Duality Of Merlin

The monster is born from a place of anxiety and wonder – it express fear, doubts, fantasy and amazement. Thus, the monster must be understood as an amalgamation of all of the aforementioned cultural expressions. The character of Merlin, like most monsters, is plagued by duality. Merlin’s character cannot be understood in neat categories – instead he is wise yet mad, natural yet supernatural, human yet bestial, Christ-like yet satanic. Merlin is all of things, and yet none of them can truly capture the complexity of his character. Indeed, “the monster’s very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure.” Merlin constantly boarders on the possible and monstrous, yet one can decode these liminal and (seemingly) contradictory character traits

Robert highlights the sorcerer’s madness when he write “Merlin then departed with the messengers. On the way he sew a churl with a pair of strong shoes and leather to mend them. Merlin laughed, for the fellow would die before reaching home. A little farther on he laughed again at a man weeping over his dead son, though the child was really the son of the priest.” Death and adultery are only truly comedic to the trickster, a character archetype whose chaotic nature means his “integration into human society is only partial.” Merlin revels in the macabre and embraces the madness of the world as if it were a comedic play. Yet Merlin cannot be simply understood as a mad anarchist. Even in the midst of his madness, Geoffrey writes “they marveled that a madman should be so familiar with secret things…” Merlin, even in his madness, is aware of one’s thought and actions, is able to prophesize, and even able to criticize the frivolity of the Britons as straying away from God. Yet, this seeming duality of madness and wisdom is unified when one comes to understand that the druids and bards of Welsh tradition often went ‘mad’ before prophesying. Thus, in Merlin, we see a rebirth of the old, dead Celtic culture. Cohen argues in his third monster thesis that “Because of it ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at a time of crisis.” Considering Geoffrey was born in 1100, a mere thirty-four years after the Norman Conquest, it does not seem far-fetched to point to the imposition of a new regime as such a crisis. Further, it should also be noted that the Norman Conquest took place concurrently alongside the “creative surge” subbed the renaissance of the twelfth-century. Perhaps these two factors threatened to sweep away the culture of Celtic tradition – leading Geoffrey to revive Celtic tradition through Merlin. From this perspective, Merlin can be seen can be seen as a