Destiny - that callous and useless word - will become a curse upon Merlin’s tongue soon enough. Now, he is only irate that it isn’t quite what he hoped for. A naivete that is almost endearing.
Episode 2: Valiant
Gwen - sweet, blessed Gwen - meets him after ‘training’ has finished, offering her arm to help him stumble along. They’re heading through the lower town, back to her house, Merlin still in the armour - he doesn’t know where it’s supposed to go, and he’s damned if he’s going to ask Arthur, so he’s just going to keep it. Besides: it’ll be useful for his education, Gwen says.
Episode 3: The Mark of Nimueh
The guards have gone back to their posts, leaving the two of them some privacy - a gift Arthur will never know he had given Merlin - and Gwen is imprisoned far from other, more mundane prisoners. Merlin drops his voice to a whisper all the same. He has learnt caution today, if not yet wisdom.
"It was me. Who put the magic poultice under your father's pillow."
Gwen's unearthly calm cracks, and she curls in on herself, the echoes of her sobs following her down to the floor. Despite knowing they're too far apart, Merlin crouches down and tries to reach her through the bars.
Episode 4: The Poisoned Chalice
"I expected so much more." The woman says.
To Arthur’s ear, she sounds not victorious, but strangely sad.
“Who are you?” He asks, only now wondering that he never got her name.
“The last face you’ll ever see.”
Mournful, rather than gloating. Arthur cannot understand why -
Episode 5: Lancelot
Arthur is, honestly, surprised to find Lancelot still sharpening swords as Arthur instructed, sheltered from the heat of the day in the undignified and unwalled back yard of the castle’s weaponsmith. Most of the recruits that come to Camelot already grown have…certain ideas about what they should and should not have to do. The rich blood of the sons of lords and kings makes them quick to forget the indignities of their squireage, and quicker still to anticipate the privileges of knighthood that, to their minds, they have already earned. They often do not believe Arthur’s sincerity when he corrects them.
If a page or a squire must work hard, then a knight must work harder still, not less. That Lancelot has not objected to this lesson by abandoning his work is unusual.
Interesting.
Episode 6: A Remedy to Cure All Ills
The various tools and apparatus that Edwin Muirden has asked be ported into the castle are…eclectic. Merlin only recognises a few of them: some from Gaius’ collection, some from the apothecary in the town. Most of them are enticingly strange, though.
Edwin catches his curious perusal. Where Merlin expects an admonishment, Edwin instead gives a little smile.
“Yes,” he says, as if they are co-conspirators in some scheme. “It was all originally designed for alchemy.”
Episode 7: The Gates of Avalon
“I don’t care!” Morgana screams. She wrenches herself out of Gwen’s grip. “I don’t care! Let him kill me, let me die. I’d stack the firewood myself sooner than live with knowing I’d let Arthur come to harm!”
Even now she can see the pyre, feel the first licks of flame at her heels. She looks no longer upon the present, upon the room around her; she looks at herself.
Gwen looks at her too. Would take the firewood from her lady’s hands, would tear the pyre apart, if she but had the time. She has it not.
With a torn and wrenching heart, she douses the fire. The smoke will remain.
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His shirt is not his usual plain fare, but one of a red to match the royal colours, trimmed around the sleeves, neck, and hem with precious gems and embroidered horses in gold thread, caught mid gallop. The collar is high and the hem long, to Arthur’s knees, but the sleeves remain short: beneath he wears an undershirt of purest white decorated with more golden thread. About his waist is a white belt to match the undershirt, and beneath that trousers of soft cream, stuffed into high leather oxblood boots. His head bears a golden circlet, and upon his fingers are many rings, and about his neck a half cloak of red and white plaid with a white fox-fur trim.
- The Poisoned Chalice: signing the treaty.
If in doubt, put a man in a big rectangle.
'Historical accuracy' is an impossible thing to achieve as a rule, and certainly not something that can really be done with the mysterious time period that this show is set in, no matter how I winge. It's not a gripe I really have with Arthur's wardrobe anyway, with the exception of the occasional suede-looking jacket.
(And the shoes. All the shoes in this show are from the local Primark bargin bin.)
Nah. My real gripe is with how plain it all is.
He's royalty! Where's the bling? Where's the extravagance? Where's the weirdness?
Whatever time period you settle on - late antiquity, sub-roman Britain, ambiguous medieval - the fashion should be notably strange to the modern eye. Like, I'd kill to see Arthur in a goddam houppelande, and a chaperone, and a pretty pair of hose.
(Pictured - late medieval Arthur if the BBC weren't cowards.)
So, big rectangle.
The easiest way to start making clothing is a tunic, and the easiest way to make a tunic is to take a big rectangle and put a small hole in the middle for the wearers head. Most of fashion history (generalising wildly, of course) is a variation on the theme of Big Rectangle with Hole. Especially in late antiquity and early medieval fashion, at least what we know about it, the tunic is the base garment upon which everything else was built, even if you were as rich as Midas. The bit that marked you as rich was usually how much fabric and what colour. Fabric and dye was expensive, so the more you had, for fabric (took longer to make), or the variety or depth of colour for dying (some colours were costly, and different shades needed to go into the vat at different times), the higher the cost.
