The Mabinogion is the single most important collection of medieval Welsh prose tales, a group of eleven interrelated stories preserved in two great fourteenth-century manuscripts, and a body of work that ranks alongside the Irish sagas as one of the great achievements of the medieval Celtic literary tradition. To answer the question what is the Mabinogion and where did it come from is to trace the survival of an older oral tradition through the manuscript period into the present, and to recognise the central place of the collection in the broader story of Celtic languages and oral tradition.
The Title and the Collection
The title Mabinogion was given to the collection by its nineteenth-century translator, Lady Charlotte Guest, who used the plural of the Welsh word mabinogi to refer to the four tales that form the mythological core of the collection. The four tales, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, are the tales of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, and Math, four interconnected stories that deal with the magical and tragic events surrounding the royal family of Dyfed, the historical Demetia in southwestern Wales.
Lady Charlotte Guest published her translation in three volumes between 1838 and 1849, and the title Mabinogion has stuck to the whole collection of eleven tales, even though the seven other tales in the collection (the tales of Culhwch and Olwen, the Dream of Macsen Wledig, the Dream of Rhonabwy, Owain, Peredur, Geraint, and Taliesin) are not strictly part of the mabinogi proper. The collection in its modern form is therefore a Victorian editorial creation, although the tales themselves are medieval.
The Manuscripts
The Mabinogion is preserved in two principal manuscripts, the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1400 CE) and the White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1350 CE), both of which were compiled in the fourteenth century and both of which contain substantially the same text of the tales. The Red Book of Hergest, now in the library of Jesus College, Oxford, is a large manuscript that also contains a substantial body of other medieval Welsh material, including the cywyddau (formal poems) of the medieval Welsh bards. The White Book of Rhydderch, now in the National Library of Wales, is somewhat older and contains a slightly different selection of material.
The two manuscripts draw on a common source, which is generally thought to have been compiled in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and the common source in turn draws on older material that goes back to the early medieval period. The tales themselves, in the form in which we have them, are products of the high medieval Welsh literary tradition, but they preserve a great deal of older material that scholars have been able to identify and to study.
The Four Branches
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi are the mythological core of the collection, and they are the tales from which the collection as a whole takes its name. The first branch, the Mabinogi of Pwyll, tells of the lord of Dyfed who spends a year in the underworld of Annwn in exchange for the friendship of Arawn, the king of Annwn, and who fathers the hero Pryderi by a magical union. The second branch, the Mabinogi of Branwen, tells of the tragic marriage of Branwen, the sister of Bendigeidfran (Bran the Blessed), to the king of Ireland, and of the war that ensues, in which Branwen is mistreated and Bran is eventually wounded in the foot by a poisoned spear, leading him to order that his own head be cut off and taken to the Tower of London to be buried as a talisman of British sovereignty.
The third branch, the Mabinogi of Manawydan, tells of the son of Llŷr who, with his companion Pryderi, is plunged into a magical mist that turns the land of Dyfed into a wasteland, and of the long sequence of enchantments that follows. The fourth branch, the Mabinogi of Math, tells of the magician Math son of Mathonwy, whose throne can only be filled when his virginity is at risk, and of the strange tale of the boy Gwydion, who is transformed through a sequence of magical punishments into a series of animals, and of the woman Aranrhod, whose supernatural shoes and hair are the cause of the transformations.
The four branches are unified by a set of recurring characters and themes, including the magical pigs, the cauldron of regeneration, the throne of the king, and the strange names of the older mythological world. The tales are also notable for their strange and sometimes disturbing content, including the birth of the hero Hywel Dda from his mother Rhiannon in the form of a young mare, the transformation of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy into a series of animals, and the long description of the war in Ireland that ends with the survivors being turned into mice.
The Arthurian Tales
The Mabinogion also contains the great Arthurian tales of Culhwch and Olwen, the Dream of Macsen Wledig, the Dream of Rhonabwy, and the three medieval romances of Owain, Peredur, and Geraint. The tale of Culhwch and Olwen is the oldest of the Arthurian tales, drawing on a substantial body of older material, and it tells of the hero Culhwch, who must complete a long series of impossible tasks in order to win the hand of the giant’s daughter Olwen. The three romances of Owain, Peredur, and Geraint are the medieval Welsh counterparts of the great French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and they are essential sources for the history of the European Arthurian tradition.
The Origins of the Tradition
The origins of the Mabinogion are a matter of considerable scholarly debate, and the tales preserve material from a number of different periods and sources. Some of the material, including the stories of the older mythological figures such as Pryderi, Rhiannon, and Branwen, is of considerable antiquity and probably goes back to the early medieval period or even earlier. Other material, including the Arthurian tales, reflects the influence of the broader European Arthurian tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which Welsh material was combined with French, Latin, and other elements to produce the great cycle of medieval romance.
The Welsh tradition preserved in the Mabinogion is the natural counterpart to the Irish tradition preserved in the great Irish manuscripts, and the two traditions are in some cases closely related. The figure of Manawydan, for example, is the Welsh counterpart of the Irish sea-god Manannán mac Lir, and the tales of the Mabinogi of Branwen have been compared to the Irish tales of the Mythological cycle. The relationship between the two traditions is one of the great subjects of Celtic studies, and it is an essential part of the broader story of the Celtic language family.
The Modern Reception
The reception of the Mabinogion today has been a remarkable story. The collection was first made widely available in English through Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of 1838 to 1849, and the tales had an enormous influence on the Romantic and Victorian imagination. The work of the translators Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones in the mid-twentieth century, and the more recent translations by Sioned Davies and others, have made the tales available to a wider audience in authoritative form. The tales continue to inspire modern Welsh-language writers, including the great T. Llew Jones, and they remain an essential part of the modern Welsh cultural heritage.
Related Topics
- The medieval Celtic literary tradition of which the Mabinogion is a central part is examined through the major works of the Irish, Welsh, and Breton traditions.
- The Celtic language family in which the tales were composed is examined in its Indo-European context.
- The Ogham and other inscribed stones that preserve the earliest written evidence of the insular Celtic languages are examined as a primary source.
- The Celtic religion, mythology, and spirituality provides the religious context for many of the older mythological figures of the tales.
- The Celtic legacy today includes the modern reception of the Mabinogion and its continuing importance to Welsh cultural identity.