Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-5279400-20180628221937/@comment-87.2.236.141-20200801123115

Yes, very probable. The spells in Merlin are in old english, but we are never given an explanation as to why: is there a reason? Is old english a special language? I don’t think so, because sidhe spells are supposed to be in old irish, and dragon language is ancient greek. This is my personal theory based also on history.

The language of dragons is ancient greek probably because it’s Kilgharrah’s mother language, not because it has much to do with dragons. We know that in ancient greece there was a lot of mythology about dragons, and Kilgharrah has lived a very long time(for centuries) so it is plausible that he was born in greece where also the dragonlords came from; greece then was conquered by rome, and dragonlors probably had a very high status, so integrated in the roman high society; then with the christianization dragonlords probably started being demonized by the church, and fled to the borders of the roman empire, where paganism was still accepted. Aithusa probably understands old greek because she spent time with Kilgharrah, learning his mother tounge.

The sidhe spells are in old Irish because they are part of the celtic folklore. Camelot is in wales, where common brythonic was spoken at the time, but I think they used old irish in the show because we don’t know much about brythonic except very few words that where written somewhere, and other words that linguists figured out. Also I’m fairly sure that the triple goddess mentioned in the show is supposed to be Morrigan, the irish goddess of destiny that had ties with magic, and was also seen sometimes as a triple deity; the disir are actually from germanic mythology, so they were probably called like that because of the saxons, but the show tend to put together elements from celtic and germanic religion, so my guess is that the old religion is an amalgamation of the religion of celts and germanic people that remained pagan during the christianization of the roman empire, and lived together in harmony before the saxon invasion.

The spells in merlin are in old english. I think that is because during the great purge a lot of information of the old ways was destroyed, except some books; we know that celts didn’t really like to write their knowledge but preferred to transmit it orally, so it is very plausible that the knowledge that survived was mostly from the saxons; also in the show they clearly wanted to make the spells sound cool, and fortunately we know a lot more about old english, so they decided to use it instead of common brythonic.

I don’t really believe that Britain is supposed to be the only place where magic exists, but I guess that during the middle ages people didn’t realize how big the world actually was, so they would have never known about places like the americas or africa if someone had not told them; I’m sure that there were magic users in scandinavia (spells in old norse), italy (latin), asia (ancient asian languages) and so on.. hell, you could even use spells in ancient sumerian if you ever want to write a fan fiction of Merlin, the only languages that you could not use are the modern languages, or to be more specific all languages from the VI century and after, because I’ll tell you this: there is nothing special or more magical about old english, old irish and ancient greek.