The Mabinogion

My new favorite translation of The Mabinogion. Davies does a great job of respecting the oral tradition lying underneath the medieval text, but without letting it club you over the head. The foot notes are useful. It was just a pleasure to read. (Except for "The Dream of Rhonabwy", which is a satire of the other tales. So, it is intentionally tiresome.)

The first four stories are really excellent, weird old stuff from pre-christian Wales that move quickly and are consistently entertaining and surprising. I found the Arthurian stories a little less interesting, though not terrible by any stretch. The Welsh taxonomy is just fantastic, and puzzling out the correct pronunciation of character and place names (with the help of the pronunciation guide) is a great game. Wales seems to get short shrift among Celt-crazy Americans, and it seems a bit unfair after reading this.

Also recommended if you enjoyed Lloyd Alexander in your youth, as he clearly drew heavily from this and similar sources.

Professor Davies’s translations of these eleven middle Welsh tales tell of ancient Celtic British heroes besting opponents that are both human and supernatural. She notes that the tales have the distinctive style of oral storytelling, and although written down in the 13th and 14th centuries, they were clearly originally recited by performers who had memorized them. Indeed, the last one in the book, Rhonabwy's dream, ends with this boast from the storyteller:

"And this story is called the Dream of Rhonabwy. This is why no one knows the dream—neither poet or storyteller—without a book, because of the number of colours on the horses, and the many unusual colours of the armour and their trappings, and on the precious mantles and the show more magic stones."

It’s clearly someone bragging about their ability to memorize stories with long lists of characters, and exactly what they and their horses all wore.

The translation into modern English is lively and captures the rhythmic repetition of sound of the original Welsh. It also includes a thoughtful introduction, translator’s note, a guide to pronunciation of Welsh names, extensive explanatory notes, and indexes of personal and place names. show less

The Penguin edition's introduction goes to enormous pains to tell me that the contents of the Mabinogian today probably do not reflect the original versions. They are only the oldest capturing we have of legends which were told orally for as many as several centuries prior. Further, we do not know exactly when this recording took place. Nor can we say for certain that it does not bear a heavy French influence which colors the lost originals. Nor is there much evidence that these stories held much influence over the development of Welsh culture. By the time I'd finished this detailed and inspiring intro, I almost reconsidered reading it at all.

Happily the Welsh legends of the Mabinogian have several memorable bits, loaded with show more mythological elements, curious reasoning and fantastic events. It has the usual conflicts and cruel acts of violence encountered in most peoples' mythologies, but there's also some humour laced into it that I thought was more unusual. The most fantastical elements are met by the characters with forthright aplomb. This seems like a characteristic of most people of legend but here it's perhaps especially worth noting. As the (otherwise unhelpful) introduction notes, it's a recurring theme to see the fantastical and the real intertwined, and to see a crossing between the two come as naturally as fording a stream. I find Greek and Norse mythology more engaging and this is not all casual reading, but enough of it is entertaining. show less

Reading/listening to this book at one go is like eating too much cotton candy. As anyone who has read ancient literature can tell you, there are tropes within them that are the legacy of an oral tradition behind the tales. I find these tropes to be extremely tiresome when taken in large quantity over a short time. And in The Mabinogion, this is made even harder to get through due to Superlatives Overload. Every woman is "the fairest ever seen", every castle or suit of armor or your-noun-here is the best that ever was.
It probably does not help that I chose a very old translation. But the audiobook narrator is a native Welsh speaker, and I wanted his delivery of the many (many!) names within the book. He is the reason I give this 3 stars. show more Otherwise, it would languish with a 2-star rating. show less

The Mabinogion is a compilation of Welsh mythology and Arthurian stories from a variety of authors and a variety of time periods. This means that the stories have a different feel. The first half of the collection is a bit speedier, with shorter stories. The Arthurian stories are much longer in the telling and contain staggering lists of warriors and horses of varying colours. Davies’s explanatory notes are well worth reading—I bookmarked the back so that I could read a tale and then the associated explanatory notes. Davies explains translation choices to convey alliteration and rhythm, the connections between the various tales, and how the Arthurian ones intersect with other sources of these tales (e.g., Geoffrey of Monmouth, show more Chrétien de Troyes). It is not a light read, but worth checking out if you like Arthur and Wales. Next step for me will be hunting down a good audio, to hear the Welsh names pronounced properly and to get the rhythm of the story. show less

I love to read history and while these tales are not histories, they do give a perspective of what was of on the minds of early medieval readers. These are traditional Welch tales, some pre-Christian era, some related to the myths of Arthur. I found Davies translations very readable and the extensive notes were for the most part helpful in providing background and context.

The 11 stories in this collection are likely more than 1000 years old (perhaps some are much older but the written versions are in that range), and yet they are both similar to and different from modern stories. Similar in that sex and violence are common themes. Many of the fantastical elements form the basis for modern fantasy stories. Different in the way the show more stories are told and the expectation of what the reader will understand / accept as part of a good story. A couple of examples of that:

1. The mix of pagan, pre-Christian notions with references to the Christian God. God, for instance, in one story curses a king and his men by turning them into pigs.

2. In the "romances" in this collection, knights are constantly running about and killing people to win the hand of the "woman they love best", even to the point of killing other men to take their wives for themselves, and those wives scheming with them to do so. Perhaps an early form of "a code of chivalry" (and the medieval notion of love at first sight) when these tales were told, but certainly not a modern understanding of appropriate behavior between the sexes.

3. The understanding that children of the noble class were commonly given away to be reared by "foster parents".

I have not read the other translations that people mention in other reviews, but I enjoyed reading this enough to (at some point) seek out some of those translations. show less