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Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts: From the Welsh Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World
The original Welsh stories of these beloved characters and their world for the first time in English
The stories in Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts deal with well-known figures from medieval Britain who will be familiar to many readers—though not from the versions presented here. These freshly translated tales emerge from the remarkable and enormous sixteenth-century Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by the Welshman Elis Gruffydd.
Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts revives the original legends of these Welsh heroes alongside stories of the continued survival of the magical arts, from antiquity to the Renaissance, and the broader cultural world of the Welsh. These stories provide a vivid and faithful rendering of Merlin, Arthur, and the many original folktales left out of the widespread accounts of their exploits.
The stories in Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts deal with well-known figures from medieval Britain who will be familiar to many readers—though not from the versions presented here. These freshly translated tales emerge from the remarkable and enormous sixteenth-century Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by the Welshman Elis Gruffydd.
Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts revives the original legends of these Welsh heroes alongside stories of the continued survival of the magical arts, from antiquity to the Renaissance, and the broader cultural world of the Welsh. These stories provide a vivid and faithful rendering of Merlin, Arthur, and the many original folktales left out of the widespread accounts of their exploits.
176 pages, Paperback
Published February 21, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 16, 2026
Elis Gruffydd was a Welsh soldier in the British army in the time of Henry VIII. He doesn't seem to have had any formal training in writing and called himself an uneducated man, and yet he read in English, French, and Latin, and created the longest work of Welsh-language literature produced up to that point at 2,400 large manuscript pages. It is stipulated that his lack of formal education contributed to this work's distinguishing voice because Elis himself shines through the text, and he was a bubbly, talkative, judgmental little b*tch (and I say this with adoration).
His manuscript is an attempt to write the chronicle of the world how a Welsh guy of the time understood it using a wild variety of sources in every language he knew. He tried to organize his work using the six-age structure (from the Creation to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian captivity, from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ, and from the birth of Christ to Judgment Day) but it spiraled out of control because this is how he was. He talked to his imaginary reader, calling him Syre, telling him his opinions and making jokes.
He was absolutely hilarious. He speculated and presented different points of view, and then made clear what he himself thought anyway. He kept saying he didn't believe in magic and then told his reader all about it. This book is a collection of stories from his manuscript that deal with exactly that: magic.
This isn't a long book, and the majority of the stories told here I've read on my Arthurian bender before (while some are completely new), but this is probably the most entertaining way to experience them. Patrick K. Ford, the translator, made sure of that.
His manuscript is an attempt to write the chronicle of the world how a Welsh guy of the time understood it using a wild variety of sources in every language he knew. He tried to organize his work using the six-age structure (from the Creation to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian captivity, from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ, and from the birth of Christ to Judgment Day) but it spiraled out of control because this is how he was. He talked to his imaginary reader, calling him Syre, telling him his opinions and making jokes.
He was absolutely hilarious. He speculated and presented different points of view, and then made clear what he himself thought anyway. He kept saying he didn't believe in magic and then told his reader all about it. This book is a collection of stories from his manuscript that deal with exactly that: magic.
This isn't a long book, and the majority of the stories told here I've read on my Arthurian bender before (while some are completely new), but this is probably the most entertaining way to experience them. Patrick K. Ford, the translator, made sure of that.
November 13, 2023
This was quite the fun romp. First some clarifications. I've classified this as "non-fiction," because the original author Elis Gruffydd writing in Welsh in the mid-1500s intended it to be a chronicle of the history of the world from "Creation" to his then-present time. This 2023 English translation is only a small portion of that original 2400+ pages, and each of the sections could be considered to illustrate Welsh mythology.
The body of the book is presented in three parts. Part I has five stories regarding ancient and biblical times:
The Birth of Hercules
The Birth of Alexander
The Story of the Rood
The Tower of Babel
The Origins of Britain.
Part II has 21 stories revolving around Merlin the Magician and King Arthur. Part III has 26 stories telling of all sorts of magical and/or supernatural goings-on during a time span of the 6th century right up through the 16th century reign of King Henry VIII. Each of these short stories are entertaining in their own right.
