TITAA #67.5: Merlin the Shape Shifter
Memory of Games - Personas - Cambridge Merlin MS - RadiantAI - OCR Tools - Weird News - Medieval Secrets
TOC (links on the site):
Merlin Manuscript
AI Creativity (video, 3d)
Merlin Manuscript!
Let’s talk about Merlin and King Arthur! Despite #nokings!
In 2019, a new fragment of Merlin manuscript was found in Cambridge and a 3 year process to digitize and interpret it ended this spring. Cambridge University reports the discovery occurred during a large-scale project to re-catalogue the library's estate records. An archivist noticed something unusual about the binding of a 16th-century register of property deeds for a manor in Suffolk. The cover was a folded, torn, and stitched piece of medieval parchment covered in Old French script.
The item had been previously identified in catalogues as a 14th-century text about Sir Gawain, but was now re-identified as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. It was dated between 1274 and 1315. There are about 40 known versions of this Suite, all slightly different. The Suite Vulgate du Merlin gives context on Arthur’s relationship to Merlin and the search for the Holy Grail and was foundational for Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur (on Gutenberg books here; and see some complex Arthurian text history at Wikipedia).
The Suite Vulgate du Merlin was originally written around 1230, a time when Arthurian romances were particularly popular among noblewomen [early romantasy?], although the fragment is from a lost copy dated to around 1300. "We don't know who wrote the text," says Fabry-Tehranchi. "We think it was probably a collaborative exercise."
It is positioned as a sequel to an earlier text, written around 1200, in which Merlin is born a child prodigy gifted with foresight and casts a spell to facilitate the birth of King Arthur, who proves his divine right to rule by pulling the sword from the stone. [source — but also, again, #NoKings]
The manuscript was obviously in terrible shape, being used as a binding, so a 3D scanning and reconstruction process was used to read it “in situ,” rather than risk damaging it. The Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab at Cambridge did the painstaking work (BBC) with a £100K camera:
The camera takes 49 images of each page using different combinations of light panels emitting different wavelengths of light into both sides of the paper. Starting with invisible ultraviolet light, it moves right through the visible spectrum – "all the colours of the rainbow" – to invisible infrared light.
You can actually see and interact with a 3D model of the bound manuscript on Sketchfab! What a total mess it is. All angles and extrusions of the manuscript page were photographed with tiny angled mirrors, and it was then digitally “unfolded” to read it properly (there’s a video of that too here).
In one of the stories in it, Merlin appears disguised as a harpist — shown in the pic here from a version of the manuscript in the BnF:
Evidently Merlin the harpist was a hottie, via this translated bit (cite):
While they were rejoicing in the feast, and Kay the seneschal brought the first dish to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, there arrived the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands. He was wearing a silk tunic girded by a silk harness woven with gold and precious stones which glittered with such brightness that it illuminated the whole room.
The NYT recap of the story has more detail and mentions the dog in the pic as a seeing eye dog:
Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, are presiding over a feast when it is interrupted by a mysterious visitor, a blind harpist, guided into court by a white dog. Charmed by his music, Arthur agrees to the strange man’s even stranger request: to bear the king’s standard on the battlefield — a seemingly fatal wish. The harpist is Merlin, disguised, though the members of court realize this only long afterward. “The standard, thanks to Merlin’s magic, can become this magical dragon who blows fire on the battlefield,” Dr. Fabry-Tehranchi said.
Aside: Merlin really did like a disguise with good outfits — I spotted this quickly in La Morte d’Arthur: “And Merlin was so disguised that King Arthur knew him not, for he was all befurred in black sheep-skins, and a great pair of boots, and a bow and arrows, in a russet gown, and brought wild geese in his hand, and it was on the morn after Candlemas day.”
But Merlin isn’t always a hottie, or even dressed (BBC article): Later in the Suite manuscript, “He will then reappear as a balding child who issues edicts to King Arthur wearing no underwear.” That’s a strangely specific medieval detail that I can’t spot in the Morte d’Arthur.
Of personal relevance: when I visited the Chained Books Library in Hereford Cathedral in April, I noticed that one of them was Merlin’s Prophecies—a fact they didn't bother to call out on any of the touristic info panels 😛:
You can find other Merlin texts on the METS site, including prophecies, which has lost its NEH funding and now needs donation support.
Onto the news of mid-month! In this issue: a deep dive on the RadiantAI system, horses in games have a hard time, new OCR tools of interest, Seedance video (better than Veo 3?), black icebergs and parasites, mandrakes, restoring a manuscript in 3D, realtime video gen, ye olde mappe of fairyland, creativity optimization, persona datasets, a grammar correcting model set, trans saints and medieval secrets, meditations on the oak from Kew Gardens, French chair forgers…. and more!