Myrddin Wyllt

Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin the Wild) is the legendary prophet-poet of early Welsh tradition, said to have gone mad after the battle of Arderydd (about 573) and lived as a wild man in the Caledonian forest. Poems in his voice, mostly prophecies, appear in the Black Book of Carmarthen and the Red Book of Hergest, and the figure was later developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth into Merlin.

The poems here are those W. F. Skene groups under Myrdin in The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), in the translation of the Rev. D. Silvan Evans. The attribution is traditional, and the manuscripts date from the thirteenth and later centuries.