Carolyn Hunter
“The T. A. Barron Podcast.”

T. A. Barron
Continuing our discussion from the last episode about Merlin, who is my enduring companion, mentor, and indeed friend on these journeys. I talked about the tapestry of myth that has been woven with such beautiful, luminous threads, threads of brilliant colors from different cultures and ages and languages that starts with the oral traditions of the Druids and the Celts, first written down by monks 1000 years ago in the Welsh Mabinogion. That’s the origin of the stories about this wondrous character.

Then the tapestry gets much more filled out over the ensuing thousand years, and it’s expanded now with the wondrous weavings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mallory, Spencer, as well as people like Shakespeare and Tennyson and Mary Stewart and T. H. White and hundreds and thousands of others. I’m only the most recent member of this chorus of people who for centuries have been singing the songs of Merlin. And yet, even as I’ve studied this vast tapestry of myth and added a few threads of my own into it, I’ve often wondered what was the historical origin of this incredible character? Surely, there was a wandering bard or a wizard or a wild man of the forest who gave rise to these initial legends. So today, to help us explore Merlin, both as a character in myth and a figure in history, I would like to welcome a very special guest.

Carolyne Larrington is a professor of medieval European literature and official fellow of St. John’s College at the University of Oxford. An expert on old Norse and medieval Arthurian literature, her areas of focus have included emotion and women and how they are portrayed in ancient tales. She is the author of many books, my personal favorites of which are The Land of the Green Man, A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscape of the British Isles, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, and The Norse Myths.

Carolyne, we are truly thrilled to have you with us today from Oxford on the land that is famously and affectionately called Merlin’s Isle.

Carolyne Larrington
Thank you very much for inviting me on. It’s wonderful to be here.

T. A. Barron
We’re going to have fun. And may I just tell you, I’ve been reading your books, and I’m just absolutely thrilled. I’ve learned so much, but I’ve also been grandly moved, honestly, by your use of language in describing all of those intricacies of the folk traditions. And there’s a lot of erudition in there, of course. But you impart that knowledge with a great sense of language, and it was very beautiful.

Carolyne Larrington
Oh well, thank you. Well, fundamentally, I think I like stories and I like telling stories. And so having the opportunity to do something rather than just write in kind of dry academic prose is a great joy when I’m writing books in more popular markets.

T. A. Barron
I just have to ask you, are you right now at St. John’s?

Carolyne Larrington
Yes. My desk backs up against the window, and so outside it is St. Giles. But if I draw the curtain, all you can see is brilliant sunshine.

T. A. Barron
[Laughter] Well, enjoy it while it lasts. It’s England after all. Back when I was a student at Oxford, I was befriended by your predecessor. A jolly English historian named Harry Pitt. He was such a wonderful man. He took me on his Sunday afternoon walks with his beloved dog Flint. And as a historian, you would appreciate this, we always went to places like Wayland’s Smithy or The Veil of the White Horse, or just stomped around in the Cotswolds or checked out an old Norman Church that Harry was certain was built on an old Druid mound. It was such a wonderful way in to England for someone like me who came from far away.

Carolyne Larrington
I’m sure. There’s a lot to be said for getting outside Oxford, which can be such a pressure cooker.

T. A. Barron
Everywhere you look on the landscape of Britain there are stories. There are these wonderful, meaningful stories. And they ask the very kind of questions that you have been asking in your books.

Carolyne Larrington
For sure. Yes. Yeah.

T. A. Barron
Well, I would like to actually begin by reading one paragraph from The Land of the Green Man, which is your extraordinary book. You wrote, “The folk traditions of Britain. Its legends, myths and superstitions are inscribed on its landscapes. They lie there still waiting to be read by those who want to unlock the stories which shaped the ways in which our ancestors thought about the places where they lived. These stories are not just old wives’ tales, entertainment for an evening by the fireside. Rather, they were ways of exploring large, urgent questions, allowing speculation and discussion about life, death, love, children, beasts, men and women, the lie of the land and its multifaceted history.”

