Scott Lloyd received his MPhil from the history department at Aberystwyth University in 2009 and published The Arthurian Place Names of Wales with the University of Wales Press in 2017. He works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and is currently undertaking a PhD in the History Department at Bristol University.
Myrddin appears in some of the earliest Welsh manuscripts as the equivalent figure to the better-known Merlin of the Latin and French sources. Welsh poetry alludes to events and stories not recorded elsewhere and the debate over the age of the material and its relationship to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth remains unresolved.
Prophetic poetry associated with Myrddin was also very popular in medieval Wales and is perhaps not as widely known as it should be. The landscape of Wales features a number of Myrddin names, frequently associated with megalithic monuments, but how old are these associations and what do they tell us about how the figure of Myrddin has been used in Wales across the centuries?
