The Mabinogi, and Other Medieval Welsh Tales

Rating:
Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: Not the Usual Contents
Review: Although at least one new translation of the collection of medieval Welsh narratives known as "The Mabinogion" has been announced (and parts are available on-line), Patrick K. Ford's is the most recent version to be published in book form, and, although it represents a variant selection of material, is in some ways the most satisfactory. Patrick Ford gives a clear and vigorous rendering, with an excellent introduction and notes. He does not try to make the medieval texts sound up-to-date, but he doesn't strive for quaintness, either (the stories are quite strange enough!).

I have reviewed the nineteenth-century translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, whose failure to recognize a scribal slip created the collective title of "Mabinogion" for a diverse group of tales, and the standard modern translation by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, which, following a little-known predecessor from 1929, created the standard modern "canon" of these stories by dropping one of Charlotte Guest's selections, and evaluated these older translations there. The Jones and Jones list was followed in Jeffrey Gantz's translation for the Penguin Classics, which appeared about a year before Ford's translation of "The Mabinogi, and Other Medieval Welsh Tales," and I have discussed it briefly in comparison with the Jones and Jones version.

Although the Jones and Jones translation has been the "Revised Standard Version" of "The Mabinogion" for half a century, during which it underwent several revisions to keep the scholarship up to date, Ford's version has several advantages, not all of which are immediately evident; I would suggest that anyone with a serious interest in Celtic literature, or even a strong curiosity, read, and if possible own, both.

Patrick Ford, then at UCLA, and later at Harvard, dropped five stories, three of which were influenced by, if not copied from, French sources, and restored the missing tale, which he had re-edited from the manuscripts, and published separately. Ford's translation, therefore, contains stories in three of the four usual categories. (Note that preferred spellings of proper names vary, and I have not tried to be fully consistent.)

First, "The Four Branches of the Mabinogi," from which the collective title was derived, consisting of "Pwyll, Prince of Dyved," Branwen Daughter of Llyr," "Manawydan Son of Llyr," and "Math Son of Mathonwy." These begin with a story about the conception and birth of Pwyll's son, Pryderi, whose death is one of the early events in the "Fourth Branch," and concern a variety of heroes, and what are clearly rationalized gods. (Evangeline Walton turned each of the "Four Branches" into a novel; and other writers have done versions of one or another of them.)

Second, there are two "native tales," "The Dream of Maxen Wledig" and "The Story of Lludd and Lleuelys," about Roman ("historical") and pre-Roman ("mythical") Britain as imagined by the medieval Welsh. The 'Lludd" text, as we have it, actually belongs to the "Chronicle" tradition launched by Geoffrey of Monmouth's supposed translation from an "ancient British book." (Which, if any part of it ever had any existence, was NOT the "Mabinogion.") The name of Lludd seems to be Welsh variant of a Celtic divine name, "Nuada" in Irish, "Nodens" in old British inscriptions, and "Nudd" in other Welsh sources; the variation seems to be due to assimilation to his epithet, Llaw Eraint, "Silver Hand." (H.P. Lovecraft picked up "Nodens" for the Cthulhu Mythos, a use which is unrelated; but Tolkien, whose hero Beren also lost a hand, actually wrote an early article on the Nodens inscriptions.) He may be behind King Lud, the supposed eponym of London. As Ford points out, Lleuellys, usually given as Llevellys, and also modernized as Llefellys, clearly should be read as Lleu-ellys, and recognized as a version of the god Lugh: the name Lleu is also used for a character in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.

"Maxen," in which a Roman Emperor seeks as his wife a princess seen in a dream, seems to reflect an even more garbled version of a story known to Geoffrey, compounding several real people, including Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. She was, in a medieval confusion compounding an honest mistake with local patriotism, believed to be British, and identified with "Elen of the Hosts." Ford drops this, as it seems to contain a rather high proportion of medieval hagiography and romance, and a very low proportion of archaic Welsh tradition.

