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Ashley Stryker
Dr. Caroline Eckhardt
CMLIT 083T
December 15, 2009
Origins of Power:
A Comparison of the Births of Merlin, Samuel, and Jesus
In myth and religion, prophets are an elite set of seers and magicians who work to
interpret various oracles so they might seek guidance from otherworldly sources. Often, there is
something remarkable about a prophet’s early years, particularly his birth, which foreshadows a
rise in ability and power, followed by a call to work as a prophet. Merlin of Arthurian legend
served as a prophet, performing miracles and interpreting signs, in addition to providing advice
and aid when needed; however, while Merlin’s power is clearly of divine origins—in some
accounts, from God and the Devil both—Merlin’s motivations for his actions are less than
obvious. There are no heavenly divine mandates which he must fulfill; Merlin seems to be left
entirely without direction as to whom he will help and why.
In the Christian Bible, on the other hand, there would often be a call from God Himself
for the prophet to work. These prophets then become the select few who are responsible to see
God’s will done on earth. Both Samuel of the Old Testament and Jesus are prophets of this sort,
in that their births are divinely-inspired and they act at the command of God.
Merlin’s independence from God is a direct result of how he was conceived. All three
prophets have a mortal mother and a divine father-figure, a coupling which heralds a child of
otherworldly talents. Following this formula, both Samuel and Jesus have God as their
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spiritual—if not actual—father, while Merlin’s father is merely a divine creature instead of God,
which enables Merlin to use his talents as a prophet for his own purposes.
The account of Merlin’s birth was first written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in The History
of the Kings of Britain, which is based on Nennius’s Historia Britonium (Wheeler 104).
Geoffrey’s version closely mirrors Nennius: King Vortigern is advised by his magicians to find
“a youth that never had a father,” and so a boy is brought before the king with his mother.
There, she claims she “[knew] no body that begot him” except a “person in the shape of a
beautiful young man” who “suddenly vanished out of [her] sight.” One of King Vortigern’s
magicians identify this being as an incubus: “[these] are of the nature partly of men, and partly of
angels, and whenever they please assume human shapes, and lie with women.” (Geoffrey 109110) The difference between the two accounts lies in the name—Nennius calls the boy
Ambrosius, while Geoffrey identifies him as Merlin, or Merlin-Ambrosius (“Merlin” 170).
Merlin, then, is the product of a union between the mortal and the divine. This is not
unprecedented, especially within a mythological context. Nennius probably based his account,
and thus his character of Ambrosius, on Welsh legends (Wilheim 5). There are several herodemigods in this cycle. One particularly famous Welsh hero, Cuchulainn, was the son of
Dechtire and the god Lugh. His name means “The Hound of Culann” because he accidentally
killed his foster father’s dog as an infant with his prodigious strength, thus demonstrating some
of his divine inheritance. (Fee 119)
There is further precedence for divine conception of extraordinary men in Monmouth’s
Christian society. The Bible clearly states that there were liaisons between angels—the “sons of
God”—and mortal women, at least in early biblical history:
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When the people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and the daughters
were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives
for themselves of all that they chose…[and] the sons of God went in to the
daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were
of old, warriors of renown. (New Revised Standard Version, Gen 6.1-4)
This passage uses the half-divine, half-mortal formula which often indicates offspring with
heroic qualities: the children on this occasion are described as “heroes” and “warriors of
renown.”
Divine intervention in mortal conception can be found elsewhere in the Bible. A
common biblical motif is one of a barren woman bearing a special child through the favor of
God (NRSV 399), which is a twist on the divine-mortal formula seen before. Two prophets in
particular come into the world following this motif: Samuel and Jesus.
The future mother of Samuel, Hannah, begins as the barren wife of Elkanah. She begs
God at the temple in Shiloh to grant her a son, promising to make him a “nazirite,” or an
extremely devout servant of the temple, if He would make her conceive (1 Sam 1.11). After the
head priest Eli blesses her request, Hannah returns to her husband and eventually bears a son,
Samuel, whom she gives as a thank offering at “the house of the LORD at Shiloh” where she
first made her petition (1 Sam 1.24).
Unlike Hannah, Jesus’s mother, Mary, does not ask for a child from God but receives one
anyway in order to fulfill one of the prophecies in the Old Testament, which the book of
Matthew quotes as “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him
Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’” (Mt 1.23). The English word “virgin” is likely the
result of a mistranslation; the original Hebrew word used in the book of Isaiah is “almah,” which
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means a woman who is of marriageable age and has not yet had children (Hooke 171).
