The eleven stories known as the Mabinogion are among the
finest flowerings of the Celtic genius and, taken together,
a masterpiece of our medieval European literature. Their
excellence has been long, if intermittently, celebrated, and
their influence deeply felt and widely recognized. The
stories have been preserved in two Welsh collections, the
White Book of Rhydderch (Llyfr Gwynn Rhydderch),
written down about 1300-25 and the Red Book of Hergest
(Llyfr Coch Hergest) of the period 1375-1425) The White
Book is preserved in the National Library of Wales,
Aberystwyth, the Red Book in the Library of Jesus College,
Oxford. In addition, (MSS. Pcniarth 6, 7, 14 and 16 (a1l in
the National Library of Wales) contain portions of different
stories, some of them written down a hundred years before
the White Book. Certain of the stories must have been
known in their present (that is, their latest) redaction well
before the time of the earliest of these manuscripts. The
likeliest date for the Four Branches would appear to be
early in the second half of the eleventh century; Culhwch
and Olwen is earlier still-its orthography, glosses, vocabulary
and syntax, and its glimpses of a more primitive social
code take parts of it back another hundred years; and no
one doubts that much of the subject matter of these stories
is very old indeed, coeval maybe with the dawn of the
Celtic world. But paradoxically the title 'Mabinogion', by
which the stories are collectively known, is a modern one.
It was used by Lady Charlotte Guest as the title of her
translations from the Red Book of Hergest and of the Hanes
Taliesin (first found in a sixteentlh-century copy). She
understood it to be the plural of mabinogi, to which in
common with the Welsh scholars of her time she attributed
an incorrect meaning. But the word mabynnogyon occurs
once only in the manuscripts, and it is as certain as such
things can be that it is a scribal error of a common enough
kind. In any case, the term mabinogi can apply only to the
Four Branches of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math,
and not to the other contents of the White Book or the
Red. Thus Lady Guest's title was really a misnomer at two
removes; but it has proved so convenient (rather like the
Old Icelandic Edda), and is now so well-established in use,
that it would be the sheerest pedantry to replace it with a
clumsier if more correct alternative. The eleven stories of the Mabinogion present a remarkable diversity within their medieval pattern. They fall into obvious groups: the Mabinogi proper, composed of the Four Branches of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math; the two short pieces, The Dream of Macsen Wledig and Lludd and Llefelys; the incomparable and unclassifiable Culhwch and Olwen, the earliest Arthurian tale in Welsh; The Dream of Rhonabwy a romantic and sometimes humorously appreciative looking-back to the heroic age of Britain; and the three later Arthurian romances, The Lady of the Fountain, Peredur, and Geraint Son of Erbin, with their abundant evidence of Norman-French influences. This diversity should not, however, tempt us to overlook a substantial unity-a unity which is imposed both by their subject matter and their social and literary milieu. The matter is primarily mythology in decline and folklore, though it is unlikely that the story-tellers were themselves often, if ever, aware of this. But that such personages as Bendigeidfran, Rhiannon, Math and Mabon son of Modron, to name but a few, are in both the literary and mythological sense of divine origin, is so conclusively to be proved from the Mabinogion itself, from the rich and extensive Irish analogues, and from our knowledge of the myth-making and myth-degrading habits of our remote world-ancestors, that the theme needs no development at our hands. Euhemerised though they are, they remain invested with a physical and moral grandeur which amply bespeaks their godlike state and superhuman nature. The evidences of a prevading mythology are neither so numerous nor so striking in the later romances but these too are seldom far from folklore. Other elements common to all or most of the tales are those styled onomastic, the attempts to explain place-names, and the historical, in so far as the references to Arthur and heroic story of non-divine origin may be called historical. That Wales had its bards is a circumstance known to most. So too that the bards celebrated their patrons in verse. That oftentimes these bards were also story-tellers whose medium was prose or prose and verse is an item of knowledge as well-authenticated though rather less widely diffused. The eleven tales of the Mabinogion are not the only examples of their craft which have survived, and the craft flourished during no shorter period than from the sixth century to the fifteenth. We know that the cyfarwydd's, story-teller's, stock-in-trade included many elaborate saga -cycles in which prose was the medium of narrative and description; and verse, often of the englyn type, of monologue and dialogue. Other tales were entirely in prose, and we are encouraged to guess at their number when we remember that the Irish ollamh was required, as a professional qualification, to know three hundred and fifty such. The triads and later verse as well as Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, suggest that the Welsh storytellers yielded to none in amplitude of material. Their tales were delivered orally, and centuries passed before some few of them were committed to writing. Thcy had thus no fixed and inviolable form, but took shape and colour from a hundred minds, each with its human disposition to variance and mutability. The locus classical for the art and practice of these court story-tellers is