The Eternal Flame – T.A. Barron

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The Eternal Flame is the third and final volume in T.A. Barron’s The Great Tree of Avalon fantasy trilogy. As in most fantasies that involve power grabs by villains  and salvation by untested heroes, the final book is mostly battle scenes. Books that are a sequence of battle scenes remind me of video games aimed at boys. Lesson learned: Don’t pick up a fantasy series at the end unless you love made-up creatures taking each other out in highly imaginative and bloody ways.

The series treats a world in the stars where some humans and a raft of invented tree, troll, gnome, elf, flamethrower and other critters are trying to destroy or save Avalon. Merlin has been banished to earth so he’s no help. It’s up to the young hero Tamwyn and a couple of chicks—Elli, an orphan who lives by harp music and Brionna, an elf who’s a sharpshooter with a bow and arrow—to save Avalon and several other starry worlds.

Terrible tricks are played on the good guys. People lose limbs, eyes, hope and their lives—well, they’re not all people but they suffer all the same. Once the war commences, it’s a steady procession of engagement, terrible rout by one side or the other, coup de grace via some magical technique or tool, many deus ex machina moments when all is lost but wait! salvation arrives in the nick of time.

The Eternal Flame is certainly imaginative and decently done for a genre book. At the end is a lengthy history and character biographies to help you out if you were an idiot like me and started with book 3. It’s no Lord of the Rings so I wouldn’t categorize it as a young people’s book that is really for all audiences. The stories were NYT best sellers so there are true fans out there, tracking developments in the heavens and worried about good and evil dragons, changelings and enchanted weapons. I like my Avalon tales a bit earthier and more Druidical so I’ll probably glide past volumes one and two and hunt for more Merlin-centric mists and lakes stuff for future reads.

The Eternal Flame (The Great Tree of Avalon, Book 3)   T.A. Barron | Philomel Books   2006

Merlin: Priest of Nature — Jean Markale

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Merlin is the seductive puzzle, the druid trickster, the bearded mentor of young kings, the pawn of priestesses and faeries.  Merlin steals the story as Gandalf, Yoda, Dumbledore and other reincarnations of the powerful, aphoristic sage. But the Merlin we think we know is a mere shade of the many Merlin’s captured in literature from ancient times.  Merlin: Priest of Nature, by the Celtic scholar Jean Markale, traces this Merlin backwards through time and tomes to a 12^th century tale in verse called Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth. That story came from ancient bardic myths and legends about a woods hermit and wild man called Myrddin Wyllt and a mash-up with a warrior chief named Aurelius Ambrosius (Merlinus Ambrosius), both figures that pre-dated Geoffrey’s work and had nothing or little to do with Arthur and Excalibur. Geoffrey also developed a Merlin in his well-known Historia Regum Britanniae, and in his Prophetiae Merlini (Merlin’s Prohecies).  

Markale spins his Merlin story from etymological threads. There are amusing observations, like the probability that Merlinus was a more acceptable latinization of Myrddin than Merdinus, which comes uncomfortably close to the French merde. Geoffrey’s audience was the educated class of Britain and Normandy and they would have known the French word to the detriment of the character. The Welsh, Celtic, Roman, Irish, Anglo-Saxon and other influences in the British Isles and along the Norman coast all serve to clarify the myriad bits that coalesce into a Merlin we accept today. If you enjoy getting lost in the etymological notes of the Oxford English Dictionary, as I do, you will be fascinated by the various permutations of Vivian, Niniane, Nimue, Gwendydd, Ganieda, Mordret, Medrawt, Morgan and more.     

But, if that’s too wonky for you, Merlin the enchanter is intriguing and ambiguous, as much myth as historical person. He may have been a wild woods-hermit, a bard, a sage, a magician who engineered Arthur’s birth and set in motion a legend treasured for a thousand years, a madman besotted with the charms of the Lady of the Lake who immured him under a rock and tricked him into giving her his power. Markale makes the case that Merlin was an heir to druids, a prophet, a master of the natural world, a madman–above all, a literary construct borrowed from appealing narratives and emerging as a powerful and enduring celebrity.

Robert De Boron, a court cleric, added Merlin to a grail history and may have written Lancelot in Prose that firmly fixes Merlin in the story of Arthur. That Merlin goes on to meddle spectacularly with history and ultimately retires to the forest in isolated, divine madness. Sir Thomas Malory wrote a great Merlin character in his thousand-page epic Le Morte D’Arthur, which I keep taking off the bookshelf and then regretfully slipping back when I realize I still don’t have time to finish it. Merlin’s literary evolution is as interesting as the wizard himself.

Merlin: Priest of Nature is a read for those who like to unravel language, or anyone obsessed with the idea of Merlin, flawed bard, outsider, prophet and magician. Markale has included a prodigious amount of scholarship and reference material that would be a good jumping-off point for an in-depth study of Myrddin-Merlin, whoever he was or whatever we would make of him.    

Merlin: Priest of Nature    Jean Markale    Inner Traditions   1995