The Mabinogion

An article about the Mabinogion on the BBC Wales history site.
Table of contents

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Tales from the Mabinogion , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Tales from the Mabinogion. Lists with This Book. Where would we be as mere mortals without our dreams, anticipation and expectations in our lives? And mine were certainly achieved when I went on holiday for a week in Mid-Wales two months ago.

I had two aims, apart from enjoying myself on holiday, of course, and that was to see the Aberystwyth National Library of Wales wonderful location overlooking the university town and the sea; and super to browse through the books, although their security was a pain — a need for identification, filling in Where would we be as mere mortals without our dreams, anticipation and expectations in our lives? I had two aims, apart from enjoying myself on holiday, of course, and that was to see the Aberystwyth National Library of Wales wonderful location overlooking the university town and the sea; and super to browse through the books, although their security was a pain — a need for identification, filling in a form, etc.

The other was to visit the Italianate village of Portmeirion. Upon arrival there, the village was breathtaking, and it stands on a rugged cliff top overlooking the estuary of the Afon river Glaswyn in North Wales. The views were stunning, and the village itself has acres of sub-tropical woodlands and miles of sandy beaches; although regrettably one was restricted to the village. It was the magnificent illustration on the cover that caught my eye. The manager also realized that she had a potential customer in me and directly made her way towards me.

Well this woman was soon in full flight, extolling the virtues of this book on Celtic storytelling and when I then told her I would take it, her beaming face was a delight to see. I really cannot believe that this is a book for children. It is a retelling of the four books of the Mabinogion texts, a collection of Welsh medieval tales about the feats and exploits of legendary Welsh kings and princes.

I loved the quick, rather racy style of writing. Lovely turns of phrase such as: And Blodeuwedd and he spent the day together talking and singing and enjoying themselves. And that night they went to bed together.

The Mabinogion - Sioned Davies - Oxford University Press

Finding this book was serendipitous indeed and I loved it. So do try it! View all 8 comments. Humans of All Ages. Celtic mythology at it's finest. This is an illustrated "children's" version of the classic Welsh tales - hence it is a a sort of digest, but still a great intro to the rich and ancient body of Welsh lit. Beguilery, Magic, Sex and Murder abound - and all for the kids! Plus, the artwork is great by Welsh artist Margaret Jones.

The story of King Lear is probably derived in part from The Children of Llyr a house of demigods of sorts -While not in one of the 4 major branches, an additional tale often found in the Mabinogion called "Culhwch and Olwen" features a cameo by none other than King Arthur himself the earliest known Arthurian references comes from the 7th Cent Welsh poem Y Gododdin.

Jul 25, Cynthia Egbert rated it liked it. My maiden name is Lloyd and I grew up with a ton of great uncles on the Lloyd side who used to tell stories. A lot of stories. These stories went on an on and when they finally wrapped up, I was often left thinking, "What was that supposed to be about? Besmir returns in "A Huntsman's Fate," a three-book bundle including the third book in the action-packed fantasy series, "The Ire of Eloran.

Review " The Mabinogion is famously magical. It will bring the tales to thousands of new readers, while its commentary will be a vital tool for scholars By fuelling debate on this and other questions, Sioned Davies's splendid volume inaugurates a new age of Mabinogion studies.

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Oxford World's Classics Paperback: Oxford University Press; 1 edition May 11, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. The Three Musketeers Bantam Classic. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention sioned davies pronunciation guide medieval welsh translation names tales notes jones modern text told background celtic charlotte helpful literature. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I really liked this translation. It is easy to follow and the notes do clarify many things. I am brazillian and I'm doing my graduation research on the women of the Mabinogion, and I found this book very helpful with the introduction, the pronunciation guide, the notes and excellent bibliography.

The author really seems to know and be passionate about the subject, something I always appreciate. I have no complaints about this book! Sioned Davies translation of the eleven medieval welsh tales that make up the Mabinogion is a delight to read. Her guide to pronunciation, extensive explanatory notes and indices of personal names and place names provide the background for readers coming to the tales for the first time to easily understand them.

This is a group of 12 Welsh legends that feature King Arthur along with other kings. They were stories passed down orally and have mnemonic devices imbedded in them to aide in the telling so they sometimes sound odd to our modern ears. There is so much here that appears in current day literature. There are magical creatures and wells and rocks and carpets, shape shifting, giants, fierce warriors, fair maidens, unbelievably delicious food, and chesslike games, etc. The knights are always handsome, unless they're the bad knights and then of course they're hideous, the women are each more beautiful than the next.