in Math. When Gwydion and his eleven companions set off for Rhuddlan Teifi, to trick Pryderi! they travelled in the guise of bards. "Why,'' said Pryden, gladly would we have a tale from some of the young men yonder." ''Lord,'' said Gwydion, "it is a custom with us that the first night after one comes to a great man, the chief bard shall have the say. I will tell a tale gladly.'' Gwydion was the best tellers of tales in the world. And that night he entertained the court with pleasant tales and story-telling till he was praised by every one in the court, and it was pleasure for Pryderi to converse with him.' What tales Gwydion told, like what songs the Syrens sang, are not beyond all conjecture. They 'admit a wide solution' by such relics and fragments of Celtic tradition as have survived the steep mortality of the years. And so, natural and pious as it is to lament our lost heritage of story, we contemplate with the more pride and affection such treasures as are preserved to us in the White Book and the Red. If now we turn to a necessarily brief consideration of the eleven tales themselves, we unhesitatingly assign pride of place to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. There has been no lack of attempts to explain the term 'mabinogi', but by common consent of Welsh scholars today it is derived from the word mab (youth), and is equated in meaning with the Latin infantia and the French enfance. It meant first 'youth,' then a 'tale of youth,' then a 'tale of a hero,' and finally little more than 'tale' or story.' Thus a Branch of the Mabinogi is a portion of the 'story.' The reader of the Four Branches in their latest redaction may well wonder of what hero's story they are branches, and here we must rely on Professor W. J. Gruffydd's discussion of the whole problem in his Math vab Mathonwy, Cardiff, 1928. Briefly, Gruffydd argues (we think convincingly) that originally all four branches were concerned with the birth, exploits, imprisonment and death of Pryderi. Numerous accretions and misunderstandings have obscured this original conception, and in particular the exploits of Pryderi have yielded place to new material. In the second and third branches the children of Llyr dominate, and in the fourth the children of Don, while the story of Lleu (his conception youthful exploits, and exile by transformation) must originally have been a story in its own right. The process of accretion and modification is readily accounted for if we remember that the cyfarwydd had to deal with a great bulk of traditional material, and not with a series of canonical texts. The author of the Four Branches, and by 'author' we mean the man who gave them the shape in which they are now preserved, was the heir of bards and story-tellers unnumbered. The traditional material on which they had worked for many, many centuries, accreting, rejecting, explaining, forgetting, goes back to the earliest creative impulses of the Celtic world, and far from its being surprising that great changes took place, the wonder would be had they not. Something of change, something of similarity, may be gathered from the lines in the obscure poem beginning Golychafi gulwyd to be found in the Book of Taliesin p.33), and probably a monologue of Taliesin's in an early ninth century?) version of the Hanes. I sang before the sons of Llyr in Ebyr Ilenfelen . . .If now we tabulate the contents of the Four Branches as we have them, and then discuss, even briefly certain aspects of the saga of Pryderi and what for our present purpose may be called its contamination, the extraordinary complexity of the material will be apparent. The Four Branches of the Mabinogi 1
In the just section of Pwyll we recognize the story of how the king of the Otherworld changes place with an earthly king, in order that he may beget a wonder-child on an earthly mother. But the story as we have it tells rather of the king of Dyfed's sojourn in Annwn, and of his loyalty and chastity there. Consequently no child is begotten, either in Dyfed or Annwn, and a fresh start must be made. And so it happens, in the second section, that Rhiannon appears before Pwyll one day, not without the trappings of magic (the special quality of Gorsedd Arberth, the wonderful horse, and as we know from Branwen and Culhwch and Olwen she possesses magic birds), and they become man and wife. At this point the story is powerfully affected by the later theme of the Calumniated Wife (the Constance legend). Rhiannon is delivered of Pryderi, but her infant son is spirited away (in an earlier rescension no doubt by his Otherworld father), and she herself is punished as though she had slain him. Next comes the episode in Gwent Is-Coed, where Teyrnon successfully protects his colt and on the selfsame occasion finds a child left at his door. Here we may well be confronted with a major confusion, if Teyrnon (Tigernonos) really is the Great King, and Rhiannon (Rigantona) the Great-queen, who is to be equated with Modron (Matrona) the Great Mother, the father and mother respectively of Mabon (Maponos) the Great Son, with whom Pryderi is identified or at least confused. In any case, the boy is restored to his mother Rhiannon by Teyrnon, and Terynon having been his father till that time, Pryderi is placed in fosterage with Pendaran Dyfed, who it is tempting to believe was the original Lord of Dyfed with whose wife the King of the Underworld slept. So much for the First Branch, the compert or Conception (as the Irish heroic tales would call it) of Pryderi. What of the Second, the macgnimarta or Youthful Exploits? Practically nothing is left: only the bare mention of Pryderi as one of the seven men who escaped from Ireland. The children of Llyr have otherwise completely ousted him. There may