Merlin

Merlin is the archetypal wizard of British legend — prophet, shape-shifter and kingmaker, the guiding intelligence behind the rise of Arthur. Born, in the medieval telling, of a mortal woman and an incubus, he turned his uncanny parentage to good. As a boy he confounded the tyrant Vortigern by revealing the two dragons, red and white, battling beneath his ever-collapsing tower — a prophecy of the long struggle between Britons and Saxons. He went on to contrive Arthur's birth, to set the sword in the stone, and to counsel the young king until his own undoing.

Merlin draws on at least two older figures: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlinus, derived in part from the Welsh prophet Myrddin, and a wild man of the northern woods driven mad by grief in battle. Geoffrey's 'Prophecies of Merlin' and 'History of the Kings of Britain' (c.1136) fixed him in the European imagination. Welsh tradition ties him to Carmarthen — Caerfyrddin, 'Merlin's fort' — and to the great works of the past such as Stonehenge, which legend says he raised by magic. He ends ensnared by his own pupil, the Lady of the Lake, sealed forever in a cave or a tree: the seer who foresaw all things but his own fall.