SUMMARY OF MY THEORY ON MYRDDIN/MERLIN

Merlin and Vivien (Gustave Dore)

[I've been asked to post this separately from my previous article (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2020/06/myrddin-mabon-st-ninian-and-nemhain.html), as it presents a more absorbable distillation of my current theory regarding Myrddin's nature.] 

The Triple Death of Myrddin 

Given that Myrddin's madness is a metaphor for a spectral state of existence, how do we account for his triple death?

Well, I still think there are two answers to this question.  The first would allow for the same kind of confusion being present in the medieval mind as in our own, viz. the madness was not understood as a death-state.  Were he believed to still be alive, then it became necessary in the literary tradition to conjure a death for him.  

But the form of death invented brings us to our second answer. Were Myrddin the man identified at some point with a god like Mabon, then that god's seasonal death (and subsequent imprisonment) and rebirth would have been incorporated into Myrddin's story. The parallel between his triple death and that of the god Lleu has been discussed for a long time (see, for instance. Nilokai Tolstoy's THE QUEST FOR MERLIN). I have shown Lleu may have been present on the Tweed near Drumelzier (at Louden Knowe). The Arthurian romance FERGUS OF GALLOWAY places a lion in the chapel of Merlin atop the Noquetran, and this lion (llew in Welsh) is an error for Lleu.  Lancelot of the Lake (Llwch Lamh-calad, i.e. the Irish Lugh) experiences Myrddin-like madness in the Vulgate.  So there is definitely room for Lleu in the mix.  The Welsh seem to have identified the two gods, placing both in death at Nantlle in Gwynedd, and having both take the form of predatory birds.

Merlin's imprisonment, like Mabon's, was of a seasonal nature.  Such imprisonment was symbolic of the sun's "death" during Winter, when the world became the Waste Land.  To heal the land (and the wounded king of sovereignty), the solar Grail had to be found and returned from the south to the north.  The sun god of the summer half-year often has a rival in the myths, a dark companion who takes the goddess for the winter.  Their contest for her is an everlasting one, with each being killed at the end of his half-year reign.  This motif is quite evident in the MABINOGION tale "Math Son of Mathonwy", in which Lleu and Gronwy trade on and off with Blodeuwedd.  Lleu is killed by his rival, but resurrected by the magic of Gwydion.  He then exacts his revenge, slaying Gronwy by hurling his lightning-spear through a great, shield-shaped stone. 

So, we need not fear that Myrddin the god remains trapped forever by the Lady of the Lake.  He is let out by her periodically, i.e. for the summer season.  At this time his madness ( = death) leaves him and he is sane again.  But come winter his "twin" will slay him and he will abide once more, for an interval, in his Otherworld prison.  

Distinguishing between a god that is being seasonally killed and a man who is being sacrificed to that god is no easy matter.  And this is precisely because a man sacrificed to a deity symbolically represents that deity.  A concept difficult for us to grasp.  But archaeology has examples for us.  Lindow Man is a good one.  And literature is sometimes unambiguous.  Men were sacrificed to Odin by being hung and pierced with a spear - an action performed by the god himself. 

What exactly was thought to happen to Myrddin the man after death is not something we can really know.  This is especially true if we are merely talking about a deified dead man, a member of the Manes. The Irish story of Suibhne Geilt or Suibhne the Mad offers us a sad portrait of a wandering ghost whose haunts are the wilds, the places uninhabited by living men.  He has company, but only that of his fellow spirits. When he returns to life (or is, by some mechanism, confined by the living), the 'Hag of the Mill' (the goddess as cailleach) drives him back into madness (death), so that he again flits from tree to tree like a bird, making the kind of prodigious leaps of which only a phantom is capable. Suibhne is specifically said to be a king.  There is no suggestion that he is a folklore version of an ancient pagan deity.  Still, he is pagan, and patently anti-Christian, and his affliction is portrayed as a punishment by God administered by St. Ronan.  

Merlin is similarly presented as being captured and even restrained, or otherwise forced into human society, as a means of staving off or controlling his madness.  But he always manages to escape back into the wild, rejoining the host of the Wild Ones.  

We should not make the mistake and read into this any kind of shamanistic practice - something that is often engaged in by those espousing neopagan beliefs.  They rather indiscriminately draw the parallel between a shaman's entering an ecstatic state and leaving his body to Myrddin's intermittent fits of madness. But a shamanistic spirit-journey was embarked upon for a profound purpose.  Usually, the shaman was voyaging to the Otherworld to obtain a cure for illness or he had some other critical purpose in mind.  Something which was needed to benefit his people, to restore the balance between the worlds, etc. There is nothing of that evident in anything we find in the Myrddin/Merlin tradition.

Yet another element may complicate the evolution of the character we now know as Merlin.  His epithet Llallawg or Llallogan is derived from the same root as W. ellyll.  This is a good description of at least one application of this word in the notes to Triads 63 and 64 in Bromwich.  There is it suggested the animal spirit of a warrior may be something akin to what is manifested during the berserker rage of an Odinic Viking (or of the similar ulfhednar, 'wolf-skins').  Here are Bromwich's remarks:

We might imagine that this same animal spirit that takes over a man when he is fighting in a battle might later be what survives him after death in battle.

Vaticination is also often dependent on the induction of ecstatic trance. Myrddin was a part of Welsh prophetic tradition (see A.O.H. Jarman's "The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy" in THE ARTHUR OF THE WELSH, ed. by Bromwich, Jarman and Roberts). His prophecies delivered from the rock of Molendinar were "extremely obscure and virtually unintelligible", and accompanied by "wailing and shouting in a loud voice" ("St. Kentigern and Lailoken", Cotton MS Titus A. XIX).  Such utterances were thus a product of his madness. Prophecy from madness was akin to that obtained through divine inspiration.  An example of this last would be Taliesin, who imbibed from Ceridwen's magical cauldron.

What we appear to have, therefore, in the character of Myrddin are several motifs that have been clumsily spliced.  First, we have men dying of goddess-induced battle-panic whose spirits reside like wild animals in the forest or other waste places. Their madness is a metaphor for a spectral existence, a shadowy continuance of life experienced outside of the physical body.  Second, we have men exhibiting battle-frenzy as if they had become various kinds of dangerous animals. Third, we have solar deities who seasonally die and are reborn, the cycle continuing eternally as the sacred round of the year turns.  Men who were sacrificed to such deities symbolically became this or that god and so enjoyed the same annual resurrection.  Geoffrey of Monmouth's identification of Myrddin/Merlin with Ambrosius of Dinas Emrys, a Divine/Immortal One who had himself come to be associated with Mabon (and Lleu?) of Gwynedd, had a major impact on the evolution of the former as a literary figure. And four, insane utterances could be construed as prophecies.  Prophecy was the province of gods like Apollo, and Maponus was identified in the Roman period with Apollo.

This is my best take on one of the most mysterious - and most beloved - personages in Arthurian legend.