possibly have been a separate mabinogi of Gwern; more obvious is the addition of Irish material, by oral transmission: the Cauldron, the Iron House, and the house made for Bran. The Third Branch, what the Irish would call the indarba or Incarceration, is altogether clearer. Pryderi's imprisonment in the Otherworld caer and his deliverance thence by Manawydan's guile are as plain as words can make them. So too the fall of mist, the desolation, the infertility which oppress the land of Dyfed on two occasions, and the destruction of Manawydan's crops by Llwyd son of Cil Coed, suggest that we here have to deal with a myth like that of Persephone, daughter of Demeter the Earth Mother, whose abduction by Dis in the fields of Enna robbed earth of its increase and joy. The sojourn of Manawydan and Pryderi and their wives in Lloegyr, and afterwards of Manawydan and Cigfa, and their betaking them to craft, may be a version of the later and widespread Eustace legend, in which a great gentleman loses his wealth and must maintain himself by the work of hands, without embitterment, and above all without any attempt to be revenged on his enemies. Such a legend could well become attached to the person of Manawydan, because the early form of his name, Manawyd, so closely resembles the word for an awl, mynawyd. Inevitably becomes one of the Three Gold shoemakers of the Island of Britain. The confusion and complexity of the Fourth Branch, Math, are extreme. There is an unmistakable indication of the original aided or Death of Pryderi, for in the contest at Maen Tyriawg (the modern Maentwrog, north of Harlech) 'by dint of strength and valour and by magic and enchantment Gwydion conquered, and Pryderi was slain.' But the main actors in Math are the children of Don and it can hardly be doubted that the Death of Pryderi is little more than incidental to the tale of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Lleu is the hero of a story of the King with the Prophesied Death type. There is a king of whom It is prophesied that he shall be slain by his grandson; he has a daughter, and in order to circumvent the prophecy he must ensure that his daughter is never touched by man. But a means is found to outwit him, his daughter bears a male child, and in the fullness of time this child, perhaps unwittingly, slays his grandfather. The version of this tale found in Math, for all its changes, is still recognizable. But persons and motives have been altered decisively. Now it is the virginity of Math's foot holder, not his daughter, which must be protected, and when she has been raped she is allowed to disappear from the story, and her son with her. It is Aranrhod daughter of Don who is delivered of the fateful child Lleu, and it is the mother, Aranrhod, and not the grandfather. Math, who labours to prevent the working out of the prophecy. Math's destiny is nowhere mentioned, and Aranrhod's hostility to her son is rationalized to shame at his illegitimate birth and incestuous begetting. Hereafter Lleu's story is mingled with a version of the Unfaithful Wife.' His mother has sworn on him a destiny that he shall never have mortal woman to wife, so Math and Gwydion enchanters both, conjure a wife for him out of flowers. This wife betrays him, and her lover comes near to killing him, but eventually Lleu kills the lover, presumably in the way in which in the earlier story he kills his grandfather. The wife's punishment is to be transformed into an owl. The pattern of story set forth in the preceding paragraphs is necessarily a simplified one, but it will suggest to the reader not unacquainted with the substance and processes of folklore something of the successive redactions which occurred between the original saga of Pryderi and the Four Branches as we now have them. A further rich source of addition is the so-called onomastic tale, the fanciful explanation of the name of a place or person. Sometimes a new tale develops in the course of such an explanation, but for the most part the narrator adapts a tale already in existence. Thus the place-name 'Talebolion' in Branwen probably means 'End of the Ridges' or 'End of the Chasms' (the intermediate -e- an old orthographical form of the definite article y), but the narrator interprets it as tal ebolion, 'Payment of Colts,' and provides an incident to 'explain' why it was so called. Numerous examples of such a process are to be found, and not only in the Four Branches; the explanation of the name Culhwch and of place-names which occur in the account of the hunting Twrch Trwyth come to mind from Culhwch and Olwen; and Caer Fyrddin and Llydaw from The Dream of Macsen Wledig. Here and there we find an onomastic tale which has not been fully understood as such by the narrator. In Math, for instance, we read how Blodeuedd and her maidens fled to the mountains before the men of Gwynedd. In their fear they walked backward (to look out for their pursuers), and so fell into a lake where they were all drowned, save Blodeuedd. This rather awkward episode seems to have been designed to explain the name Llyn-yMorynion.' ('Maidens Lake'), but we miss the expected tag 'And for that reason far the lake called Llyn-y-Morynion. It is likely that a close study of the tales, the Four Branches and Culhwch and Olwyn in particular, would reveal many other such imperfectly understood onommstic stories. But it is time to say a word about the excellence of the Four Branches as literature. That the final redactor, the 'author' of' Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math in their present form, was a great artist no competent judge has ever denied. The natural turn of his mind was towards harmony and proportion; he brought a considerable degree of unity into the most diverse