It doesn\u2019t matter what I do, Merlin appears, as if by magic. He even appeared over Christmas, as one of his stories has some very interesting parallels with a Jewish version of the life of Jesus. This led to (as night leads to day) me looking for the first Merlin-like book I could see on my shelves. It was a textbook.<\/p>\n
Some textbooks discourage reading. Others say \u201cRead this bit and then that, then go find the works I\u2019ve introduced to you.\u201d Merlin through the Ages<\/i> (ed R.J. Stewart and John Matthews)<\/a> is definitely one of the latter. I\u2019ve never read the whole book. I have, however, read some of the works extracted. All the Medieval ones and just enough of the others so that I can (occasionally) feel as if I\u2019m almost educated. I bought it when I was teaching this kind of subject and, even though I\u2019ve no space for more books, I can\u2019t get rid of it because\u2026 what if I need it again?<\/p>\n The reason I haven\u2019t read it from beginning to end is partly because the type is tiny and partly because the table of contents is overwhelmingly male, but mostly because I have favourite Merlin stories elsewhere and every time I open this book (even when I was using it for teaching) I would have put it down within fifteen minutes. I didn\u2019t put it down because the book was dull, but because I kept wanting to check something else. At least half the time, that something else was T.H. White. There is no extract from T.H. White in this book, you see, and I felt I owed him a re-read.<\/p>\n There was one other thing I did with this book. I came to it too late for it to be a source book for my first novel. Illuminations<\/i> <\/a>was based on medieval versions of a whole bunch of stories we take for granted, so this volume would have been perfect except\u2026 I\u2019d already written a large chunk of the novel. I used Merlin through the Ages<\/i> to remind myself of where I\u2019d been in my research.<\/p>\n Just considering this takes me back to the actual research for the bits that were borrowed from the Middle Ages. I wandered through the stacks at Fisher Library and grabbed all the things I wanted to read that I had no real excuse to read, and I read them for my novel. To this day I don\u2019t know why I thought that reading nineteenth century editions of Medieval stories was a holiday from reading all kinds of editions (and a bunch of manuscripts, not edited) of Medieval stories.<\/p>\n