Decisions made quickly often have far reaching implications. There is a sense of immediacy. Anyone could die at any time or make a life long alliance. Magic, War, Love, that's what these stories are made of. I alternated between this new translation of Davies and Charlotte Guest's Victorian one and enjoyed both however Davies gives a wealth of background information that I found very helpful. These stories come from a strange time. Though I have no other translation to compare it to, this one seems excellent, and the notes to the text are very extensive, should you want to go through them contained in the back, not as footnotes.

There is some Arthurian Legend involved, and though the stories in the Mabinogion come from a century or two after the original King Arthur, they seem very proto Thus the cantref of Merioneth was held to be named after Cunedda's son Merion, while the district of Dunoding was believed to have acquired its name after another son Dunawd, while a third of these brothers — Ceredic — is held to have been the eponymous founder of the kingdom of Ceredigion.

It is not inconceivable that at least some of these names represent the memory of flesh-and-blood individuals from the fourth-, fifth-, or sixth centuries.

The Mabinogion

But considerable doubt must be cast on the neat genealogical scheme which identifies a sibling relationship between the eponymous founders of the particular northern Welsh districts. Spurious blood relationships of this kind are entirely typical of pre-literate tribal history, and represent a convenient way of expressing contemporary political relationships rather than being genuine record of dynastic realities.

We find a clear example of this in the traditional lore of Ghana — an oral record which has many similarities with the cyfarwyddyd of Medieval Wales. Anthropologists record tales of the legendry Jakpa and his sons, founders of the kingdom of Gonja. Like the sons of Cunedda, each of his five sons was associated with one of the territorial subdivisions of this regional hegemony.

Some years later, after two additional territories had been incorporated into this West African overkingdom, and sure enough a new variant of the foundation legend was recorded: We might expect that the number of sons of Cunedda may have fluctuated in a similar way with the ebb and flow of regional politics in Early Medieval Wales.

This example illustrates the dynamics of the oral tradition, in which contemporary geopolitical facts on the ground are frequently back-projected into a schematic tribal-historic past. The Welsh genealogies were clearly affected by this kind of process — a testament to their oral origins. However, at their more remote reaches, these lineages also alluded to more generic tribal-historic traditions — recalling names of saga heroes known to the poetry and prose narratives such as we find in the Mabinogion, but also not unheard of in more reputable historical sources as well.

The mythical element within this tradition — so often talked about, but so rarely understood — is what we will be considering in the following section. Myth, as the philologist K. Jackson once wryly remarked, has never lacked definers. Perhaps for this reason, it remains remarkably difficult to establish a workable consensus on what myth actually is, let alone its value or significance. The word comes from the Ancient Greek muthos , meaning 'things recited', and refers primarily to archaic narratives, which typically concern the gods or significant human ancestors and includes a strong supernatural component.

During the Hellenistic era muthos was sometimes contrasted unfavourably with logos analytical reasoning and thus acquired a wider definition which encompassed all discourse of a primitive or pre-rational nature. Even today, 'myth' retains this pejorative colouring, and is often used to denote a widely-believed fallacy e. However, this has not always been the case. Commentators from Plato onwards have regarded the strange, dream-like recitations of antiquity as shimmering with esoteric significance, the visible veil of a higher invisible truth. Something of the same exalted view of myth also informed Renaissance scholars, among whom the science of mythology was born in an effort to extract the inner truth from these ancient narratives through a means of exegetical analysis, just as their scholastic forerunners had worked over the Christian scriptures.

Mabinogion

More recently, myth was held in highest regard the Romantic folklorists and philologists of the early nineteenth century. A measure of scientific gravitas was leant to this predeliction by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who found in mythic narratives the key to what he described as the 'collective unconscious': More recently Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, Fredric Jameson and Camille Paglia have worked from a similar starting point albeit with rather different destinations: Here, we will confine ourselves mainly to the original definition of myth as simply as narratives of traditional i.

We will attempt to avoid value-judgements such as those described above, but instead focus on what such material meant to the authors and audiences of the Mabinogion texts, within the cultural context of the Welsh Middle Ages. Inevitably, this will require some consideration of the question of origins.

