Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian Legend

Thirteenth-century manuscript fragments discovered by chance at a library in Bristol, England, have revealed an alternative version of the story of Merlin, the famed wizard of Arthurian legend. A team of scholars translated the writings, known as the Bristol Merlin, from Old French to English and traced the pages' medieval origins, reports Alison Flood for the Guardian. "The medieval Arthurian legends were a bit like the Marvel Universe, in that they constituted a coherent fictional world that had certain rules and a set of well-known characters who appeared and interacted with each other in multiple different stories," Laura Chuhan Campbell, a medieval language scholar at Durham University, tells Gizmodo's Isaac Schultz. Later accounts from the 12th century added new elements to the legend, such as Merlin's mentorship of Arthur. Now, the scholars have published the translation, as well as their study of the manuscript fragments, in a book titled The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment. So the Bristol Merlin gets rid of unchaste connotations by removing reference to both Viviane's groin and the idea of Merlin sleeping with her. "With medieval texts there was no such thing as copyright," Campbell tells Atlas Obscura.