So, Carolyne, you make a compelling case in that book and in your others that these ancient British traditions were attempts to illuminate and possibly answer some of those biggest questions about life. For example, you explain how giants help to understand how the land around people came to be made, or legends like True Thomas explored the perils as well as the rewards of love and lust. So my question for you to begin is why do you believe the legend of Merlin the wizard came into being? What did those early tales about Merlin attempt to explain?

Carolyne Larrington
I think that we have to think of two different sets of traditions about Merlin coming into contact with each other. And so, if you like, the earliest legends of Merlin that we have in the Welsh tradition are probably stories of a survivor with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Somebody who was caught up in the battle in which his nephew, the son of his sister and other kinsmen were killed. We don’t know much about the details, but by the end of the battle where Merlin is a survivor, he runs off into the forest and is quite mad and makes his companionship, not with humans any longer, but with animals, and in particular, makes a friend with a little pig. And so there’s that sense in which he is somebody who simply can’t cope with life among the rest of humanity. And I think we can probably assume that in his madness and in his isolation, he learns other kinds of truths about human existence. And when he is just thought to his wits in various ways, sometimes through drinking from a healing spring or sometimes just over time, then he brings new insights back to the court, though sometimes these insights are kind of quirky and tricksterish. So there’s that kind of Merlin tradition that we have, particularly from the north of England.

T. A. Barron
May I just ask you approximately what dates would that have begun… do you think, that tradition?

Carolyne Larrington
Well, we can probably, if we’re being bold, I think we could say that these stories probably originated in the fifth, sixth centuries AD, long before anything was written down, of course, but this was encapsulated in oral tradition and not actually written down, in fact, until the 12th century in the major Welsh manuscripts. But the evidence does seem to point to a Merlin tradition of sorts from that time. And then as against that, we have the idea of Merlin, and these two figures come together as a man with a mysterious birth story, the son of a princess, but also the son of an unknown figure who visits her by night and who eventually gets sort of concretized as a demon, whose main project is, in fact, to try and bring about the birth of the Antichrist. And this very special child has wisdom both about the past and about the future as well as about the present, about what’s going on in other places. And he comes to be the advisor of kings, in particular in the later material, King Arthur, of course, and he brings a certain kind of knowledge of past and future, which is critical to have, but also which is quite unsettling to have as well. In some ways, I think nobody really likes a prophet that much. And so these two figures, the madman, if you like, and the seer, come together in the traditions of Merlin that have come forward into the later Medieval Period.

T. A. Barron
And effectively merged, say, around the 12th, 13th century AD?

Carolyne Larrington
Yeah, the 12th century. I think we can see them in the works of the earliest biographer of King Arthur, if you like, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who writes from both traditions, one from his great and very popular work, The History of the Kings of Britain from 1138, gives us the idea of Merlin as the adviser, even though in Geoffrey’s story, Merlin never actually meets Arthur, but he is instrumental in his conception, and he’s an adviser to Arthur’s father and his immediate predecessors. And in the second of Geoffrey’s works, which survives only in one manuscript and some fragments, we have the story of the madman in The Life of Merlin, the Vita Merlini. And that seems to draw much more squarely upon Northern Welsh traditions. Whereas what Geoffrey knew about in terms of the son of the princess and the mysterious figure, at this point, he isn’t quite a demon, belonged to South Wales, so Geoffrey himself was Welsh. He was the Bishop of Monmouth on the borders, and so he could draw upon Welsh traditions. And he also, of course, was writing in Latin and knew some English traditions as well, though English wasn’t so important, I think, to building the Merlin stories that he puts across in those texts.

T. A. Barron
How much do you think the stories of Merlin, especially as they came together in Geoffrey of Monmouth and afterward, were efforts to sort out the commingling and often conflict between the ancient Druidic religions of people and the newer religion of Christianity?

