Carmel Niland: Merlin’s Secrets

Carmel Niland:  That’s right. When I write about him, he leaps off the page.  He’s around me. I can hear him pacing sometimes saying, “Nuh-uh-uh-uh-uh, no, this, this-this.”

He’s highly directive but incredibly charming. Marvelous character and I are sure a marvelous person.

Victor Fuhrman: You brought up a wonderful point.  I know a lot of authors who do novels and fiction.  When they create their characters, they see them as actually living, alive, they’re present with them, and have conversations with them and have arguments with them.  Do you find yourself in that process?

Carmel Niland:  I do, particularly with Uther Pendragon. He doesn’t walk. He strides. He doesn’t talk. He kind of blasts.  He oozes charm, oozes charm. He’s always joking. I’d like to meet him.

Victor Fuhrman: So, getting back to the characters, now, obviously, Merlin is your focus.  Did you find in your studies and research and travels that Merlin was a specific individual or an amalgam of mythical magicians and shamans?

Carmel Niland:  I think he is the amalgam of mythical shamans; we say it has been superimposed on it by our desire to tie the history up. History is messy. Merlin, I believe became the name of the title.  So, in ballet, when there is a young male ballet dancer, they will say he is like a Nureyev. I think something similar happened with the name Merlin.

And other bards who were interested in magic took it on.

He is a character even bigger than Uther Pendragon.  And I can understand why other people would want to take his name.

Victor Fuhrman:  The timeframe of the legend places it in sub-Roman Britain at a time when the pagan practice was slowly being transformed into Christianity.  How much were these stories framed?

Carmel Niland: I just think the Celtic Christianity, which is a phrase, had these two themes running parallel for hundreds of years.

My grandmother was Irish.  And from the Christianity that I got from her, her Irish Catholicism, there were fairies in it.  And there was nothing odd about that at all.

Victor Fuhrman: Let’s talk about the Lady of the Lake.  Who is the Lady of the Lake?

Carmel Niland:  Well, when you ask a question of an Australian, we tend to be iconoclastic.  And I believe she was a good swimmer.  And in those days, there were very few good swimmers around.

So, if you can get someone who can go underwater, hold their breath, and then come out again, particularly with a sword called Excalibur, boy, have you got a winner.  That story lasts 1,500 years.

Victor Fuhrman:  What a refreshing take on the story.  I think that’s fabulous. Because we all think of the Lady of the Lake in a Christian sense.

Carmel Niland:  Yeah.  But, I’m postmodern in my approach to the Arthurian legend.  I believe in its beauty.  I believe in its fable.  I believe in its myth. But when you go to the places where the Lady of the Lake was, which I have been to, and you look at it, and you think, “Nuh-uh, this pond that she was in is six foot deep. Okay.  If it’s six-foot-deep, she was either very tall or even if she were very short, she would’ve only had to hold her breath for a very short time and then stick the sword up.”

It becomes a myth because of its mystery. But, for modern eyes, a lot of it is not particularly mythical.

So, you must create something. 

We’ve got a trickster.  We’ve got tales of love.  We’ve got tales of dedication.  We’ve got tales about courtesy, about perfect truth, about loyalty, courage, adventure, moral temptation.

Victor Fuhrman: In your opinion, was the triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot a literary device or based on something historical?

Carmel Niland:  Historical. It’s just like when one reads Shakespeare.  So much of Shakespeare is based on real characters who existed in Elizabethan times. 

You work with the real character,  Arthur, and your Merlin thinking about him.  But, there are little bits you leave ambiguous that leaves for other people to invent. But, their story is a palpable story, a story of the return of Arthur.

And if Arthur’s coming back, why is he coming back?  What are we confronting now in Britain which is very like what they confronted in the fifth and the sixth century A.D.?

They are confronting a movement of people who are having to leave their country because of war, famine, or because of climate change in those times because the sea was rising.  And all the people in the low-lying areas of what was called Germanica had to move.

Now, it faces the movement of people because of war and to some extent climate change.  And a new Arthur will emerge from that.

So, as I think with those things, I’m very interested in who was Arthur reincarnation all before that?  And who were Guinevere and Lancelot because I always believe that, when there is a love which is like almost at first sight, and it’s extremely strong, it’s based on experiences of previous lives that go back two, 3,000 years.

Victor Fuhrman:  So, you started talking a little bit about the plot and the themes.  Why don’t you expand for our readers?  Give them a little tease as to what the storyline is about.

Carmel Niland:  Okay.  This is a story about long-buried secrets. One of them that Merlin, the story has two storytellers.  It has Merlin speaking in the first person.  But, it also has the universal way of telling the story where there is a person whose identity you don’t know, the author, who’s also telling the story and using modern language.

But, when Merlin speaks, he’s a poet.  He uses poetry and song quite a lot.  He says, “I am Myrddin.  I weave magic.  I engineer battles.  I remember the future.  I toy with the laws of nature.  I fly with my lady-hawk on the sky tracks of the air.  I am a Smith of strangeness.”

So, a Smith is a person who could do anything with his hands.  But, he cannot only work with metal.  He cannot only build a dam or a bridge.  He cannot only build the weapons of war, swords, shields, explosives. 

Merlin is a hypnotist.  The main female character, Emily, because she’s modern, she knows that what he’s doing is hypnotizing.

Victor Fuhrman:  You use the device of time travel in your novel.  Why?

Carmel Niland:  So that Merlin can reveal to us long-buried secrets, a different take on the Arthurian legend, it’s a different truth, a different reality.

And this story is a very important story, though a story I’m tapping into, is a very important story for who we are, the nature of God, how God works on earth. And ultimately, a look at the quest for the Grail.  And it’s all the time about the birth of Christianity.

Victor Fuhrman:  Now, many of the characters in your book we talked about before are modeled after either people they know personally or historical figures that they admired. You had mentioned Merlin as a Leonardo da Vinci types character.  Who is your heroine Emily based upon?

Carmel Niland:  My niece.

Victor Fuhrman:  Beautiful.  “A Darker Magic This Way Comes” revolves more around the powerful feminine characters rather than the men.  Why did you choose that trope?

Carmel Niland:  I chose that trope because what will happen as one gets further into the Arthurian story you’ll find it dominated by the male characters, who are fascinating for every reason.  They should dominate.

But, to understand the whole of their humanity, we should either know their mothers, their sisters, or their lovers so one can see the full side of these great people.

And I needed strong female characters to provide the way that girls who read probably compared to boys.

So, that’s why the female characters have got to be mothers.  They’ve got to be sorceresses.  They’ve got to be leaders.  They’ve got to be able to fight.

They’ve got to have the full diversity of roles that were open to women at that time.

Victor Fuhrman:  When all is said and done, what lessons can we learn from the glorious age to turn our world back into a place of magic, compassion, and love?

Carmel Niland:  Well, what I’ve got to see, what I’m trying to do is inspire young people and let them know, to present them with role models who they can emulate, but also so they can understand that there is far more in our reality than what we are told scientifically is in our reality.

So, these are the mysteries and wonders.  And these are the things that Merlin works with daily.

 

About Victor Fuhrman

Rev. Victor Fuhrman, MSC, is a healer, spiritual counselor, and author whose deep, rich, compassionate and articulate sound inspired the radio handle, “Victor the Voice”.  Victor is the host of Destination Unlimited, Wednesday 8 PM on OMTimes Radio.