Myths and legends

In a world so shifting and uncertain, it is not surprising that great store was set on all that was not clearly one thing or another. At the in-between places - rivers and borders - and at all edges, verges, brinks, rims, fringes and dividers, anything might happen, and chaos could be loosed upon the world.

It made no difference whether these were borders of space or time. Caves, the threshold between open air and the solidity of earth, were often entrances to the world of spirits. Wells linked the visible world with subterranean realms and had an innate enchantment that might give awareness of the future or restore the dead to life. In the space dividing foam and water or bark and tree, devils could be confined by those who knew how.

Certain objects held magic by virtue of this same borderline nature. It was no accident that mistletoe could heal diseases and bring good luck (or sometimes bad) to those who held it. Mistletoe belongs to the edge of the family of plants. It grows not from the ground but in the air, thrusting its roots deep into the bark of hawthorn, oak or rowan trees.

Dew likewise is poised at the limits of definition. Though water, it comes not from sea, river or spring but from the air. It does not flow with gravity but rests lightly on leaf or grass blade. And it comes and goes at yet another borderline, the division between night and day. There were those who thought that dew mysteriously digested sunlight and made it into gold.

Dawn and dusk were magical times, for they divided the fundamental elements of existence: night from day, darkness from light, the period when evil was abroad from the time when it was banished to its secret sanctuaries.

So also the times between the seasons. Among the Celtic peoples of Ireland, Britain and France, winter began at Samhain, the first of November, later called All Hallows Day. On the prior evening, the rules of reality were suspended, the air was more dangerously charged with magical power than at any other time, and the spirits of other worlds were free to roam. The eve of Beltane, or May Day, which marked the beginning of summer, was another crack through which primeval magic entered.

Unseen powers were at play in those days, in those times and places. Only a few men and women understood these powers and - through that understanding - controlled them. The early wizards possessed great knowledge, which sprang from the very nature of their being. Through their brains and veins and sinews, the cordial of magic flowed like blood. In greater or lesser degree, they contained in their bodies the very elements that made the world so restless. The greatest, though men or women in form, encapsulated something of the nature of animals, plants, winds, thunder, lightning, moon and stars - all the things in heaven and earth, one could almost say. They were both human and superhuman.

It is no wonder that strange tales about their births arose. Vainamöinen, his people said, was fathered by the winds and waves on the Air Virgin of Finland as she floated on the primeval sea; he rested thirty years in the mother's womb before emergin to become the much-sung wizard of his country. Merlin's maiden mother had never known a human man, his father was an incubus, a seeming man who visited the young woman at night, no more than a transient dream. Of Taliesin, many of whose later deeds are shrouded in the mists of time and cryptic poetry, they told a strange birth-tale indeed.

A sorceress named Ceridwen, the story begins, lived on a mountain lake in Penllyn in Wales. Some chroniclers claim the palace was under the waters of the lake, but this is unlikely, and most sources place it on an island. In any event, Ceridwen bore a son named Morfran, so repellently ugly that he was nicknamed Afagddu, or "Utter Darkness". Ceridwen was determined that he have wisdom to compensate for his appearence - a body as hairy as a stag's and a demeanor so horrid people thought him to be a demon - and to this end she studied deeply in the magical arts.

Finally she discovered a means of giving Morfran all the knowledge of the world, as well as the gift of prophecy. She had only to pick up certain herbs at the times when they were most potent and boil them in a caldron for a year and a day. At the end of that period, three drops of the brew would spring from the caldron, fall on the boy and make him an enchanter.

Ceridwen gathered her herbs and engaged an old blind man to tend the caldron for the brewing. The old man's name is not important to the story. He had a boy with him who served as his eyes, and that boy's name is famous now. It was Gwion Bach. For a year and a day, in the depths of Ceridwen's castle, the man and the boy stirred the magic brew and kept the caldron's fire blazing. The sorceress added herbs at the prescribed times, and as the year drew to a close, she stationed her son beside the caldron. Then she rested.

This was a mistake, for at the moment when the brew's bubbling indicated that the magic potion had reached its final stages, the silent churl Gwion Bach, the blind man's guide, pushed Morfran aside so that when the three magic drops sprang from the caldron they fell on him instead of on Ceridwen's son. With a wailing shriek the caldron cracked, the liquid in it streaming into the fire below. Ceridwen awoke.

