Merlin is best known as the wizard featured in Arthurian legend. The standard depiction of the character first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and is based on an amalgamation of previous historical and legendary figures. Geoffrey combined existing stories of Myrddin Wyllt (Merlinus Caledonensis), a northern madman with no connection to King Arthur, with tales of the Romano-British war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus to form the composite figure he called Merlin Ambrosius.
Geoffrey's rendering of the character was immediately popular; later writers expanded the account to produce a fuller image of the wizard. Merlin's traditional biography casts him as born of mortal woman, sired by an incubus, the non-human wellspring from whom he inherits his supernatural powers and abilities. Merlin matures to an ascendant sagehood and engineers the birth of Arthur through magic and intrigue. Later, Merlin serves as the king's advisor until he is bewitched and imprisoned by the Lady of the Lake.
Geoffrey's Prophetiae do not reveal much about Merlin's background. When he included the prophet in his next work, Historia Regum Britanniae, he supplemented the characterization by attributing to him stories about Aurelius Ambrosius, taken from Nennius' Historia Brittonum. According to Nennius, Ambrosius was discovered when the British king Vortigern was trying to erect a tower. The tower always collapsed before completion, and his wise men told him the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a "child born without a father". Ambrosius was rumored to be such a child, but when brought before the king, he revealed the real reason for the tower's collapse: below the foundation was a lake containing two dragons who destroyed the tower by fighting. Geoffrey retells this story in Historia Regum Britanniæ with some embellishments, and gives the fatherless child the name of the prophetic bard, Merlin. He keeps this new figure separate from Aurelius Ambrosius, and to disguise his changing of Nennius, he simply states that Ambrosius was another name for Merlin. He goes on to add new episodes that tie Merlin into the story of King Arthur and his predecessors.
Geoffrey dealt with Merlin again in his third work, Vita Merlini. He based the Vita on stories of the original 6th century Myrddin. Though set long after his timeframe for the life of "Merlin Ambrosius," he tries to assert the characters are the same with references to King Arthur and his death as told in the Historia Regum Britanniae.
Some early references name the madman as "Lailoken"; this name especially used in the hagiography of Saint Kentigern. A version of this legend is preserved in a late 15th century manuscript, in a story called Lailoken and Kentigern. In this narrative, Kentigern meets in a deserted place with the naked, hairy madman Lailoken, also called Merlynum or "Merlin", who declares that he has been condemned for his sins to wander in the company of beasts. He adds that he had been the cause for the deaths of all of the persons killed in the battle fought "on the plain between Liddel and Carwannok." Having told his story, the madman leaps up and flees from the presence of the saint back into the wilderness. He appears several times more in the narrative until at last he asks Kentigern for the sacrament, prophesying that he was about to die a triple death. After some hesitation, the saint grants the madman's wish, and later that day the shepherds of King Meldred capture him, beat him with clubs, then cast him into the River Tweed where his body is pierced by a stake, thus fulfilling his prophecy.
Welsh literature has many examples of a prophetic literature, predicting the military victory of all of the Brythonic peoples of Great Britain who will join together and drive the English – and later the Normans – back into the sea. Some of these works were claimed to be the prophecies of Myrddin; some were not, as for example the Armes Prydein. This wild prophetic Merlin was also treated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Vita Merlini which looks like a close adaptation of a number of Myrddin poems.
Geoffrey's account of Merlin Ambrosius' early life in the Historia Regum Britanniae is based on the story of Ambrosius in the Historia Brittonum. He adds his own embellishments to the tale, which he sets in Carmarthen (Welsh: Caerfyrddin). While Nennius' Ambrosius eventually reveals himself to be the son of a Roman consul, Geoffrey's Merlin is begotten on a king's daughter by an incubus. The story of Vortigern's tower is essentially the same; the underground dragons, one white and one red, represent the Saxons and the British, and their final battle is a portent of things to come.
At this point Geoffrey inserts a long section of Merlin's prophecies, taken from his earlier Prophetiae Merlini. He tells only two further tales of the character; in the first, Merlin creates Stonehenge as a burial place for Aurelius Ambrosius. In the second, Merlin's magic enables Uther Pendragon to enter into Tintagel in disguise and father his son Arthur on his enemy's wife, Igraine. These episodes appear in many later adaptations of Geoffrey's account.
