Introduction [chapter]

2018 Merlin  
Merlin is an icon: a few lines will create him, sketching the pointed hat and the long beard, plus a magic wand and someone to teach. So T. H. White described him in The Once and Future King, Disney visualized the image in The Sword in the Stone, and Lerner and Loewe set it to music in Camelot. But that image is an illusion of modernity: medieval Merlin was not old and bearded, was wise rather than a wizard, guided countries rather than learners. The modern icon delineates an image not
more » ... mythic, but one we find both credible and consoling among contemporary anxieties. Modernity, though, is not the first period to refashion Merlin and his knowledge in its own terms and interests: Merlin and his knowledge have multiple and conflicted meanings, developed and varied over some thousand years in many differing genres, locations, and political contexts. This book will explore these many manifestations of Merlin. Merlin's beard, wand, and pointy hat are recent phenomena with recent meaning: through those motifs the figure who possesses knowledge is deprived of both normality and vigor, made pointy-headed to match the hat. This reduction of Merlin and his knowledge seems a odd phenomenon in an age of science, which is the Latin for knowledge. In fact it is a dialectical reality, the modern version of the constant and age-old conflict between knowledge and power. This book will argue that when knowledge is most important, most close to taking control, that is when it is most vulnerable to some form of limitation or repression by power. Michel Foucault's underlying
doi:10.7591/9781501732928-002 fatcat:fozpteihdvcqfpl6yoo3ut5j4y