A review by lukerik
The Life of Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Basil Fulford Lowther Clarke

challenging informative medium-paced

4.0

I noticed that Geoffrey used some techniques in his History of the Kings of Britain that would later be used in post-modernist fiction. In this book he plays with structure and uses structure to tell the story in a way that I just don’t think I’ve seen before in something so old. It reminded me a bit of Heinrich Böll’s Gruppenbild mit Dame where the novel still has its scaffolding up and you’re not sure if its under construction or being taken apart.

Geoffrey has made his poem by jointing together a whole range of disparate sources. The joints are unwieldy and rough. The themes of the poem come in related pairs, so you have for example the past and the future or madness and prophecy. As past and future are jointed in the present so madness and prophecy might be jointed in people. Cleverly done, but the poem is something of a victim of its own success as it is rather a disjointed read.

I see there is more than one edition on the market. I have Basil Clarke’s. I recommend it. It has the Latin text in parallel if that’s useful to you. A very good introduction that will tell you everything you’ll ever want to know about the background to the poem. Also excellent notes which (amongst much else) identify the sources Geoffrey has cobbled together. Without that context I don’t think I would have understood what he was trying to do. It also has translations of the Lailoken A & B tales from Cotton Titus A xix (early Merlin analogue tales) and part of Yr Afallennau from the Black Book of Carmarthen.
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