; it is saved by the counsel of Gorlois. A great Christmas feast is held by Uther; Gorlois and his wife, Igraine, arrive, and Uther falls in love with Igraine, attempting to woo her. She refuses him. Gorlois flees with Igraine to Tintagel, without permission. Uther goes to war with Gorlois. Uther and Ulfius enlist Merlin's help; Merlin disguises Uther as Gorlois and smuggles him into Tintagel while Gorlois is away at battle. Uther lies with Igraine, who thinks he is her husband. Gorlois dies in battle and news comes to Tintagel; Uther escapes, his imposture undiscovered. Merlin demands as his price that Uther give Merlin his firstborn son.
With the help of Ulfius, Uther makes peace with the partisans of Igraine. Uther and Igraine marry, forming the order of the Queen's Knights, and the Knights of the Round Table agree to protect and defend any children of either Uther or Igraine. Uther arranges marriages for Igraine's daughters, Morgause, Elaine, and Morgana. Merlin arranges in secret for Ector to raise the coming son of Uther and Igraine. Ector, who does not know the boy's true father, christens him 'Arthur'. A poor, spendthrift former knight of the Round Table, Cleges, discovers his cherry trees yielding excellent fruit in the middle of winter, and, overcoming obstacles, takes them to Uther as a Christmas gift. Uther and Igraine both rejoice, because Merlin has previously indicated to them both that cherries in winter would be a sign of good. Cleges is honored and prospers. As the life of Uther approaches its end, the Danes begin to make trouble again. The ill Uther, at Merlin's advice, prepares himself for death and leads his army against the Danes from a litter. He is victorious, but continues to sicken; Merlin extracts from him a public declaration that his son should succeed him. As no such son is known, the barons fight over the kingship and the land becomes wild. Merlin, learning of his mother's death, flees north and lives as a wild man until Kentigern returns him to his path.
Notes
Of Logres
The Matter of Britain is an immense tradition with many varying branches across many cultures and languages. Our usual acquaintance with it in the English-speaking world comes from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which organizes a more or less coherent history from a variety of French works. But this more or less coherent history leaves out many excellent stories, ranging from local legends to folk tales to highly literary works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It would be nice to have a work that does better than anything that has been done so far at drawing all of this together in a unified way. We want a unified story, based on the traditions. These traditions, however, differ greatly in tone and detail, because different stories branch off at different stages of the tradition and enter into very different historical mixes. So in unifying, one has to (as Malory to some extent did) pick and choose what goes in, and modify and adapt various stories so that they can weave well with each other. The ideal is a unified text in which (1) a large variety of the different branches are brought together in a way that draws on their various strengths; (2) the selection of different stories and story elements be done on a unified set of principles; and (3) any change to a received story be justifiable either by some other part of the tradition or as useful for making different traditions cohere with each other or as making the story better on its own terms. This, then, is the essential idea of Logres.
A look at many of the Arthurian works that have been written in the past few hundred years shows the dominance of three basic impulses: historicizing, celticizing, and secularizing. Retellings historicize when they bend the stories to conform to some reconstructed version of the historical past; they eschew the fantastic in favor of a speculative or scholarly history of Britons and Saxons, turning the tales of the Matter of Britain into historical fiction. Retellings celticize when they rework the tales in order to make them more 'Celtic' according to some constructed version of Celtic culture. Retellings secularize when they sharply reduce the specifically Christian or broadly spiritual elements of the tradition that we have inherited in order to make the tales more generically relatable or more easy to integrate with modern liberal ideas. All of these have their place in the tradition, and have plenty of precedent, as well; they all go back to the beginning. What is often forgotten by those who engage in these activities is that the result is entirely fictional -- the historical reconstructions are entirely fictional, the Celtic Twilight even more thoroughly fictional, and the secularizations posit even more fictions in order to work. None of this, again, is a problem; these are all ways you might adapt the tradition, and they have always been part of the traditions we have inherited. But they also do not sit well with the goal mentioned above, and therefore I have resolutely refused to do any of them: I treat any historical points as just one of the traditions, not superior to any other; any Celticism in the stories is just that which is already in the tradition itself; and I don't try to excise any spiritual or religious elements beyond what is practically required to integrate tales and keep them from getting too unwieldy. Likewise, most Arthurian treatments over the past century and a half have been novelizations. Some of these, like Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur, are excellent contributions to the tradition. But I have deliberately avoided any attempt to make the overall story more novel-like; although the influence of the novel probably does affect some of the ways I organize things like dialogue and description, I am not trying to write a novel but a romance, a legendary history.