Chaos followed. Gwion Bach now was possessed of a wizard's intuition, which told him that the thwarted enchantress would kill him if she could. He turned and began to run, with Ceridwen at his heels.

Through the echoing corridors of the palace ran Gwion Bach, with the sorceress ever close behind him. When he found a way out, he suddenly changed into a hare for fleetness and headed across the grass. He glanced back, and where Ceridwen might have been, he saw instead a greyhound with its teeth bared, running like the wind, stretched out lean and low to the ground. Gwion reached the island's shore and at once dived into the lake, using his newly won powers to change into the shape of a fish. He sped away among the swaying water reeds, but at his tail was an otter, lithe, brown and deceptively sweet-faced. The dainty otter paw grazed his tail, and Gwion shot to the surface.

He broke water, changing into the form of a swift, fleetest of birds. But as he flew off, he saw far above him, mounting in easy spirals, a great, long-winged hawk. In an instant it stooped, rocketing toward him, talons at the ready.

Gwion dropped toward the earth again, and as he dropped he shrank and shifted his shape to that of a grain of wheat. He landed on a winnowing floor, surrounded by thousands of other grains exactly like himself. For a moment all was still.

But a black hen appeared, picking her way fussily through the littered floor, cocking her head sideways in her hennish way so that the round eye stared straight down into the wheat. She hunted and pecked and cackled under her breath. She pecked at a grain and discarded it. Finally she came to the grain that was Gwion Bach. The sharp little beak descended and the hen snatched the grain and swallowed.

The black hen ruffled out her feathers and swelled until she once again took the form of Ceridwen. But now the sorceress carried within her the seed of an enchanter, and nine months later she was delivered of an exquisite son. She wanted to rid herself of him, but she had not the heart to murder the beautiful child. Instead, she tucked him into a coracle - a tiny, hide-covered basket - and ordered him cast into the waters.

Some say the sorceress had the child put into the sea, some say a lake, some say a river. In any case, the coracle did not sink but drifted until it reached a weir - a dammed-up tidal pond - at the edge of the sea near Castell Deganwy in the north of Wales.

The weir was famous in that kingdom, for every year at the Eve of Samhain it cast up rich salmon. In that particular year, a lord's son, Elphin, came to the weir in search of the fish. What he found instead was the coracle. He drew back the wrappings and saw the shining forehead of a child.
Elphin cried, "Behold the radiant brow".
That prase in Welsh was Tal iesin, and to Elphin's astonishment the infant replied, "Taliesin he is!"

As it happens, the most that is known of Taliesin's life concerns his childhood and youth. The young Lord Elphin was a spendthrift and a rather silly man, but he seems to have a good heart. He placed the coracle in the saddlebag of one of his horses and took the infant home to his wife, who cared for the boy, the scribe says, "lovingly and dearly".

Even in infancy, Taliesin was a singer, and he grew into that most beloved of Celts, a bard whose poetry had magical powers. He became a kindly supporter of his foster father, bringing him prosperity and saving him from trouble when need be.

When Elphin was wrongfully imprisoned for boasting at the court of his king, Taliesin charmed his fetters off. Then, before the assembled court, the young man sang of his miraculous origins and prophesied, in poignant verses, the coming invasions of Britain by the Saxons.

The mark of all the great enchanters was their profound knowledge of words and of that best ordering of words, poetry. Nowadays, when words float cheap as thistledown, people only faintly recall the worth and power they once possessed. Words gave order and shape to reality: To know the name of a thing was to percieve its essence and therefore to master it.

To name a thing not present was to summon it into being, so that the thing itself existed in the words for it. "I was many things before I was released," sang Taliesin once. "I was a word in letters". A name could be moved and manipulated and placed innew arrangements, and all of these activities would affect the object named. It is no wonder that people at that time were very reluctant to reveal the true names of their gods, their countries and themselves. The outward sign of the inner powers of a wizard was his knowledge of words and names and the songs he made from them.

