For the people of antiquity, these myths were part of their religion.  By the Middle Ages, however, the people of Britain had embraced Christianity, and were less interested in the mythical aspects of Arthur as the divine king than in the chivalric ideal of the noble, just, and valiant king, by the grace of God.  The ancient Welsh bards sang the deeds of the heroes and gods across Britain, for even in Edinburgh, Welsh was spoken at that time.But by the time interest in these sagas revived, many new peoples had settled on Britain’s sacred soil: Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Danes, and finally, the Norman knights who brought French as the language of their court.

The twelfth century witnessed the sudden efflorescence of great medieval poetry in French, singing the exploits of heroes and kings of an unknown past.  Chretien de Troyes and Geoffrey of Monmouth are the best-known writers of that time.  They found their source material in the border districts, Brittany and Wales, where the language and poetry of the Celts were still alive.  Of course, those court litterateurs selected what suited them and changed what they took to suit the taste of their patrons, the kings of France and England, the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine.  Thus King Arthur became a medieval knight in a twelfth-century Christian kingdom.

Merlin, however, pagan spirit that he was, had to be described as a child of the devil, for the old gods could not be tolerated.  Yet, among the people of Britain, Merlin had, and has, many friends.  He is, like so many characters in popular traditions, ambiguous—that is, not entirely saintly and angelic.  Medieval scholars were absolutists: Merlin was not completely Christian, so he could not be good.  But this literature already shows signs of a new taste, of the coming Renaissance.  Arthur’s queen has a lover, and that stain on his house will ruin his kingdom.  And Merlin is unable to help since he is trapped in the spell of the beautiful Morgana.

Merlin is the mythical magician who enlivens the oldest stories of Wales.  There, the oldest folktales of Britain are preserved, just as the oldest language is still spoken.  In this mountainous province, all the people who did not want to be subjugated by the Saxon invaders of the late fifth century, nor to emigrate to Armorica (now called Brittany), congregated to make a determined stand against the Saxon kings.  Sometimes they even invaded English territory, so that King Offa had to build an eighty-mile-long dyke to ward them off in 780.  In those days the English still called the Welsh Britons, showing that they were aware of their identity (Welsh, on the other hand, is a word identical with the Flemish Walsch [now Waals], referring to the Walloons).