Third are two Arthurian stories in native Welsh mode. "Culhwch and Olwen," is an elaborate quest, dragging in, at least by name, most of the gods and heroes traceable in Welsh material, and some of their Irish cousins into the bargain, mostly as part of Arthur's court.

"The Dream of Rhonabwy" is a visionary encounter with Arthur and his warriors (and anything else I could say would probably be controversial); a fascinating text, which, after a very grittily realistic opening, almost boasts of its authentically dreamlike obscurity. It breaks off in a manner most modern readers will find unsatisfactory -- and its arbitrary nature may have been part of the point. Ford does not include it; a pity, but it is probably the least readable part of the collection.

Ford also does not translate the fourth group, the three "Romances," "Owain" (otherwise known as "The Lady of the Fountain"), "Peredur son of Evrawc," and "Gereint the Son of Erbin," the first and last of which are clearly versions of Chretien de Troyes' Old French Arthurian Romances, "Yvain" and "Erec," while the second is related in a more complex manner to his unfinished and problematic "Perceval le Gallois." These seem to illustrate Celtic materials going out into wider European society, and then flowing back into Wales to enrich (and confuse) the native heroic and mythic tradition with ideas of chivalry.

The story missing from the three other modern translations was published by Charlotte Guest as "The Tale of Taliesin," but it is also found in some manuscripts as two separate tales. Although attested rather late, there are Irish parallels, and its tradition would seem to belong very much with the "native tales" like the "Four Branches of the Mabinogi" and "Culhwch." There seems to have been a real Taliesin, an early medieval poet, to whom much-later poems were also attributed, but this story-complex has more to do with the myths about the nature of poetry. (It is also behind Thomas Love Peacock's comic novel, "The Misfortunes of Elphin," and quite a bit of modern fantasy literature.)

The version of "Taliesin," based, as noted earlier, on the text Ford had re-edited from manuscripts, is restored to its two-story version, as "The Tale of Gwion Bach" and "The Tale of Taliesin," and includes reliable versions of the poems attributed to the variously-reborn hero. There was a real Taliesin, a dark-age Bard, according to Welsh tradition; but these stories are pretty much independent of anything he may have actually composed. The absence of the tale(s) from other twentieth-century translations seems to be due to the fact that Charlotte Guest's text for the story (with poems) had passed through the hands of the notorious Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1747-1826).

Iolo was a Welsh and local patriot, and a pioneering scholar who may have known more about medieval Welsh than anyone in his lifetime. Unhappily, he didn't hesitate to *invent* evidence to support his theories, and Charlotte Guest was only one of the nineteenth-century writers he had led astray. Since the other copies of the Taliesin story were all obviously late, there had been little incentive to plunge into that thicket.

Unfortunately, the Guest version of Taliesin had been worked over by Robert Graves for his brilliant, and absurd, "The White Goddess," and a reliable version for non-Celticists was more than overdue. Ford's text edition was of value for another reason; there are close parallels between the stories of Gwion and the boyhood of the Irish hero Fionn (Finn McCool), investigation of which certainly needed a proper edition of the Welsh version to work from.

As an added bonus for readers of his "The Mabinogi," Ford included as an appendix a translation of the notoriously difficult "Cad Goddeu," or "Battle of the Trees," also found in Guest's notes. It too had been given a splendid, and absurd, interpretation in terms of the Irish Ogham script by Robert Graves, who demonstrated his profound lack of knowledge of Welsh, and equally deep understanding of Irish. (Graves actually "improved" and re-ordered the translation he was using, without reference to the original....) Ford doesn't claim to understand its "real meaning," if any, only what it actually says, and it is very nice to have it. (By the way, "The Battle of the Trees" seems rather likely to have been in Tolkien's mind, along with Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, when he was writing about the Siege of Orthanc.)