That is why Joukahainen's challenge to Vainamöinen began with a recitation of all the things he knew about the world, and why Celtic wizards such as Taliesin prefaced their spells with transformation songs - verses that claimed they had taken the shape of everything in creation, from raindrops and starlight to bubbles in beer, and thereby had gained infinite understanding.

Words were the bricks of all charms and incantations, all spells, riddles and conjurations. Words, it was said, could blind, maim and pulverize. They could cause kings to lose their thrones, as an Irish tale attests:

There was a time, this tale begins, when Ireland was ruled by a grasping, morose bully of a sovereign by the name of Bress. He taxed his unhappy subjects mercilessly and laid additional levies on their homes and possessions, down to the boards the women used for kneading dough. He was cunning in his avarice, too.

He proposed to his people that the milk of every hairless brown cow in Ireland should be his. Since a bald cow is a rare cow, the people readily agreed. Bress immediately gathered all the brown cows of the country and passed them between two fires to singe off their hair. He was, as the Irish liked to say, father and grandfather to a fox. But he was arrogant and therefore careless.

One day a bard and a wizard named Cairpré came to Bress's palace. Poets being held in high regard, it was both customary and prudent to invite such a visitor to stay as long as he liked and to take his meals at the high table in the hall, along with the King and courtiers. Bress was far too mean. He had the power lodged in a bare, cold attic, where no more than a trencher of dry bread was carried to him by an ugly servant girl.

Cairpré knew the proper order of things, the patterns of behaviour that kept the small world safe from the dark. He knew what made a worthy king and what was due a wizard. Every feeling was offended. He announced that he was leaving, and when he did so, he was summoned, as he expected, before the King to give the usual poem of thanks to his host.

Bress talked to his counselors throughout the recitation and therefore did not notice that Cairpré's poem was no lickspittle tribute. Instead, the poet made a little rhyme that wished Bress the kind of treatment he doled out to his guests.

As soon as the poem was done, the King felt a warm tingling in his cheeks. His companions were horrified to see large red blotches break out over his face. None of Bress's doctors, herbalists or sorcerers could disperse the unsightly rash, and nothing would persuade Cairpré to withdraw his words.

Since the law said that Irish monarchs must be without physical blemish, Bress was forced to abdicate - a great relief to his subjects - and all because of a few verses composed extemporaneously by a wizard.

Among enchanters, Taliesin was most famed for his skill with words. Unfortunately, no complete accounts of the songs and deeds of his prime survive. Looking into the past to find him - and many of his fellows for that matter - is like gazing into the wrong end of a telescope. The image is tiny, and everything important seems to be happening just outside the viewer's field of vision. Taliesin is reported to have appeared at one king's court and then at another's; scattered songs are still remembered. But details are few.

One of Taliesin's songs says that he was present at Cad Goddeu, and fragmented as the story is, it is of interest for the wonders he reports and for the wizard who caused them. Cad Goddeu was a battle, called one of the three futile battles of Britain because the slaughter was brought about for so petty a cause - a white roebuck and a greyhound pup, according to some sources; a deer, dog and lapwing, according to others. The animals - the first of their kind on earth - were taken from Arawn, King of Annwfn, that is to say, from the Underworld. The thieves were the sorcerer Gwydion and his brother, and they fought Arawn, successfully, it is said, to keep the prizes.

Taliesin himself does not report the outcome of the battle, but he does describe the initial charge. On the field, Gwydion raised his staff on enchantment, says the bard, and called upon his powers. From the forest around, at his command, strode an army of sentient trees - swift and mighty oaks, ferocious elms, hawthorn, willow, rowan and, tearing to the fore, the stalwart fir trees. The battle got its name because of Gwydion's spells: Cad Goddeu means 'the battle of the trees'.

Cad Goddeu, in its incomplete way, fits perfectly into the picture of the early enchanters and their deeds. With their magic, they acted upon or through or with things of the natural world - winds and waters, stars and planets, birds, beasts, flowers and trees. Nature was closer to humankind then. There were no teeming cities. The towered castles or warring kings and the fragile huts of peasants stood alike in clearings that seemed small and vulnerable amid the wilderness of the young earth. At night, when magic was most often abroad, the people's feeble rushlights made hardly a glimmer in the darkness that surrounded them. Above them in ordered patterns wheeled the silent, star-fretted heavens, so lucid and close that the moon herself seemed to rest upon the tangled branches of the trees.

