Michael Scot

Alongside the documented scholar who translated Averroes at Toledo and served Frederick II at Palermo, the Scottish Borders kept a second Michael Scot, a wizard whose feats belong to local legend rather than to any court record. Rev. J. Wood Brown's 1897 study of the legend traces its best known episode to the Eildon Hills near Melrose: tradition holds that Scot, needing work to occupy a restless familiar spirit, ordered it to split the single conical hill into the three separate peaks that stand there today, a labor completed, the story insists, in a single night. The same restless energy is said to have been turned on the River Tweed, which Scot supposedly bridled with a curb of stone, a phrase Sir Walter Scott himself later used to describe the feat in verse. Neither claim appears in any record of the historical Scot's own life or writings; both belong to the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders, where his genuine reputation as an astrologer at a foreign court seems to have supplied a real name for feats of magic the region already told about other, nameless figures. The legend's persistence, still attached specifically to the Eildon Hills' three peaks centuries after Scot's death, is itself the kind of local, place-bound tradition folklore study treats as evidence of how a historical figure's name can be borrowed to anchor an older, otherwise anonymous local story.

Michael Scot carries a checked edge to Merlin because British legend eventually filed both men under the same heading, a great wizard of the past whose reputation could be extended by whichever storyteller needed one. Giovanni Boccaccio, writing the Decameron within a generation of Scot's death, already assumed his readers would recognize the name, placing a fictional necromancer in Bologna and remarking that Michael Scot had lived there too, evidence that his reputation as a magician was current in Italy within decades of his death and not only a later medieval accretion. Dante had already sent him to the eighth circle of the Inferno among the false prophets and diviners, and J. Wood Brown's study records that later medieval commentators on the Divine Comedy added still more supernatural episodes to Dante's brief mention, embroidering the legend further with each retelling. The tradition reached its fullest modern form five centuries later in Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which staged Michael Scot as a magician of the first rank, his memory then invoked wherever the poem wanted an authority on the supernatural. Merlin supplied English legend with essentially the same office centuries earlier, and it is this shared narrative role, the named wizard a storyteller reaches for, rather than any claimed meeting or shared story, that the edge between the two records.