Carolyne Larrington
There I think it’s very hard to say. We just have so little information about what pre-Christian religion among the Celtic peoples was like. And when we have it, it’s written down by Latin, what we might call anthropologists, who don’t have much direct knowledge and, of course, interpret everything through their own particular set of beliefs and ideologies. And in all the written texts we have, Merlin is definitively Christian. So I think it’s not very easy to make that connection in any really kind of concrete sense between an idea of what Druids might have been like and what medieval Christianity was like. And indeed, in the story that, Geoffrey is using, at least in the immediately later versions of it, the fact that Merlin is baptized very quickly after his birth is absolutely critical to his story. And that’s what stops him from becoming the Antichrist and puts the seal of God on him and allows his preternaturally remarkable knowledge. His capacity to speak at the age of three days old and to defend his mother in court from a charge of fornication is something which God has enabled by his being baptized and whisked him out of the clutches of the devils who are plotting in hell to get the Antichrist project going. But it always leaves Merlin with a kind of, I always like to think of it as a kind of stripe of not quite as Christian as he could be, not quite the same as you and me. And that’s not just about knowing a lot of things, but having a slightly different set of morals, perhaps from the more exemplary knights of Arthur’s court.

T. A. Barron
And also, it strikes me that he also had a different understanding of the natural world that he brought into that.

Carolyne Larrington
I think that’s absolutely true, certainly from Merlin, the madman who, even when he’s restored to his wits and he’s offered his kingdom back again, just says, “No, this is not for me.” He tries to stick it out for a little bit, and then he always ends up back in the forest again with his sister coming to join him in the Vita Merlini. They’re getting a little kind of, I like to think almost a little college of people coming to stay with him, to learn his wisdom and to enjoy being in a space where you don’t have court power politics going on. And even in the French versions of the tale, he always is to be found still in the forest in the forest of Rossellion in France, where he meets the maiden Vivian, who becomes his lover. And that is where he ends up when he becomes imprisoned in the magical tower that Vivian constructs for him. So there seems from both the traditions something that’s always pulling him away from court. And you can see, I think, in the kind of high political version of the Arthurian story that really Arthur ought to want to keep Merlin around as his Prime Minister and the man he should be asking about all kinds of questions of state and strategy and battlecraft and so on. But Merlin is always saying, “Sorry, now I have to go.” And he goes to visit his master, as he calls him, Blaze, who was the confessor to his mother and the one who enabled his baptism and his eventual salvation. But he also decides to go out and about and wander around and see what’s going on in the kingdom. And that’s also a very valuable asset in an advisor. You don’t want somebody who’s in that court bubble all the time with you. You want someone who goes out and finds out what people are thinking.

T. A. Barron
That’s right. And it’s not simply a desire to get out of the court, but there’s a positive motivation to get into the forest and his elemental connection there with the trees and the rivers and the rocks and the animals who live in that forest, as well as his desire to really know what is going on in the minds and hearts of the people. So he’s both uncomfortable, not quite a fit with the human-centric court, but he’s also aware that he’s learning very valuable ideas. And regaining his connection with nature is perhaps the most important thing that he does when he’s away.

Carolyne Larrington
Yeah, I think that’s right. And perhaps, although I think many modern re-tellings tend to think of him as the man who’s in the court all the time, who goes away for a little holiday to refresh himself, if you like. Actually, he does belong in that world, as you say, not just from those Northern British traditions, but more generally. He seems to feel more at home in green space than sitting in the court, where he doesn’t seem particularly to enjoy feasting and he doesn’t ride out on adventures and so on. And he likes to go somewhere where he can pursue the life of the mind, but that’s not simply sitting and reading books in some kind of library, but actually immersing himself in that natural environment where he learns or refreshes his knowledge of the quality of plants as healing objects, of stones, and communes with animals. I think that’s a critical part of him, and one which maybe speaks particularly to us nowadays as a kind of avatar of the way we should think about our own connections with nature.