So Arthur should be to Merlin as a peacock is to a common sparrow. Where's the embroidery? Where's the layers? Where's the bling? The fancy outfit Arthur seems to default is his armour, for goodness sake -
- which can be fancy, but is also heavy, cumbersome, and easily swapped out for cloth that can be made to ape armour if you really want -
- and that just doesn't cut it.
So, what might a fancy Arthur look like? Well, sadly for me, a houppelande is probably too late in the period for this version of Arthur - if we care about period accuracy, the appearance of Saxons, as opposed to, say, the English, rather sets a date limit. Rather than spend too much time worrying when which bit of fashion came when (buttons are apparently later to the game than I ever would have guessed) I went for some British medieval staples:
Bitches love layers, bitches love gold, and bitches love plaid.
I found a few inspiration pieces - the brooch above is a replica of one found in Bath, in the distinctive pennular style, for example -and otherwise went with something that wouldn't look too out of place with the costuming on the rest of the show. It's fancy enough that Arthur actually matches the glam level of Morgana, his nearest peer, in a way that I hope merges what we might expect from a very 2000s masculine Arthur with something that's actually interesting to look at.
It is the hour of the wolf. The hour of the bat, the thief, the sly fox and the solemn ghost.
It is the hour of the witch.
All candles and tapers are long out, the fire in its hearth banked and slumbering till cold morning, when those servants who find their work in the pre-dawn glow will come and waken it, so that their masters shall not suffer the chill. For now, the mistress of these rooms is still sensibly abed, sleeping, guarded by bed-curtains and quilts and goose-down pillows. The dark yet presses softly on her eyes. It is not time for her to wake. It is time for her to dream.
Or not to dream. Rather, to see.
Well fuck. Guess I'm back, Chapter 7 in tow.
Anyway, who wants to hear me bitch some more about the linguistic choices of canon bbcmerlin.
In the end notes on ao3, I explain that I changed Aulfric to Ailil and Sofia to Órlaith - some Irish names that sound a little unusual to my very English ears, but not wholly foreign. As with many Celtic heritage names, they actually look stranger than they sound: Ah-lil and Orla are not so very far from Ioan, Siobhan, or Bryn, when spoken aloud, all names of people I know.
Perhaps if the beeb had been content to just have generic otherworldly entities, I wouldn't (continue) to be so petty about the language used, but they very clearly name them 'the sidhe', which gets us into pan-Celtic territory, and then claim that the writing on the staff is Ogham, which sits us now squarely in the Irish camp. So not just the names are changed - their spells are in Old and Middle Irish, taken from this gem of a website again, and I use modern Irish when the non-magical text talks about them. It's why we've got 'aos sí' for the collective, and duine for the individual - I had a heck of a time trying to find what one might call an individual of the aos sí, with no luck, so went for the Irish for 'person' instead. Given that the aos sí are also sometimes called 'daoine sí', with daoine as the plural of duine, it felt acceptably close.
In general I know pan-Celtic stuff is a bit out of fashion compared to its heights in the 90's and 00's, and just doing a 1:1 match between Irish, Welsh, and Scottish traditions - all of which do have some kind of fae tradition - isn't the academically watertight venture it might appear. But, given I'm trying to stick close to the vibe of a show brought out in 2008, I hope you'll all forgive me for including it. I certainly can't do worse than having an Ogham writing, Celtic originating fae creature doing spells in Old English.
So if you were wondering why I had aos sí (Irish) from Anwnn (Welsh), specifically from 'ndún Aball' (Old Irish) aka 'Fort of Apples', well. Now you know.
Upon the island there are figures -
- there is nothing -
- there are ghosts -
Upon the island there are people of a kind Merlin has never seen before: of many kinds, perhaps, though he will later find it difficult to say one way or another, to say anything certain at all, for they seem to shift between one visage and the next the way Merlin might shift between emotions. He sees faces, he is sure, that bear resemblance to people he knows in Camelot, dressed in skins as they do in old stories of the world when they were but petty barbarians, or in peplos and tunic as if stepped straight from the frieze in a noble villa; then, they change, and their fine garb is touched by the neglect of years, and their faces sunken, skin burnt by ice or turned frail and brown like cheap leather; and though Merlin feels that they are still grand, with dignity beyond the kings of men, he also pities them.
Grand, but dead - or something like it. Beyond kings, perhaps, but below their corpses too.
I'm particularly fond of the bits about Anwnn. I've spent an awfully long time researching and deciding what I wanted my version of the Otherworld to look like, including how you get there and who lives there. Gone are the little blue people, who I can only assume gone from the more modern Victorian influenced version of fairies, and instead I've gone with people a bit more regal, and, hopefully, a lot more unsettling.
