He is wise with a
riddling evasive wisdom: the builder of Camelot, the prophet, a
shadow of Druidry clinging to the Christian king. His wisdom cannot
avail him: if he beholds "his own mischance with a glassy
countenance," he cannot avoid his shapen fate. He becomes assotted
of Vivien, and goes open-eyed to his doom.
The enchantress, Vivien, is one of that dubious company of Ladies of
the Lake, now friendly, now treacherous. Probably these ladies are
the fairies of popular Celtic tradition, taken up into the more
elaborate poetry of Cymric literature and mediaeval romance. Mr Rhys
traces Vivien, or Nimue, or Nyneue, back, through a series of
palaeographic changes and errors, to Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, a kind
of lady of the lake he thinks, but the identification is not very
satisfactory. Vivien is certainly "one of the damsels of the lake"
in Malory, and the damsels of the lake seem to be lake fairies, with
all their beguilements and strange unstable loves. "And always
Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever
passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for
she was afraid of him because he was a devil's son. . . . So by her
subtle working she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her wit
of the marvels there, but she wrought so there for him that he came
never out for all the craft he could do. And so she departed and
left Merlin.
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