Today's xkcd touches on a part of TH White's The Once and Future King that's obsessed me since I was a kid.



When Merlyn is first introduced in White's novel, he is a fairly light-hearted, absent-minded-professor sort of character, until shortly after his first meeting with Arthur we get the following scene.

He stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way.

"Have I told you this before?"

"No, we only met about half an hour ago."

"So little time to pass?" said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjamas and added, anxiously, "Am I going to tell it you again?"

Then there's a particularly melancholic scene with Merlyn and Arthur's foster brother, Kay, a short while later.

"Oh, well," said Kay, "I bet the old man caught it for him."

"Kay," said Merlyn, suddenly terrible, "thou wast ever a proud and ill-tongued speaker, and a misfortunate one. Thy sorrow will come from thine own mouth."

Gene Wolfe did a little riff on this in Urth of the New Sun, with Severian meeting characters who were travelling backwards in time, which from their perspective was their final farewell. I stole a bit of it in a couple of scenes in End of the Century, with characters meeting each other out of sequence. And, come to think of it, did something similar in AEGIS: Book One, though there's no telling when that one will see the light of day.

So far as I know, the business about Merlin living backwards was an invention of TH White's, since I don't recall seeing anything similar in any of the stuff I read while researching Arthurian myths for EotC. Does anyone know if I'm in error, and White was building on an existing tradition?