Merlin begins in many places. There is the possibly historical figure named Lailoken, a man who went mad after the ca. 575 Battle of Arfderydd in Cumbria. Having taken part in the horrors of war, Lailoken fled to the Caledonian Forest in Scotland and lived a kind of a shaman's life among the animals and wild nature for fifty years. Only slowly did his eccentricity (and what we would call post-traumatic stress) turn him into a prophet.
Welsh beginnings
Alongside this tradition, however, another figure appears on the battlefield at Arfderydd, that of Myrddin. Whether storytellers merely gave him Lailoken's details – or if stories of Myrddin predate Lailoken – is unclear. But Myrddin is also driven insane by what he saw in the battle; unlike Lailoken, though, he is a public figure. He often retreats to the forest for mysterious purposes, but he is also a political figure, mourning his lost life before the war and still surrounded by enemies who wish to kill him.
He begins to prophesize in public, and several Welsh poems and stories survive about Myrddin, or are purported to be written by him. The most important are collected in the Myrddin Poems, which contains a number of Welsh texts written from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries that were almost certainly composed centuries earlier.
Lailoken and Myrddin both lived in a storytelling milieu – and later a literary one – crowded with characters just