T. A. Barron
Quite so. Isn’t there an ancient tale, possibly in The Mabinogion, and I don’t know where it appears, where Merlin is asked to deliver a message from King Arthur to the Archbishop of Canterbury, goes there, does that, and then immediately wanders outside onto a high hill where he sits and is quietly joined by an old wolf who sits down next to him like brothers, and they just simply look into each other’s eyes and have a moment of meeting together?

Carolyne Larrington
There’s certainly in… now, which of the tales is it? I think it is in one of the Welsh tales where his companion is a wolf and he is retreated to the forest again after one of these sallies into civilization, and somebody is sent to look for him. And there he is, instead of as in the earlier poem about the apple tree where Merlin is sitting talking to his friend, a little pig. This time he’s just there with the old wolf. But, yeah, sitting in a kind of quiet companionship really does seem to be the picture there.

T. A. Barron
This, as you said, is an aspect of why Merlin is still with us today. And that’s really the next question on my mind. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why have these legends about this complex character persisted, and also expanded. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why.

Carolyne Larrington
I think probably what the enduring fascination of the Merlin story represents is a very old dichotomy between brains and brawn, if you like, against the kind of muscle power of the great fighters, like the Arthurian Knights, like Arthur himself, before he becomes king and then has to stop having adventures and settle down to rule the kingdom. But so many sort of heroic dyads are the one with the brains and the one with the brawn. And there’s someone who rushes in impetuously and gets into the battle, and there’s someone going, “Not so fast. I think there may be a better idea.” So I think it’s partly that very ancient function of being the one who thinks.

And that becomes very important in the kind of formation of ideas of knighthood that as knights develop out of sort of thuggish warrior fighters into people who defend Christianity, who are nice to women, who are kind to animals, who have higher ideals than simply military ones. Thinking a bit about what it is that you’re doing becomes sort of critical. So I think Merlin becomes increasingly important as a different kind of hero. Not the kind of hero who fights his way. He’s not a superhero. He’s not somebody who fights his way through swathes of villains, and almost never kills anybody. He does occasionally in some of the earlier stories, but actually uses his intelligence and suggests there are other ways of solving problems than simply through brute force. So I think that’s part of it.

And there’s also, in a way, we can see him as a kind of… and here I’m kind of riffing on this as I go along, so I don’t know actually whether I should believe what I’m saying by the time I finish saying it. [Laughter] In some ways, he’s kind of the patron of the Internet, if you like, before the Internet was invented, as someone who has knowledge of things that are going to happen, things that have happened and things that are going on somewhere else, and you can just say, “Merlin, what’s the truth about this?” And Merlin can say, “No, actually, he’s not the son of the person he thinks he’s the son of. He’s actually the son of this other person.” or, “You will win that battle, but you got to be careful about this or that woman you’ve been sleeping with is your sister. That was a mistake. I maybe should have pointed out that you were related to her, but I was away at the time.” So there’s somebody who has access to huge amounts of knowledge that you can tap into. But at the same time, because of these comings and goings, he’s not there all the time going, “Don’t do this. No, that will be wrong. That’s a mistake,” which would kind of cripple the story, but rather nuances the actions of the other characters around him.

And then I think in versions particularly, I’m thinking of his role in T. H. White’s, The Sword and the Stone, turns into this marvelous educator figure which is, as White really understood, he’d always had in his DNA. When we see him in Mallory for example, when Arthur suddenly found himself King just having pulled the sword out of the stone and has to have a crash course in doing kingship, he’s perfectly qualified to be a knight, but not to be a king. And Merlin’s there saying, “Okay, if you’re going to fight these people to establish your right to the throne, I would get help from these other kings who are from France and are not going to start claiming land in your kingdom. So get in the alliance together with them. Right, at this point in the battle, stop killing everybody because you’re winning. You don’t have to kill all your subjects now.” And you can see Arthur learning in Mallory and in Mallory’s French sources, how to do kingship. And you can see there how White picks up not just lessons about ruling, but actually lessons about how to be a good human being.