All around the little clearings loomed great trees: the oak, said to wail when it was cut; the hawthorn, home to fairies; the ash, which Northerners said held up the sky. Some of these trees had beneficial powers, and some were trees to fear. There was the yew, for instance - so much a tree of death that nothing would grow in the shade of its boughs; and the willow, which pulled up its roots and shuffled whispering after travelers foolhardly enough to venture out at night when the owl called and the ferret and other creatures hunted. The tall trees grew in multitudes so dense that in England, it was said, a squirrel could hop from Land's End to the Roman Wall without touching the ground.

Few dared that wilderness except the wizards. They, like the sweet singer Taliesin and the battle-brave Gwydion, were armed with words. Gwydion's name, in fact, meant 'to speak poetry' - the man himself defined in terms of the powers of his speech - and every story about him shows the sway his words held over the things of the earth, both when he was young and roisterous, and later, when he grew in wisdom and kindness.

Gwydion lived in Gwynedd, in northern Wales, the nephew and heir to Math the Ancient, Gwynedd's ruler and himself a fearsome wizard. Math taught Gwydion profound enchantments, and he schooled the younger man in the right use of his powers.

It was a hard schooling, but it was one Gwydion required, for he used his fledgling skills carelessly, so that they made evil ends. It happened that Math had a handmaiden named Goewin, who never left his side except when he went to battle. Gwydion's brother Gilfaethwy desired the maiden, but there seemed no way he could approach her. He began to languish, growing pale and wan. To help him, Gwydion settled on the simple expedient of starting a war, thereby drawing Math from Goewin's side.

Accordingly, he took Gilfaethwy, along with a company of young warriors disguised as bards, to the south of Wales. The lord of this region, Pryderi, had a herd of wonderful swine - a gift, it was said, from the lord of the Underworld, Arawn himself. At Pryderi's court, the youths were received joyfully, as bards always were. There was a feast, and Gwydion delighted the assembly with his songs and tales. In return, he asked Pryderi for a boon: the fabulous swine.
"That I cannot do," replied Pryderi, "for I have the beasts on the promise that I will neither sell nor give them away."
"You cannot sell or give them," Gwydion said slyly, "but that does not prevent you from exchanging them for something that is better."

It was so, and Pryderi agreed. Gwydion promised to offer and exchange the next day. That night he looked around him for the raw stuff of illusion and found it in a group of toadstools. He stared at them and, with the spells he knew, urged them into new forms. Soon, instead of parasols of fungus, there stood before Gwydion twelve mighty black stallions, their backs overlaid with mantles of scarlet trimmed in gold, and twelve black greyhounds with white breasts, whose collars and leashes were made of hide studded with gold, and twelve golden shields.

The glittering ruse was a success. Pryderi gave up the pigs. Gwydion and his company set out as quickly as they could for home, since an illusion of that sort lasted one day only.

Soon Pryderi saw his hounds and horses shrink to toadstools. He set off with his forces in pursuit. In Gwynedd, against Math's greater numbers, Pryderi's men were massacred. To spare the remnants of his company, Pryderi fought Gwydion single combat and died.

Amid the noise and uproar, when Math was occupied with battle, Gilfaethwy sought out Goewin and raped her. It was a wicked deed and a mad one: Math, who could hear any whisper in the world, would surely find out.

He did, and he caused Gwydion and Gilfaethwy to come to his fortress, Caer Dathyl, to make reparation for the men and animals lost in the foolish battle, for the needless death of Pryderi and for the shame of Goewin. Each year, for three successive years, Math changed the young men into a different pair of beasts: hind and stag, boar and sow, wolf and she-wolf.

The worst indignity, fine payment for the nature of the crime, was this: That each year for three years the pair must mate - taking turns as the female - and produce offspring, so that when finally Math relented and restored the brothers to human form, there were three new living creatures to remind the brothers of how they had offended nature.

