Saxon yobbos, poetic Celts or gwyddbwyll
Roy Kerridge
THE COMING OF THE KING: THE FIRST BOOK OF MERLIN by Nikolai Tolstoy Bantam Press, £12.95, pp.606 Count Nikolai Tolstoy lives at the end of a long lane in Berkshire. Here he uncovered a buried standing stone, and pretended to his children that it had been erected by the wizard Merlin. He even invented a terrible curse on the man who defiled the stone. You can read Merlin's own account of the matter in this book.
This is Nikolai Tolstoy's first novel. In a sense it is a sequel to The Quest for Merlin, Tolstoy's account of his search for traces of the real-life wizard and poet. A knowledge of that book can help as a guide or a map to the traveller who enters the enchanted land of Tolstoy's novel. A cruel, beautiful land, it seems strangely familiar, for it is our own Britain in another aspect, the Island of the Mighty, or Merlin's Precinct. Tolstoy's Dark Ages of the sixth century are not so dark, for he depicts an island where barbarous Saxons are confined to the south, and the rest of the land bathes in a fairy light of Celtic mystery.
To make sure of my facts, I telephoned the Count and he assured me that every character in the book bears the name of a real historical person. All the songs and poems are translations of verses known in the Dark Ages.
At the book's beginning, the Celtic king Ceneu and his retinue seek out the grave of Merlin in a lonely, forbidding spot. They call on his spirit to appear and tell them the outcome of their warring with the Saxon. Merlin appears and begins to speak. He talks all night, not of King Ceneu's prob- lems, but of his own life story. As he speaks, the King's bard inscribes the tale on the hide of a dun cow. Later the cowhide story, Tolstoy's book, is copied by monks and emerges as the Yellow Book of Meifod. In fact, the First Book of Merlin would have taken a week to recite and would have used up the hides of cattle on a thousand hills. Is it meant to be the real voice of Merlin, and are we to accept magic happenings as 'real'? Apparently so. As the unfolding story grips the reader, scep- ticism vanishes. Amid the bloodshed of the battle scenes a religious sense emerges. At the very least, the reader will roll up the last cowskin with a new appreciation of the Welsh and of the necessity of a monarchy in Britain.
To the surprise of all who meet him, Merlin is born fully covered in fur and able to speak in an upper-class, cynical yet self-deprecatory tone. Something of a worldling, in fact. Removed from his mother by a king who rightly fears an ancient prophecy, the newborn infant sails off to sea in a leather bag, his fur falling away at baptism. With no time allowed for growing, he becomes a youth and then a lean one-eyed man of 50, while those around him age more naturally. The 40 years he spends in the sea as a herring are passed over fairly quickly. Later he becom- es a trout, chased through the Thames by an evil spirit. At times this strangeness verges on parody, and it is not until the great hosting of warriors led by Maelgwn the Tall sets out against the Saxons that Merlin-Tolstoy truly finds himself.
Within the magic mysticism and passages in the style of ancient monks recalling paganism runs a boyish adventure story pure and simple, one that ends with the Slaughter of Dineirth. This heroic siege resembles a tale of the Indian Mutiny in red cover with gold writing on the back. A Roman castaway, Rufinus, befriends Mer- lin and King Maelgwn, and surprises the Saxon savages with modern inventions of war, such as giant catapults.
Rufinus, a man who treats war as a science, is out of his depth among magic, poetic Celts, who exasperate him by their waywardness and unpunctuality. Merlin, the most magical and poetical of them all, is an intellectual who can appreciate a foreigner's point of view. Celtic imagina- tion and Roman discipline combine to defeat the Saxons. These are a crude lot, uprooted and charmless as the modern yobbos they resemble. The bleak, cruel, wintry beauty of Norse mythology is de- picted in Tolstoy's book, but so is the drunken, cunning oafishness of men who are severed from their own soil. Two drunk Saxon kings, attempting to greet one another, are instead violently sick over one another's heads. Without civilisation, the Saxon reasserts himself in the Englishman, and we should all join Merlin, Maelgwn and Rufinus in defeating the Saxon.
While warriors rage all around him, stately Celtic King Maelgwn sits in deep melancholy within his hill fort and plays gravely at gwyddbwyll, an early form of chess. This is not presented as an absurdi- ty, but as a necessary magic precaution. Together with a Christian sermon that presents Our Lord as a Celtic warlord on a cattle raid to Hell, these passages are pure Dark Age, a strange reminder of a forgot- ten mode of thought. When things get more serious, Saxon and Celtic kings tussle man to man, rolling, gouging and biting.
Beowulf, the Saxon hero, appears in the battle-fog as an early Hell's Angel. He is quickly disposed of, I am glad to say, by a dragon, one of the Roman devices of Rufinus. When Rufinus is dying and calls for a priest, Merlin can only find Idno Hen the Druid to perform the last rites. Idno speaks of the bright god Lleu of the Skilful Hand, a type of Christ, and christianity is given Blake-like roots in British soil.
But though bright Lleu was slain and left hanging from the Tree . . . his spirit flew heavenwards. . . And there he receives those who have voyaged in a right manner from this world to the next, appearing before them once more in the guise of a beautiful youth, guiding them through a land of emerald meads, limpid streams, fragrant flowers and honey-distilling dew, there to dwell with him for evermore.
I felt I could read this book for ever- more, so I was pleased to learn that Tolstoy intends to write another two volumes of Merlin's adventures. Who is Merlin's father? Is it Lleu himself? I can hardly wait.
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