Which is perfectly ridiculous if you think about it.  He's only been dead, what -- eight hundred years or so.  I can follow his Latin if I have a facing page translation (Wright's edition, bless him) to help me along.  Reading the first part of the Historia is like reading a brisk telephone book -- such a blinding litany of names and desires, flashing by at a generation a second until the text stalls -- and then -- bam! -- you have Leir and Cordelia (different ending there than Shakespeare gave it) or the incestuous warmongering of Belinus and Brennius, or Maximianus's disastrous social experimentalism, or, most compelling of all, Vortigern and his falling fortress, which brings me to Merlin.  Arthur? -- bah! -- he's just Belinus on steroids in a glitterball.  But Merlin is genuinely weird.

Nennius has a similar figure whom he calls Ambrosius -- a name that associates him with immortality (it's the masculine latinized from of ambrosios, "of the immortals") -- and sure enough, he seems to stand just enough outside of history that he can see its wilder, broader tempos.   I wonder if Geoffrey took his name away in order to make him more Welsh (invoking the 6th c. poet Myrddin) while still keeping a murmer of immortality about him that emerges in his transhistorical insight.  In the text, he opens the window to allow a glimpse of the historical prison that all the civilization-builders of Britain are caught up in -- without offering any tunneling tools. 

However, later, in the Vita Merlini, the Life of Merlin, Merlin breaks jail, goes mad, leaves aristocratic honor culture, lives in the woods, conceives a curiosity about nature for its own sake and as a line of access to its Creator, and finally accepts his mortality even as he draws around him a counterculture of similarly disinvested fellow travelers, including, amazingly, his sister Ganieda, who inherits Merlin's prophetic gift, along with his blessing, right at the end of the narrative.  Think about it.  How different would Exodus be if Moses actually passed the torch to Miriam at the borders of the promised land, instead of overshadowing her with adumbrations of patriarchalism and death.  Geoffrey does the equivalent -- as Merlin passes into silence Ganieda's prophecies linger -- and then Geoffrey himself bows out, resolving none of the questions that he's raised. 

I think it's astonishing -- that a twelfth-century border-writing historian, church careerist, and flamboyant litterateur could and would do this.   Robert Stein credits Geoffrey with singlehandedly inventing (or at least uplifting into literate culture) virtually every romance theme that was to occupy fiction writers for the next three hundred years.  But I think Geoffrey goes beyond that -- he invents/uplifts/steals from Welsh sources themes that were so radical and unexpected that his audience had no idea what to do with them.  So they vanish with barely a literary trace. Instead of Ganieda, we get later, semi-demonized figures like Morgan le Fay who operate, like Miriam, at the sidelines without ever tapping into the kind of prophetic authority that Geoffrey's text grants Ganieda.  

Geoffrey's contemporaries might give me a clue.  I need to read more about what William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntington, and William of Newburgh (damn his persnickety little nose-out-joint) were doing and thinking about.  Gerald of Wales, writing a generation later, I think, might illuminate some of the weirder gestures of Welsh border-stepping that they both engage in.  Maybe it will domesticate Geoffrey a little -- but I doubt it.  There's no explanation for what he was able to come up with -- so briskly, ironically, humorously, parodically, mercilessly, and passionately.  I don't think I've felt this way for any medieval author except the Gawain poet.  I wonder if they were related -- brothers under the skin across two centuries.

What would he have thought if he knew that people to whom the Normans were no more than a vague historical whisper (if that) were going to be reading him eight hundred years after he became dust.  I wonder what else he wrote that hasn't survived . .