Gwydion's transgression was thus engraved on his heart. Later he became known as a saver, a restorer and even a giver of life. Appropriately, the materials he worked with were growing things. The humble mushrooms of his careless youth gave way to other plants - to trees and healing herbs, to seaweed such as kelp and red dulse, and once, in the great venture of his life, to the flowers of oak, meadowsweet and broom.

Curiously enough, among all the stories of Gwydion's deeds - his songs and spells, his shape-shifting and illusion-making - none survives to show him as a weather-worker. But he must have been, for mastery of the elements was the mark of the enchanter then as later. In times of peace, the sailor's helping winds, the farmer's slanting rains and smiling summer sun all worked, it was said, at wizard's will. In times of war, the people turned to those who could make of wind and water either swords or shields.

Grim weatherworking stories trickled down from icy, wind-swept Finland. Vainamöinen suffered from the weakness of age: He sometimes lacked important parts of spells and, sadder still, he never obtained a wife, for Joukahainen's sister Aino drowned herself rather than marry such an elder. Still, he was fairly called the Steadfast, for he never ceased to defend the people of his region - the Kaleva - from their enemy to the north.

This was the sorceress Louhi, mistress of a land called Pohjola and an implacable adversary. At various times she sent darkness and plagues to the Kaleva, but Vainamöinen's magic always provided protection against them.

Louhi sought the prosperity of the Finn's, and for a time she had it: Much of it rested in a magicall mill called the Sampo, which had been made by a Finn and which Louhi obtained by a series of bribes and broken promises. When she refused to share its endless supplies of grain and gold, Vainamöinen, old as he was, went in quest of it; he was determined to repossess the precious mill through trickery.

The storytellers say that Vainamöinen took a company of men and sailed across the bay that divided his lands from Louhi's. When he reached her shores, he began to play his harp and to sing, and the dulcet music sent the land to sleep: No birds called, no beasts lowed, and Louhi and her soldiers lay entranced.

It was then an easy enough task to take the mill from the cave in which it was hidden, and set sail for home. For three days Vainamöinen and his crew sailed swiftly. And then the ship was enveloped in an impenetrable, lightless fog. The pilot could not steer. Louhi, it was clear, had awakened and discovered her loss, for this was not a natural fog. Old Vainamöinen saved them: Muttering his spells, he slashed the fog to ribbons with his sword and scattered it like feathers into the sky.

At once the winds began to howl and the waves to billow as storms settled upon the Finns and their precious cargo. But the old man's magic held fast, and he thrust the storms - more sendings from the sorceress - back into the sea.

In the end, Louhi herself came after Vainamöinen, in the shape of a monstrous, ravening sea bird. She settled on the mast of the ship, darkening the sky with her wings. Then there was fierce battle. The wizard fought the sorceress with his sword and, when he had to, with his bare hands, until she was torn and bleeding. Defeated, she flew limping to her own lands, leaving the remains of the mill - for parts of it had been lost during the battle - to Vainamöinen and his people.

No greater contrast to those doleful Northern battle sagas could be found than in the stories of that insouciant and most beloved weather wizard, Manannan Mac Lir, across the world on his wave-washed Isle of Man...

Manannan sprang from the ancient Irish race, the Tuatha de Danann, who, long before history began, retreated into invisibility, leaving the country to mere mortals. Manannan's special domain was the sea, where his power was supreme, and innumerable legends surround his name: He had, it said, a boat that knew his destination without prompthing and traveled there without the help of sail or oar. In armor that shone as brightly as the sun, he rode his horse over land or water; the mere sight of his sword caused the strenght to drain from his enemies. And when he cloaked himself or any other person in his magic mantle, it extinguished them from view.

As long as he lived - some say he is living still - his kingdom was invulnerable. When enemies approached, he enveloped the island in a mist, and they sailed by unaware. He could raise storms if he wanted; and if he needed to, he could toss wooden chips into the water and make each grow into a warship. He could conjure one hundred armed men from each of his troops.

In peace he was a provider of prosperity. He cultivated fish as if they were cattle, and when the pigs from his herd were slaughtered, the bones re-formed themselves into plump, living beasts. He was the happiest and most generous of wizards, and he made happy those about him.

