Though its popularity was never remotely comparable to that of Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae, it did have a noticeable influence on medieval Arthurian romance, and has been drawn on by modern writers such as Laurence Binyon and Mary Stewart.
News of Merlin's whereabouts eventually reaches his sister Gwenddydd (Ganieda), wife of Rhydderch, and she sends an emissary into the woods to find her brother.
The author now explains that in later years the boy fell from a rock, was caught in the branches of a tree beneath it, and being entangled there upside down with his head in a river he drowned.
[6][11][12] Assuming that this view is correct the date of the poem can be estimated, since Robert de Chesney became bishop of Lincoln in December 1148, while Geoffrey died in 1155.
Moreover, it has been urged that Geoffrey's election to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1151 would probably have freed him from the necessity of finding patrons like Robert de Chesney, and that one of the Vita's prophecies includes a likely reference to the battle of Coleshill in 1150.
The Life of St. Kentigern includes an episode in which a homo fatuus (meaning either idiot or jester) called Laloecen at the court of Rhydderch correctly prophesies the king's death.
In Lailoken B the hero detects the queen's adultery by a leaf caught on her shawl, but is discredited when he predicts his own death in three different manners, only to be vindicated when he is beaten, transfixed by a stake, and drowned in the river Tweed.
[22] The description of the first finding and capture of Merlin shows close resemblances to an episode in the Vita Gurthierni, a life of St Gurthiern of Quimperlé.
[30][31] Merlin and Taliesin's conversations together on cosmology, natural history and geography largely derive from medieval Latin writers associated with the Chartres School and from Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, a 7th-century encyclopedia which was hugely popular through the Middle Ages.
[32] The theme of Merlin's laughter at the beggar and at the man buying leather has analogues in Greek and Jewish literature that can be traced back to the Talmud.
[33] Other writers who have been suggested as minor sources of the Vita include Solinus, Rabanus Maurus, Bede, Pomponius Mela, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Apuleius, Boethius, Bernardus Silvestris, Adelard of Bath, Lambert of Saint-Omer, and the author of the De imagine mundi.
[30][34][35][36] The Vita Merlini is written according to medieval ideas as to the proper structure and purpose of a poem, and is widely seen as presenting problems to the modern reader.
[37][38][39][40] Geoffrey invoked the musa jocosa, the playful muse, in the first lines of the Vita, and this has led most critics to see it as being intended as a light, entertaining poem, written, as F. J. E. Raby said, solely for the delight of the reader.
Siân Echard has suggested that it might be "a cerebral game", sometimes grotesque but not light; Michael J. Curley considered it a reaction to the horrors of the period in which the poem was written, the Anarchy of King Stephen's reign, a picture of austerity and renunciation of the world undertaken for learning's sake; and Penelope Doob called it a "profoundly religious" poem,[42][43][38] But A. G. Rigg found its religious outlook to be unconventional: Historians such as Gildas or Henry of Huntingdon imposed moral patterns on their material, usually of guilt or retribution or at least of good and evil, but Geoffrey, in creating his own material, has brought the mysterious into harmony with nature, with no reference to Christian morality.
Mark Walker has written that as a Latin poem with a British subject, an epic which deals with personal problems and domestic situations rather than warlike deeds, it cannot be placed in any genre,[45] Peter Goodrich saw it as a comedy remarkable for the number of medieval modes of literature it includes: "Celtic folklore, political prophecies, pseudo-scientific learning, catalogues of information, and set-pieces of medieval oratory"; altogether, "a crazy quilt of styles and subjects rather than a tightly plotted narrative".
[48] He also, while acknowledging that the poem has no unity, praised Geoffrey's skill in organization, alternating description with exposition, picturesque detail with swift narrative.
[50] Ferdinand Lot wrote of the elegance of its style and the facetious bizarrerie of some of its episodes,[51] Nikolai Tolstoy noted that there were incongruities of plot and character, but admired the poem's drama and vividness, the feeling for nature and the lively and convincing character-drawing.
John Jay Parry conceded that it "is good, by medieval standards, and in places rises to poetry",[32] and likewise Peter Goodrich thought it "better than average Latin hexameter verse".
[46] Tatlock wrote that it is "a favourable specimen of mediaeval metrical verse", with few false quantities, no elision or hiatus, and a moderate use of verbal jingles, though he preferred the poetic form and style of the two short poems in Geoffrey's Historia.
[56] Stephen Knight's view was that Geoffrey makes Merlin a figure relevant to medieval churchmen, a voice "asserting the challenge that knowledge should advise and admonish power rather than serve it".
[57] Mark Walker has written of the Vita's Merlin as a figure at home in the romantic and humanist atmosphere of 12th-century thought, so sensitive that the death of his companions can bring on a mental breakdown, who eventually becomes "a kind of Celtic Socrates", so enamoured of scientific learning that he sets up an academic community where he can discourse with scholars of his own (and Geoffrey's) turn of mind.
[62][63] Étienne de Rouen's Draco Normannicus (c. 1168) gives details of King Arthur's removal to Avalon which do not appear in the Historia, but it is uncertain whether he took them from the Vita or from oral tradition.
[70] It was also suggested by Tatlock that the various romances which show Lancelot, Tristan and Yvain as love-maddened forest-dwellers take that idea from the Vita, but this theory, John Jay Parry wrote, "rests on general and unimpressive similarities".
Three manuscripts of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon include a truncated version of the Vita, inserted between the years 525 and 533; these are Harley 655 (late 14th century), Royal 13 E i (c. 1380), and Cotton Julius E viii (c. 1400).
[82][83] By the beginning of the 19th century, the Vita Merlini had been rediscovered by the antiquary Joseph Ritson, who sent his own manuscript copy of the poem to Walter Scott and planned to produce an edition of it himself.
[84] This project never came to fruition, but Scott's friend George Ellis included a thirteen-page detailed synopsis of the Vita in his Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805).