Sacred Texts Legends & Sagas Celtic
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The Mabinogionby Lady Charlotte Guest[1877] |
The first five tales are Welsh versions of incidents from the Arthurian canon. The Mabinogion per se consists of the four connected narratives (called 'the branches') from Pwll, Prince of Dyved, through Math, the Son of Mathonwy. Following these are three additional stories, including the legend of one of the most famous bards of Wales, Taliesin.
The Mabinogion is one of the masterpieces of world literature, and a must-read for anyone who wants to have an understanding of Celtic lore.
One minor barrier for some readers may be the spelling of Welsh, particularly in place names and names of people. In a nutshell, 'w' and 'y' are vowels, pronounced like 'u' and 'i' respectively. Technically, double 'l' is voiceless; rest assured, 'Ll' at the start of a word is not a typo. So 'Pwyll', which on the face of it doesn't appear to have any vowels, can be thought of as being pronounced approximately like 'poo-eel'.
PRODUCTION NOTES: This version is up to current site standards, and includes anchored page numbers, linked foot- and end-notes, and so on. This version includes all of the endnotes which are omitted from previous etexts of this book, and corrects several errors in the body text. Unicode is used through this text to display archaic orthography.
John Bruno Hare, March 4th, 2004.