Behind the legend is a real historical figure who lived in the 6th century AD. How much of his story is true? Discover also how Merlin and Arthur championed the ideals of changing times - Celtic independence, the creation of a British identity, decency over decadence, Jewish values, White supremacy, and the Aryan myth.
At The PROUDFOOT INSTITUTE, Moffat 09.30 Saturday 18th April
Archaeological field trip to Upper Tweeddale Sunday morning 19th April £30 (advance booking includes conference buffet lunch and refreshments)
Contact: [email protected]
Saturday Conference
09.20 – 09.30 Welcome and introduction Robin Crichton is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Chairman of the Arthur Trail Association. As a social anthropological film maker, he became a full time independent director/producer of both drama and documentaries for international TV and cinema. He built Scotland’s first independent film studio, ran a Council of Europe small countries coproduction initiative and was Scotland Chair and UK Vice Chair of the Independent Producers Association. He is author of several books including “On the Trail of Merlin in a Dark Age”. ______
1. THE ORAL TRADITION
09.30 – 10.00 Lailoken and Myrddin, the Scottish roots of the Merlin legend Tim Clarkson is an independent researcher and historian. He obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester, his dissertation being on the warfare of early mediaeval northern Britain. He is the author of several books on early mediaeval Scottish history, including The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland, Columba: Pilgrim, Priest and Patron Saint, and Scotland’s Merlin.
The legend of Lailoken, a mysterious 'wild man' who is said to have lived in southern Scotland in the sixth century AD, is preserved in three mediaeval Scottish tales. Two of these are grouped together in a fifteenth- century text under the title Vita Merlini Silvestris (The Life of Merlin of the Forest) while the third appears in a twelfth-century 'Life' of St Kentigern of Glasgow. This paper considers the possibility that Lailoken might be the original figure behind the Arthurian wizard Merlin. It notes a number of similarities between Lailoken and the oldest representations of Merlin (Myrddin) in mediaeval Welsh literature, observing that both are depicted as traumatised survivors of a savage battle. It also considers the case for seeing Lailoken as a real, historical figure rather than as an entirely fictional character.
10.00 – 10.30 Merlin and traditional pre-Christian belief Nikolai Tolstoy was at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in Modern History and Political Theory. He also studied Celtic languages and literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Adjunct Professor at Utah Valley State College. He is the author of several books including The Quest for Merlin, The Oldest British Prose Literature: The Compilation of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, and The Mysteries of Stonehenge: Myth and Ritual at the Sacred Centre.
This paper examines the evidence for and against the existence of an historical Merlin (Myrddin), who may have lived and prophesied in the Scottish Uplands (Y Gogledd). The motifs recurrent in his legendary life are explicable in terms of shamanistic practices and beliefs found in British and Irish Celtic lore, together with striking shamanistic parallels throughout the world. These aspects of the tradition are both persuasive and significant.
10.30 – 11.00 Merlin in Wales, Sources and Placenames Scott Lloyd received his MPhil from the history department at Aberystwyth University in 2009 and published The Arthurian Place Names of Wales with the University of Wales Press in 2017. He works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and is currently undertaking a PhD in the History department at Bristol University. Myrddin appears in some of the earliest Welsh manuscripts as the equivalent figure to the better-known Merlin of the Latin and French sources. Welsh poetry alludes to events and stories not recorded elsewhere and the debate over the age of the material and its relationship to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth remains unresolved. Prophetic poetry associated with Myrddin was also very popular in medieval Wales and is perhaps not as widely known as it should be. The landscape of Wales features a number of Myrddin names, frequently associated with megalithic monuments, but how old are these associations and what do they tell us about how the figure of Myrddin has been used in Wales across the centuries?
11.00 – 11.20 COFFEE/TEA BREAK
11.20 – 11.40 QUESTION TIME
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2. THE STORY IN THE LAND
11.40 – 12.00 Banes and Stanes: Where is the 6th century Archaeology of Southern Scotland Andrew Nicholson is the regional archaeologist for Dumfries and Galloway, having first come to the area in 1986 to work on the excavations at Whithorn. His interests include early mediaeval Galloway, experimental archaeology and military history.
In Southern Scotland archaeology relating to the sixth century is remarkably hard to pin down with any degree of certainty, most sites falling into the catch-all of ‘early mediaeval’. This presentation examines the extant material and asks where we should be looking for archaeological evidence to elucidate this formative period.
