The Mabinogion

There never was an original book called the Mabinogion. What we have are eleven prose tales, written in Middle Welsh by storytellers whose names are lost, composed at different times between roughly the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and preserved in two great manuscripts of the Welsh gentry: the White Book of Rhydderch, written about 1350, and the Red Book of Hergest, written a generation later. The scribes who copied them were saving a world that was already old: tales passed down through centuries of court poets and professional storytellers, the cyfarwyddion, the "knowers," whose craft was memory. When those two manuscripts survived fire, war, and neglect into the modern age, they carried with them the entire mythic map of medieval Wales.

At the heart of the collection stand the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, four linked tales of magic and consequence. In the First Branch, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, offends Arawn, king of Annwn, the Welsh otherworld, and pays for it by ruling that grey kingdom in Arawn's shape for a year; later he wins his wife Rhiannon, a horsewoman who rides out of the otherworld at a pace no pursuer can match, and whose newborn son vanishes on the night of his birth. The Second Branch is the tragedy of Branwen, sister of the giant king Bran the Blessed, whose mistreatment in Ireland brings a war that leaves all Ireland's warriors dead and only seven Welshmen returning, carrying Bran's severed head, which feasts and talks with them for eighty-seven years. The Third Branch follows Manawydan, Bran's brother, through enchanted mists and ruined cities with a craftsman's patience. The Fourth Branch is the tale of the magician Gwydion and his nephew Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the bright hero who can be killed by neither day nor night, and of Blodeuwedd, the woman Gwydion makes out of oak, broom, and meadowsweet to be Lleu's wife, who betrays him and is turned into an owl, hated by every other bird.

Around the Four Branches gather the other tales. Culhwch and Olwen is the oldest complete Arthurian story anywhere: the young Culhwch, cursed by his stepmother to marry no one but Olwen, daughter of the chief giant Ysbaddaden, must win her by completing forty impossible tasks with the help of King Arthur's war-band, hunting the enchanted boar Twrch Trwyth across Wales and Ireland. The Dream of Macsen Wledig gives Wales a Roman emperor; Lludd and Llefelys gives it three plagues and buried dragons. Then come the three romances - Owain, Peredur, and Geraint - Welsh tellings that mirror the French romances of Chretien de Troyes, where the knights of Arthur ride through a landscape of magic fountains, black knights, and enchanted castles that is unmistakably Wales.

The world almost lost these tales, and then one woman gave them back. Lady Charlotte Guest, an English ironmaster's wife who taught herself Welsh, published the tales in English between 1838 and 1849 under the title The Mabinogion, taking the word mabinogi - properly the name of the Four Branches alone - and stretching it into a grand plural for the whole collection. Victorian readers fell on the book: here was a mythology as rich as the Norse, hidden in plain sight in the mountains of Wales. Poets mined it, painters illustrated it, and Welsh speakers claimed it as their national epic.

Since then the Mabinogion has never stopped generating stories. Lloyd Alexander built his Chronicles of Prydain on its names and creatures; Alan Garner made The Owl Service out of the tragedy of Blodeuwedd; and translator after translator, from Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones to Sioned Davies, has re-englished it for new generations. It remains what it always was: not a book but a doorway, the place where the old Welsh world of giants, horses, and enchantment is still standing open.