T. A. Barron
Exactly.

Carolyne Larrington
And how to live in the natural world in exactly that way we were talking about earlier. To be a really valuable human being and future king, you need to put yourself not just in the position of the peasants in the forest or other knights in the court, but actually in the position of the animals who also shared the kingdom with you.

T. A. Barron
Exactly. And therein you have two of the principles that I would humbly suggest are very important to why Merlin has persisted over the centuries, that connection with the natural world that we are increasingly aware of its importance. And then secondly, that sense of a universality among all people and the way Merlin really is often listening as closely to the peasants in the forest as he is to the nobles in King Arthur’s court. And he seems to be that one character in the mythology that crosses all of those boundaries. And that’s another very important thing for us today in the 21st century. Here we are. We could learn a bit from Merlin in both of those areas.

Carolyne Larrington
I think that’s absolutely right. And I think following on in the way from T. H. White’s vision of Merlin is Mary Stewart’s Merlin as well, who is also someone who dips in and out of the court, but actually is most at home in his hermitage, brewing up herbal remedies and talking to other people, talking to the people who are not the good and the great. And having towards, I guess, in later parts of the book, getting increasingly meshed in the sort of tragedy of Arthur and rushing around trying to fix things in a way that sometimes makes things worse before, in the end, he withdraws from the whole game of politics. But there is that sort of understanding of the democratic in Merlin, which is just as important as you say, of the natural world, that it’s not simply about who your father was. “Are you nobly born or not?” And I always think there’s an interesting moment in Mallory where… and Mallory times this very nicely, where Tor, who is the son of a cowherd, turns up at the festivities of the court just before Arthur marries Guinevere. And his father asks if he can be made a knight. And Arthur says, “Yes, sure,” and knights him and then turns to Merlin and says, “Was that a good idea?” And Merlin says, “Yes, he’ll be a good knight.” There’s a moment there where a cowherd’s son can become a knight, where there is real possibility. You don’t find in many other places in Mallory, but it’s that one place where somebody who just looks like they could be a good knight can be admitted into the order of knighthood, no questions asked about his lineage. And Merlin endorses that. I think that’s important.

T. A. Barron
Was the notion of time travel in any earlier renditions of the myth? The notion that he could not just see into the future or the past, but that he could go there

Carolyne Larrington
No…I think…

T. A. Barron
And possibly even live backwards in time.

Carolyne Larrington
Yeah, well, that was White’s kind of genius, I think. And I think it has a lot to do with White’s own calling as a schoolmaster that in order to be able to teach about the past effectively, you had to not just set down the dry facts about what happened, but actually make it live imaginatively. And that therefore, Merlin, instead of just knowing stuff about the past or knowing stuff about the future, has to be able to go there and come back and bring his knowledge. And I always very much admire White’s Merlin much more than I admire Disney’s version of White’s Merlin, where he becomes a sort of scatty old man dancing around waving his magic wand. And you can see that White is thinking a lot about how to teach things to young people and also a sense of Merlin’s aging when you get out of The Sword in the Stone and into the later books in the Tetralogy. So I think that’s a very clever expansion, rather 20th century expansion in the sense kind of following on H. G. Wells and the idea of time travel that you get in that 19th, 20th century imaginings of new possibilities in fantasy. I think White really picks up on that very cleverly. Now, I haven’t read Mary Stewart for years and years and years, but I think what she does is actually build a real historical context to put Merlin in and give us that sense of being in Wales when the Romans are just leaving, where there’s a real sense of Romanitas, that Kaliya. And this is a great city that you have paved roads and you can travel very quickly along them and you don’t have the kind of crumbling sense of the Roman heritage that you get in Anglo-Saxon England, for example. And then what happens when you have a kind of power vacuum, as in the time of Vortigern, and when Merlin first appears to help Vortigern out with his problem of his tower falling down all the time.