Manannan had a fatherly fondness for the Irish, a race he kept under a watchful eye. He trained the country's young warriors, provided them with powerful weapons and healed their battle wounds. Those who had acquaintance with him usually came out of it better, wiser men.

There was, for instance, the lesson he taught Cormac Mac Art. Cormac was a wise if somewhat pettish Irish king. The chink in his wisdom was his opinion of women. "Crabby, haughty, lewd, birdbrain," he described them. "Greedy, vindictive, niggardly, quick to insult, eloquent of trifles," and more in this vein.

One day as Cormac walked the ramparts of his wooden fortress at Tara, seat of Irish kings, he saw a young man approaching, carrying a silver branch from which nine golden apples hung.

The young man shook the branch, and the apples tinkled as sweet music. The delicate melody of the apple bells made Cormac straightaway forget all cares. He hailed the young man and asked whether he would sell the apple branch.
"Surely," came the reply. "There is nothing I have I would not sell."
"And what is the price?"
"I will tell you when you undertake to buy," answered the young man.
The King agreed. "And what is the price?" he asked again.
"Your wife and children."

And whether it was the effect of the music or irritation with his wife, Cormac let the three go without a protest. A year later, despite the music of the apple bells, he found himself pining for his family. Driven by his loneliness, Cormac set out along the road they had taken. As he walked, a mist arose around him, and when it cleared, he found himself in a strange, dreamlike land, where buildings of satin and of feathers stood crookedly in green meadows. He walked until the day drew in, and finally he came to a brightly lighted palace. A man at the palace gate greeted him with high good humour and invited him to dine and rest.

Inside, a pig was ready for the spit. Cormac's host cut a quarter from the pig and set it to cook at the blazing fire.
"Now," said the host with a smile, "How shall we entertain ourselves? I'll tell you. Give us a tale. And mark this fact: If your tale is a true one, this quarter of the pig will be cooked by the end of it."
"I would sooner you told one first," said Cormac, "and then your wife, and I shall happily tell mine afterward."
"Very well," said his host gaily. "Guests must have their will and way. Here is my tale. I own seven of these pigs, but with those seven I can feed the whole word. When one is killed and eaten I put the bones back in the sty, and when the sun comes up it is live and whole again. Now, if I have told you the truth, the quarter will be done." He pierced the meat with his knife, and indeed it was.

His wife's turn came. "I have seven white cows," she said, "and the milk in them never runs dry. If all the people of the world were gathered in the plain, I could give them all to drink. And if I speak the truth, the second quarter will be done." And it was.

Now Cormac knew who his host was, for only Manannan owned such pigs and cows. He said so, and the wizard nodded, but called for Cormac's story without delay. Cormac told how he lost his wife and how he missed her, and by the time he finished, the third quarter of the pig was cooked. Manannan laughed.

"You are King Cormac," he said, "and I'll tell you the truth. It was I in that young man and I who took your family - fairly, remember, and according to the agreement we made. But you're here now, and thinking differently it seems, and I'm happy and honored to see you. As for your wife..."
Here the wizard jumped up, strode to a darkly curtained door, threw it open and called the three inside to come out. They were Cormarc's wife and children.

After the embraces and tears, they all sat down at the long oak table. Manannan took up a golden goblet.
"Now here's another curious thing," he said. "Speak a lie before this cup and it will break in a hundred pieces. Tell the truth and it's whole again."
"Show me," said Cormac.
"Very well, I will," replied Manannan, with a chuckle. "Since I took your wife away, I'm sorry to tell you, she has found a new husband." Cormac felt steel bands tighten in his chest.
But Manannan laughed, and as he did, the noise was drowned by the clatter of golden fragments on the board.
"I'm afraid," said the wizard's wife demurely, "that my husband has lied." The pieces of the goblet flew together.

After that, the evening passed in stories that grew ever more fanciful. As Manannan elaborated, the cup, in pieces again, seemed to lose all will to restore itself. Eventually the company retired, but when Cormac awoke, he was in his own palace, his own dear wife asleep beside him and near the bed the golden goblet for truth and the silver branch of apples for delight. The misogynist had had a pointed lesson.

Manannan, wise and merry, song-filled Taliesin, Math and old Vainamöinen - all of them were, in a sense, forerunners, bearers of the flame that was to shine the steadiest at the last, in Merlin the Enchanter.