material; one senses in him at all times sanity and the spacious mind. He wrote the finest Welsh prose of his age, a grand master who never for one sentence intrudes the veil of style between the reader and what is read. Technically, we enjoy almost without awareness his perfect assurance a skilled management of dialogue; an impressive reserve and control, a command of phrase which allowed him to move easily from tenderness, to cruelty, from the grave to the grotesque, from pathos to the sublime, and a sustained yet delicately varied pace of narration. Second, though it is the tendency of folklore to deal with types, our author had a fine feeling for character. The children of Llyr and the sons of Don are in their origin gods, but how consummately he gives them manhood, womanhood. Rhiannon, half contemptuous of, half pitying the lying women who accuse her of destroying her son; the impetuousness of the youthful Pryderi contrasted with the middle-aged caution of Manawydan before the magic caer (so admirably sustained in Manawydan's attitude towards the jealous craftsmen of Lloegyr and his bargaining with the bishop); Blodeuedd, who betrayed Lleu Llaw Gyffes with Gronw Bebyr, and 'under pretence of the importunity of love' drew from him, like Delilah from Samson, the secret of how he might be slain-he never fails to explore their individual quality. And third, his vision of life must be stressed, clear, sincere, and noble. He has pondered long the destiny of mankind, its griefs and triumphs, its mystery and pain. Sometimes he touches heights at which comparison and comment are futile. He did so in the superb sentences which describe the death of Branwen; and later in the same story, in his account of the sojourn at Gwales in Penfro and the opening of the third door that looked on Cornwall and Aber Henfelen, he achieved that effect of illumination and extension of time and space which lies beyond the reach of all save the world's greatest writers. That we know nothing of him personally, save that, as appears from the internal evidence of his masterpiece, he was a man of Dyfed and shaped his great work at the beginning of the second half of the eleventh century, is of little or no significance. Our concern with him is as artifex of a monument more lasting than brass, a classic of European literature, a glory of the Celtic world. The two shorter pieces, The Dream of Macsen Wledig and Lludd and Llefelys, fall together in the mind rather by virtue of their brevity than for any correspondencies of subject or treatment. Macsen is a joy, with its firm outlines, good proportions, high finish, and delicate yet glowing workmanship. Its one flaw is the none-too-skilful onomastic addition which tells of Cynan's exploits in Brittany. Macsen is the Spanish-born Magnus Maximus, who served with Theodosius in the British wars and rose to high military command in this Island; in 383 he invaded Gaul to oust Gratian, then emperor of Rome, and after Gratian's assassination and the flight of Valentinian became master of Italy, but was himself put to death in 388 by Theodosius, at Aquileia. The excursion of Elen's brothers to Rome is historically on a par with Arthur's expedition thither, as related by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory but the story shows a strong and indeed nostalgic interest In the old Roman grandeur, and the (exaggerated) contribution to it of British fighting men. Lludd and Llefelys is an attractive little folk-tale which calls for no particular comment. Its account of the dragons stirs echoes of Nennius; one judges it a late representative of a class of magical tales of rather wider appeal than the mingled subtlety and precision of the Four Branches. The author of the Four Branches, we have said, was an artist who concealed his art. Not so the author of Culhwch and Olwen, who deploys with gusto every resource of language and style to heighten the colour and deepen the character of the fantastic and primitive world his creatures inhabit. It is a world in which birds and beasts are as important as men, a world of hunting, fighting, shapeshifting and magic. Immemorial themes of folklore are here: the jealous stepmother, the swearing of a destiny, asking a boon, the fulfilment of tasks, the helping animal, the oldest animals, the freeing of the prisoner, the hunting of the Otherworld beast, all strung along the controlling thread of Culhwch's seeking the giant's daughter for wife -itself one of the oldest themes of all. The zest of this unknown story-teller still hits one like a bursting wave; There is magnificence in his self-awareness and virtuosity. One feels how he rejoiced in being equal to all his occasions: the gallant picture of young Culhwch and his steed, the bombast of Glewlwyd Mighty-grasp, the poetic beauty of the episode of the oldest animals, the savage grotesquery of Ysbaddaden Chief Giant, the headlong rush of the hunting of Twrch Trwyth, the lyricism of the description of Olwen. Now he is bare hard staccato; now he luxuriates with Adjectives, compounds, puns even. It is not surprising that his story is rather loosely held together: his delight in its parts has affected its unity. Twice there appears to be an attempt to bind the diverse elements together, but each time on the dubious principle that the wider you throw your net the more surely you bring things together. When Culhwch first goes to Arthur's court, the narrator supplies a list of personages which is at once an index to cycles of lost story and a glimpse into his own teeming imagination; and second, at the court of Ysbaddaden he finds place for a list of some forty tasks, presumably each one of them the hook on which a story might be hung Arthur's warriors and Ysbaddaden's demands are a