But in line with the strain of 'new criticism' that has emerged in Celtic studies over the last forty years, we will also be adopting the synchronic view — and looking at the function of this mythic material within the extant medieval narratives in which it was used. We will be attempting this latter task in more detail within our studies of the individual texts themselves found elsewhere on these pages. Myth, it must be emphasised, does not exist in isolation, but rather should be understood as part of a broad cultural continuum that includes proto-legal and political origin stories, usually embedded within tribal-historical tales of the ancestors.

Another important though frequently misunderstood element of myth was contributed by the narrative ideation underlying magico-religious custom and belief. The pre-literate world did not clearly distinguish these categories. What causes magical and fantastical elements to feature within the memory of actual past events is a complex psychosocial question which lies somewhat beyond the scope of this particular study. It is enough to suggest that the more remote the events in time, space and stature; the greater the extent to they will be assimilated into the magical imagination.

But what is this magical imagination? What, indeed, is magic? Restricting ourselves to one of its less problematic definitions, magic might be defined as a series of actions and modes of thought designed to construct a sense of power which is then deployed for a variety of purposes: A parallel process can also be seen at work at a collective level — and this is the magic that interests us here, relating as it does indirectly at least to the mythical material of Mabinogion.

Communal or ceremonial magic is typically enacted through rituals, dramas or seasonal pageants, often representing the triumph of tutelary ancestral figures against the malignant supernatural forces. The classical Frazerian paradigm of communal magic would be the fertility rite, a seasonal festival to promote the fruitfulness of the land or celebrate or enable, or participate with the onset of spring. We might suspect that customs of this kind lay behind stories of 'the king and his prophesied death' , the climax of which typically represents the killing of an aging king representing thanatos , or the departing winter by a young hero representing libido , or the incoming spring.

A myth of this kind, albeit in a distorted form, can be detected underlying the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. Another distinctive Brythonic motif involves the unsettling arrival of a menacing stranger Pwyll as Pen Annwfn , Gawain's Green Knight, Melwas of the Arthurian tradition who appears uninvited at the door of the tribal hall on a certain seasonal feast-day, demanding food or sexual favours.

These stories, with their chthonic undertones, perhaps contain echoes of the same folkish pageants underlying traditions such as the Mari Llwyd parades, or the frenzied cavorting of the Cornish 'Obbyoss'. But communal magic could be enacted at different times and for a variety of reasons: One such ceremony, which was enacted by a coastal Inuit community during the onslaught of a fierce Arctic gale, was described in detail by the Danish explorer K.

The Shaman was Horqarnaq, a young man, who took some time to enter into a trance. He explained to Rasmussen that he had several helper-spirits at his disposal: He is dubious about his skills, and is encouraged gently by the village women … He enters slowly into an almost frenzied trance and the audience increases, trying to stimulate his frenzy … Finally he no longer recognises the people around him and asks who they are. Then one of the helper spirits enters his body; he no longer has control over his actions; he jumps and dances around, and invokes his father's spirit, an evil spirit.

His recently widowed mother is also present, and she tries to calm her son, but others encourage him to greater frenzy. He then names several other spirits of dead people, whom he sees in the hut, among the living. The old women try to guess who it may be, becoming more and more excited as they attempt to solve the mystery. Then one old woman comes forward and calls out the names of the people whom her sisters had not dared to mention: The shaman cries out that it is they. They have been turned into bad spirits and are the cause of the tempest. Horqarnaq leaps at old Kigiuna and seizes hold of him; he shakes him brutally and pushes him into the centre of the hut.

They struggle and grunt and eventually he, also, is in a trance and follows the shaman docilely until they fall to the floor where they roll around, possessed. The old man seems to be dead and is dragged over the floor like a sack of old rags … The tempest has been killed symbolically.

The shaman bites the old man and shakes him like a dog would a rat … The people are silent while Horqarnaq continues his dance … Then he slowly becomes calmer, kneels down by the body and begins to massage life into it. The old man revives and eventually gets to his feet. But he has only just managed to do this, when the whole scene is repeated, and he is again seized by the throat. This happens three times: Finally, it is the young Shaman that faints, and the old man rises up and describes the images that are racing before his eyes — naked men and women flying in the air, causing the tempest to swirl before them … they are afraid and they are fleeing … Among them is one whom the wind has filled with holes; the wind blows through these, causing the whistling noise … he is the strongest and will be mastered by the old man's helper-spirit … Then the young shaman recovers and they both begin to chant and sing plaintively, addressing the Mother of marine animals and begging her to send away the evil spirits, to bite them to death … So, the two shamans struggle until the tempest is finished, and the people return, reassured, to their huts, prepared to sleep.