12.20 - 12.40 Story-telling and place names: history, lore and legends written in the landscape David Monro is an historical geographer with a special interest in landscape studies and place names. He was a research fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Edinburgh (1984-96) before being appointed Director of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1996-2008). He is currently writer in residence at Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfriesshire and was honoured with an MBE.
The exploration of place-names as tools for a range of academic disciplines has, in recent times, been recognised by historians and historical geographers over and above answering the basic question ‘What does this name mean?’ . Toponymy – the study of place-names – provides an insight into the world of the name-givers of the past and the languages they spoke. In Scotland, where many place-names were coined between 1,000 and 1,500 years ago, the messages encoded in a name are from a world which is otherwise extremely scantily recorded. The traditional approach to name etymology has been to combine the tracing back through manuscript, map and literary sources to the earliest rendering of a name with an appreciation of the geographic/landscape setting and the modern pronunciation of the name. In the context of Arthurian and Merlin stories that are handed down to us largely through literary sources that post-date the period in which these stories are set, place-names have played an important part in attempts to place in the landscape events such as the battle of Arfderydd. In this presentation David Munro explores the complex interactive relationship between literature and landscape within which both new and existing place-names serve to root a narrative in a particular locality.
12.40 - 13.00 Kingdoms in early mediaeval Southern Scotland: - the archaeological evidence Ronan Toolis is a Director of GUARD Archaeology Ltd, with over 25 years experience of investigating archaeological sites. He has excavated extensively in Scotland, with particular emphasis on later prehistoric and early mediaeval settlements in south-west Scotland. In 2012 he led the excavation of Trusty’s Hill, a hitherto undiscovered early mediaeval royal stronghold (The Lost Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged).
Early mediaeval Scotland is usually depicted as a patchwork of small kingdoms that disappeared over the course of time, during a period when the foundations were being laid for the separate nation states of Scotland and England. The historical evidence for many of these kingdoms is slight, tentative and contested. But what is the actual hard, physical evidence for early mediaeval kingdoms in southern Scotland? What does archaeological evidence reveal about these kingdoms? Is it even possible to identify kingdoms from archaeological evidence? And what does archaeology reveal about the nature of society during this period?
13,00 - 14.00 LUNCH BREAK.
14.00 – 14.15 The Wood of Celydon, A critical pollen-analytical re-analysis Richard Tipping, is a paleo-geologist and geo-archaeologist, recently retired from Stirling University. He has published widely on many aspects of environmental change and human palaeo-ecology in Scotland in more than 200 peer-reviewed books and articles.
This contribution will evaluate how much our ‘scenery’ can be traced to human agency since the earliest times. It will explain and draw on a range of evidence for environmental change, both natural and human and explore new ideas which suggest a closer relationship between people and climate.
14.15 – 14.35 Wizard, Sage or Myth? A sceptical view of the historical Merlin " Andrew Breeze. FSA. FRHistS, is a philologist. He was educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He teaches at the University of Navarre, Pamplona, and has published books including Mediaeval Welsh Literature (1997), the co-authored Celtic Voices, English Places (2000), The Mary of the Celts (2008), and British Battles 493-937 (2020).
Textual analysis has some surprising results. It shows that St Patrick was born in fourth-century Somerset; that the British hero Arthur died near Carlisle in 537; and that St Kentigern (d. 612) used to bathe at Gourock, on the Clyde. All these characters are historical. Similar analysis applied to Merlin points to the opposite. Nothing said of him in early sources can be called historical, particularly references in the poem ‘Armes Prydein’ (The Prophecy of Britain). This call for war on the West Saxons was written in late 940 (after their capitulation to the Vikings at Leicester), with Merlin appearing in it as a mysterious being endowed with knowledge of the future. The poem's associations with Dyfed underline the obvious explanation of Merlin as a fictitious entity created from misunderstanding of Carmarthen as 'Merlin's Stronghold'. There is no more reason to think that he ever existed than there is for Romulus, King Lud, or Old Mother Hubbard.
14.35 – 14.55 QUESTION TIME ______
3. THE LEGEND
14.55 – 15.15 The Metamorphosis of Merlin: the 13th century French romans de Merlin Claudine Glot is a writer, researcher, lecturer, exhibition director, and founder the Centre de l’imaginaire arthurien. In France she is a leading specialist in Arthurian and Celtic heritage and its intepretation to the general public. She is a member of la Société des Amis des Etudes Celtiques, la Société Internationale Arthurienne, la Société Internationale des Amis de Merlin et la Société de Mythologie française.