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Commentary--Excellent Translation
Review: For those interested in going to some of the sources of the Welsh tradition rather than New Age commentaries, this book is a treasure. Not only do you get Ford's reliable translation of some of the oldest Welsh tales, you also get his highly readable and insightful introduction to the texts of the Mabinogi and the Welsh tradition in general. If you are at all interested in Welsh mythological traditions, start with this book.

Rating:
Summary: How the owl got it's name.....
Review: Once upon a time...the stories from childhood begin. Scholars now think fairy tales and many other stories are derived from more serious fables orally transmitted from generation to generation over thousands of years, until a redactor cast them into literary form. With the exception of the last two tales in Patrick K. Ford's translation of THE MABINOGI AND OTHER WELSH TALES, the stories in this book exist in manuscripts religious monks familiar with the `original' narratives prepared in the early part of the second millennium. For the most part these recorded versions appear to be relatively faithful to an oral tradition, however confused their narratives may at times seem to modern ears. In addition to recording the tales, the monks appear to have used the tales to transmit Christian notions, just as Christian missionaries to Hawaii explained the triune God using the sacred tripartite banana.

The last two tales in the MABINOGI were set down in the sixteenth century by one Elis Gruffydd, an educated man of Welsh extraction (The Tale of Gwion Bach, and The Tale of Taliesin"). Ford says that although no manuscript dating from an earlier era has turned up, it is apparent from the structure of the stories Gruffyd recorded that the two tales are very old and may have been copied in earlier times and the manuscripts lost. Gruffydd apparently was familiar with the oral versions of the tales which were still being retold in sixteenth century Wales which makes them all the more remarkable. events.

The tales of the Mabinogi set down in Ford's translation are somewhat interlinked, much as a set of short stories might be today, or as the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable were in the 12th Century. Characters in one tale show up in another and King Arthur shows up in The Tale of Taliesin ("shining forehead") the remarkable bard whose poems fill the last few pages of Ford's book. Ford suggests literal truth, moral insights and religious/philosophical/magical elements form the basis of these tales. For example, a good deal of evidence exists to support the notion King Arthur lived sometime in the 5th-6th Centuries and Merlin may have been his counselor. On the other hand, the feats of Cerwidan the shape-shifting mother of Morfan and brewer of the cauldron of inspired wisdom are not as well documented, and may be largely mythical/religious. The feats performed by magicians and witches in these tales are quite amazing, but the creation of Blodeuedd (flower face), the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lugh, the fair one with skilled hands), conjured out of flowers by Math and Gwydion, is the best. She was transformed into an owl in punishment for her unfaithfulness to Llew which is why some owls have faces that look like "blowed" flowers.

Rating:
Summary: How the owl got it's name.....
Review: Once upon a time...the stories from childhood begin. Scholars now think fairy tales and many other stories are derived from more serious fables orally transmitted from generation to generation over thousands of years, until a redactor cast them into literary form. With the exception of the last two tales in Patrick K. Ford's translation of THE MABINOGI AND OTHER WELSH TALES, the stories in this book exist in manuscripts religious monks familiar with the 'original' narratives prepared in the early part of the second millennium. For the most part these recorded versions appear to be relatively faithful to an oral tradition, however confused their narratives may at times seem to modern ears. In addition to recording the tales, the monks appear to have used the tales to transmit Christian notions, just as Christian missionaries to Hawaii explained the triune God using the sacred tripartite banana.

The last two tales in the MABINOGI were set down in the sixteenth century by one Elis Gruffydd, an educated man of Welsh extraction (The Tale of Gwion Bach, and The Tale of Taliesin"). Ford says that although no manuscript dating from an earlier era has turned up, it is apparent from the structure of the stories Gruffyd recorded that the two tales are very old and may have been copied in earlier times and the manuscripts lost. Gruffydd apparently was familiar with the oral versions of the tales which were still being retold in sixteenth century Wales which makes them all the more remarkable. events.

