With all the hoopla about Harry Potter this week , it seems as if people have leave about the OG sorcerer : Merlin . The fabled go - caster has been written about by no less than Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis ( among others ) and portrayed on film and television by Joseph Fiennes ( pictured ) , Stacy Keach , Sam Neill and Bobcat Goldthwait ( really ) .
But did the sorcerer really live ? All signs aim to … kind of , maybe .
The fictional role of Merlin originally appeared in an 1136 record titledHistoria Regum Britanniae(“History of the Kings of Britain ” ) by Geoffrey of Monmouth , the guy who popularized the whole Arthurian fable thing .
He was reportedly base on a valet name named Myrddin Wyllt . Myrddin suffice as court consultant for Gwenddolau , a Brythonic top executive who prevail in the mid - 6th century . When Gwenddolau was kill in conflict in 573 AD , Myrddin fled into the Caledonian Forest and eventually lost his mind . When he lastly egress , he lay claim he was a prophet . purportedly , Myrddin successfully portend his own " triple last " by fall , stabbing and drowning . It ’s say to have amount true in 584 when he was chased off a cliff by shepherd , then impale on a fisherman ’s spear in the water below and in conclusion drowned because he had set down oral sex first .
Myrddin ’s prognostication were apparently written down in Cornish language and were later transform by John I of Cornwall in the 12th century . Rumor has it that John of Cornwall ’s original manuscript is currently somewhere in the depths of the Vatican Library ( are n’t all mysterious texts in the Vatican Library ? ) . Some fence that Myrddin really was the all - have a go at it salvia later embodied by the fabricated Merlin - they say Christians rewrote history to paint Myrddin as a madman to discredit him .
farseeing narrative short : Merlin the Magician is most likely a fictional character with stem in a local fable whose effort may or may not have been wildly embellished by the time John of Cornwall and Geoffrey of Monmouth compose about him .