Therefore, an “almah” is not necessarily a virgin in the physical sense. In this vein, Merlin’s
mother and even Hannah could be considered ‘virgins,’ though Hannah is married when she
gives birth to Samuel, connecting the mothers of these three exceptional men on a fundamental
level.
The divine beings which facilitate the conception of Merlin, Samuel, and Jesus are the
source of their respective powers. In Jesus’s case, this means his actual sire. Jesus’s mortal
father is Joseph of Bethlehem, but God is the one who actually created Jesus. The angel Gabriel
tells Mary in the book of Luke, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most
High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of
God” (Lk 1.35). Clearly, God drives this particular birth, as he has a distinct use for the child
that will result.
Samuel has a real mortal father, Elkanah, but he serves no real purpose in the text. 1
Samuel says that Elkanah is an “Ephraimite,” a descendent of one of the twelve tribes of Israel
(Brown 237). He is probably a wealthy man, as he could afford to take another wife, Peninnah,
when Hannah was barren. (1 Sam 1.1) Besides these two attributes, Elkanah is given no other
qualities; indeed, he disappears for the rest of the text. God, then, has replaced Elkanah as a
father figure, especially when his mother gives Samuel up to the temple and Eli’s care. In both
instances of intervention, God wishes for the child to become His mortal mouthpiece: God only
grants Hannah a son after she promises to give him to the temple, and Jesus is considered to be
the actual son of God, sent to earth as a messianic figure to the Jews.
The motivation behind Merlin’s conception, however, is quite different from any in the
Bible, such as it is presented in The Prose Merlin—Merlin was not to be God’s avatar, but rather
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the Devil’s. In The Prose Merlin, the incubus who sires Merlin is a true devil that may assume
human form to couple with a mortal woman. Merlin, as the child from that union, was meant to
be an Antichrist, a “spokesman” for Hell the way Jesus was for heaven. (Robert 306-07) His
mother repents of her sin of lying with a man out of wedlock, though, and “so, as the Devil
wished, the child [Merlin] received his ability and his power to know all things said and done in
the past. But…[God] did not wish the sin [of Merlin’s mother]…to harm the child, and so God
gave [Merlin] the power to know all things to come” (Boron 309). God’s intervention thus
allows Merlin to retain his powers from the Devil and not to be forced to follow the Devil’s
plans. God also permits Merlin to choose his own way—God does not command Merlin to be
his prophet and turn away from the destiny that the Devil set for him, as the narrator observes:
“Let the boy [Merlin], then, decide which way to turn: to choose the Devil’s path or our Lord’s!”
(Boron 309)
This choice marks a fundamental difference between Merlin and the biblical prophets
Samuel and Jesus. While their initial births indicate similar vocations and divine talents,
Merlin’s prophetic gifts are not necessarily to promote the word of God. Though God grants him
“intelligence and memory, the ability to see and hear and understand” more to Merlin “than to
any other…[because] his need was greater” (Boron 309), Merlin receives no command from God
about how he should conduct himself.
Samuel and Jesus, on the other hand, are directly ordered to their specific work through a
call narrative, which is God’s initial summoning of a potential prophet to give instructions. The
call narrative tends to focus on the specific message that God wishes the prophet to spread,
typically following a specific pattern. (Peterson 21) Samuel’s call narrative is an auditory vision
that comes to him in the temple at Shiloh while serving as Eli’s apprentice. God actually
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summons Samuel three times, and on the third time He gives Samuel his messages to deliver. (1
Sam 3.2-14) Jesus has no definable call narrative, as he is considered the physical being of God
and thus has no need to be summoned as directly as Samuel, though God often will show signs
of favor towards him. When John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, for example, the Spirit of God
descends from heaven in the form of a dove, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I
am well pleased” (Mt 3.16-17). Jesus has followed God’s command and is publically
acknowledged for it; this sign will mark the beginning of his three-year ministry.
Despite God’s intervention on his behalf while in the womb, Merlin’s call to work as a
prophet is not from God, but from man. In Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain, King
Vortigern summons Merlin to court on the advice of his personal magicians, who have told him
that Merlin’s blood is needed to prevent a tower from constantly collapsing. Instead of fleeing
when he discovers that Vortigern intends to kill him, Merlin decides to prove that the magicians
were lying. He tells Vortigern of the pond with two serpents that lies beneath the tower.