This harrowing Arctic episode displays the violent hysteria of the magical consciousness in its raw, unprocessed form.

The Mabinogion

Nonetheless, even within the apparently spontaneous outbursts of Horqarnaq and the old man Kigiuna, we can see the cultural influences at play e. Both the entranced participants and the onlookers saw, more or less, what they expected to see. In this way, the ritual served its purpose 'until the tempest is finished, and the people return, reassured , to their huts, prepared to sleep'.

Thus culture prevails over nature. We will consider a second example, recorded in the eleventh-century Lacununga manuscript from late Anglo-Saxon England. Loud they were, lo loud, when they rode over the mound, They were fierce when they rode over the land. Shield yourself now that you may survive their ill-will. Out little spear, if you are in here! I stood under the linden-wood, under a light shield, Where mighty women betrayed their power, and screaming they sent forth their spears. I will send them back another, a flying arrow from in front against them.

A smith was sitting, forging a little knife, … Out little spear, if you are in here! Six smiths were sitting, making war-spears. Out spear, not in, spear! If there is a particle of iron in here, the work of hags, it shall melt! Whether you have been shot in the skin, or shot in the flesh, or shot in the blood, [or shot in the bone], or shot in a limb, may your life never be endangered.

If it be the shot of the Aesir, or the shot of the elves, Or the shot of the hags, I will help you now. This as your remedy for the shot of the Aesir, this for the shot of the elves, This for the shot of hags, I will help you. Fly to the mountain head. May the Lord help you. This recitation would have belonged to a wider ritual-performative context, which we might assume was characterised the same ructions of consciousness associated with the exorcism of the arctic tempest described above.

Here we find reference to the fairly widespread traditional belief that certain types of internal pain are caused by invisible arrows fired by supernatural beings witches or elves are typically implicated in Anglo-Saxon contexts. In the first part of the incantation, the healer describes a past encounter with these monstrous entities, and alternates this description with protective injunctions to the present patient. The ritual climaxes with an extraction and dissolution of the agent of pain, addressed as a magical spear 'Out spear, not in, spear!

If there is a particle of iron in here… it shall melt! After this, the focus incantation switches back and forth from the source of the afflicting spears elves, witches, the old pagan gods to the power of the healer to counteract these agencies.


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The ritual ends with an evocation of the power of the Christian god, and what would appear to be the dissolution of the extracted arrowheads into the herbal balm. A parallel might be drawn with Native American healing rituals in which magical projectiles were miraculously sucked out of the patients' bodies. Over time, some of the spontaneous psychodramas that represent magic in its most natural form might acquire canonical status and undertake the status of community rituals. The narrative element within these rituals draws on pre-existing mythic structures of belief — superstitions concerning the spirits of the dead, magical beings such as elves or witches, the powers underlying the cosmos and the forces of nature.

As O'Keefe suggests in Stolen Lightning , his survey of the anthropology and sociology of magic 'the witchdoctor who cures does so with verbal incantations and references to myth…stories of primordial magical acts performed by culture heroes'. Thus the rituals themselves are mythopoeic, revitalising the reservoir of inherited dreams and nightmares that played such an important role in the primitive narrative tradition.

We have rather less direct information on how magic was practiced or understood in Medieval Wales — certainly nothing of the scale or type of the Anglo-Saxon Lacununga survives extant. However, an understanding of the magical ideation and behaviours exemplified in these comparative sources does much to account for some of the more outlandish and 'irrational' elements in the Mabinogion tales. Other outlandish but strangely loaded gestures in the Four Branches include Manawydan's mock-execution of the captured mouse on the mound at Arberth, or Gwydion's incantatory restoration of the eagle Lleu — all of which might be thought of in terms of primordial magical acts enacted by culture heroes, as described above.

Further evidence of magical ideation can be found elsewhere in the Mabinogion, such as in the curious stratagems deployed by the protagonists of Llud a Llefelys scattering crushed insects over their enemies, digging up dragons from the centre of the island, speaking to one another through a long copper tube. The Romances too show evidence of magical thinking and behaviour, which is deployed in a very specific way in the distinctive literary mode defined by medievalist Anne Wilson as the magical plot.

