100 Named Arthurian Women #1: Adhan
In the Middle English prose Brut Chronicle, Merlin's mother is named Adhan:
Or, very roughly translated by Yours Truly who is not a medievalist:
The king's messengers, when they heard this strife between the four youths, they asked the men who stood between them when it was that Merlin was born and who nourished him, and the folk them that a great gentlewoman bore him in Caermyrddin, that they called Adhan, but no man knew who was the child's father.
27 35
Thus the top half of the picture follows the Galfridian version of the story of Merlin's conception, in which Merlin's mother is a princess of Demetia (Dyfed) and Merlin's father is a spirit who appears to her in the form of a handsome man and lies with her. The bottom half shows Adhan and the boy Merlin in the court of King Vortigern.
99 more to go.