There's a lot of folk tales and lit that looks at fae beings - not necessarily aos sí - through the lens of the dead, or of ancestors, or a people that came before. I heartily recommend the podcast Folkways, and their episodes on the Otherworld. You'll find a lot of their stuff for free on places like Spotify, but the link I've put will take you to their ko-fi page - please give them a look, I literally would not have conceived of this version of Anwnn without listening to their stuff.
To create the look of the aos sí, I looked at a lot of bog bodies, ice mummies, and other preserved remains from very early in human history. Bog bodies in particular are so interesting - they are often flattened by the weight of the peat that settles on them, and are coloured by the mineral heavy soil/water until they often have this very specific red hue. I'm loathe to put images of what are very much human remains in a post, so if you're curious, go and look it up. The colours of the Old Croghan Man in particular are disturbingly stunning.
I'll not comment much upon the changes from the original episode to my re-write, save to say that the MVP is once again Gwen - her choices for Órlaith and Morgana are gonna come back to her, one way or another.
The room, when he enters, is filled with flame. At its source stands Edwin, face twisted with anger. At its burning centre is Gaius.
Merlin has come upon an execution.
“What are you doing?” He yells, bile rising as he glares at the man he thought so clever.
Gaius shouts, sounding desperate. “He was trying to kill the King! I couldn’t let him.”
Oh. Of course he was. For a moment, Merlin is overwhelmed with that same sympathetic understanding he found with Mary Collins, so long ago: who did Edwin lose, the last time he was so close to such a flame?
My writing might be a bit like buses - none for ages, and then several turn up all at once...
Anway - riding this wave of motivation, here's Chapter 6!
First off, I want to give credit where it's due: the bulk of inspiration for the changes in this episode come from this excellent post by @tyrannuspitch.
^here's a boquet of flowers for you - promise there's nothing wrong with them
It's this meta - and our own household's howling indignation every time Uther lives and a magic user dies - that prompted the change in the last few scenes of this episode.
“Release him,” he says to Edwin, arms spread wide, palms facing down in an expression of peace. “Please.”
For starters, some more angst about yet another sorcerer Merlin kills in service of Camelot: specifically this time, for Gaius, who, for better or worse, has chosen to stand against Edwin.
EDWIN You didn't know he was a sorcerer? Ah. I wonder what Uther will do. Probably have him burnt.
GAIUS You would betray another sorcerer?
EDWIN You did.
Like, Edwin's not wrong here. We know, canonically, that Gaius turned people over to the Camelot inquisition - it's not come up before now, not explicity, but Uther doesn't call folks 'allies against magic' for nothing. We'll hear later on that he helped some people escape too, though we're never given enough information either way to say whether Gaius was acting as a double agent on the side of magic, or whether he just thought to spare a few people that he cared about.
Is Gaius a true believer in the Utherian doctrine? Hard to say. He's certainly absorbed an ethos of caution and, argubly, corruption: Merlin is constantly told that magic is dangerous, a tool of last restort. Not wrong, per sey, but when it's the only food you're fed, you're going to grow in a certain way.
And we get our first ethical contrasts, the first real assaults on the system of ethics that Gaius is imparting to Merlin. One, from Edwin, who speaks of magic with such freedom and love, but who also sees it at least somewhat as a means to power (not unlike our unfavourite king...). The second, and the one to which Merlin is much more likely to pay attention, is of course from Gwen.
Merlin knows what she's going to request of him before the words have reached her lips. “You want to know if I could help her instead.”
“Is it selfish of me to ask? I know it would be dangerous for you, I just -” She covers her mouth with a shaking hand, looks away to hide herself, even slightly, from his well-meaning look.
“It’s not selfish. Not at all. But…”
Gwen snaps her gaze back to him, and now it is his turn to hide.
“Gaius said I shouldn’t.”
That's gonna be important, these two constrating sets of ideals. Imagine if she'd been in the King's chambers at the end.
“Why do you want to be a knight so much?” Merlin asks him. The source of a dream can be illuminating, in its own way.
Lancelot, behind him, answers in a low tone. Something of melancholy sits upon his tongue. “When I was a boy, my village was attacked by Frankish raiders - God alone knows how they had gotten so far west. I imagine the village must be gone now.” He pauses, and Merlin turns to see him fidgeting with the leather cuffs around his wrists. “They were slaughtered where they stood. My father, my mother. Everyone. I alone escaped, further west, to my mother’s people in Armorica, and then, when I was ready, to here. I have devoted my life to the art of combat, and now -” he shrugs, “- everything I fought for. Wasted.”
Not wasted, Merlin thought. Such skills were never wasted. But he saw that there was no way to convince Lancelot of that now.
“I give you my word,” he said, prompting Lancelot to raise his head. “Whatever it takes, I will make this right.”
Chapter 5! Our boy Lance has arrived! *Insert celebatory horm noise here*
The Lancelot episode is one of my favourites, and is the beggining of Arthur amassing his knights who are noble in spirit rather than blood - something that we'll come back to in later episodes, and which I intend to give a different take on than the show's.