The magical aspect of these thirteenth-century Arthurian prose tales which is clearly apparent in a number sequences, such as the 'Fountain Ritual' at the beginning of Owain , or the banishment of the Mist Hedge Earl's bloodthirsty 'custom' towards the end of Geraint. In the earlier Arthurian tale of Culhwch ac Olwen , we are perhaps closest to the magical thought-world, with the complex series of tasks and injunctions to be accomplished by the hero arguably serving the underlying magical purpose, albeit through an almost carnivalesque form, of liberating the community's life-giving energies.

The Medieval Celtic texts normally described as 'mythical' are characterised by intermittent magical strategies of this kind. But, as we have already suggested, tribal history also features as a predominant concern. These tales are aetiological — origin myths in the most general sense. In many of these accounts, the actions of their larger-than-life protagonists to leave a physical imprint on the appearance on the landscape: More frequently, the imprint of these formative deeds is on the naming of the land: It was during this 'mythic time', as we have seen, that kingdoms or districts often acquired their name from some kind of eponymous founder.

Other forms of geo-political development are also projected back into the Foretime: Perhaps the most notable of these developments is the accession of Caswallon son of Beli at the end of the Mabinogi of Branwen, which provides the link between the genealogical networks of the Four Branches with those of the historical Welsh princes, as found in the Harleian genealogies and other related sources. Macsen and Llud have a similarly tribal-historic focus.

Between them these Mabinogion tales set the scene for the pre-dawn of the Roman invasion, and thus mediate the transition from mythic into historical time. The mythical narratives are different in scale but not necessarily in kind from the more recent tribal-historical cyfarwyddyd. We have a similar register of language being used in the accounts of contemporary dynastic-political events found in the Brut Y Twysogion.

We have the same preoccupation with genealogy, the same dynamics of family conflict, the same accounts of tentative reconciliation. Legal custom and practice, as well as magic, had has its origin in the paradigmatic events depicted in tales such as the Four Branches. Thus, in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, we find the Irish king Matholwch receiving compensation from the Britons in the form of a rod of silver and a plate of gold for the insult to his honour — the very same 'face price' wnebwerth for a prince of Aberffraw that we find stipulated in the lawbooks of Wales.

The exchange of livestock that accompanies this treaty resembles nothing so much as the 'horse, three cows, three newly calved cows' given by Elcu to Tudvalch's kin, as recorded in the Surexit memorandum of the Lichfield gospels. What we think of as myth would have been understood in Medieval Wales simply as one of many aspects of the cyfarwyddyd. As anthropologists and historians now recognise, myths are stories set in the distant past to explain the circumstances of the present: These stories may have drawn heavily on supernatural elements, and are punctuated by gestures and actions which seem to belong more to the world of the magical ideation than rational causality.

But their concern is as much with law and property claims as with history and religion again, we must remember that these categories would not have been clearly differentiated in the pre-modern mind. The basic setting was a familiar one — a pastoral landscape, populated by agnatic kindreds who fight and intermarry. Like the protagonists of Ancient Greek myth, the key players described in the Welsh cyfarwyddyd were only too human. They were no less prone to adultery, pride, greed, covetousness, low cunning or momentary stupidity than their latter-day descendants - and much of the understated humour of the Welsh narrative art hangs on these realistic psychological depictions.

Human beings, in all times and places, have enjoyed the experience of listening to stories. Any sequence of events with a defined beginning and end has the potential to be abstracted from the broader matrix of history to be told and re-told as a stand-alone narrative unit. Storytelling has its own set of rules, its own generic conventions. In medieval Wales the characteristic opening formula introduces the hero, defining him briefly in terms of lineage, status and geographic provenance e. X son of Y was king of…. The title of the tale is usually found in an equally conventional closing device: The word has a wide semantic field — meaning 'tale' or 'story' on one hand, but also 'history' or 'news' on the other.

The distinction between these categories may not have been clearly defined, particularly in the context of traditional material dealing with the remote past. The Welsh storyteller, like his counterpart elsewhere in the world, used a variety of ruses, structural and stylistic, to prime the imagination the assembled audience.

A well-known device of this kind is the so-called 'Law of Threes', the tendency for events to be presented in triplicate series e. The stereotypical nature of these devices was mirrored by an equally formulaic quality within the content of the narratives themselves. The heroine was always 'the most beautiful maiden in the world', the hero more often than not an impetuous arriviste. Medieval Welsh narrative also had its own rather more specific conventions.

