between Geoffrey and Merlin. This description compliments Alexander’s majesty while distancing Geoffrey’s own artistry from Merlin’s prophetic authorship. Geoffrey is merely the humble medium; he mediates the creations of a fictional magician and the desires of a powerful bishop. Through this dedication Geoffrey displays the usefulness of imaginative ventures like prophetic soothsaying to those in power. Powerful bishops like Alexander, Geoffrey reminds us, have access to their own muses; it is their aesthetic pleasures—their designations of “correct harmony” and “favorable music-makings”—that determine which sounds will gain a fair hearing and which will fall on deaf ears.
Geoffrey’s text displays a crucial fact of patronage.27 Sovereigns and bishops need aesthetic creation (and linguistic techniques) to display their power. In fact, the story of Merlin that Monmouth tells will link linguistic technologies (the powers of storytelling, translation, and prophecy) to a powerful set of material activities. Merlin’s skill in the power of the story, his ability to “foretell the future,” is linked with his knowledge of “mechanical contrivances” (195). Skilled in tales and technologies, Merlin’s prophecies restore stability to Vortigern’s military fortifications: he solves the problem of the crumbling tower by revealing the fighting dragons underneath it. He is able, in explicit contrast to the brute strength of Vortigern’s warriors, to dismantle the Giant’s Ring in Ireland, reerecting it as Stonehenge. Indeed, Merlin’s usefulness to his sovereign is matchless. More important than any army, “his artistry is worth more than any brute strength” (ingenium que uirtuti preualere) (198). And Merlin manages explicitly innovative technologies of sovereign succession, providing the magical means whereby Uther Pendragon and Ygraine beget Arthur. As a prophet and magician, Merlin builds monuments and produces monumental kings.
As Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke have noted, Merlin’s awesome abilities mark him as more than the average court poet. Shichtman and Finke call him “the possessor of intellectual property a monopoly so absolute and valuable that it almost equalizes the relationship between client and patron” (35).28 And this, as Shichtman and Finke also point out, is one way to read Geoffrey the historian. Geoffrey, like Merlin, mediates influential pleasures to amazing cultural and political effect. In Merlin Geoffrey may well craft a veiled representation of the power of his own ingenium, the word Monmouth used repeatedly to describe Merlin’s craft, a term which in the Middle Ages could mean both “artistry and genius” and “deviousness, artifice and fraud” (Shichtman and Finke 34). Despite their attention to the ambiguities of ingenium, Shichtman and Finke characterize Geoffrey’s use of the word as unequivocally enthusiastic: “Geoffrey glosses over the limitations of Merlin’s ingenium,” they argue, “just as he glosses over the limitations of his own” (34). But Geoffrey’s efforts to distance himself from the pleasures of the text he “translates,” the dedications that identify Merlin’s skills with Bishop Alexander’s power rather than with Geoffrey’s own, all hint at anxieties about his own ingenium. When he positions himself as the medium and not the source of the pleasures of his own text, Geoffrey’s dedications—read as “fulsome” and “sycophantic in the extreme” by some29—suggest an artistic and historiographic agency constrained by pleasures other than his own. He is, in the textual variants that include these dedications, overcome by the wishes of his patrons; their dictates and their pleasures may likewise overwhelm his text.
Such a reading suggests Geoffrey’s political canniness; it suggests as well that Geoffrey may have been trying to point out that histories were always written for politicians with political axes to grind. In light of this we can now consider the ambiguities of the Merlin Prophecies, a central, and perhaps the most imaginatively excessive, section of the Historia. Geoffrey’s representation of Merlin’s power for Vortigern may indicate sobering testimony to what massive things sovereigns can do with soothsayers like Merlin at their service. Yet Geoffrey also places in Merlin’s mouth radically prophetic words powerful enough to jolt an imperial king like Vortigern out of his sovereign complacency. Merlin’s prophecies warn of a horrific British future:
For Britain’s mountains and valleys shall be leveled, and the streams in its valleys shall run with blood.…
The race that is oppressed shall prevail in the end, for it will resist the savagery of the invaders.…
The island shall be called by the name of Brutus and the title given to it by foreigners shall be done away with….
Three generations will witness all that I have mentioned, and then the kings buried in the town of London will be disinterred….
London shall mourn the death of twenty thousand and the Thames will be turned into blood.
The Daneian Forest shall be wakened from its sleep and, bursting into human speech, it shall shout: “Kambria, come here! Bring Cornwall at your side! Say to Winchester: ‘The earth will swallow you up. Move the see of your shepherd to where the ships come in to harbour. Then make sure that the limbs which remain follow the head! The day approaches when your citizens will perish for their crimes of perjury…. Woe to the perjured people, for their famous city shall come toppling down because of them.’” (Thorpe 171, 175, 176, 178; VII, 3, 4)
The prophecies warn of injury, death, devastation, and a vengeful repayment for “the savagery of invaders.” As Rupert Taylor points out, Merlin’s prophecies resonate with Biblical indictments from apocalyptic literature of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Revelation (27). Those prophetic books, identified by Biblical scholars as “crisis literature,” narrate the captivity of a conquered, yet holy, people, and of their messianic hopes for deliverance. Embedded, in the vulgate version, within Monmouth’s larger text, Merlin’s prophecies launch a sharp critique of conquest, prophesying death to London, a scene of such geological tumult that Wales (“Kambria”) and Cornwall shout curses upon Westminster. London shall mourn; the Thames will be turned to blood; the Kings of London will be disinterred after three generations. Statements like these allude to promises of divine wrath meted out upon oppressors.
The prophetic traditions that fueled Merlin’s apocalyptic tone, moreover, were borrowed from Welsh vaticinative tradition. The Merlin Prophecies and the story of the Red and White Dragons battling beneath Vortigern’s tower were, according to A. O. H. Jarman, “lifted bodily … from the ninth-century collection of early British and Welsh saga material and semi-historical traditions known as the Historia Brittonum” (131). These prophetic and symbolic Welsh traditions date from “memories of the struggle of the Britons and the English for supremacy in the fifth and sixth centuries,” when the figure of the Red Dragon represented the Welsh who “will arise, and valiantly throw the English people across the sea,” while the White Dragon represented “the people who have seized many peoples and countries in Britain” (Historia Brittonum, as cited by Jarman, 136). The Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr, dated c. 930, prophesies Welsh efforts to vanquish foreign invaders; it mentions Vortigern and Merlin as well. Jarman argues through linguistic and textual evidence that Geoffrey was“clearly aware” of Welsh vaticinatory tradition, and used “the [general] nature and purpose of vaticination”—that is, a critique of conquest and invasion—borrowed from Welsh tradition to craft Merlin’s prophecies.30
Developed from this Welsh tradition, the Merlin Prophecies encode an early version of what postcolonial scholars term “oppositional discourse.” Postcolonial cultural studies, a field marked by a commitment to the agency of conquered peoples, has reminded scholars in all disciplines of the importance of acknowledging the historical agency of such groups. In the words of critic Benita Parry, oppositional works attest “to the counter-hegemonic strategies” of a people under siege as they struggle to resist or to accommodate the vicissitudes of their experience. As I noted in the introduction to this study, oppositional discourse has come to define “postcolonial” itself. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Postcolonial Studies Reader, define “postcolonial” as “the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being” (117).31