Several decades later the poet Robert de Boron retold this material in his poem Merlin. Only a few lines of the poem have survived, but a prose retelling became popular and was later incorporated into two other romances. In Robert's account Merlin is begotten by a devil on a virgin as an intended Antichrist. This plot is thwarted when the expectant mother informs her confessor Blaise of her predicament; they immediately baptize the boy at birth, thus freeing him from the power of Satan. The demonic legacy invests Merlin with a preternatural knowledge of the past and present, which is supplemented by God, who gives the boy a prophetic knowledge of the future.
Robert de Boron lays great emphasis on Merlin's power to shapeshift, on his joking personality and on his connection to the Holy Grail. This text introduces Merlin's master Blaise, who is pictured as writing down Merlin's deeds, explaining how they came to be known and preserved. Robert was inspired by Wace's Roman de Brut, an Anglo-Norman adaptation of Geoffrey's Historia. Robert's poem was rewritten in prose in the 12th century as the Estoire de Merlin, also called the Vulgate or Prose Merlin. It was originally attached to a cycle of prose versions of Robert's poems, which tells the story of the Holy Grail; brought from the Middle East to Britain by followers of Joseph of Arimathea, and eventually recovered by Arthur's knight Percival. The Prose Merlin was detached from that shorter cycle to serve as a sort of prequel to the vast Lancelot-Grail, also known as the Vulgate Cycle. The authors of that work expanded it with the Vulgate Suite du Merlin (Vulgate Merlin Continuation), which described King Arthur's early adventures. The Prose Merlin was also used as a prequel to the later Post-Vulgate Cycle, the authors of which added their own continuation, the Huth Merlin or Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. These works were adapted and translated into several other languages; the Post-Vulgate Suite was the inspiration for the early parts of Sir Thomas Malory's English language Le Morte d'Arthur.
Many later medieval works also deal with the Merlin legend. For example, The Prophecies of Merlin contains long prophecies of Merlin (mostly concerned with 13th century Italian politics), some by his ghost after his death. The prophecies are interspersed with episodes relating Merlin's deeds and with various Arthurian adventures in which Merlin does not appear at all. The earliest English verse romance concerning Merlin is Arthour and Merlin, which drew from chronicles and the French Lancelot-Grail.
As the Arthurian mythos was retold and embellished, Merlin's prophetic aspects were sometimes de-emphasized in favor of portraying Merlin as a wizard and elder advisor to Arthur. On the other hand in Lancelot-Grail it is said that Merlin was never baptized and never did any good in his life, only evil. Medieval Arthurian tales abound in inconsistencies. In the Lancelot-Grail and later accounts Merlin's eventual downfall came from his lusting after a woman named Nimue (or Ninive, in some versions of the legend), one of the maidens serving the Lady of the Lake, who coaxed his magical secrets from him before turning her new powers against her master and trapping him in an enchanted prison (variously described as a cave, a large rock, an invisible tower, etc.) This is unfortunate for Arthur, who has lost his greatest counselor.
The name "Myrddin" (note that double-d in Welsh makes the voiced 'th' sound in English 'the' and 'this') might have arisen from the Roman-period Celtic name for a place in Wales, *Mori-dunon, meaning "sea fort". The name became Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin in Welsh), which can be loosely translated as "Fort of Moridunum", since a caer is a fortified, often royal residence. It seems that the name was taken to mean "Caer of [some man called] Myrddin".
Some accounts describe two different figures named Merlin. For example, the Welsh Triads state there were three baptismal bards: Chief of Bards Taliesin, Myrddin Wyllt, and Myrddin Emrys (i.e., Merlinus Ambrosius). It is believed that these two bards called Myrddin were originally variants of the same figure. The stories of Wyllt and Emrys have become different in the earliest texts that they are treated as separate characters, even though similar incidents are ascribed to both.
Much Arthurian fiction includes Merlin as a character.
The Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) is an interferometer array of radio telescopes spread across England and the Welsh borders. The array is run from Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire by the University of Manchester on behalf of STFC as a National Facility.
The array consists of up to seven radio telescopes and includes the Lovell Telescope, Mark II, Cambridge, Defford, Knockin, Darnhall and Pickmere (previously known as Tabley). The longest baseline is therefore 217km and MERLIN can operate at frequencies between 151 MHz and 24 GHz. At a wavelength of 6 cm (5 GHz frequency), MERLIN has a resolution of 40 milliarcseconds which is comparable to that of the HST at optical wavelengths.
