Michael Richardson, a special collections librarian at the University of Bristol, found the parchment pieces glued into a 15th-century book in 2019, reports Sarah Durn for Atlas Obscura. Since then, Campbell and colleagues Leah Tether and Benjamin Pohl, both medieval historians at Bristol, have concluded that the pages made their way to England about 80 years after they were written. //

“We know it was in England by that point [because] someone has written ‘my god’ in the margins in English,” Campbell tells Atlas Obscura. “From the handwriting, we’ve dated that to the early 14th century.”

By 1520, the pages had ended up in a scrap pile at a British bookshop, where they were used as binding materials for a French philosophy text. That book found its way to the Bristol public library sometime after the collection’s establishment in 1613. As the scholars explain in a statement, the book’s “likely route to Bristol” was Archbishop of York Tobias Matthew, who co-founded the library and collected many books in Oxford. Matthew left his collection to the library after his death in 1628.

The text probably remained at the library until Richardson discovered the pages in 2019. Now, the scholars have published the translation, as well as their study of the manuscript fragments, in a book titled The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment. //

The team found that the account differed from other versions of the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is “slightly toned-down,” Tether tells the Guardian. //

Merlin’s image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story, however, Campbell says he was a “morally dubious” magical seer or even a “creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil.”