I saw this as I was walking out of the library and couldn’t resist adding it to the borrowed pile. I’ve read a few Merlin-based books when I was younger (T.A Barron’s Merlins series, basically) so the idea of reading about the history and many incarnations of Merlin throughout history was very appealing.

The Book of Merlin looks at Merlin from a few angles:

• Merlin the Shaman
• Merlin the Prophet
• Merlin the Magician
• Merlin the Lover
• Merlin the Sage
• Modern depictions of Merlin (title: The Return of Merlin)

This book excels in the sheer amount of Merlin-related and possibly-Merlin-related material that it has collected. It goes all the way to the present, and I enjoyed the discussion of the 2017 movie ‘The Kid Who Would Be King’, which was a movie I also really enjoyed. If you want an overview of how Merlin has been portrayed through the years, this is the book for you.

However, the book does suffer from what I can only call ‘sloppy’ writing, which means you have to be pretty alert while reading this book. I think that the author really wanted to draw a line through the various portrayals of Merlin to find an origin, so sometimes, leaps were made. For example, I’m still not certain how the Myrddin poems refer to Merlin, but the book takes a few references and assumes that they refer to Merlin. Later on, Matthews uses the Irish myth of Etain, connects it to a different form of her name (Befinn), takes the meaning of that name (White One) and says that it’s “too similar to be mere coincidence” when we compare it to meaning of Gwenddydd name (White Day). Gwenddydd is the twin sister of Merlin/Myrddin, as described in the Welsh book: The Black Book of Carmarthen. And all this to connect Gwenddydd to Nimue (through possibility, or as the book puts it “easily could have developed”, Befinn’s name change in the hands of French romances to “Vivianne, another variant of Nininane’s name”. I personally find this to be a a reach.

I’m also not sure that the physical existence of Merlin has been proven in the book, but the book seems to go back and forth between “Merlin as depicted in history” and “Merlin the real person”, stating in Merlin the Prophet that “This form of trance state was common among classical shamans the world over; as someone versed in the shamanic arts, Merlin would certainly have been aware of the technique.” Would he? Or are we referring to the people who wrote about Merlin?

Overall, The Book of Merlin presents a wealth of information about the way Merlin has been written about and ties it up together in an appealing narrative. I would, however, caution readers to beware of believing the interpretations the book offers wholesale – some of the arguments here seem a bit weaker than the others. (Of course, I have to offer the disclaimer that I am not an expert, this is based on what the book writes about itself. I may be wrong and the book may be entirely trustworthy.)