Gaius: The First Code of Camelot states that only those of noble blood can serve as a knight. Uther created the knights to protect this kingdom from those who wished to destroy it. He knew he would have to trust each of his knights with his life. So he chose them from the families that had sworn allegiance to him.
(I have Opinions on how medieval-fantasy stories deal with noble class - I started writing it out here, but it got so long that I thought it would be better off as it's own post. So keep an eye out for that! For now, suffice it to say that it's going to change.)
The other thing I'm doing a bit differently compared to the show, highlighted in this episode, is the anti-magic competancies of a kingdom apparently famous for them.
Uther: You must prepare your knights, Arthur.
Arthur: Have faith, Father. We'll be ready.
Are you, though?
Look, I love swords as much as the next bi, but a suitable weapon for every senario they are not. You want to fight a huge, aerial creature? With a short-range weapon?
Like, they didn't even go for greatswords. I'm just saying.
You want something with reach, and you want something that can control its movement. Given that griffins aren't real, and that we don't really have winged animals of that size anyway, I chose to think of it as if they were fighting a boar that was particularly aeorodynamic. And for boars, you use spears, and you use crowd control - usually dogs.
Now, whether or not Uther and the rest of his retinue have ever fought a griffin specifically, we do know that they've fought dragons. They were so good at it that most think dragons extinct! A griffin is just a small dragon that doesn't breath fire - an easier dragon, really, a cakewalk. Even allowing for most of the actual fighting force being made up of men too young to have seen the Purge, the tactics would still be known by those in charge - it would surely be part and parcel of any training Uther put Arthur through, as much as would be relevant at least.
So, if we assume that these people can at least make an educated guess as to the best way to combat the griffin, and we assume ideal tactics match what would work with irl large mammals -
“And a spear for each man,” Arthur says, mind already whirring, thinking how to best defeat this novel enemy. “For the beast will likely not close with us.”
Uther nods. “You see the shape of our attack already. As you prepare the knights, so I shall prepare the armsmen, the hunters, and the falconers.”
“The falconers? Whatever for?”
“You said it yourself, Arthur. This beast has wings. Your knights will have the best chance of killing it if we can remove that advantage. Those that work in the royal mews were invaluable once in our eradication of dragons. Weighted nets, game hounds, mimic whistles. And for the guardsmen, bows and buckets of thick tar.”
“You hope that we can lure it, and then ground it.”
Spears for everyone in that courtyard, and nets for controlling its movement. I kept the, frankly stupid, decision by Uther later to send the knights out unsupported and in the dark to finish the job - he is still a man of high hubris, convinced that there is nothing magic can make that he can not defeat. But that first fight needed changing up.
Two other minor descisions, about the two I think are really the stars of this episode:
Gwen's changed role in this ep is really a continuation of her new role in the season - Merlin's best buddy, and co-conspiritor in shennanigans. She isn't going to sit around while her friends run headlong into danger. No sir. She's going to go with them of course, nervous but brave. Is there going to be fighting? Well, later canon episodes show that someone (Morgana?) has taught her at least the basics with a sword. I went with a bow this time, mainly as a salute to the very medieval British tradition of peasants being damn excellent with bows - sometimes it was a legal imperitive to practice so many hours a year, specifically to make sure that the levy in wartime was as good as can be.
The other thing Gwen gets in this ep is -
Merlin speaks, in a manner Gwen has never heard, does not know, but which tugs against her like a half forgotten childhood memory.
A clue for you all, which I'll not be explaining for a while yet.
Onward"
You may have noticed in the flavour text at the top of this post a brief line about the Franks, and about Armorica. This links in with Lancelot's backstory, as I've decided to construct it.
The character of Lancelot is from the French & German versions of the Arthurian mythos, with a recurring spot among the Dutch, and doesn't really enter the English canon until later. It seemed right to keep him French, or as French as you can get before France is even around. The Vulgate has him as from "in the borderland between Gaul and Brittany", which I like, and helps lay down some new and interesting threads.
The Franks did indeed move from east to west during their various conquests of what was once Gaul, and I imagine that Lancelot's village fell around or just after the fall of the Kingdom of Soissons in 486 - the rest of former Gaul, save Brittany and Septimania, would fall during his lifetime.
Having this early nod to the Franks - Germanic peoples who migrated into and conquered much of the former Roman Empire, doesn't that sound familiar - will help me put more substantial bits in later. It seems right - in a show that talked a big game about a Golden Age TM, and what aspects of pervious ages (Uther/Romans, druids/Celts) to bring forward - that we should consider the real world changes that were happening during the theoretical years of Arthur's life.
As for Brittany - for those who don't know, Brittany=Armorica, the most celtic part of France (they still have morris dancing I think), and a destination for migrants from Britain during this period. I imagine the reverse was also true. Either way, places like Cornwall kept trading with Armorica, bits of the Iberirian penninsula, and further still.