mytho-heroic assemblage, and one reads them with the sensation that here, tantalizingly glimpsed, is a vast rolling panorama of lost Celtic story. Less than half the tasks are fulfilled, and of those, three do not figure in Ysbaddaden's list. It is probable that the list of tasks has been extended and not the accomplishlnents reduced. The personages of Arthur's court surely the oddest retinue of any court in the world, and the list of tasks, would between them justify almost any wanderings of an author's furious fancies, but we are left with the impression of a conception too great for one man's powers. Unless indeed we have to do with a mutilated version of a masterpiece. What is left, however, is unique, a native saga hardly touched by alien influences, exciting and evocative, opening windows on great vistas of the oldest stuff of folklore and legend. After the Four Branchs it is the one story of the Mabinogion whose loss would not be made good by any other product of the medieval art of story-telling. This is not the place to discuss the historical and pseudohistorical references to Arthur to be found in the Historia Brittonum associated with the name of Nennius and in the Annales Cambriae. But it would be an omission not to stress that Culhwch and Olwen is a document of the first importance for a study of the sources of the Arthurian legend. The Arthur it portrays is, of course, remarkably unlike the gracious, glorious emperor of later tradition, whether exemplified in the literatures of France, Germany or England, or for that matter in the concluding Arthurian romances of the present volume, subject as they have been to Norman-French influences. But when we recall that Arthur was not a French, German or English, but a British king, it is not unreasonable to emphasize the significance of British (which in this connexion means Welsh) material relating to him. British material, that is, uncontaminated by the Cycles of Romance, though necessarily affected by the vast complex of Celtic myth and legend. It consists for the most part of some exceptionally difficult poems, and of Culhwch and Olwen itself. In one these poems, the so-called Preideu Annwfyn from the thirteenth-century Book of Taliesin (p.540 we hear of Arthur's raids in his ship Prydwen upon eight caers in the Otherworld. Perfect was the imprisonment of Gweir in Caer Siddi, In the second verse there is mention of the Cauldron of the Head Of Annwn, which 'boils not the food of a coward.' And when we went with Arthur . . . And in the fifth we read of the Ych Brych, the speckled Ox' of Culhwch and Olwen. And when we went with Arthur, sad journey,And so to the last verse: When we went with Arthur, sad contest,In this context belongs the poem beginning Golychafi gulwyd which has been quoted from earlier, and the poem beginning Pa gur from the twelfth century Black Book of Carmarthen (p. 94) though the poem is considerably older than the manuscript itself. In Pa gur we find Arthur seeking entry into a 'house' of which Glewlwyd Mightygrasp is porter. A. What man is porter?And so Arthur names his followers: Mabon son of Modron, Cysteint son of Banon, Gwyn Godyfrion, Manawydan son of Llyr ('of profound counsel'), Mabon son of Mellt, Anwas the Winged, Llwch Windy-hand, Bedwyr Fourteeth and Llacheu. As in Culhwch and Olwen pride of place is given to Cei and his exploits. Here too he is the great warlock-warrior. Cei pleaded with themClearly these poems and Culhwch and Olwen are much of a piece. They tell of the same people, and the events described are of a kind too. The account in Preideu Annwfyn of Arthur's sea-voyage 'to the Otherworld, and the mention of the peir pen annwfyn, remind one strongly of the account in the prose tale of Arthur's sea-voyage to fetch the cauldron of Diwrnach from Ireland; and the portion of Branwen which recounts Bendigeidfran's expedition to Ireland, the uses of the Cauldron of Rebirth, and the return of seven men to Wales, Pryderi being one of them, is a parallel which challenges the imagination. The feats attributed to Arthur's followers in the Glewlwyd dialogue would not be out of place in Culhwch and Olwen: the slaying of hags, monsters, witches. Cei and Bedwyr are consistent characters throughout, the former bearing little resemblance to the discourteous and ineffective buffoon of later romance. and what of Arthur himself? His nature is unmistakable: he is the folk hero, a beneficent giant, who with his men rid the land of other giants, of witches and monsters; he undertakes journeys to the Otherworld to rescue prisoners and carry off treasures; he is rude, savage, heroic and protective. And already he is attracting to himself the myths Of early gods and the legends of early heroes. In other words he is at the centre of British story; he is the very heart of it, both for his fame as dux bellorum and protector of Roman Britain against all its invaders (the historical and pseudo-historical Arthur), and for his increasingly dominating role in Celtic folklore and legend. It is remarkable how much of this British Arthur has survived in the early twelfth-century Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the mid-fifteenth-century Morte Darthur of Malory. Arthur setting off with Kaius and Bedeuerus to slay the swine eating Spanish giant, and bursting out laughing when the monster crashes like a torn-up oak, or his battle with the beard-collecting Ritho, are cases in point. The growth may be traced both backwards and forwards. Behind the royal features in Geoffrey and Malory may be discerned the ruder lineaments of the folk hero; in the folk hero of Culhwch and Olwen one observes adumbrations of king emperor. This is one of the three chief glories of this astonishing tale: its importance as a