Merlin is a fascinating character, and I'm a bit of a fan of Arthurian legends, with about 1001 books on the subject. You might find Nikolai Tolstoy's The Quest for Merlin an interesting addition to your reading.

Have you seen the Disney film, The Sword in the Stone? There's a sequence in which Arthur 'shape-shifts', becoming a squirrel, and one where Merlin battles a witch, both shifting into other beings, such as dragons, hens & stuff. What's interesting is that similar things occur in the Mabinogian (a collection of ancient Welsh tales), and are common features of shamanic peoples, with shamans apparently taking on animal forms. Whoever wrote those bits for the Disney film was certainly au fait with some wider literature on the subject. The point is, Merlin certainly appears to be a Druid character.

Recent tradition has three grades of Druid, Bard & Ovate. Whether these are interchangeable terms, or really do signify different roles, we don't actually know, but they are undoubtedly linked. In Ireland, the fili are referred to as maybe cognate with Druid, and certainly druids were said to spend twenty years studying 'poetry' - fili means both poet & seer. Whether they are druids, or one of the other classes (bards - poets, or ovates - seers) referred to , I don't know. They certainly practised well into the christian era in Ireland, and the Bardic Schools persisted for centuries. There's less than 100 years between the suppression of the Irish Bardic Colleges & the establishment of similar in Scotland in the 17th century, followed by the whole 'modern' Druid revival in the late 18th.

Druids do seem to have incorporated roles of philosophers, law-makers & adjudicators, bearers of history & tradition, seers, magicians, poets & 'natural scientists'. In that sense, they were an intellectual elite, and some serious intellectual arguments must have occurred between them & the proponents of the new religion.

Jesus only appears in one book of myths. Arthur is a character in English, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish, and Breton folktales & myths. You do the maths.

OK. So if Jesus is in more books of myths, he's more mythical that Arthur, therefore Arthur is more real. Obvious really.