A stag-hunt is usually a prelude to adventure. Giants are typically black-skinned and one-eyed. Noble characters are always clad in 'gold brocaded silk'. The end result was a picturesque but formulaic narrative universe, in which it often feels like a finite number of these motifs are being endlessly repeated and recombined.

Some awareness of this homeostatic quality can be seen in the medieval Welsh catalogue literature known by scholars as the Triads, which in modern narratological terms could almost be described as a 'motif index' for native storytelling. The Triads are predicated on the notion of repetition. Historical events or personalities are grouped into threes, defined by type: These triadic listings are to be found in a number of manuscripts from the thirteenth-century onwards, although there is a case for regarding them as the residue of an oral-mnemonic tradition that probably reached its peak in the previous century, as we will be considering below.

Around a hundred such triadic entries have been edited by the great Dr. Rachel Bromwich in her Trioedd Ynys Prydain , from which the following examples have been taken. Drystan son of Tallwch. And one of them was diademed above the three of them: That was Bedwyr son of Bedrawc. Three Levies that departed from this Island, and not one of them came back:. The first went with Elen of the Hosts and Cynan her brother, The second went Yrp of the Hosts, who came here to ask for assistance in the time of Cadial son of Eryn. And all he asked of each Chief Fortress was twice as many men as would come with him to it; and to the first Fortress there came only himself and his servant.

And it proved grievous to have given him that. Nevertheless, that was the most complete that ever went from this Island, and no man ever came back. The place where those men remained was on two islands in the Greek sea: And those men came from Arllechwedd. They went with Caswallawn their uncle across the sea in pursuit of the men of Caesar. The place where those men are is in Gascony. And the number that went in those Hosts was twenty-one thousand. And those were the Three Silver Hosts: And they were picked men. As can be seen from these examples, there was a generic structure to the Triad, which was repeated with a few minor variations.

After that, the three exemplars are listed — sometimes with qualifying annotations.

As can be seen from the third example, these annotations sometimes expand to the proportions of mini-narratives in their own right. Occasionally, a fourth exemplar is added to the list — as in the case of the first example. In the later tradition, this 'crowning fourth' position is often given to Arthur. The Triads represent the skeletal remnant what appears to have been an extensive body of oral-narrative tradition current in Wales during the early and central middle ages.

Some of these names are known from other sources. The first expedition led by 'Elen of the Hosts and her brother Cynan', for example, is clearly a variant of the Mabinogion tale of Maxen Wledig. Hueil son of Caw is the brother of the cleric Gildas, and is well-known to medieval Welsh hagiography. However, other figures are rather more obscure — Heidyn son of Enygan and his fellow assassins Llawgad and Llofan almost unheard of, aside from a few ambiguous references in the early poetic tradition. However, enough can be seen even from citations of this kind to suggest a vast ocean of narrative material, the majority of which have not survived the passage of time.

The Triads are poised between the worlds of literacy and orality. It has been plausibly suggested their original purpose was to assist a process of oral learning: The increasing appearance of the exegetical notations, qualifying the significance of this or that hero or relaying the circumstances by which they came to earn their position in the Triad, might be seen as further evidence that the knowledge of the hen chwedlau or 'old stories' was not what it had been in previous ages. Rising levels of literacy in Medieval Welsh society during this time might be seen as both a symptom and a cause of a wider process socio-cultural change.

This is not simply a matter of literature enabling an exposure to a wider variety of cultural influence though this is undoubtedly one of its significant outcomes. Equally important is the change that literacy itself brings to a culture's view of its own past, of history and the passage of time.

In oral cultures, the tendency is to regard time as a cyclic process: As we also saw in the example of the growing number of the sons of Gonja, there is a tendency to assimilate and 'back-project' geo-political change — a tendency that is facilitated by the inherent amnesia of the oral tradition. Thus oral cultures tend towards an eternal present — where the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The introduction of writing inevitably fractures this cosy illusion. The very structure of annalistic record — with successive entries one below the last — is merely one of the more concrete manifestations of the process out of which time becomes linear and history is born.

The jagged discontinuities of cultural and political change are revealed in other ways too by the preservation of the ancient written word. Not only do the contradictions in the oral tradition become uncomfortably apparent, the embarrassment of cultural change is also exposed: Written records thus reveal a process of permanent and irreversible change — and the ongoing process of cultural evolution.