well-head of Arthurian romance. The other two are its richness as a repository of the early lore of Britain and its brilliance as prose narrative. For those things it is by itself. alone. Whether a story so complicated in structure and so diffuse in episode as Culhwch and Olwen was ever in its entirety narrated orally, is open to question. That the intricacies of the early thirteenth-century Dream of Rhonabwy were designed to defy the memory of both bard and cyfarwydd we have the colophon (even if it is a gloss) to prove. It may not be known 'without a book.' It is an artist's piece, a succession of illuminated pages, deficient in movement and character, but a tour-do-force of close observation and description. The first set-piece, the black old hall of Heilyn Goch, is in the vein of the 'February' histories of Pol de Limbourgh and Jean Foucquet; nor do their bright masterpieces of January and May out-do in loving care and brilliance of execution the pictures of the squires who interrupt Arthur and Owein at gwyddbwyll The advantage, however, lies with the miniaturists, whose paints and enamels do what all the coloured words in Wales must fail to do. In detail The Dream of Rhonabwy is impeccable, the portraits shine like jewels, but the whole hardly equals, much less exceeds, the sum of its parts. Yet for all its elaboration, it has its roots in native tradition of the Heroic Age. The significance of the games of gwyddbwyll between Arthur and Owein, like the nature and origin of Owein's ravens, has been the subject of much ingenious but unsuccessful speculation. What might have proved another difficulty, the author has himself cleared up for us. For as the author of The Dream of Macsen Wledig looked back with affection and respect to eternal Rome, so this later, selfconscious artist conjured up a vision of Arthur and the great men of the past, by way of comment on his own day. 'How sad I feel,' says Arthur 'that men as mean as these keep this Island, after men as fine as those that kept it of yore.' Men as one, that is, as Caradawg Stout-arm and Rhun son of Maelgwn Gwynedd, whom we know from history, or Goreu son of Custennin, Mabon son of Modron, Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues, and Gwalchmei, Gweir and Menw -old friends out of Culhwch and Olwen -and Owein, Peredur, and Edern son of Nudd, with whose adventures we are to grow acquainted in the three romances to come. Towards these romances the manner and matter of The Dream of Rhonabwy provide a natural, though unintended, transition. In The Lady of the Fountain, Peredur, and Gereint son of Erbin there is at once apparent a change, and something of awakening of interest. Norman-French influence is strong and obvious in background and tone and characterization, in the social and ethical code, in clothes and armour and the realien generally, and in the vague topography which contrasts so strongly with the precision of scene in the Four Branches and the routes marked so accurately across the pages of Culhwch and Olwen of Macsen and Rhonabwy. The opening section of Rhonabwy is a quite striking piece of realistic description of an intensely-realized setting. In place it is accurately sited in Powys; in time it belongs to the days of Madawg and Iorwoerth, the sons of Maredudd, lord of Powys, persons known to history (Madawg died in 1159 his brother six or seven years later). In all the dream literature of the Middle Ages one cannot call to mind an author who took pains to establish his dreamer in a more credible or less comfortable bed, or a dreamer who proceeded with more precision to his destination. But in the three romances, once a hero leaves Caer Llion on Usk, he is travelling not in Gwent or the adjoining districts of Lloegyr, but 'the bounds of the world and its wilderness. In this, as in other ways, the Norman-French influence on Welsh storytelling was as unfortunate as it was inevitable. This is not to say that, considered as Arthurian romances, these three tales fall below the level of such tales elsewhere. They are excellent of their kind, and provide a variety of interesting episode free from the fashionable longueurs which make so much Arthurian romance determined reading to-day. It is significant too that their best passages are such as stem from the old root of native narrative: the remarkable parallel in The Lady of the Fountain to the vanishing of the court and later of Pryderi and Rhiannon in Manawydan the enfance of Peredur, with its delightful incident of the two hinds, and its well-sustained folk motif of the Great Fool; the hedge of mist, the apple tree, and the horn which Gereint blew. It is probable that their charm seems less to the Welsh than to the English reader; for the former the decline from the Four Branches to Gereint son of Erbin would be not unfairly expressed in the difference between Branwen and Enid, or Manawydan and Gwalchmei. In the romances lay figures move through stock adventures in unlocalized places; they entertain but have little power to move or excite. The sorrows of Branwen touch one as close after a hundred readings, but one needs sentimentality rather than sympathy to feel pity for Enid. Bendigeidfran is hurt mortally with a poisoned spear, Pryderi is borne down by main strength and magic, the enigmatic Efnisien bursts heart and cauldron alike; but the knights invariably overthrow their thousands. Victrix causa deis placuit. . . . But who for ever would wish to side with gods? The connexion between the three Welsh prose romances and the Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion), Perceval (Conte del Graal), and Erec of Chretien de Troyes has been long and severely debated. It is part of the wider issue between the 'continental' and the 'Welsh' schools