It was if Merlin - the name is Latin rendering of the Celtic Myrddin - gathered into himself all their various powers to serve one purpose: the making of the last great kingdom of the old Britons. Of the innumerable legends surrounding him, that is the most enduring; one early name for Britian is, in fact, Clas Myrddin, meaning 'Merlin's Enclosure'.

Like the older wizards, the English Merlin attracted legends as nectar does bees, which makes the man himself extraordinarily elusive. The songs and predictions of two early Welsh Myrddins - one a bard and companion of Taliesin, one a warrior driven to madness and prophecy by the horror of battle - usually were attached to him.

And the mysterious and frightening giants' circle at Stonehenge was explained as his work: He is said to have transported the monoliths from the Irish mountain Killaire, an unlikely tale. These various stories are superfluous: The real matter of Merlin lies in two episodes.

Merlin's magic first came to light in this way: In war-racked Fifth Century Britain, by a series of villainies too tortuous to describe, a king called Vortigern had usurped the throne from its rightful heirs, two boys named Aurelius Ambrosious and Uther, who fled for safety to Brittany. Vortigern imported armies of vicious Saxon mercenaries to protect himself from his own unruly subjects, but these men took control of the country. The King thereupon retired to Snowdon in Wales, to build himself a stronghold.

The mighty tower Vortigern planned simply crumbled as he built it. Vortigern consulted his court magicians, who announced that if the mortar and stones were sprinkled with the blood of a boy who had no father, the building would hold. Accordingly, the King sent messengers throughout the countryside, seeking such a boy. In Carmarthen, in southern Wales, they found him, and took him with his mother to the King. She said that she never had lain with a man, but that a spirit had visited her at night and made her son.

Vortigern now had his sacrificial victim, but the boy, who was Merlin, forestalled him. He told the King that if he dug underneath the building site, he would find a pool of water - which was the source of the building's unsteadiness - and if that pool was drained, two sleeping dragons would be revealed. The pool was drained, and all appeared as Merlin said. A red dragon and a white emerged from the pool and began to fight bitterly, while young Merlin sang his prophecies.

He told Vortigern that his end was near: The King, he said, would be slain either by marauding Saxons or by Aurelius and Uther, each of whom would succeed to the throne in turn. He predicted that the rivers of the country would run red with blood during the battles of the ensuing years as Briton fought Saxon, but that finally the Boar of Cornwall would trample the invaders and unite the country.

It happened just as Merlin foretold. The rightful heir, Aurelius, trapped Vortigern in one of his own towers and burned it to ghe ground. Aurelius, and in his turn Uther - now called Pendragon because his standard displayed a winged dragon - succeeded to the throne.

That was, in effect, the overture, the first notes of the magicial strains that sang through the wizard of Merlin. When the right time came, he himself would summon the Boar of Cornwall.

The thing was set in motion in London, at Uther's coronation feast, when the King saw Igraine, wife of Gorlois of Cornwall, the most beautiful woman in Britain, and a fit mother of kings. Uther was entranced. His eyes flew continually to Igraine; he passed his own gold wine goblet to her; he lingered at her side.

His passion was obvious, and Gorlois, who loved his wife and would defy fate, was enraged. He took Igraine away at once and against Uther's order. He sequestered her in his castle of Tintagel, high on the wave-washed cliffs of Cornwall, and rode out on his lands to secure his other strongholds against Uther's army, which he knew would soon arrive.

Uther followed hotly, raiding and burning and intent on Igraine. He could not reach Tintagel, however: It was impregnable from the sea and reachable from the land only by a narrow isthmus of rock, well guarded. Uther sent for Merlin, who came, knowing what the King would ask, and determined on the act that would bring the savior of Britain.

The King did ask. Igraine, as Merlin knew, had become his heart's desire. More than that, it was clear that Uther's passion was consuming him. The next night, the guard posted at the windy gates of Tintagel was amazed to see his lord, Gorlois, whom he thought to be fortifying his camp at Dimilioc to the southwest. With Gorlois were his friend Jordan and one of his captains, Britaelis. These two lingered with the guard, but Gorlois strode to his lady's chamber, and there he stayed throughout the night.

