Merlin

[prosodic]

Did anyone else watch Merlin last night? Overall, I liked it, and will continue watching it, but I'm really confused on a lot of stuff. I studied a great deal of Arthurian Legend in my literature classes, so some things about the show make no sense to me.

For starters, isn't Morgana (AKA Morgaine/Morgan la Fay) supposed to be Arthur's sister...or half-sister? In this show, she's Uther Pendragon's ward and supposedly being groomed to be Arthur's wife. Where in the hell is Guinevere? Oh wait...Morgana has a lady-in-waiting named Guinevere. Hmmmm. How odd.

Also, Lancelot appears to be missing. Perhaps he arrives later on in the series.

Merlin and Arthur are the same age. Not that bothersome to me, really. But also not really how it's been depicted before.

Dragons? I suppose there are dragons in the canon somewhere, but not in anything I've read thus far. But the dragon on this show is pretty badass, so I can dig it.

What is going on on this show? I'm doing a bit of reading on it and it's produced by BBC, and according to Wikipedia, deviates quite a bit from traditional renderings of the tale. For starers, Nimue (the Lady of the Lake, sometimes portrayed as Merlin's lady love) is actually going to become Merlin's adversary. That's next week's show, apparently.

Anyway, this could get me off my Tudors fixation for now and put me back on a Camelot fixation, which I had for about half of my grad school years. I actually chose Arthurian Legend as the theme for the Composition & Literature class I taught in spring 2003, and all the literature we read that semester had something to do with King Arthur.

Now I suddenly want to watch The Mists of Avalon.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Some of the Arthurian lore in my Camelot book may appear changed or unrecognizable, but I went back to the earliest sources, most notably the Welsh stories. Doesn't sound like that's what Merlin is doing, though. (Especially the age similarity between Arthur and Merlin--in the original stories Merlin was found by a king, Vortigern, who existed decades before Arthur is supposed to have.