T. A. Barron
Right. I think we can’t talk about the wonderful reimaginings and deepenings of Merlin and Arthurian lore without adding in one more voice, which is Marion Zimmer Bradley and The Mists of Avalon, also in the second half of the 20th century. And just the wonderful way she elevated the stories of women and the roles of women in both the creation of their elements of society and at the same time their persecution because they were standing for the strength of women to decide their own fates. That was just a brilliant new take on the whole Arthurian myth, wasn’t it?

Carolyne Larrington
It really was. And it spawned a whole series of feminist rewritings of all kinds of mythologies and legendary cycles in that way. But I think it’s beautifully written, The Mists of Avalon, and really deeply imagined in terms of what was at that point, I think a real sense. I mean, we can trace it back to Robert Graves and The White Goddess. In some ways, the sense of matriarchal power that once existed and had been lost have been edged out by the coming of Christianity. With other patriarchal religions as well, Indo-European religions, like the worship of the old Norse gods, for example, would be exactly the same kind of thing that women’s power rooted in fertility, in cycles in the Earth, gets sidelined for essentially a kind of mechanism that we recognize still in the Arthurian stories of the medieval period of power, kingship, fame, honor, all mediated through who’s the best fighter, all about military success and about territorial expansion, and a sense that there is more than that. But of course, again, it’s many years since I’ve read Marion Zimmer Bradley. But the Merlin figure there is kind of sideline, too, isn’t it? It’s a hereditary office.

T. A. Barron
Right, it’s diminished and appropriately so, because that wasn’t the story she was telling. I thought it was especially poignant at the end. You know? That is one of the most powerful, emotionally tearing endings I’ve ever read of a book was The Mists of Avalon. But in that poignancy, such great wisdom, and throughout, how much the elevation of women and the wisdom of women was threatening to the male-centered society and to some men.

Carolyne Larrington
Yeah, and how at the end there you can see what you could perhaps read as assimilation and the kind of productive fusing together of the old traditions and the new. Or you can see it as kind of swallowing up and neutralization of everything that we’ve been living through with Morgan in the book that so long and so rich in terms of figuring the Arthur story from at that point, a very unusual angle.

T. A. Barron
A swallowing, but also with a sense of majesty about it, too. I just felt like in the very end, Morgan finding her way into that abbey at Glastonbury where she realized that the Mother Mary was in fact an embodiment of much of how she had lived her entire life. And so there was a bit of majesty and beauty as well as tragedy and loss in that very moment. It was so poignant.

Carolyne Larrington
Yeah, I think that’s right, isn’t it, that the Goddess has not been completely erased, that she lives on in that kind of in a way that limits her to two functions, that of the Virgin and of the mother, in that kind of paradoxical combination nobody else can aspire to because there is only one mother of God. But at the same time, that sense of how important the figure of the Virgin Mary becomes from the 12th century onwards in terms of both thinking about the development of Christian theology across Europe and as making it more, though it’s a word I hate, relatable to ordinary people who didn’t necessarily understand complicated doctrine like the Trinity, but certainly could understand what it would be like to be the Virgin Mary being confronted by the angel Gabriel or giving birth in a stable or having to stand by the cross and watch her son die. All of these things are absolutely crucial for making Christianity accessible to hearts and minds. I think in that mid and later medieval period.

T. A. Barron
This is a marvelous path you have chosen to walk, Carolyne, and we’ve only talked about one or two footsteps on your multifaceted path here. Is there anything else before we wrap up that you would like to add about the myth of Merlin in particular, and what that myth might mean for us today?

Carolyne Larrington
I think maybe I would point to some of the TV and movie versions of Merlin. Now, I’m very fond of John Boorman’s Excalibur, which I must have seen so many times. But I’ve never quite liked Nicol Williamson as Merlin there, even though you can see that Boorman has kind of got the quirky, tricksterish Merlin from some of the Celtic material, and then the prophet and the wise man who knows what is to come but still can’t quite escape his fate. He can’t help being entrapped by Morgana.