(Cornwall is one of those weird places that got more Roman after the Romans left, in part due to the continued stability of their trade. Grass is always greener, I guess.)
I have no idea if this was deliberate on the part of the writers, but when they made Igraine of Cornwall into Igraine du Bois, they opened a rather neat posibility: the du Bois family, established in Armorica, from a long line of Romanised Gauls, powerful enough to put themselves forward as nobles if they weren't such already, emmigrating to Cornwall in part or full sometime after 410.
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A young maid in Bayard’s colours trips over her own feet, and her burden of cushions and blankets get hurled floorward. Merlin - feeling a camaraderie with anyone that clumsy - throws himself next to her immediately and tries to help her. Their hands cross over, grabbing for the same things, tugging them in opposite directions. Merlin isn’t helping at all.
“Sorry,” the maid says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean - oh -”
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Merlin says, passing a cushion with too much force and sending her pile of bedding toppling again. “Happens to me all the time. As you can see.”
The maid laughs: it seems to catch her by surprise, and she glances up at Merlin, unsure of her own humour. He can’t help but laugh himself, giving her permission to find it all as funny as he does. She has a nice smile, he thinks. Kind.
With a quickness that will later have him wondering, Merlin decides he likes her.
Chapter four is here, finally. I've had a bit of a break between the last chapter and this one, but we're back at it again just in time for Yuletide - and here, my special gift for you all:
UTHER Camelot welcomes you, Lord Bayard of Cair Lerion.
Cair Lerion, not Mercia. It's a bit of a petty change, I'll admit: it does nothing to change the story as of yet, if it ever will, and is purely for my own satisfaction. But it ties into my general disdain for the very English trappings of bbc merlin, which should have been Welsh, or at the very least more generally Brythonic.
I mean, Mercia is an Anglian kingdom, so even if I ignore the historical bits - it doesn't much matter when Mercia was founded (6th century) if the show only vaguely picks a time period (??14th???) - we're still left with the same problem that we had with Old English=magic.
No???? The Angles, Saxons and Jutes are the bad guys??? We can't just smack a Anglin kingdom down and declare it an ally of Camelot without doing some on-screen examination of that?
Which, ya know, the show didn't do. And I don't want to do either, tbh, though I'd bet for different reasons, so Mercia has to go. Instead, we get a taste of what was probably happening in Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries in real life: in the wake of the Roman ruling infrastructure collapsing, power would have disolved back to whatever locals were willing to take it. That might have meant wealthy elites, landlords, high-ranked soldiers or veterens - the possibilities are quite endless, and I've not picked one specifically for Bayard. What I have decided about him is that his ancestors were probably Gaels or Franks - Bayard is a very French name - and that he, or the founder of his line, chose an established location to rule over and from.
I think many people probably did, given the evidence we have of continued habitation in so many places. I picked Cair Lerion - Leicester - over others because it has a lovely Welsh name, and because it has more Roman associations over the Anglian associations places like Tamworth or Repton have. It's not too far from Camelot, either, in the version of Albion's geogeraphy I have in my head.
Put a pin in that geography bit - we'll be coming back to it later in the season.
Now, about Merlin and 'Cara'...
She has a nice smile, he thinks. Kind.
With a quickness that will later have him wondering, Merlin decides he likes her.
Merlin's magic vibe sense has caught him out once again. There are a few things Merlin and his magic do in this chapter that I don't want to explain lest I spoil something for what's to come, but I did want to say this bit.
Merlin is getting a handle on some very specific parts of his gift, to Nimueh's detriment.
He looks. He sees -
- through the water, their eyes meet -
- she stumbles back from the font, shaken.
It is cold and dark, this place we are shown. Pale rock shines - coated with ice, a thousand sharp crystals - and somewhere beyond our sight is the irregular drip drip of water falling onto stone. A cave.
There is someone here.
Burgundy robes, which we have seen before in a midnight market. Hands which we have seen passing a necklace to and fro: we watch them now, standing before a waist high font hewn from the very stone of the cave, dipping their fingers in so that they can better work the clay they hold. They are shaping it with long digits into a creature no bigger than can be held in their hands. It is more or less reptilian, with something approaching a crest on its head, scales down its back and legs. The tiny creature is placed in a hinged egg, which bears, in expensive red ink, images of snakes and lizards and a very familiar symbol.
Two chevrons, overlapping, with a dot in the diamond space in the middle.
Chapter three is here! And we have our first truly big changes from canon: the casting of Nimueh, the language of magic, and the Merlin's secrecy.
With no slight at all to Michelle Ryan, I've always thought that Nimueh should have been cast with an older actor. She's meant to be a contemporary of Uther and Igraine, part of their court in the lead up to the purge, and while her youth can be explained away -
UTHER
It can't have been. We'd know her. That witch's face is not easily forgotten.
GAIUS
She's a powerful sorceress. She can enchant the eye that beholds her. We never knew it was her.
- I just wasn't satisfied with such lukewarm reasoning. So, the planning for this chapter included the search for a new Nimueh.