Adding to the amusement, though, is the commentary interspersed by the original Welsh chronicler Elis. He was clearly a serious man working earnestly hard to relate what was known about history at the time and to include as many differing accounts as were available to him; whether in writing or through oral traditions, and from the many languages in which he was fluent. While mostly not taking sides about which account is more likely to be true, sometimes he just can't seem to stop himself from suggesting that we would be silly to believe one or the other version. At the same time, he occasionally goes all Socratic on us with questions meant to show how something purportedly magical could not have really happened, unless of course God deigned it to be so. Ol' Elis was clearly a man of his times.
There is a wonderful "Introduction" that I chose to read after the body of the book, which serves as a short biography of Elis. And there is an equally wonderful "Translator's Note" that I read before launching into the body, which describes how the making of this English translation came about.
The body of the book is presented in three parts. Part I has five stories regarding ancient and biblical times:
The Birth of Hercules
The Birth of Alexander
The Story of the Rood
The Tower of Babel
The Origins of Britain.
Part II has 21 stories revolving around Merlin the Magician and King Arthur. Part III has 26 stories telling of all sorts of magical and/or supernatural goings-on during a time span of the 6th century right up through the 16th century reign of King Henry VIII. Each of these short stories are entertaining in their own right.
Adding to the amusement, though, is the commentary interspersed by the original Welsh chronicler Elis. He was clearly a serious man working earnestly hard to relate what was known about history at the time and to include as many differing accounts as were available to him; whether in writing or through oral traditions, and from the many languages in which he was fluent. While mostly not taking sides about which account is more likely to be true, sometimes he just can't seem to stop himself from suggesting that we would be silly to believe one or the other version. At the same time, he occasionally goes all Socratic on us with questions meant to show how something purportedly magical could not have really happened, unless of course God deigned it to be so. Ol' Elis was clearly a man of his times.
There is a wonderful "Introduction" that I chose to read after the body of the book, which serves as a short biography of Elis. And there is an equally wonderful "Translator's Note" that I read before launching into the body, which describes how the making of this English translation came about.
September 6, 2023
This is a beautiful, beautiful translation!!! I haven't read any primary sources or translations since university, and it was lovely to dive into a historical text again!!
God bless the Welsh they have such funny, twisted, and gorgeous representations of King Arthur, Merlin, Henry VIII, and others you will be in love!
Highly recommend!!
God bless the Welsh they have such funny, twisted, and gorgeous representations of King Arthur, Merlin, Henry VIII, and others you will be in love!
Highly recommend!!
August 2, 2023
Elis Gruffydd was a self-taught Welsh author who wrote his World Chronicle, in Welsh, while serving in the English army in Calais 1530-1552. It is more than 2000 manuscript pages in length. Patrick Ford has translated a tiny fraction for this slim volume. As a record of history, Gruffydd's chronicle is, I presume, useful only for his own time and place. But this is not the parts that Ford has translated. Rather, as the title implies, Ford has concentrated on two things: 1) Gruffydd's account of legendary British history from the rise of Vortigern in the 5th century to the fall of Arthur and Merlin in the 6th; and 2) the appearance of magic across all periods of history, almost up to Gruffydd's present. This selection must be based on Ford's own interests, but I suppose it is likely to overlap strongly with the parts of interest to most modern readers.
This selection is the largest part of Gruffydd's Chronicle yet translated into English, and so the book is certainly to be appreciated for that. I found it odd that Ford did not always stick to Gruffydd’s order of events. As a more serious issue, I have to express some reservations about how far Ford’s work can be trusted. I am no expert at all on Gruffydd, or in Welsh, let alone Middle Welsh. Despite this, and despite the shortness of the book, I came across what seem to me two clear errors. One is quite major, and is one of interpretation. The other is relatively minor, and is one of translation (unless I am quite mistaken). I mention the minor one only because it is the single instance where I checked the translation against the original manuscript (available online at the University of Wales), which doesn't give one great confidence in the rest of the book.