The tales of the Mabinogi set down in Ford's translation are somewhat interlinked, much as a set of short stories might be today, or as the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable were in the 12th Century. Characters in one tale show up in another and King Arthur shows up in The Tale of Taliesin ("shining forehead") the remarkable bard whose poems fill the last few pages of Ford's book. Ford suggests literal truth, moral insights and religious/philosophical/magical elements form the basis of these tales. For example, a good deal of evidence exists to support the notion King Arthur lived sometime in the 5th-6th Centuries and Merlin may have been his counselor. On the other hand, the feats of Cerwidan the shape-shifting mother of Morfan and brewer of the cauldron of inspired wisdom are not as well documented, and may be largely mythical/religious. The feats performed by magicians and witches in these tales are quite amazing, but the creation of Blodeuedd (flower face), the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lugh, the fair one with skilled hands), conjured out of flowers by Math and Gwydion, is the best. She was transformed into an owl in punishment for her unfaithfulness to Llew which is why some owls have faces that look like "blowed" flowers.

Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for anyone interested in Celtic heritage
Review: There are several translations of the Mabinogion in print, but this is the one I recommend. Not only is the translation a careful balance of scholarly accuracy and readable prose, but it has excellent introductory material as well. As for the text itself... well, as an amateur Celtic scholar and practitioner of neo-Celtic spirituality, I think anyone, of any faith tradition, who wants to cultivate a "Celtic" form of spirituality, owes it to themselves (and to Celtic culture) to become familiar with the primary sources of Celtic myth. The Welsh Mabinogion and the Irish Tain are the two places to start. So... whether your interest in Celtic myth is academic or personal/spiritual, this is an essential text.

Rating:
Summary: Basic Text for Welsh Literature and Folklore/Mythic Studies
Review: This is THE edition for the stories of Pwyll, Gwion Bach/Taliesin and Culwich and Olwen. The introduction and notes alone are worth the cover price. Translations are elegantly rendered, and Ford discusses the difficulties in explicating the history and meanings of the stories.

Rating:
Summary: The best translation of the Four Branches
Review: This is, hands down, absolutely the best translation of the four branches of the Mabinogi, and of the "native tales." Really. Ford has managed to capture the lively, intimate conversational tone, including the acerbic wit, of the Welsh originals, something that no other translator has managed. In addition, the Introduction and headnotes provide provocative guides to thinking about the tales in the context of medieval Celtic literature, for either the novice or the scholar. Even if you have another translation, read this one for Ford's notes, and for the not readily available "Tale of Gwion Bach."

You really can't find a better person than Ford to guide you as you read the Mabinogi.

Rating:
Summary: Best Translation of the Mabiongi
Review: Though he leaves out the decidedly more "literary" romances ("The Dream of Rhonabwy", "The Dream of Maxen", and the three retellings of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian works), Ford's translation of the main cycle of Welsh mythology is without comparison. He is able to make the Four Branches come alive in a modern way, while preserving their magic.

Most important, however, are his notes, and his new translation of "Taliesin", the story of the famous Welsh bard. He uses a version older than the Guest edition, and tackles the difficult poetry to make it fully readable where he can. As for his notes, Ford makes excellent use of Indo-European scholarship, particularly the works of Georges Dumezil, to illustrate the primitive themes embedded in these late-medieval tales.

This volume should be on any medievalist's shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Best Translation of the Mabiongi
Review: Though he leaves out the decidedly more "literary" romances ("The Dream of Rhonabwy", "The Dream of Maxen", and the three retellings of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian works), Ford's translation of the main cycle of Welsh mythology is without comparison. He is able to make the Four Branches come alive in a modern way, while preserving their magic.

Most important, however, are his notes, and his new translation of "Taliesin", the story of the famous Welsh bard. He uses a version older than the Guest edition, and tackles the difficult poetry to make it fully readable where he can. As for his notes, Ford makes excellent use of Indo-European scholarship, particularly the works of Georges Dumezil, to illustrate the primitive themes embedded in these late-medieval tales.

This volume should be on any medievalist's shelf.