Some of the telescopes are occasionally used for EVN and VLBI observations in order to create an interferometer with even larger baselines, providing images with much greater angular resolution.
| Original MTRLI telescopes | |
|---|---|
| Name | Coordinates (links to map & photo sources) |
| Lovell Telescope | |
| Mark II | |
| Mark III | |
| Defford | |
| Knockin | |
| Pickmere | |
| Darnhall | |
The construction of the new telescope, the installation of microwave communication links and the construction of the correlator were jointly called "Phase 1" of the MERLIN project, the funding for which was approved on 30 May 1975. The construction of the new telescope started on 9 July 1976, and was completed by 8 October 1976. The telescope was first controlled remotely from Jodrell in January 1977. The microwave links were installed in May 1978. The first observations using the system - measurements of 30 distant radio sources - were taken in January and February 1980. The final cost of phase 1 of the system was £2,179,000 (1976).
Two additional telescopes were added in Phase 2 of the project, along with their radio links to Jodrell Bank. While it was originally proposed that one of the telescopes would be sited at Jodrell Bank and the other at Darnhall, the pair were finally sited at Pickmere (also known as Tabley) and Darnhall. The two telescopes were the same as that at Knockin. Construction on both telescopes started on 9 April 1979, and was completed by 31 October 1979. The Pickmere telescope was connected into MTRLI for the first time on 20 July 1980, followed by the Darnhall telescope on 16 December 1980. The second phase was formally completed on the 31 December 1981, and had cost £3,142,210.
The longest baseline of MTRLI was 134 km, between Pickmere and Defford. The first map produced by the array was published on 6 November 1980. In the first 2 years of operation (1980-1982), the array was used to observe at frequencies of 408 MHz (with a resolving power of 1 arcsecond), 1666 MHz (0.25 arcsecond) and 5GHz (0.08 arcsecond).
When the Mark II's surface was replaced in 1987, it could be used along with the three E-systems telescopes on the 22 GHz frequency, expanding MTRLI at that frequency.
| Current MERLIN telescopes | |
|---|---|
| Name | Coordinates (links to map & photo sources) |
| Lovell Telescope | |
| Mark II | |
| Defford | |
| Knockin | |
| Pickmere | |
| Darnhall | |
| Cambridge | |
MTRLI was renamed to MERLIN in the early 1990s, and shortly afterwards the addition of the Cambridge antenna in 1991 increased both the sensitivity and angular resolution of the array. The array also had a new correlator and new, cooled receivers, and some of the microwave links between the telescopes were improved so that the array could observe both hands of polarization.
Since 1996, carousels for the different receivers on each of the E-systems telescopes and the Mark II telescope were installed (the Cambridge telescope already had such a system installed), providing frequency agility. In 1997 and 1998, dual-frequency (5 and 22 GHz) observations were made with the array for the first time.
There are plans to construct a telescope in Ireland that would be added to the array.
Another major development which is part of the upgrade is frequency flexibility — the ability to alter the observing band of the entire array in a matter of minutes using rotating carousels of receivers. Some telescopes in the array already have this capability, while the rest require the visit of an engineer to change the receiver. When e-MERLIN becomes operational the telescope will be able to switch rapidly between 1.4, 5, 6 and 22 GHz. This is required in order to take advantage of optimum conditions for high frequency observations where atmospheric conditions can severely affect results.
Work started on the e-MERLIN upgrade in May 2004.
On 6 March 2008 the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced that the (e-MERLIN/JIVE) project was at risk because of a £80m shortfall in its budget. This was due to the initial recommendations of the Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science Committee (PPAN), that had listed the project as a "lower priority". Following concerns that PPAN's recommendations did not adequately represent the UK's astronomical priorities, STFC established a wider consultation review involving various advisory panels to re-priorities the STFC program. The Ground-Based Astronomy Consultation Panel then recommended e-MERLIN should be changed from the lowest band ("lower priority"), to the second highest, adding that "e-Merlin could be a world-leading facility well into the next decade" and "e-Merlin offered dramatic potential to both traditional UK radio astronomy users and importantly to a broader community.
On 8 July2008 STFC presented their final version of the programmatic review at a Town Meeting at the Royal Society stating:
'Given the strategic importance of e-MERLIN to the future of UK radio astronomy and to the highly ranked SKA project, we are working with the University of Manchester and other stakeholders to find a viable way in which e-MERLIN operations can be supported in the medium term on a shared cost basis. We have made provision for STFC support of operations to be made available to facilitate such a solution.'
The telescope can also be used for highly precise astrometry.
In 1998, MERLIN in conjunction with the Hubble Space Telescope discovered the first Einstein ring.
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