There is also a secondary aspect to the book, that is not the primary source of the storytelling decisions, but nonetheless is a hope for the book, and one that I do keep my eye on in terms of how I conceive the overall story. The tradition is immensely broad, but large parts of it are interesting in being specifically focused on the spiritual life of the laity. This thread is found in very diverse parts of the tradition; we find it in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we find it in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, we find it in various hagiographies with Arthurian elements, and of course we find it to an almost overwhelming degree in most of the versions of the Grail Quest. Even Malory, a prisoner accused of rape who tends in general to be a secularizer, provides an excellent contribution to this aspect of the tradition in his story of Sir Gareth. This is also often an explicit purpose; for instance, in some strands of the tradition, particularly those associated directly or indirectly with the Cistercians, Merlin dictates his book to Blaise specifically so that it may be read for spiritual enlightenment. Again, the primary narrative decisions are not driven by this; but I think it is important that the overall story be able to fulfill this function that was so important to so many contributors, and to so many very different contributors, to the tradition.
Of Book I in General
Following the bulk of the tradition, there are basically three commonly chosen places where one can start the story: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, or Young Arthur. I have followed Malory in picking the second, drawing the first into the mix only to the extent that it is relevant backstory for the Round Table and the Grail. Starting with Arthur and the Sword in the Stone causes problems with trying to give a text with any kind of unity; Malory, I think, was exactly right that it is Merlin who makes it possible to bring the essential elements -- Arthur, Round Table, Grail -- together in a coherent way.
The story of Merlin is in many ways one of my favorite parts of the entire Matter of Britain. Malory's version is excellent; in many ways the version in what is called the Prose Merlin is even better. Most of the tradition is very clear that he is the son of a demon, either a fallen angel or a 'demon of the air', i.e., a not-quite-savory spirit, and that his birth was intended by the Devil to be the birth of the Antichrist. He was, however, baptized by Blaise, thus ruining the Devil's plan. However, as a half-demon almost-Antichrist, Merlin is a very powerful figure. In fact, one of the fascinating things about him is that, despite being a generally (if sometimes ambiguously) good character, all of his powers are powers that are usually associated with demons. (The one exception is genuine prophecy of the future. It is a common theological view that only God really knows the future; demons are better at extrapolating and guessing than we are, but only God can provide genuine prophecy. So some strands of the tradition make very explicit that Merlin's genuine prophecies, as opposed to just his shrewd predictions, are gifts of divine grace rather than part of his panoply of inherited Antichrist-powers.) This is also true of some of his behavior, which includes tricking people by deceptive appearances and demanding a firstborn son as payment. I like how in many of the versions of the story we start out in what is easily identified as a horror story -- and it is quite as horrific as a story involving demons could be expected to be! But Blaise by disrupting the Devil's plans also redirects the story into a different genre.
On Sources of Book I
The Prose Merlin is one of the (many) names for a Middle English translation (from the fourteenth or fifteenth century) of the Merlin-part of the rough collection of Old French Arthurian romances that are collectively known either as the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail. Since the Middle English translation is an unusually good one, 'Prose Merlin' is often also used as the name for the Old French text that it translates. A reworking of a now-lost version by Robert de Boron, the Old French Prose Merlin is the central version of the Merlin story, being far and away the most influential version, including on Malory, and rivaled in quality, I think, only by Malory's very reworked and abridged retelling of it. In Book I, I have followed the Middle English Prose Merlin in almost all major elements of the story. The primary version I have used is:
Henry B. Wheatley, ed., Merlin, or the Early History of Arthur: A Prose Romance, EETS, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co. (London: 1894).
I have also used:
John Conlee, ed., Prose Merlin, TEAMS, Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo, MI: 1998).