of thought. The former has held that Wales contributed very little or even nothing of importance to the Arthurian legend as it developed in France and Germany and then England, and that the credit for the influence exerted by that legend upon the literature and culture of Europe must go to Chretien and his disciples in France, and to Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Hartman von Aue. On the other hand, there have been many scholars to maintain that the continental romances were derived from Welsh sources, whatever the links and transmission. There seems little room for doubt that the argument is now swinging to the 'Welsh' side, and that Chretien's sources, little though we know of them, were derived from Welsh originals. The evidence of comparative folklore, of proper names and linguistics and what may be reasonably if tentatively deduced from the methods of literary composition in the Middle Ages, is telling with increasing weight against the opposite view. The achievement of Chretien and the Gaulish poets is not affected by this; their poems stand, and influence remains; their contribution to the Arthurian legend is impressive enough, though they are denied what they themselves never claimed, its origin and fountain-head. Of the relationship between the three Welsh romances and Chretien's poems it may be said that the romances are translations of the Yvain, Conte del Graal, and Erec. It may be that they are compositions proceeding from the same ancient traditions, both oral and written, as provided Chretien with the outlines of his stories. That the French speaking Normans are in the direct line of transmission between Welsh tradition on the one hand and both Chretien and the authors of the Welsh prose romances on the other, seems certain. By the twelfth century it is clear that matters Celtic were the rage in literature, and that for a variety of reasons Arthurian legend was the fashion. Arthur's dominating position in British. story; Geoffrey of Monmouth's spectacularly popular History; the twofold advantage to the Normans of Arthur as a British, not an Anglo-saxon, hero, with no unfortunate emotional or political connotations to his story and the ease with which the imagination played about him rather than more defined figures like Charlemagne and Duke William; the skill of the Welsh and Bretons as story-tellers (the thing is just as true of the Icelanders), and the indubitable excellence of the stories they told: all these were elements of the supremacy. Further, the professional men of letters of the twelfth century knew their business well; they developed their material and conventionalized it at one and the same time: chivalry and courtly love, knight-errantry and faerye, religion, society and morality, mysticism and poetry-place for them all was found in the Matter of Britain whose mighty accumulations met the diverse requirements of feather-brained page lovesick courtier, gallant warrior, gentle lady, reverend senior, the dreamer and the man of action, the artist and the student of affairs. It displayed the pattern of society and the web and woof of human behaviour; it was remote as Broceliande and close as the nearest tilt-yard. It held a treasure for every seeker. And so, while the final miracle will always defy a logical and documented explanation, the Arthurian legend now became a priceless European inheritance, and part of the European imagination for ever. In their vast expansion of matter and significance the three Welsh; prose romances now under discussion, are quantitatively a humble affair. Their interest lies rather in their evidence of Welsh tradition underlying the continental expansion, and certain positive merits of narrative and construction which contrast with the deficiencies of Chretien's story-telling. Assuredly they were popular performances, with their Norman-French characteristics imposed on the old Welsh virtues, and appealing more to their sophisticated audiences than the earlier, ruder tales of Owein, Peredur and Gereint had done. So popular indeed, that the earlier versions have yielded before them and fallen from human memory. These then are the eleven stories of the Mabinogion. The present translation is the third into English. The pioneer in the field was Dr. Owen Pughe, whose version of the first part of the tale of Pwyll (the episode of Pwyll and Arawn) appeared in the Cambrian Register for 1795, and with some slight verbal changes in the Cambro-Briton for February I821. In 1829 he published a complete version of Math son of Mathonwy in the Cambrian quarterly. But it was left' to Lady Charlotte Guest, with the help of Tegid, Carhuanawc and others, to complete a translation of all eleven stories along with the 'Taliesin' (not found in the White Book or the Red), and publish them in three handsome volumes during the years 1838-49. Her translation was a charming and felicitous piece of English prose, and has been justly esteemed by every succeeding generation of readers as a classic in its own right. The present translators believe themselves to be in as favourable a position to assess her merits as anyone now alive, and they cannot too emphaticly pay tribute to so splendid an achievement. But the absence of texts the lack of strict scholarship, and the ever present sense of an undertaking ad usum filioli have left their tell-tale marks. Hers are beauties indeed, but too often they are not the beauties of her wonderful original. In 1887 Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans and Sir John Rhys published a diplomatic edition of The Text of the Mabinogion and other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest, and in 1907 Dr Evans published a diplomatic edition of The White Book Mabinogion, which