Merthur fanart! Bc i havent drawn them inna while
OKAY I got peer pressure into posting the whole thing by my friend :'(
Fanart for chapter 4 of the fanfic “jeg faller faen meg ikke for sjarmen din!”
(the colours might be a little too vibrant for phone screens fyi, sorry for that…)
Chapter 3 - duell fan art
Dirty dancing at Two Tigers Tavern
(For the fic “Jeg faller faen meg ikke for sjarmen din!” on ao3)
“Ai ai, kæpt'n”
wylltmerlins
nextstopparis
So I was getting lost in a Merlin Wiki rabbit hole, as one does, and I stumbled across the page for spells. And turns out the writers actually put a lot more thought into it than I initially thought (they're not actually just shouting random words in Old English). But what shocked me the most was learning what Merlin was actually saying to Arthur while he was unconcious in the Poisoned Calice episode. I always thought he was trying to enchant some sort of protection spell to keep Arthur safe while he couldn't be there for him. But turns out he was actually declaring poetry, POETRY to Arthur the whole time!
That's right, Merlin was declaring actual POETRY to Arthur on his deathbed!! I kept seeing the wiki mention verses from a book called Beowulf and I got curious so after a quick Google search, I found out that it's actually one of the most famous epic poems in Old English and I just lost it!! I never thought this episode could get any gayer...
Duuude posts that chemically change your brain forever holy shit
…because my first thought was that immortal!Merlin in the modern day would love the MDH translation (that is to say, the famous ‘Bro!’ translation) of Beowulf, but when I pulled out my copy to make sure I didn’t misquote the bit I was thinking of, I was immediately struck by this passage from Headley’s introduction:
“Beowulf bears the distinction of appearing to be basic — one man, three battles, lots of gold — while actually being an intricate treatise on morality, masculinity, flexibility, and failure. It’s 3,182 lines of alliterative wildness, a sequence of monsters and would-be heroes. […]
The phrase ‘That was a good king’ recurs throughout the poem, because the poem is fundamentally concerned with how to get and keep the title ‘Good.’ The suspicion that at any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch, teeth bared, causes characters ranging from scops to ring-lords to drop cautionary anecdotes.
Does fame keep you good? No. Does gold keep you good? No. Does your good wife keep you good? No. What keeps you good? Vigilance. That’s it. And even with vigilance, even with courage, you might still go forth to slay a dragon (or, if you’re Grendel, slay a Dane), die in the slaying, and leave everyone and everything you love vulnerable” (viii-ix, boldface is mine).
Is this not the root of Arthur’s character arc in BBCM? The struggle over what it means to be a good king in the eyes of his people, his father, himself? The conflict with those presumed to be ‘monstrous’ but are yet more complex and human than he was raised to believe? The fact that it ends almost as soon as it’s begun, with his death coming just as the Golden Age is finally upon us?
Despite being unconscious, Merlin knew what the fuck he was doing <3
