The matter of the Celts has had a strong hold on the English-speaking imagination for a long time, at least since the publication in the mid-18th century of the forged Poems of Ossian; but it was a symbolic moment of great importance when Matthew Arnold told his Oxford audience how, on a seaside holiday at Llandudno in North Wales in 1864, he had turned his back on “the prosperous Saxon” to his east, and looked on the “eternal softness and mild light of the west.” Since then the conviction has grown that things missing from modern life—romance, poetry, mystery, ancient lore—will be found in those remote northern and western zones of the British Isles. For, as the contemporary poet X.J. Kennedy puts it, “Somebody stole my myths, / Took all their gist and piths,” and from that sad certainty it is an easy translation to a strong hope that replacements will be found north of the Roman wall, west of the River Severn, and over the Irish Sea.

As fantasies go, this one is fairly harmless, and it has given rise to a huge bibliography, fictional and nonfictional, some of it eccentric. Nikolai Tolstoy is a contributor to this literature. Although best known for his books on his family, and on the compulsory repatriation of Soviet citizens in 1945, he has also written The Quest for Merlin, a book about the historicity of Merlin, and now this long fictional narrative of Merlin’s life. The Coming of the King, the first of three volumes. He knows Irish and Welsh, and is familiar with the materials that survive from that dim period of British history between the departure of the Romans and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. To that extent his story is based on authentic matter; but there is no denying its eccentricity.

Tolstoy’s Merlin is not based on the Arthurian Merlin of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, but on Merlin Silvester, Merlin of the Woods, a mad northern prophet of the 6th century, whose legend survives in fragmentary references in a handful of medieval Welsh poems, and in Geoffrey’s Life of Merlin. Like Geoffrey’s Merlin, however, Tolstoy’s is a composite figure who shares some of the features of the Arthurian Merlin. Moreover, whereas the original Merlins are obviously fairy-tale creatures, this one is downright mythological, a miraculous child born of a divine father and a virgin mother, who harrows hell, sleeps with his sister the morning star, and grows from a precocious child into a one-eyed old man in about a year.

At the time of the story, Merlin is dead, and he tells the tale of his life and transmigrations to a later British king in a dream. He also gives his sleeping visitor a portrait of Dark-Age British society and its Germanic enemies. Like Matthew Arnold, he much prefers the Celts to the Germans, even though he portrays his fellow Britons as unintelligent people on the whole, who laugh a lot for no reason, and drink themselves insensible at every opportunity on “the yellow ensnaring mead.” They are touchy and quarrelsome, and their most marked trait is a habit of orotund speech, packed with mythological and geographical references; they sound like a society of pagan fundamentalists. They are supposed to be Christians, but their clergy are scatty old men whom no one takes seriously, and all the real religious work is done by druids. (When the dying tribune Rufinus asks to be baptized. Merlin can only find a druid, who performs an analogous ceremony in Welsh; the implication is that it is much the same, just as effective, and much prettier. To his credit. Merlin feels guilty about the deceit.)

The Britons’ enemies, “the mongrel hosts of the Iwys,” as the Anglo-Saxons are called, though equally fond of mythological references, are much clearer-headed and better-organized. They are cunning, brutal, sadistic worshippers of death in the form of a demon god, and they take a keen interest in committing atrocities. In fact, they look suspiciously like ancestors of the Nazis’ death’s-head battalions; they even plot to sell the conquered Britons as slaves for the Imperial mines and factories. And whereas Merlin’s father, the British god, is a Celtic Christ, the Saxon’s Woden is a Germanic Lucifer.

The main story is about a battle fought at a place called Dineirth or Beranburh between the Britons under Maelgun and an immense, pan-Germanic force (which includes Beowulf) under Cynric of Wessex. The chronology of events is vague, for as we learn from Merlin, the Brythonic Celts are not good at time. They do not think it exists. If, however, we consult the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we will find that this battle was fought in 556 between Cynric alone and unnamed opponents, and that contrary to what Merlin tells us, Cynric survived and presumably won. Merlin’s role in events is not clear, although in some way he is the. guardian of Britain. He continually experiences visions, and even loses his eye during one of them, but he seems not to understand their meaning. After his last adventure, involving transformation into a fish, and disguise in a newly flayed skin of a pig, he returns full of information about enemy plans; he does not tell us how he gets it, but one presumes it was by more conventional techniques than shamanism and totemistic disguises.

Nikolai Tolstoy’s Merlin, like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s, is an invention based upon a few hints, and it suffers from the lack of resistance that such amorphous material offers to the imagination. At its best it is a good read, full of curious, startling, misleading, sometimes titillating matter. Its style is best described as high pastiche, with echoes of Ossian, of Waverley, of Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion, of Robert Graves and other more popular writers. New Agers will enjoy Merlin’s Gnostic dualism and fatalism, his ecumenical and comparative mythology, his transmigrations, shamanism, and numerology—and his prose will not bother them. Many other readers will find it a disturbing book, an essay in revisionism with little or no relationship to real history, which it remakes under the weight of some modern preoccupations.

Consider the role of Beowulf, the only surviving hero of the epic poetry of the Old English people. His poet, who knew something of Vergil and the Bible, portrayed him as a good, brave, generous man, an asserter of order against evil and death. He is a father to his people, who in old age goes out to his last fight in their defense. Beowulf is one of the first works of English Christian humanism, possibly first composed in Northumbria as early as the age of Bede and the Lindisfarne Gospels. The poem is unique testimony to a people, its hero a forerunner of the chivalry to come.

Tolstoy’s Beowulf, on the contrary, is a bestial Goliath, killed in a rampage of bloodlust, his mail-coat “encrusted with broken flesh and running gore,” and his nails and jaws dripping blood. Like so much else in the book, that is pure, or impure, invention, and it seems a pointless revision of a character that has survived a thousand years of violence and change. It also gives the lie to one of the few evidences we have of the mentality of that age.

Admittedly Beowulf is a poem, and so a fiction; but so are the sources of Merlin, and so are all our myths, by definition. It is a question of the value of our fictions, and of the beliefs they carry. Did Vergil prophesy the coming of Christ? Did Constantine give the succession of the Western empire to the Church? Did Arthur and his companions preserve an idea of civil and imperial order in the anarchy that followed the fall of Rome? The revisionist answers no, and goes on to research and imagine real Vergils, real Constantines, and real Arthurs. Vergil, he says, was a clever poet who lined his pockets by flattering the most important man he knew. Constantine was a soldier-politician who used a new religion for his own ends. Arthur, if he existed at all, was a British chieftain who fought a briefly successful rear-guard action against the Saxon invaders, and no doubt suffered from fleas.

The trouble with this attitude is that without the prophetic Vergil there would be no Christian humanist poetry as we know it. The Donation of Constantine may be a forgery, but without the idea of it there would be no Europe of the many parishes and the great cathedrals, nor, to come a little closer to our English-speaking place of origin, would Gregory the Great have sent Augustine and his 40 companions to restore the lost province of Britain to the Church. Without Arthur and his round table, the history and the social forms of Western Europe, especially of Britain and France, would be quite different from those we know. The “real” Vergil, Constantine, and Arthur are phantasms of the modern imagination, and they are quite unimportant. Vergil of the prophecy, Constantine of the gift, and Arthur of the round table are the historical reality of the Europe we all know. They are the myths we think we have lost, and they are here, at home, on our own bookshelves. And Merlin and Beowulf are with them.

[The Coming of the King, by Nikolai Tolstoy (New York: Bantam Books) 640 pp., $18.95]