Merlin

Merlin is the French enchanter whom Don Quixote’s account makes responsible for the centuries-long enchantment of Montesinos, Durandarte, and their companions. Though Merlin never appears directly in these episodes, his reported power shapes their strange landscape and supplies Don Quixote with a prophecy that casts his own knight-errantry as a possible means of release. The tale’s authority remains uncertain: Sancho attributes it to his master’s imagination, while Don Quixote insists that he witnessed the marvels himself.

Identity and Attributed Power

In the story Don Quixote recounts, Montesinos describes Merlin as the enchanter who has held him, Durandarte, and many others in an enchanted state for more than five hundred years. Montesinos reports that people say Merlin was the devil’s son, but distinguishes that rumor from his own judgment: Merlin, he suggests, was exceptionally knowledgeable. The account does not explain why Merlin imposed the enchantment or how it works. Montesinos can only speculate that time may eventually reveal the reason, and he believes that moment may not be far off.

Merlin’s power is presented less as a set of defined rules than as an explanation for the contradictions Montesinos encounters. Durandarte is dead, having died in Montesinos’s arms, yet he remains present in the enchanted palace and sometimes moans and sighs. Montesinos cannot reconcile those signs of continuing life with the death he remembers. Merlin’s spell thus suspends the ordinary boundary between death and ongoing existence, without the narrative supplying a clear account of its mechanism.

The Enchanted Company and Transformed Landscape

The account places the enchanted company in a palace of crystal, in a cool alabaster chamber where Durandarte lies on an elaborately wrought marble tomb. His body, however, is described as flesh and bone rather than a sculpted image. Montesinos recalls that Durandarte had asked him to remove his heart after death and carry it to Belerma. He says he fulfilled that request, wiped the heart with a lace handkerchief, and carried it toward France; at the first village after Roncesvalles, he sprinkled it with salt to preserve it for the journey. The detail turns a legendary duty into a practical errand, even as the surrounding spell makes the whole scene uncanny.

The enchantment also reshapes the fates of the company’s mourners. Montesinos says that Ruidera, her seven daughters, and two nieces are no longer among the captives because Merlin changed them into lakes in response to the tears they shed. The lakes, he says, bear Ruidera’s name and lie in the province of La Mancha. Guadiana, Durandarte’s squire, was changed into a river; grieving at the prospect of leaving his master, he plunged beneath the earth, though his natural course brings him back to the surface from time to time. The lakes’ waters feed the river, which continues on toward Portugal. In this account, geography preserves the company’s grief: the landscape is not merely a setting but the reported aftermath of Merlin’s transformations.

Prophecy and Don Quixote’s Role

Montesinos connects Merlin’s enchantment to Don Quixote by identifying the knight as the figure for whom Merlin has prophesied great things. He presents Don Quixote’s revival of knight-errantry as a possible means by which the enchanted people might be freed. The prophecy gives Don Quixote a role inside the very marvels he claims to have witnessed: he is not only their observer but, in Montesinos’s account, a potential agent of change. It does not establish that Merlin has promised a definite outcome, and Montesinos frames release as a possibility rather than a certainty.

Don Quixote later invokes Merlin in connection with Dulcinea’s supposed disenchantment. He asks Sancho to begin the hundreds of lashes that form part of the thousands he is expected to give himself, presenting Sancho’s promised self-punishment as necessary to freeing her. During the encounter with the galley, Don Quixote suggests that Merlin might count each lash given there as ten of the required strokes. This is Don Quixote’s speculation about how the enchantment’s terms might be satisfied, not an independently confirmed rule spoken by Merlin. Sancho resists being hurried and maintains that he intends to fulfill his promise in his own time. When Don Quixote later promises not to touch him and leaves him free to choose when to whip himself, the proposed remedy remains unresolved.

Disputed Testimony and Narrative Role

Sancho challenges the account of Merlin and the enchanted company directly. He suspects that Merlin, or other enchanters, have filled Don Quixote’s mind with the tale. Don Quixote answers that he saw and touched what he describes, but his insistence does not settle the matter for the reader. Merlin’s powers reach the story through reported speech: Don Quixote recounts what Montesinos told him, and Sancho questions the reliability of that account. The layers of testimony make Merlin powerful within the story while leaving the truth of the marvels open to dispute.

That uncertainty also governs the appearance of Dulcinea in Don Quixote’s report. He says that Montesinos showed him three country girls skipping through the meadows and that he recognized one as Dulcinea and the other two as the girls encountered on the road from El Toboso. Montesinos, according to Don Quixote, did not know them and supposed they might be enchanted ladies who had recently appeared there. The episode associates Merlin’s enchanted world with Don Quixote’s continuing beliefs about Dulcinea, but it does not establish that Merlin personally transformed her. As an unseen enchanter, Merlin joins the captive company, transformed landscape, prophecy, and proposed disenchantment in one account whose marvels remain inseparable from the question of whether Don Quixote has truly seen them.