Merlin’s talents are acknowledged as “divine inspiration,” and he remains at court as an advisor
to the king. (Monmouth 110-11)
During his stay with the kings, Merlin performs miracles as a great magician and prophet.
He chooses to do these works himself, with no evidence of an outside guiding force telling him
which miracles to perform when and to whom. For instance, Merlin is credited with the erection
of Stonehedge. When King Uther led a group of 15,000 soldiers to retrieve the stones, Merlin
demonstrates “what craft and cunning can accomplish that bodily strength cannot” as he bespells
the heavy stones to be light so they might be taken from Ireland to Britain (Wace 100). Also,
Merlin correctly interprets signs that appear for the kings, such as the dragon-star that appears for
Uther in The History of the Kings of Britain. This sign does not appear to be divinely inspired,
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but rather a magical phenomenon to give news. From this sign, Merlin relates of the death of
Uther’s brother, King Ambrosius, and the eventual ascent of a “most potent son”—Arthur—“to
whose power all those kingdoms shall be subject over which the ray reaches” (Geoffrey 138).
These true prophecies and miraculous works serve Merlin’s purpose by assuring the Arthurian
kings that he is a true prophet, but it is unclear whether he is serving God’s purpose at the same
time.
In contrast, Samuel and Jesus each have miraculous powers as prophets of God and
perform miracles to reassure the populace of their strength, but they can only do what God
commands. Samuel comes to be known to all the Jews as “a trustworthy prophet of the LORD”
(1 Sam 3.20), and it is after he establishes this reputation does he become a kingmaker, picking
both the first and the second kings of Israel to be Saul and David, respectively. Samuel is only
able anoint the man whom God tells him to make king—Saul—so that Samuel’s sole option in
the entire exercise is to follow God’s will (1 Sam 9.16-17; 10.1). Jesus, too, has no say in his
own actions—when he goes to the Mount of Olives before the Romans come to take him off to
court, he asks God to “remove this cup from me,” because he does not wish to die on a cross.
Despite this desire, Jesus continues with the plan that God has placed before him, for it is “not
[Jesus’s] will but [His] be done.” (Lk 22.42) These prophets appear to have no will beyond
God’s: they were called to be intermediaries between God and the people, not to decide anything
themselves.
Both Samuel and Jesus were destined from birth to be this sort of dependent prophets of
God, drawing their powers and directions from Him. Merlin escapes this fate, thanks to the
bizarre twist of his parentage and the choice that God Himself grants him. In the end, Merlin
chooses to align himself with God. During his mother’s trial in The Prose Merlin, Merlin
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announces that his wish is to “defend the right,” clarifying that it is “God’s” right—and not the
Devil’s—that he wants to uphold (Boron 313). This wish to “defend the right” comes true: after
years of war and magic, Merlin will be the prophet and advisor of the good, devout King Arthur,
thus making the best of his accidental birth.
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Works Cited
Brown, John. A Dictionary of the Holy Bible. Albany: H.C. Southwick, 1816.
Fee, Christopher R. and David Adams Leeming. Gods, Heroes & Kings: The Battle for Mythic
Britain. US: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Aaron Thompson. Ed. J. A. Giles.
Ontario: Medieval Latin Studies, 1999.
Hooke, S. H.. Middle Eastern Mythology. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007.
Petersen, David L.. The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction. Louisville: Westminster Knox
Press, 2002.
Robert de Boron. “The Prose Merlin.” Ed. Samuel N. Rosenburg. The Romance of Arthur: An
Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. New, expanded ed. Ed. James J. Wilhelm.
New York: Garland, 1994. 306-348.
Wace. “Roman De Brut.” Ed. James J. Wilhelm. The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of
Medieval Texts in Translation. New, expanded ed. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New York:
Garland, 1994. 95-108.
Wheeler, William, and Charles Wheeler. Who Wrote It?: An Index to the Authorship of the More
Noted Works in Ancient and Modern Literature. Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1881.
Wilhelm, James J.. “Arthur in the Latin Chronicles.” The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of
Medieval Texts in Translation. New, expanded ed. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New York:
Garland, 1994.