The familiar image of Merlin, the wise, gray-bearded wizard of King Arthur, is in fact a recent manifestation of the famous wizard—indeed, his wizardly status is also relatively new—and bears little resemblance to his earlier incarnations. In a study that spans centuries and encompasses a wide array of media, Stephen Knight traces the development of the Merlin figure from the earliest literary sources through the modern era, from echoes of a preliterate Celtic tradition to Hollywood blockbusters.

Beginning with a nod to Foucault, Knight lays out his fundamental proposition, that Merlin represents knowledge and its constant ambivalent relationship to power. Regardless of the era in which he appears or the form he takes, Merlin “[will use] knowledge on behalf of those in power, and so in some way, and ultimately in an unacceptable way, expose the limits of the power of the powerful” (xii). Knight argues that the knowledge/power conflict is “inherent to organized societies,” and though Merlin’s story changes in its details over time and space, “the myth’s essential dynamic of knowledge versus power will not alter—it will just be reconfigured to be newly relevant in many varying contexts” (4).

Knight’s survey takes him from the medieval manuscripts of the Black Book of Carmarthen and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae through the French and British romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Mallory, and then through the Renaissance and all the way to twentieth-century novels and film. With each source he considers the role of the Merlin figure vis-à-vis political authority, analyzing Merlin’s actions in detail and highlighting the varying agendas of authors who use Merlin for specific political ends.

The book’s four chapters explore what Knight sees as the primary themes embodied by Merlin across the centuries: wisdom, advice, cleverness, and education. Each theme corresponds broadly to a different historical period and geographic distribution of the Merlin literature, from ancient Britain through medieval Europe to early modern England and finally the contemporary global scene. Knight’s facility in moving between eras and languages is impressive, and his focus on Merlin’s role as a font of knowledge never wavers: in every context, Knight highlights the kinds of information at Merlin’s disposal and elucidates the significance of this information to the rulers with whom Merlin interacts.

Knight’s commentary emphasizes the historical contexts in which each text was composed. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin is a prophet who predicts an ultimate British victory against the invading Saxons. According to Knight, Geoffrey, who is writing of the Celtic past in a period of Norman domination, is both crafting a national epic for his Norman patrons and "in a subtle way suggesting to the Norman lords both the possibilities and limitations of their own authority" (31).

Later, Robert de Boron, employed by a Crusading nobleman, situates Merlin squarely in a supernatural Christian context, connecting him to the story of the Holy Grail (46-47). In Layamon’s Brut Merlin is again a prophet, and the political implications of his prophecies again bubble to the surface. According to Knight, the poem reclaims the Arthur/Merlin tradition for English culture and is characterized by a "British Celtic nostalgic fantasy" which had "increasing currency in the Middle Ages, as English kings struggled increasingly with the influence of Rome" (84).

In the twentieth century, for T.H. White, the knowledge that Merlin represented became "individual, in the sense that it is moral and personal, so in modern terms credible, but also crucially weak in practice because it has no general, supra-individual analytic power, no sociopolitical plans or sanctions to resolve the problems it identifies" (197).

Occasionally there is some confusion in Knight’s terminology: "power" and "knowledge," the central concepts of his study, are not clearly defined and sometimes seem to overlap. Discussing Merlin’s abrupt departure from the narrative of Geoffrey’s Historia, Knight asks,

“…how could power, which acknowledges its need of wisdom—including by sponsoring texts like this—accept the continued and powerful presence of knowledge? Geoffrey… also encapsulates dialectically the two key elements of the Merlin tradition, the power of his knowledge and the difficulty of his engagement with power” (30-31).

Knowledge and power are separate, but knowledge has power; does power also have knowledge? Elsewhere the apparent conflict Knight elaborates between these seems to collapse, as in the work of Robert de Boron, of whom Knight observes: “The new Merlin, a super-cleric who deploys his knowledge on behalf of the powerful, is a projection of learning such as Robert’s own into the courts of the highest contemporary power” (57-58). In this scenario, as Knight himself admits, there appears to be little conflict between political authority and the knowledge that Merlin represents; indeed, Merlin represents a bridge between scholarly learning and political authority.

Throughout the book Knight argues for the subversive potential of Merlin’s knowledge, and in his conclusion he writes, “If knowledge is of value it must bear danger to someone who will be discomforted by it, or wants to profit by it secretly, and so would prefer it not to remain in the hands of those who have developed it” (222). This negative coding of knowledge is unnecessarily exclusive, and it does not follow from Knight’s own analysis, which elsewhere rightly emphasizes the ambivalence of the power/knowledge relationship: Merlin can be subversive, but he can also affirm the status quo. His knowledge is not truly a tool of the “power” represented in the texts, but of the writers who deploy it. These authors use Merlin’s knowledge in creative ways to suit specific political agenda. It is knowledge that can generate power, which can be normative as easily as it can be subversive.

Despite these semantic quibbles, Knight’s study is a masterful and exhaustive piece of scholarship relevant to scholars in a range of disciplines, from literary criticism to cultural studies, anthropology, and folklore. Merlin is an important epistemological contribution in that it draws attention not to the construction of specific ways of knowing, but to the construction of knowledge itself, and more significantly, to the explicit uses of knowledge by authors with highly unique political agendas. It is not an examination of the production of knowledge as data within a particular disciplinary or national context. Knight is not concerned with the generation of information under the rubric of physics or mathematics or biology, nor of a particular national history. Rather, he explores the category of knowledge as a socially-contingent phenomenon, imagined in each new context as transcendent, but always very much the product of historical processes. Merlin embodies this concept in every incarnation, and so provides an invaluable window onto the construction of knowledge over time.

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[Review length: 1096 words • Review posted on September 15, 2010]