made available to scholars an earlier and in many ways more fundamental text, along with the variants supplied by other Peniarth manuscripts. The second edition of Professor Loth's brilliant French translation ' Les Mabinogion, Paris, 1913 was a tribute to Dr Evans 's inspiring labours. Then came the second English translation, by T. P. Ellis and John Lloyd, Oxford, 1929 which restored Lady Guest's omissions, corrected her softenings, and attained a far greater accuracy of detail. It was. based upon a study of all the texts but in the present translators opinion still left the way open for a rendering which should aim to convey literature in terms of literature and yet endure the most rigorous scrutiny of contemporary scholarship. This new translation, now reprinted from the Golden Cockerel Press edition in folio, July 1948, is based upon the White Book of Rhydderch, as the older and truer manuscript. Its omissions, which are considerable, including as they do the whole of The Dream of Rhonabwy and substantial portions of other stories, have been supplied from the Red Book of Hergest. Our method can best be described as the preparation of a critical text based on the White Book, with a collation of all other MSS., and the translation of that text. We have used the diplomatic editions already refered to, of both the White Book and the Red, and consultation of the White Book manuscript has yielded a number of correct readings now incorporated in a translation for the first time. The forms of all personal and place names have been modernized in orthography but not in phonology; we have retained the epenthetic vowel, and so far as is practicable used one form only of a name in any one tale. No translation of a Welsh classic has received warmer and more ample aid than this. We have three major obligations. Professor J. Lloyd-Jones, of the Department of Welsh at the National University of Ireland, and our colleague Professor T. H. Parry-Williams, of the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, have read and commented minutely on the bulk of our versions. Professor Sir Ifor Williams, of the Department of Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, has submitted gracefully to our questionings upon many an awkward passage, and we have made full use of his editions of our texts, and more especially his Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, Cardiff, 1930 What their united help has meant in terms of applied scholarship needs no words of ours to stress: our merits are often of their cultivation, our failings are entirely our own. To Mr Christopher Sandford, of the Golden Cockerel Press, for his vision, care, and generous spirit, we shall always be under the deepest obligation. The greatest debt of all demands a separate mention. It seems to either translator that without the encouragement and furtherance of his wife this work could hardly have been carried through amid the duties and distractions of four troubled years. No adequate acknowledgment is possible, but within the little space and with the few words left to us, it is our privilege and pride to dedicate this translation of the Mabinogion ' To ALICE AND MAIR.' Gwyn Jones. Thomas Jones SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (a) DIPLOMATIC EDITIONS John Rhys and J. Gwenogvryn Evans, The Text of the Mabinogion and other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest, Oxford, 1887 ; J. Gwenogvryn Evans, The White Book Mabinogion, Pwllheli, 1907. (b) EDITIONS OF TEXTS. (for Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabonogi, Cardiff, 1930; Breuddwyd Maxen, 3rd ed., Bangor, 1928; Cyfranc Lludd a Llevelys, 2nd ed., Bangor, 1932; ; Melville Richards, Breudwyt Ronabwy, Cardiff, 1948. (c) GENERAL. Sir Edward Anwyl, ' The Four Branches of the Mabinogi,' in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, I (1896 ), 277 ff. ; H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, The growth of Literature, Vol. I : The Ancient Literatures of Europe, Cambridge, I932 ; W. J. Gruffydd, ' Mabon ab Modron,' in Revue Celtique, XXXIII (I912), 452, ff ; ' The Mabinogion,' in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1912-13, 4 ff.; Math vab Mathonwy, Cardiff, 1928; ' Mabon vab Modron, in Y Cymmrodor, XLII (1931), 129 ff.; Rhiannon, Cardiff, 1953 ; Ivor B. John, The Mabinogion, London, 1901 ; T. Gwynn Jones, ' Some Arthurian Material in Keltic,' in Aberystwyth Studies, VIII (1926), 37 ff. ; Roger Sherman Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, New York, 1927; Arthurian Tradition and Chretien de Troyes, New York, 1949 ; Wales and the Arthurian Legend, Cardiff, 1956; ; Alfred Nutt, Celtic and Medieval Romance, London, 1904; Cecile O'Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, Their Historical and Literary Relations, London, 1924; ; Sir John Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, Oxford, 1891 ; Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx, Oxford, 1901 ; Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, Dublin, 1944 ; Mary Williams, Essa isur la composition du roman gallois de Peredur, Paris, 1909. (d) Translations into ENGLISH. The Mabinogion from the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, and other ancient Welsh manuscripts, with an English Translation and Notes, by Lady Charlotte Guest, 3 volumes, London, 1838-49. The Mabinogion. A New Translation by T. P. Ellis, M.A., and John Lloyd, M.A., 2 volumes, Oxford, 1929. The Mabinogion, A New Translation from the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones with illustrations by Dorothea Braby, in folio, London, The Golden Cockerel Press, 1948. FOOTNOTES[1] The table of contents is taken from Gryffudd, Math vab Mathonwy, Cardiff, 1928, pp. 326.7. |