The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path
The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology
The Wild Man
geilt · gwyllt · homo silvester
The battle-maddened exile who flees to the trees and gains prophecy: Suibhne in Ireland, Lailoken in the North, Myrddin in Wales, and behind them the Bible's grass-eating Nebuchadnezzar. The pattern is stable across the traditions — trauma, curse or vision, flight, transformation toward the bird or beast, the compensations of madness (poetry, prophecy, sight), and a mediated return, usually into a saint's keeping.
He is this path's strongest thread and this site's deepest room. His law: sight is purchased by expulsion. The seer must be driven out of every human category before he can see — which is why the tradition's only incorruptible authority is the one figure who holds no office at all.
Where it surfaces
- 6 The Man of the Wood — The complex entire: Suibhne, Lailoken, Myrddin.
- 9 The Vita Merlini: The Wild Man Made Latin — Geoffrey's Vita Merlini: the wild man made Latin.
- 14 Yvain and Lancelot: The Lion and the Cart — Yvain's madness: the pattern re-tasked as courtly penance.
- 25 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — The wodwos in Gawain's wilderness — the figure at the story's edge.
- 33 The Inklings' Arthuriad: Williams, Lewis, and David Jones — Lewis's Merlin wakes in the twentieth century.
- 36 The Wild Man's Return — Heaney, O'Brien, and the modern return.
A door from this motif
Buile Suibhne — the reading room — The tale kept whole on this site, with its study page — and the creative wing that inhabits it.