I gave myself some limitations, which I've used for all the new casting I've done for this story:
No actors who don't normally do this kind of television work - that means I can't cast Cate Blanchett in a role.
No-one who wasn't working when the show was airing - 2008 to 2012.
If in doubt draw from the known pool of BBC and period actors - the old joke that we all know Britain only has ten actors etc etc.
If you've seen my reblogs, you already know who I picked - Michelle Gomez, who can do weird as easily as she can do regal, and can hold her own in a scene with Anthony Head and Richard Wilson. We're ditching the prom dress in favour of something almost as anachronistic but many times more dignified, with inspiration from gods, queens, and whatever pre-Roman fashion I can find.
Emphasis on the pre-Roman - for a show about a Celtic myth, BBC Merlin sure gets unecessarily into the English side of it? Like, mild tangent, but we could have had three lovely Irish accents in the main cast if they hadn't been cowards about it - Nimueh sounds Glaswegian now, bite me BBC - and at least an attempt at Old Welsh for our magic, instead of the bizare choice that was Old English.
You know, Old English? The language of the Angles and the Saxons et al? The traditional enemy of Arthurian heros (if we ignore the Romans and each other) and the mooks of evil Morgana in season five? Why is our Welsh-derived mythocial magic sounding closer to Beowulf than to the Mabinogion?
Anyway, the magic is in Welsh now.
Or, as Welsh as I can reasonably get: I didn't want to use modern Welsh as our magical language because that feels weird ('Welsh is a living language, not a prop' being about the sum total of my feelings on it) and to no-ones surprise the resources on Old and Middle Welsh just aren't there in the same way as for English, so I've reached a comprimise with myself. I'm taking poetry and prose from the Welsh tradition and - choosing the lines that fit the gist of the spell, then finding those lines, changing the othography a bit, making valiant guesses - using those instead.
An example of my method, for those interested. Note - my Modern Welsh is limited to 'hello', 'goodbye', and 'tea, thanks', and my Old Welsh non-existant, so bear with me.
Lets go with a line of magic from the start of the episode:
In the waters of her font, the woman in the burgundy robe watches. The water shows her - and us - things beyond natural human sight. As the water displays the far-distant egg bobbing in the unknown pool, the woman speaks
“Trannoeth y bore ef agychwynnawd hela ac adoeth y dyffrynn afon adygwyd y Camelot.”
From with the egg, the creature reaches out. The shell cracks.
Working from this website, that line started out life as:
"Trannoeth y bore ef a|gychwynnawd a|e|nifer ac a|doeth y dyffrynn auon a|dygỽyd y ruuein."
"And the next day in the morning he set forth with his retinue, and came to the valley of the river that flowed towards Rome."
'ỽ' is an older Welsh letter that isn't used anymore. Most medieval and later texts gloss it as 'w', so I did that. Same kind of deal with some uses of 'u', which was often used in place of 'v' - for clarity of pronunciation, I change it to the more modern 'f', which is in Welsh equivalent to modern English 'v', so 'auon' becomes 'afon'.
Ruuein - modern is Rhufien - is Rome, which is not where Nimueh is sending the egg, so change that for Camelot. Cut ou the bit about the retinue, which involves me painstackingly trying to work out exactly which words mean what and deleting as necessary - abusing translation websites as best I can.
Lastly, something that is entirely guesswork. The OG texts I'm working from have a lot of '+' signs, which I'm confident just means a word is continuing over the line. It also has other notation that I'm not sure on, such as the '|' that appears in words, usually if they begin with a. I mostly just delete these and hope the language gods look kindly upon me.
Like I said, I don't speak Welsh, ancient or otherwise - if you do, and you want to tell me something about it (critique about my use, advice, fun facts) please do! I'm doing my best, and I'm always happy for my best to be better.
By the Triple Goddess, this is already so long. What else was I gonna say?
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...
...
"I'm sorry," he says, words tumbling from his mouth, true but inadequate for what he's done.
Gwen looks at the ground as she replies, as if she is the one who should be ashamed. "It's not your fault."
"Well…"
Well. It is, isn't it.
Gwen is about to speak again, is looking up at him again, and if he doesn't confess now he never will -
Listen. Listen.
OG Merlin is forever alone.
And that works, to a point - part of the tragedy of the show is that Merlin only ever has enemies and allies he can never fully trust (RIP Lancelot) - even Gaius lies to him, tells him to let people die, whatever the shit was happening in 1.06. That's some juicy tragedy goodness! Love that!
But like.
Hmm.
This show isn't actually a tragedy tho, is it? We get tragic moments, we get the curbstomp moment of the finale (on xmas day??? the fuck bbc), characters die and fail and betray our heroes, yada yada.
But we also get moments that are arguably tragic, but which the show doesn't treat as tragic.
