Merlin finds Merlin: a Book Review/Plug

I, Merlinus AmBrettus, have just returned from the library here at Fordham with a new little treasure of 430 pages. I was grateful to find our library had it in the stacks. I looked on Barnes and Noble and it runs 108.00 dollars, but at some point I my just go ahead and buy it ... it looks that promising. The title is Merlin: a Casebook, and it is a collection of essays edited by Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson. I went to the library after my summer job (having emailed myself the call # from work), which is an editorial assistantship for an academic journal in Medieval Studies called Traditio (a very respected journal in the field, meaning the assistantship is a very good line on my CV). The article I am currently pre-formatting (a bugger with 250 end-notes) is on the Merlin prophecies in some medieval Italian texts (basically prophecies attributed to Merlin concerning the rise of an anti-emperor who will then be thrown down eventually by the coming of a true emperor, but the material was quickly picked up religiously and applied to the Papacy, particularly in regard to Pope Celestine V, formerly a Franciscan hermit, who reigns briefly and is then replaced, and subsequently persecuted, by the "wicked Pope" Boniface VIII [who is, if I remember correctly, heavily criticized in Dante's Inferno] - with those who promulgated the literature under the heading of the papacy putting forth the idea that this new "anti-pope" will soon be replaced by a righteous Pope who will be crowned by angels [thus also known as the "angelic pope"]) ... thus it falls under religio-political thought in Medieval studies. So that is how I stumbled across the book (in the bibliography for this article ... and sat up and thought "what in the name of Merlin's most baggy Y fronts is this?" - and 50 points to the house of anyone who can identify that reference without looking in the books) MERLIN: I'm guessing this will be a very good read, as it has an essay on Merlin in Modern Fiction that begins by discussing the Merlinus Ambrosius character in CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength. More than that, it seems to be an extremely thorough exposition of the entire "canon" of Merlin literature. It is broken down into 2 sections: Evolution of the Legend and Major Motifs and Works. The Former consists of essays on: the Merlin legend in Welsh tradition of prophecy; Prophet and Magician; Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake; Italian Literature; Spanish Lit; German Lit; "New World Wizard"; and Modern Fiction. The latter has: as wise old man; in the Grail Legend; Robert de Boron's Merlin; as Romancier (Paternity, Prophecy and Poetics); Malory's Tragic Merlin; Spenser's Merlin; Druids, bards and Tennyson's Merlin; as Image of the Artist in Tennyson, Dore, Burne-Jones and Beardsley; as Master and Mediator of the natural world. One of the reasons I am so interested/excited is the whole issue of prophecy (a sort of side interest corresponding to my plan to work on Jeremiah the prophet for my Ph.D. dissertation). I already use Merlin in passing in my Intro to OT course for sophmores. When we get to the books of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings and the critique by prophets such as Hosea (in all of which the tension between prophet and king is central), I use Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien has a great essay on the anonymous Gawain piece, attached to his own translation of Gawain in a small little paperback - well worth buying and reading) - basically the author of Gawain makes a criticism of the "court" of Arthur, on the light side taking itself and its values way too seriously (a bit like the line "on second thought, let's not go to Camelot ... it is a silly place" in Monty Python's holy Grail - a line which I also use in the classroom), and on the darker side those values tempting Gawain to act directly against real virtue. Hosea specifically says that the "mirth" of the Northern Kingdom will be ended. In this I also draw on Charles Williams' (friend and colleague of Lewis and Tolkien) exposition of Arthur as the tension between the Pendragon/Logres and King/Britain concepts of kingship (for more on this read Williams' essay on the figure of Arthur in his volume generally referred to as "The Arthurian Torso," if you can find a copy used [last I knew it had not re-entered print in a long time], which contains his 2 volumes of Arthurian poetry, his essay, and an essay by Lewis on Williams' poetry - Williams' also has a novel called "War in Heaven" which centers around the Grail ... but you can also glean alot about the concepts of kingship from Lewis' That Hideous Strength) ... because the idea and role of kingship is central and the Arthur material provides an illustrative comparison from other lit that helps the kids get the ideas Up until now I have simply thrown in in passing that in the comparison Merlin would obviously be the prophet character (the "king maker and king breaker"), but I have thus far only been able to do this in passing as sort of my own passing extrapolation from the comparison ... now (from this article and this book) I have texts to point to for it. HARRY POTTER: The thing that interests me most is how a mage character is thought of as also a prophet character (although it should be noted that in the Gospel accounts, the magi from the East are seen as possessing prophetic lore concerning the coming of a king). In Harry Potter there is the whole issue of divination - and Dumbledore's and McGonnegal's commentary on it. I use that part of HP especially to develop the distinction (most clearly developed by the American Jewish Rabbi Avram Heschel) between prophecy as foretelling (mere prediction) and as forth-telling (socio-religious criticism of present conditions): Harry wonders what the pensieve can have to do with the prophecy - but for Dumbledore examining Voldemort's past so as to understand him better has everything to do with the prophecy. Anyway, a scholar like John Granger, whose main area is this realm (medieval lit), may have come across this book when it first came out back in 2003, but, being primarily in Biblical Studies, I have just come across it, but am very excited to delve further into such a central character in the magical world that informs the HP novels, and maybe from a distinctive angle of the concerns in studying prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. PS I asked yesterday and found out that we editorial assistants receive a complimentary copy of the 2 volumes of the Traditio journal on which we work - which is very exciting to me because last week I just finished pre-formatting an article on "occultic properties" in the "nature" thought of Aristotle (and how it was received by medieval philosophers such as Aquinas and the Muslim Aristotelean philosophers Avicenna and Averroes) - back in the day when thoughts on "magic" and "nature" were closer together and "magic" was thought to draw on "hidden" (the original meaning of the word "occult") properties that were, none-the-less, part of the concrete nature of a thing ... should be interesting stuff.