The first error was that Ford, has, in commentary on one passage, misunderstood a very basic relation between Gruffydd and his sources. Ford states on page 40 that Gruffydd gives critical arguments against the account of the peopling of Britain in John Rastell’s history, The Pastyme of People (1529–30). In fact, what follows is Gruffydd’s translation, at great length, of Rastell’s own criticism of traditional (mythological) accounts. Then, when Gruffydd reverts to his own voice, on page 48, he says, more or less, that despite this criticism he is going to keep using Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source anyway. For another witness to Gruffydd’s extensive quotation of Rastell, see the notes “ELIS GRUFFYDD AND MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF GEOFFREY’S HISTORIA” by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, which one can find online.
The second error, the one of translation, occurs on page 74. Ford’s translation reads as follows: “Geoffrey agrees with this, saying that King Vortigern often took as many as eleven hundred Saxons as men sworn to him”. Now this figure of 1100 was not one I’ve seen in any version of Geoffrey of Monmouth, so, out of curiosity, I looked up the original manuscript, and the number appearing is clearly “un uilarddeg” or (since v and u were interchangeable) “un vilarddeg”. In modern Welsh “un mil ar ddeg” is eleven thousand, while eleven hundred would be “un cant ar ddeg”. Unless the linguistic rules for number formation have completely changed in Welsh since the 16th century, Ford’s translation is wrong. Now this error of 1100 for 11,000 is pretty unimportant in itself, since 11,000 is a fictional figure (whether arising from one of Geoffrey’s translators, transcribers, or adapters, or from Gruffydd himself), but it does cast doubt on the reliability of the translation as a whole, as I said above.
This selection is the largest part of Gruffydd's Chronicle yet translated into English, and so the book is certainly to be appreciated for that. I found it odd that Ford did not always stick to Gruffydd’s order of events. As a more serious issue, I have to express some reservations about how far Ford’s work can be trusted. I am no expert at all on Gruffydd, or in Welsh, let alone Middle Welsh. Despite this, and despite the shortness of the book, I came across what seem to me two clear errors. One is quite major, and is one of interpretation. The other is relatively minor, and is one of translation (unless I am quite mistaken). I mention the minor one only because it is the single instance where I checked the translation against the original manuscript (available online at the University of Wales), which doesn't give one great confidence in the rest of the book.
The first error was that Ford, has, in commentary on one passage, misunderstood a very basic relation between Gruffydd and his sources. Ford states on page 40 that Gruffydd gives critical arguments against the account of the peopling of Britain in John Rastell’s history, The Pastyme of People (1529–30). In fact, what follows is Gruffydd’s translation, at great length, of Rastell’s own criticism of traditional (mythological) accounts. Then, when Gruffydd reverts to his own voice, on page 48, he says, more or less, that despite this criticism he is going to keep using Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source anyway. For another witness to Gruffydd’s extensive quotation of Rastell, see the notes “ELIS GRUFFYDD AND MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF GEOFFREY’S HISTORIA” by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, which one can find online.
The second error, the one of translation, occurs on page 74. Ford’s translation reads as follows: “Geoffrey agrees with this, saying that King Vortigern often took as many as eleven hundred Saxons as men sworn to him”. Now this figure of 1100 was not one I’ve seen in any version of Geoffrey of Monmouth, so, out of curiosity, I looked up the original manuscript, and the number appearing is clearly “un uilarddeg” or (since v and u were interchangeable) “un vilarddeg”. In modern Welsh “un mil ar ddeg” is eleven thousand, while eleven hundred would be “un cant ar ddeg”. Unless the linguistic rules for number formation have completely changed in Welsh since the 16th century, Ford’s translation is wrong. Now this error of 1100 for 11,000 is pretty unimportant in itself, since 11,000 is a fictional figure (whether arising from one of Geoffrey’s translators, transcribers, or adapters, or from Gruffydd himself), but it does cast doubt on the reliability of the translation as a whole, as I said above.
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