Related to this we find the distinction between fact and fiction, often rather blurred in oral-historical discourse, becomes marked more defined within literary societies. We can see something of this transition at work in the Mabinogion. There is no doubt that the more 'archaic' native texts such as the Four Branches and Llud a Llefelys would have been regarded as an authentic record of past events, as well as being exercises in narrative entertainment. In the later Arthurian texts, the so-called Three Romances, there may be a nominal claim to historical veracity, but the overwhelming agenda is audience entertainment — storytelling for its own sake.

By the time we arrive at the latest Mabinogion text, The Dream of Rhonabwy , we are comfortably within the realms of the self-conscious literary fable. Here we find a full realisation of inter-textual self-consciousness that is the keynote of the literate sensibility, as we see in the ironic attitude towards the bombast of the heroic past displayed in Rhonabwy's encounter with warriors of Arthur. The Mabinogion tales were the product of a literate culture, albeit one informed by a considerable hinterland of oral tradition.

In the earliest of the Mabinogion tales, Culhwch ac Olwen , the traces of this background are most clearly apparent. Not only is it based on the time-honoured scenario of 'The Giant's Daughter' variants of which are found on every inhabited continent of the world , but this chwedl also includes stylistic features bear the impress of the oral delivery. One thinks of the rich descriptive sequences resembling the crescendos of traditional Welsh areithau the echo of which can be heard in the chapels and town halls to this day. However, even within this most 'oral' of the Mabinogion narratives, an element of literary self-consciousness appears to be at play.

If Joan Radnor's interpretation of Culhwch xiii is indeed correct the author appears to be sending-up the genre, playing on its excesses, as we will consider in more detail elsewhere. Ironic humour of this kind operates partially undercover, appearing on the surface to say one thing, while its true meaning is apparent only to a privileged inner circle of cognoscenti. Such a perspective is wholly characteristic of a literary elite, which probably in the eleventh century at least was drawn more or less exclusively from a distinct clerical caste.

Read in this light, we can see the target of the parody here is not only the rollicking excesses of the Arthurian topos , but also the illiterate lay majority themselves whose enjoyment of such tales was of a rather less sophisticated calibre. Judging by the range of interests explored in medieval Welsh writing by the late twelfth century, the reading habit seems to have extended beyond the narrow confines of these clerical elites — though what proportion of the lay population were 'readers' of this vernacular literature rather than just 'listeners' is rather harder to say.

In England and on the Continent as well, literacy was also on the rise. But while most of these medieval European readers were taught to read in Church Latin rather than their through their own literary vernaculars, in Wales the opposite seems to have been the case. Most Welsh readers seem to have learned to read and write in their own language, and often remained as 'literary monoglots' — with no direct access to Latin or Old French writing.

The literary language by this stage had stabilised into what we now recognise of classical Middle Welsh, with a well-defined set of syntactical and orthographic principles which was to endure well into the fourteenth century. Within this, a particular style of narrative prose was to develop: Professor Brynley Roberts describes the texture of this distinctive literary register:.

They are frequently linked by conjunctions, or joined phrases, a 'and', sef a wnaeth 'this is what he did', so that the reader is conscious of being moved along by the story. Though coordinate clauses or an elementary pattern of adverbial clause and main clause are the most usual, the syntactic pattern of clauses varies…the word order may be changed from the normal VSO [verb-subject-object] to SVO, OVS…what one is most conscious of is an aesthetic appreciation of the effect of balanced clauses and sentences which contrast with each other.

Such smoothness of style is not accidental … it appears to have developed over the years. The Four Branches of the Mabinogi — which epitomised this style of medieval Welsh prose — was a self-consciously 'readerly' work. For instance, the Second Branch at one stage refers to Efnisien as gwr anagneuedus a dywedyssam uchot 'the quarrelsome man whom we referred to above' a clear reference to the literary medium. Its organisation into 'Branches' may reflect the influence of some kind of predecessor of the French prose Romances although it is not inconceivable that the influence was in the other direction.

Either way, there is an orderly, structured quality — including an elaborate system of internal thematic interlace — which one would not expect to find in a more spontaneous oral work. The Four Branches, along with the early stratum of the Triads and the poetry of the Book of Taliesin represent surviving fragments of what appears to have been an extensive and involved vernacular literature. This literary culture was unusual within the early- and central-medieval European context in that its primary agents were often secular the cyfarwyddiad and the bardic poets rather than clerical.

A further significant characteristic, as we have seen, was that many of its readers were often literary monoglots, and therefore unexposed to other Latin or European literatures.