Merlin?

Hello everyone,

So @ShadowPrincess16 and I are currently working on a new series called the Mage Chronicles series. It's basically about a war between a mother and her sons. One of our main characters (he actually started out as a side character but we decided that we really liked him so we decided to keep him on as a main character) is Merlin. Like, the legendary sorcerer Merlin. In our book, Merlin has a twin brother named Stryker who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen years old and is evil. (Yes, there will eventually be a battle between the brothers and we literally cannot wait to get to that part of the book.) We have Stryker's backstory and everything all planned out but there is one thing we don't know that is quite important. Their parents. Does anyone know who Merlin's parents were and what happened to them? If you could help it would be greatly appreciated. We've done a bunch of research and so far we've come up with absolutely nothing and we really need to know about them. If it's possible, we'd like to insert at least one of his parents into our story to help flesh out their characters. Thank you guys so much in advance.

Colly.

I thought you were doing a fanfiction about something and has a long post written out, but realized I was wrong when rereading your post.. Ugh. my fault but gah.

Anyways. I'm just gonna summarize what I mostly said in my original post: have you considered just making your own story for Merlin's parents? I mean, from what I know about Merlin, he's been adopted so many times in so many novels and movies and such that there's no real set history on him. I could be wrong, though, but from the sounds of your dead-end research, it's probably somewhat close to that.

So why not just create your own story? Put your own touch to his history, come up with something the readers wouldn't expect. Sometimes, sticking to the original story can get boring. You gotta out your own twist to it.

But that's just my opinion. Maybe someone with more fantasy knowledge will come along. ^^

For a quick reply to this thread, I suggest doing what Iggy says—even in the original legends surrounding Merlin, he doesn't have a very set family or history. The closest thing to a solid history that I can remember is that his mother was a human woman, possibly fey, and his father was some sort of demon or powerful fey, but that could be all wrong.

One of the important things to remember is that Merlin is a feature of Britain's mythology, in a way. He's been used and reused in so many different myths and legends that it's hard to tell what was "originally" Merlin and what was someone else that they put Merlin's name on—it's kind of like how, when Greece expanded, all the kings of gods in an area were renamed to be Zeus, and their myths were added under Zeus' name.

So in the long run, I'd encourage you to think up something that would be realistic for the time period and the legends surrounding Merlin. It's unlikely you'll be able to find a definitive history on him, and whatever definitive history you can find is just as likely to be contradicted by the next definitive history down the line.

I read somewhere that Merlin was the son of an incubus, which is the male version of a succubus. Sorry, that's all I know.

Thanks guys. Colly and I are just gonna come up with our own tale for Merlin's history and stuff because we can't find anything definitive. We just wanted to make sure there wasn't something out there that we weren't finding.
ShadowPrincess16