In the small hours of the morning, the three men left Tintagel, and as the gray dawn broke, their true shapes returned to them. The false Gorlois was Uther, the man Jordan was an adviser of Uther's named Ulfin, and as for Britaelis, he was watchful Merlin, who had shifted all their shapes to bring about that one night's union safely.

Gorlois died that same night, killed at Dimilioc by Uther's troops; and Igraine then married Uther. Nine months after the night, Igraine bore a son - Arthur, the Boar of Cornwall.

Times were perilous then, as Uther fought the Saxons and the northern tribes, not to mention the unruly factions among his own people. Merlin, aware of the dangers, had demanded of Uther a price for his aid: The wizard insisted on caring for Igraine's child. Thus, shortly after the birth, Merlin appeared at Tintagel again, and left by the postern gate, carrying the infant down the steep path through the cliffs to the sea below.

Nothing was seen of the boy for fifteen years. Some say that Merlin took him to Brittany, others that the wizard put the boy in care of a knight named Ector in a safely remote part of England. In any case, Merlin saw that Arthur was protected and properly schooled, so that when the time came and Uther lay dying, Arthur was ready to take his rightful crown.

This is the story of the wizard, not the King, and it is not the place to tell of Arthur's long reign, of the battles he fought to forge his nation and of the treachery of his nephew that ended its bright splendor. Merlin was there, just out of sight and watchful almost to the end, which he foresaw but was helpless to avert. It was he who found Arthur's sword Excalibur, with the Lady of the Lake, and he who directed the construction of the Round Table.

Bur Merlin left before the end. By some accounts, he retreated to an invisible glass palace on an island, said to be Bardsey, off the Welsh coast. He took for safekeeping - until they were needed - Britain's Thirteen Treasures:

• Sword of Rhydderch, The - which poured forth invincible flame in the hands of a brave man.

• Hamper of Gwyddno Long-Shank, The - which turned food for one into food for a hundred.

• Horn of Brân, The - a supplier of endless drink.

• Chariot of Morgan, The - which went anywhere the rider wished.

• Halter of Clydno Eiddyn, The - which summoned the best of horses.

• The powerful knife of Llawfrodedd the Horseman.

• Caldron of Dyrnwch - wiched cooked only for the brave.

• Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd, The - which sharpened swords only for heroes.

• Coat of Padarn Red-Coat - which fit only the wellborn.

• Crock and Dish of Rhygenydd, The - which gave any food demanded.

• Golden Chessboard of Gwenddalou, The - whose silver men played by themselves.

• Mantle of Arthur, The - which made its wearer invisible.

There are other accounts of Merlin's disappearence. It is said that he fell in love with a princess - or a fairy - whose name is variously given as Nimue, Niniane or Vivian. She learned his magical charms and with them locked the enchanter in a crystal cave - or a hawthorn bush or an oak tree in the forests in Brittany or a rocky tomb or in the air - where he lives invisible, having spoken only to tell Arthur's knight Sir Gawain about the Holy Grail.

The truth cannot be determined and does not matter. What matters is that Merlin, like the great enchanters before him, disappeared but did not die. Manannan retreated into invisibility, but kept watch over the Isle of Man, so that even in later times, sailors invoked his aid. Old Vainamöinen sailed in a copper boat to a place, his people said, between the upper reaches of the world and the lower reaches of the heavens, leaving his magic harp behind.

So the first wizards left the earth, disappearing into a silent limbo, to wait for the time when their countries might call them again. For the world was changing. The numinous powers abroad in its young age gradually receded, but piecemeal, like retreating ice, leaving small pockets of influence all over the earth. Man retreated, too, away from nature and into himself.

None of this happened all at once; indeed, people with some of the first wizards' powers lived many centuries after Merlin. But the climate had retreated from magic. Those who dared to deal with ineffable powers would come to dryly classify and regulate what magical resources they could unearth, and codes and registers are always the enemies of spontaneous activity.

The age of earthy wizard heroes gave way to that of the scholars of sorcery, people who tampered with powers no longer naturally theirs - and paid the price of curiousity.

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See also
Wizards and Enchanters - Content | Myths and Legends