ABSTRACT
The untold tale of Merlin’s birth haunts the opening of Malory’s Morte Darthur; the ghostly presence of his demon-father infiltrates the work, provoking the insults of enemies and explaining his own sometimes erratic behavior. Although the usual approach to Malory, particularly since Vinaver, is to de-emphasize the marvelous, Merlin is, nevertheless, surrounded by an aura of the uncanny. Thus, while Vinaver argues that “incidents which appealed to the French authors because of their fairy element are reproduced with an emphasis on their human and realistic aspects and with a noticeable neglect of magic,”1 Thomas Wright, in a beautifully evocative phrase, identifies Merlin as “the most intermediate of beings,” adding that “neither devil, man, nor god, Merlin wears the masks of all three” (33). Synthesizing these divergent approaches, I would suggest that it is precisely the diminution of the marvelous in Malory’s text that heightens the reader’s impression of Merlin as intermediate and indefinable.2 The problem is not that he wears the masks of devil, man, and god, but that Malory, by erasing the story of Merlin’s birth, inscribes the riddle of his origin in the margins of his text. The problem is not so much Merlin’s “masks,” but the impossibility of distinguishing mask from reality, of deducing his essence from his behavior.