Every single moment Merlin kills a magic user - or near enough that I can't recall an exception - is treated as triumphant. Every time Merlin saves the life of genocidal tyrant Uther Pendragon - triumphant. Every time we return to the status quo - triumphant. The tragedies are only interpersonal - on the many occasions where Merlin drives Arthur further away from accepting magic, it's tragic because of how it affects Merlin, and his relationshop with Arthur - not because of the ongoing persecusion.
The show focuses on the interpersonal to the exclusion of everything else, and then it doesn't even do that full justice. Arthur and Merlin suffer a bit from the new trek Kirk-Spock phenomenon, where we forget other characters exist, and we forget their own dynamics with our main protag.
(Another part of the tragedy, right? That Merlin ends up only seeing Arthur, and nothing else - and maybe only his idealised Arthur at that. Another one that goes largely unaddressed.)
So, Gwen.
I don't want to go too much into why I wanted someone in on the secret, and why I wanted it to be Gwen - we'll get there later in the season - but at least part of it is to balance out the allies Merlin has. The dragon, who wants to get rid of Uther and return magic; Gaius, who wants everything to stay exactly as it is; and Gwen, who wants...
Well, she a different kind of moral beast than the others, isn't she? Let's just see how different.
It’s long past dusk, but the market never truly stops. Only changes faces - vendors, stalls, patrons - like a mummer in a masked show. The stranger who stalks through its crowded thoroughfare is entirely unfamiliar with its many guises: so, though he strides like a predator, he looks over his shoulder like prey.
In the hidden nook to which he is heading - though, pertinently, cannot yet see - wait two figures. One is the owner, short and middling in age, surrounded by the accoutrements of high war. We might assume he is a master armourer and weaponsmith.
The other is in shadow.
Chapter two! This episode probably gets the top spot for 'least changed from canon'. The original episode is just so good: the beginning of a rapport between Merlin and Arthur, growing to trust; first showing of the worth of commoners vs nobility in Camelot; Gwen! Gwen! Gwen!
So what changes are there? Well, for starters.
Why does Arthur have literally no other servants?
ARTHUR My chambers are a complete mess. My clothes need washing. My, uh, armour needs repairing. My boots need cleaning. My dogs need exercising. My fireplace needs sweeping. My bed needs changing. And someone needs to muck out my stables…
Like, arguably none of this should be Merlin's job. The world of BBC Merlin exists in a quasi-historical fantasy medieval setting, sure, so we have wriggle room, but even in the earliest and lowliest of post-antiquity royal households, most of these are done by different people. Merlin, as a personal manservant, might organise them, and get different servants to do them, but he largely won't be doing them himself.
A castle would have a laundry, where they'd probably also do repairs, and may have the bootboys too. They'd have a dedicated stable staff, farriers and stablehands and horse breeders and so on - depending on the household, they'd have a Marshal or it's equivalent to oversee all that. The knights would have pages and squires and drill masters and armoursmiths - who would probably be different from the weaponsmiths, and definately different from smiths that make general goods, like nails. You'd have kennel masters for the dogs and chambermaids to do the cleaning and -
You get the gist.
I get why all this wasn't shown - budget, rotating cast of extras, it's just easier to have Merlin involved in literally every aspect of Arthur's life - but! I think it also kneecaps Merlin's character.
This is the tip of the iceburg of my ongoing quibble with the series regarding Merlin the perpetual servant. I'll get into it more in future episodes, but essentially I think the maintenance of the shows initial premise - high school au Arthuriana, Merlin-as-servant - reduced the potential character growth we could have seen, and a real fulfilment of the idea of Arthur and Merlin as equals (two sides of the same coin, anyone?).
It's also really funny to imagine Arthur driving away everyone who might be in his service, to the point he doesn't even have a squire. Like damn, how bad an employer are you?
The only other thing that got changed was the weird...thing... between Arthur and Morgana. Whatever that was, it died a death midway through season one and was never addressed again. I'm not against weird incest vibes in my Arthurian media - it'd be terribly genre-blind of me to be so - but it's not what I'm going for here. Or at least, Arthur and Morgana themselves don't see each other that way - they have lived too long as childhood peers to do so - and if it ever comes up, it'll be in the way that Gwen mentions it. People on the outside of the relationship assume that Uther means to betroth them at some point, to the pairs unbridled objection. Everyone else unknowingly condones incest, but not the actual participants.
That's it for ep two - ep three is already up as well, so I'll do a bts on that sometime soon.
DRAWTOBER #23- Myddrin's Matter of Britain by @maura-labingi
Destiny - that callous and useless word - will become a curse upon Merlin’s tongue soon enough. Now, he is only irate that it isn’t quite what he hoped for. A naivete that is almost endearing.
do you enjoy BBC Merlin? do you enjoy it despite it... kind of being a bit of a dumpster fire (affectionate)? do you wish the characters and relationships and story arcs had been handled a bit more purposefully and a bit less, uh, noughties-no-homo-y? are you interested in the history and folklore surrounding Arthurian legend and would you like to absorb that through the medium of a goofy highjinks show?
THEN HAVE I GOT A FIC FOR YOU MY FRIEND.