And I have occasionally consulted the following translation of the Old French version:
Norris J. Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, Volume I, Routledge (New York: 2010).
However, I have used several other sources to supplement and 'correct' the Prose Merlin. Chapters 1, 14, 22, 23, and 25 are based on completely different sources.
Chapter 1 is based primarily on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which is the usual name given for a twelfth century legendary history of Britain sometimes also called De gestis Britonum. It is both a major treasury of British legends (like King Lear and King Coel) and one of the major early contributors to the Arthurian mythos. A major concern of the early part of the work is to connect various British legends with the larger legendarium of Europe; as with many other such attempts, it does so by going back to the Trojan War, which provided a convenient way to connect various nations to major Greco-Roman legends. The version I have used is:
J. A. Giles, ed., Six Old English Chronicles, Henry G. Bohn (London: 1848).
The Historia was the foundation for Wace's Roman de Brut, which translates and reworks it; although it was not the primary source, I did consult it for Chapter 1. It was, however, the primary source for Chapter 14. The Roman de Brut was originally called the Geste des Bretons and has also been called Brut d'Engleterre. In some ways it is even more important for the Arthurian mythos than the work on which it was based, since it incorporates even more Arthurian material. I consulted
Wace & Layamon, Arthurian Chronicles, Represented by Wace and Layamon, E. P. Dutton & Co (New York: 1921).
Chapters 22 and 23 are based on the Middle English lay, "Sir Cleges"; the earliest manuscripts of this tale date to the fifteenth century, although it likely records an earlier oral tradition. I have consulted:
Anne Laskaya & Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays, TEAMS, Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo, MI: 1995).
Chapter 25 is a somewhat more complex matter. One major source is Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, a very early contributor to the tradition about a prophet named Merlin who lives as a wild man (Myrddin Wylt) after a terrible battle. A further source is Jocelyn of Furness's Vita Kentigerni. These two are combined with various legends of the wild man Lailoken, whom Kentigern is said to have met and who is sometimes identified with Merlin; I did not consult a specific source for the Lailoken aspect, but merely used my own knowledge of bits and pieces of the legend. There are several interesting hagiographies with Arthurian stories, but, with a few exceptions, they are on the margins of the tradition, branching off early and never receiving development, so that they have to be reworked rather heavily in order to integrate them with other traditions. For the Vita Merlini I consulted:
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Vita Merlini, John Jay Perry, tr., University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature (Urbana, IL: 1925).
For the Vita Kentigerni I consulted
Jocelyn, a Monk of Furness: The Life of Kentigern (Mungo), Cynthia Whidden Green, tr., Internet Medieval Sourcebook, translation copyright 1998.
In addition to all of the above, there are bits and pieces from other sources. With a few exceptions I have followed the naming conventions of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, and anticipating the latter's role in upcoming parts of the book, it has influenced some of what I have selected from the Prose Merlin. I have also incorporated a few local legends. There was no need to do much to incorporate the connection between Merlin and Stonehenge (near Salisbury, i.e., Sorbiodunum), since this is in the Prose Merlin and is a very prominent part of the tradition. However, there is also a tradition in Malborough, north of Salisbury, that connects Marlborough Mound to Merlin and the name of the town to "Merlin's Barrow"; the town motto is ubi nunc sapientis ossa Merlini, 'where the bones of wise Merlin are now'. As one might surmise from these, the local legend takes Marlborough Mound to be the grave of Merlin; this is untenable in the larger story, but, feeling that Salisbury should not get all the glory when Marlborough has so many Merlinic associations, I have incorporated it and given an explanation of those associations that I hope fit it more easily into the rest of the legend. It perhaps requires taking the geography a bit loosely, but this is in fact common in Arthurian tales. Likewise, there is near Trevena (i.e., Tintagel) a sea case known as "Merlin's Sea Cave"; the particular legend associated with it I do not anticipate being able to use, but I have briefly given it an association with Merlin nonetheless. In general, with local legends (like Drumelzier, associated with Myrddin Wylt) I am happy to reweave them into the larger whole, but I take them as looser than those with strong textual authorities.
