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£30 (Advance Booking Includes Conference Buffet Lunch and Refreshments) 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 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
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