@maura-labingi is on a mission to rewrite BBC Merlin - preserving the elements of it that we all love, but focusing strongly on consistent characterisation, comprehensive plot arcs, and bringing in a little more historical accuracy. one example of a change made is Nimueh, pictured above; why would such a powerful sorceress to go around looking like a fifteen year old in a primark prom dress? she has been recast in this rewrite as Michelle Gomez, and given a prominence in the narrative far more befitting of her character 👀
this is a really exciting project that I've been involved on the planning and plotting side of (please do not ask how many times I have now watched season one. it is....... many.) that I really think you guys will love. you can follow @myddrinmob to get updates and behind the scenes content!
We are shown shadow.
It is a warm shadow, almost blood hot. It occupies a space at once vast and very, very small. Philosophers don’t give it much thought in this age, believing the important shadows live in a being's liver or heart. They are not precisely wrong. But for our purposes, they are not precisely right.
This warm, red-shot shadow is the space behind a boy’s eyelids. In the daylight hours this space is filled with light, coloured and full of life, but we have entered this space as night covers the world. Behind his eyelids, in these hours, there is nothing. Behind his eyelids there is only darkness. As it should be. He is in the deepest dell of sleep, past the province of dreams and nightmares, beyond the easy intrusions of the waking world. Nothing should ever be in this dark except the sleepers own slumbering mind.
Nothing should be.
Merlin…
Well, chapter one is out! There's not much that's changed as yet, it being so early on: the original episode has a sweet, nostalgic cringe aspect to it that I wanted to keep - even the cringe. Mainly I've made the dragon weirder, Uther more competant - and therefore more threatening - and given us a slightly longer glimpse of Hunith and Will, so we already care about them come 'The Moment of Truth'.
The two biggest changes, in my opinion, are both to do with Mary Collins.
Throughout the canon series, Merlin gets a 'thing' about other magic users. Sometimes it seems like he can tell that they've got magic by some kind of vibe-radar - often he'll bond or flirt with them sooner than with non-magic folk. And, of course, he kills them more than anyone else.
So, lean into his vibe-radar - he clocks Mary in the crowd, feels an odd kinship with the dragon, decides to hold vigil at the execution. Next, actually sit down for a second with the fact that we see Merlin's very first kill in the very first episode - only a few days into his time in Camelot. Killing Mary wasn't necessaruly the wrong decision - he didn't have much time to think of other ways of stopping her - but it the first instance of this weird thing the show has, where Merlin will sooner defend the murderous Pendragon regime than come to an understanding with the justifiable violence other sorcerers feel towards them.
You can do some cool Watsonian meta with that - and people have - but I wanted to look at it in a more Doyalist manner. And from a Doyalist viewpoint, that's an incredibly bland, superheroes-defend-the-status-quo take on it that I don't really care for beyond the purview of some incredibly angsty magic-reveal fics.
Her voice climbs to untouched pitches, from soothing to sharp, and she moves to take something from her sleeve. She nods at him, familiar. Merlin feels as if he should know her. Her song reaches its crescendo, and she pauses in the final note’s echo.
“A son for a son.” She says expectantly, as if he will understand.
You took my son! And I promise you, before these celebrations are over, you will share my tears-
Oh gods -
Like, Merlin should feel some kind of fucked up about this entire thing! It's fucked up! He should be thinking about his own mum, and how if he does something wrong he could be in Thomas' shoes, and now he's working for the son of the guy that killed Mary's son...
“You saved my boy’s life. A debt must be repaid,” he says, and Merlin fights not to flinch, thinking of a shadow on a balcony, of a mother with her son.
Let me leave you with our version of 'Where's Wally': can you spot an errant priestess in this chapter?
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Ne sont que III matieres a nul homme antandant: De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.
There are only three subject matters for any discerning man: That of France, that of Britain, and that of great Rome.
-- Jean Bodel, La Chanson des Saisnes (Song of the Saxons)
Having finished with one canon rewrite, I've decided that the best thing to do is to throw myself into a second. The BBC Merlin series was a great love of my childhood, in that weird BBC era of psuedo-historical fantasies, where the characters of myth are stuck into a high-school au.
This is less a happy-ending au, and more a can-I-make-this-show-make-sense au, a little pet project where I'm trying to re-write everything within the constraints of it being a ~40mins teen BBC show, aka low budjet cgi and angst with a veneer of shenanigans. I'm mostly going to be writing those bits that I'm actually changing, because copy-pasting the script with some descriptive flavour sounds like a boring nightmare, so there may be some chapters that are relatively short - unchanged - and some that are more or less the full 40 mins.
This blog is going to cover:
behinds the scenes meta
things I've changed that didn't make it 'on screen'
'episode' lists
whatever else comes to mind
For those curious, my main blog is @maura-labingi - also check out @little-smartass, who deserves huge credit for going through the brain-storming process with me, and partaking in our symbiotic relationship where we occasionly burst into a room to yell about what we're writing that day.
