Myrddin Wyllt
Welsh · mortal · post roman · Recorded classification
The madman-in-the-woods is the older layer and the court magician is the later one, and a registry that held only 'Merlin' would hold the later one and lose the fact. The Scottish Lailoken, generally taken to be the same figure under another name, is carried in the alt-name list and not as a separate record; there is no Scottish tradition key in this corpus.
Domains
- prophecy
- madness in the wild
Relations
- distinguished by the sources from: Myrddin EmrysReciprocated in-batch.Reference treatment of Giraldus's distinction between the two Merlins. (secondary)
- contemporary of: ArthurIn-batch, and deliberately the weakest available kind: the source places them in the same period and does not put them in a room together, and the whole Merlin-and-Arthur relationship is Geoffrey's.Reference treatment: the northern Merlin was a contemporary of Arthur. (secondary)
Sources
- Myrddin Wyllt is the northern Merlin of medieval Welsh legend, a prophet bard driven mad by a portent seen in battle, whose stories Geoffrey of Monmouth combined with Ambrosius Aurelianus.: Reference treatments of Myrddin Wyllt and of the Welsh Merlin tradition. (secondary)