Book Review

The Prophecies of Merlin: The First English Translation of the 15th-Century Text

by John Matthews and Maarten Haverkamp

Publisher: Inner Traditions

320 Pages

Release Date: July 2025

Merlin has spent so long as a stock fantasy figure that it’s easy to forget he was once a working prophetic voice, one taken seriously enough to be copied and recopied across two centuries of manuscripts. This translation exists to correct that. In 1498, an unknown Franciscan scribe compiled a body of prophecies attributed to Merlin, drawing on sources going back to a thirteenth-century monk’s collection. Maarten Haverkamp, a longtime collector of rare medieval books, acquired a copy and spent five years translating it, working alongside Arthurian scholar John Matthews, who built the historical and interpretive framework around it. The result is the first English version of this text in over five hundred years.

The prophecies themselves come in the form of a dialogue. Merlin dictates to his scribe Tholomer, and later to others, in the coded, apocalyptic register you’d expect from medieval political prophecy: rising seas, dragons, tyrants, popes and antipopes, kingdoms rising and falling under symbolic weight. None of it reads as a story so much as a long sequence of riddles, each one addressed at length in the commentary section, where Matthews works out who a given Chaplain probably was, what an obscure place name meant to a fifteenth-century scribe, or why a particular sea image likely points to a specific pope. It’s meticulous work, and it needs to be. A text this coded would be unreadable without it.

That density is really the whole character of the book. This isn’t something to read cover to cover in a sitting or two; I got more out of it working through a handful of numbered passages and their commentary at a time, rather than trying to process the whole prophetic arc in my head at once. Readers coming for narrative momentum, or for something you can lift a working straight off the page from, will want to recalibrate their expectations first. This book is closer to sitting with a primary source and a very good annotator at your elbow.

Where it earns its keep is in exactly that scholarly labor. R.J. Stewart’s foreword ties the recurring Dragon imagery to Kabbalistic sources like the Bahir, and Matthews traces threads back through Geoffrey of Monmouth and the early Welsh Myrddin poems, both included in full as appendices, along with the tale and letter of Prester John. For anyone doing serious work with Merlin as a prophetic or oracular figure rather than a folkloric one, that apparatus is the real value here, and it’s substantial.

There’s also a quieter note to this edition. Haverkamp passed away in June of 2025, and by all accounts, this project, the culmination of decades spent hunting down rare medieval texts, was among his last. That context is worth sitting with while you read.

About the Authors

John Matthews has made a lifetime study of Arthurian legend, from its origins to modern retellings. He has published over 100 titles on myth, folklore, and ancient traditions, and won a BAFTA for his work on the 2004 film King Arthur. He lives in Oxford, England.

Maarten Haverkamp (1964–2025) was a senior lecturer and researcher at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, and an avid collector of rare medieval books for more than twenty years. This translation was the culmination of his life’s work in that field.

**

Author Bio:

Kat Marshall is a practitioner-scholar working at the intersection of divination, magic, and embodied wellness. She writes Signs & Omens for Pagan Pages and is the author of the forthcoming As the Crow Flies, a guide to bird augury grounded in historical and cross-cultural sources. Her devotional life spans Hekatean, Hellenic, Druidic, Norse, and Mesopotamian currents, and her research background includes formal training in Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) theurgy and strategic sorcery.

Alongside her occult writing, Kat is a Reiki Master/Teacher and trauma-informed yoga practitioner who runs Adaptive Wellness with Kathleen Marshall, bringing a similar commitment to primary sources and lived practice into her work on nervous system regulation and Ayurveda. She lives on a small homestead in southeastern Wisconsin, where she tends land, animals, and an ever-growing library. Her Substack, Of Ashes and Flames, follows her ongoing work across both worlds.