T. A. Barron
On the other hand, don’t you think that Helen Mirren got her part just right?

Carolyne Larrington
She is marvelous. And I love that moment towards the end where the magic fails when she’s performing the final spell of making to bring the Dragon’s breath, and she suddenly turns into the wrinkled old hag that partly comes from Rider Haggard’s She, of course, but also is inherent in the medieval stories as well, that making a pact with the devil to perform black magic is going to exact a price from you. And that price might be your beauty, which you then have to somehow sustain with spells. But actually, the TV miniseries with Sam Neill as Merlin, I rather liked in some ways, because I thought it gave you the sense of Merlin as human, too, as somebody who has a longing for stability and something like almost like a family life.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Carolyne Larrington
That’s something we miss from many of the other stories, that this wandering figure either falls in love with and commits himself to, in the earliest French version of his relationship with Nimue, Vivien, whatever you want to call her, or who becomes entrapped by her and imprisoned, and she goes away. And I always rather like the version in which she just puts him in one place and she will come and go, but she will come and see him almost all the time. And that they become a kind of couple.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Carolyne Larrington
And it’s also interesting, I think, that Merlin never seems to get any children. That maybe there’s something about that diabolical heritage that makes it dangerous for him to reproduce. And so he might live for a very long time disembodied, locked in the tomb. You might hear his voice if you go there and consult him about questions. But he’s one of his kind. It’s a hereditary office, of course, for Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it’s one that’s passed on to different people rather than the Merlin’s own bloodline. And I think there’s something interesting and perhaps rather saddening about Merlin’s view of the future is of a future that’s taking place without his particular investment in it, that he doesn’t have descendants.

T. A. Barron
Well, one thing we know for sure is that the stories of Merlin will continue to live and inspire. Carolyne, thank you so much for giving us your time and also your wisdom, your thoughtfulness, your erudition, and I would also say your passion for this subject. It’s been an absolute delight to talk with you.

Carolyne Larrington
Well, it’s been wonderful to talk to you as well, Tom, because there’s nothing I like more than sitting around talking about these stories, which I’ve been so passionately interested in since I was first able to read, I guess.

T. A. Barron
[Laughter] Before we conclude, I can’t resist telling you one very funny and also very Oxfordesque story about my old friend Professor Harry Pitt. As I mentioned at the top of this interview, his dog Flint was his constant companion, including living in his room in the college. But the college rules prohibited anybody from having dogs allowed in the college. Not cats, not hamsters, just dogs. So, what did Harry do? He simply registered his dog Flint on the list of pets, not as a dog, but as a cat. Now, [Laughter] this being Oxford, it wasn’t all that peculiar, and it worked just fine. Until one day Harry was walking out of the college and he saw a student leaning his bicycle against the wall right under a sign that said, “No Bicycles Here.” Well, Harry, feeling miffed, looked the student in the eyes and said, “Young man, can’t you read? No bicycles!” And the kid turned to him and replied, no hesitation, “I beg your pardon sir, this is not a bicycle, this is a cat.”

Carolyne Larrington
[Laughter] Hoist by his own patard.

T. A. Barron
[Laughter] Exactly right. Exactly right.

T. A. Barron
[Laughter] Well, just beware of dogs that are masquerading as bicycles. As you go out on the busy street of Oxford.

Carolyne Larrington
[Laughter] I shall watch out as I’m crossing the road on my way home. But, yeah, this has been great fun.

T. A. Barron
Wonderful. Thank you, Carolyne.

Next week we will continue our Merlin explorations, but in a rather surprising way. To everyone out there, let me just say thank you so much for joining us for “Magic & Mountains.” We’ll see you next week. And in the meantime, may you have magical days.

Carolyn Hunter
We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of “Magic & Mountains: The T. A. Barron Podcast.” Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information and to find all of T. A.’s books, visit TABarron.com. Have a magical week.