In European literature there is no more famous magician or the most prestigious of the wise Merlin, a mythical character with clear medieval origins. It belongs to the repertoire of the most legendary in the world of chivalry and courtly, built around the no less legendary King Arthur. With his role as advisor and protector of the ruler of Camelot, Merlin had to do both with the birth of the British monarch, and his education, and the establishment of the Round Table, which he suggested to the king. He then retired to the woods and disappeared mysteriously just before the Arthur would encounter an equally enigmatic end.
Merlin is a literary creation rather complex, whose origins date back to medieval literature. The learned writer Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to introduce the role of Merlin in European literature, first with his Prophetiae Merlini and later with the work in verse Vita Merlini. Soon including Prophetiae Merlini in his most important work, always in Latin, Historia Regum Britanniae ; was this great text which appears in the magnanimous King Arthur in all its glory to make known the name and fame of the prophet magician.
In the work are recounted the deeds of fabulous Merlin, born of a maiden after a sexual intercourse with the devil, was taken when he was a child in front of the British king Vortigern to be offered in sacrifice, but was saved thanks to its divination skills. Then, moved with his magical powers from Ireland to England and the megaliths of Stonehenge, which has become counselor to the king Uther Pendragon, gave these the appearance of the Duke of Cornwall, thereby not penetrate the fortress of Tintagel and allow him to lie with the wife of the Duke himself, Igerna; from that meeting was born the night of love and King Arthur. In Vita Merlini Geoffrey tells of how the magician was crazy then witnessing the horrors of a bloody battle and had retired to a solitary life in a forest. From his hideout, Ganieda prepared by his sister, the "savage" Merlino told some scribes his predictions and his dark prophecies about the fate of Britain, threatened by the invading Saxons.
Under the name of Merlin, Geoffrey recovered an ancient character that Welsh tales called Myrddin and that was from the town of Carmarthen. Vrotigern, king of Britain, wanted to erect a guard tower on a hill, but this fall all the time. The king summoned his magicians, who advised him to sacrifice in that place a child of unknown father. The killers of the king found a baby at this point, Merlin, who responded to these characteristics, and brought him before the king. The small, however, took the word the same as making known magicians court ignored, namely that under the hill of the tower there was a pond in which they fought two great worms. The boy said the spell and prophesied the fate of the kingdom with the disastrous end of Vortigern. According to Geoffrey of earthworms There were two dragons, one red and one white, the latter a symbol of the Saxons, came out the winner at the beginning, to then be defeated by the red, a symbol of the Britons.
The episode of the transfer to England from Ireland in the sacred circle of megaliths of Stonehenge, in which Merlin as proof of his extraordinary magic, probably was based on some ancient local legend
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