In early 13thcentury France, the Arthurian stories were reworked around the Quest for the Holy Grail,. Merlin, who previously had hardly featured in the tales of the Round Table, now provided a connection between the Suffering of Christ and the Holy Grail and this helps the Knights of the Round Table to solve part of the mystery. Merlin and his Celtic historical and mythological background become central to the development of the new storyline . Although he does take up much space on the page, Merlin’s presence in the story is of primary importance. In effect, he becomes the anchor and the key to the Arthurian adventure and the Quest for the Holy Grail. It is the literary metamorphosis of Merlin and in exploring his permanent dual personality we will try to identify how much of the original Celtic or Brythonic Merlin survived.
15.15 – 15.35 Tennyson’s Serial Merlin Katie Garner is a Lecturer in 19th Century Literature in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Romantic Women Writers and the Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge (Palgrave, 2017) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on 19th century Arthuriana.
What did the Victorians make of Tennyson’s Merlin? This paper will explore the pubic response to Tennyson’s wizard, first introduced in ‘Vivien’ (1859) but expanded in ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869) and other supporting poems which, over a period of twenty-four years, eventually completed his epic Idylls of the King (1859-1883). If the Idylls of the King is a ‘serial poem’, then the poem’s gradual growth brought to life a partial, shifting and necessarily incomplete Merlin who could alternately appear as sage, lover, and political advisor. Drawing on contemporary reviews and correspondence in a wide selection of Victorian periodicals and newspapers, this paper will recover the ordinary voices of Tennyson’s first readers, both adults and children, shedding new light on the processes by which his Merlin settled into the public imagination.
15.35 -15.55 White Nationalism and the Arthurian Legend Martin B. Shichtman, Ph.D. is Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. His scholarship focuses on the Middle Ages and contemporary receptions of the Middle Ages. His books include Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (2010), King Arthur and the Myth of History (2004), Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend (1994).
Mediaeval symbolism and characterisation has long been used as a tool by conservative, even reactionary forces . The figure of the mediaeval knight embodies an uncorrupted and incorruptible purity – guarding the religious, social, and economic values of the ruling classes. From the Middle Ages to the present day, the knight serves as an anchor for the political ideologies of intolerance . While mediaeval aristocratic stories like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have periodically been used to champion social or political inclusion, more often than not these have been adopted and adapted by the radical right, whether it be Nazi Germany’s Heinrich Himmler, France’s Marine le Pen, or the marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia’s 2017 Unite the Right rally.
15,55 – 16.15 QUESTION TIME
16.-15 –16.35 TEA BREAK
16.35 – 16.55 Imaging the Myth Richard Demarco is an artist with works in national collections. He is also a byname for originality as an arts promoter who pioneered cultural links both sides of the Iron Curtain. He was awarded the European Parliament Medal, a CBE, and equivalent honours in Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Romania. Currently he is Emeritus Professor of European Cultural Studies at Kingston University, and director of an experimental university of all the arts, in collaboration with Edinburgh University. Books include “The Road to Meikle Seggie”.
Merlin is just one example of how Scottish culture and history have been internationally interwoven with the worlds of mythology and all manifestations of the visual and performing arts. This presentation explores how artists from the 13th century onwards have visually interpreted the personality of Merlin and the characters who surround him. Why do these images talk to us? What thoughts and reactions do they provoke? On the surface they express the ideals and new ideas of changing times and reflect the interests of the patrons who commissioned them. But subliminally they also echo ancient folk memories, which are being slowly smothered by global universality and linear thought.
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4. DEBATE
16.55 – 18.00 Fact or Fake? – Intangible cultural heritage and the interpretation of history All speakers
Field Trip – a talking walk
09.20 – 10.00 Depart Moffat Annandale Arms and travel to Stobo 10.00 – 10,30 Stobo Kirk containing half a pagan altar where St Mungo attempted to convert Merlin to Christianity 10.30 – Tinnis (Drumelzier) (via the Altar Stane) a 6th century hillfort provisionally planned for excavation in August 12.15 Return to Annandale Arms
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This event is dedicated to the memory and in appreciation of the late Liz Roberts, former resident of Moffat who initiated and seed-funded this conference and for many years made a distinctive contribution to the cultural life of the town.
merlintrail.com