FREETHE MABINOGION EBOOK Sioned Davies | 336 pages | 11 May 2008 | Oxford University Press | 9780199218783 | English | Oxford, United Kingdom The Mabinogion - Ancient Welsh tales of myths and legend T hose interested The Mabinogion Celtic mythology, historians of the Welsh nation and students of the Arthurian tradition will all, at one time or another, have found themselves directed to a collection of Middle Welsh prose known by the curious name of the Mabinogion pronounced Mabin- OGion. Compiled from texts found The Mabinogion two late-medieval manuscripts — the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch — The Mabinogion collection was initially edited and translated by antiquarians The Mabinogion Pughe and Lady Charlotte Guest in the early nineteenth The Mabinogion. Guest and Pughe applied the term 'Mabinogion' based on The Mabinogion spurious plural of mabinogi to their translated The Mabinogion. While the Mabinogion collection itself The Mabinogion thus be regarded as a nineteenth century editorial creation, its constituent texts are authentic medieval productions, deriving from originals composed between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. They represent a golden age of narrative prose that flourished in Wales over the course of the central middle ages. This distinctive and evolving literary culture forms the context of the Mabinogion, and the focus of our interest in this introductory study. Eleven separate tales are normally included within the Mabinogion corpus. Within these, two subgroupings - 'the Four Branches of the Mabinogi' and the 'Three Romances' - are traditionally recognised. In chronological order, the texts are as follows:. The Mabinogion texts are concerned with the heroic age or mythological past of the British Isles. They were not original compositions, drawing as they did on pre-existing traditional material, whether from oral or written sources. But these traditions were reworked, often to reflect contemporary concerns. We might read the The Mabinogion as both an interpretation of a mythological past and a commentary on the medieval present. The two and half centuries during which the Mabinogion texts were being composed represent a threshold of critical transition in Welsh history and literature. Here, in this little-known corner of the European Middle Ages, we find the thought-worlds of oral The Mabinogion and literate proto-modernity face-to-face in curious The Mabinogion. The transition between the two can be traced as a literary process - which we can observe unfolding on the very pages of the Mabinogion. By the end of the twelfth century, Middle Welsh narrative prose was in The Mabinogion second or third generation, and along with poetical and triadic material formed part of an expanding, self-referencing literary tradition. Vernacular literary self-confidence, as well as foreign influence, accounts for the gilded splendour of thirteenth-century works such as the Three Romances and the Dream of Macsen Wledig. The conclusion of this tradition is marked by the Dream of Rhonabwywhere literary self-consciousness has come full-circle and finally turned in on itself — anticipating the sloughing of the medieval spirit that took place throughout Europe in the following centuries. Far from being 'a ruin of antiquity' — as Matthew Arnold misunderstood the Mabinogion i — these texts are better understood as constituent parts of a complex and ongoing literary conversation. Within this unfolding tradition, each name, motif and reiterated incident would have formed part of a cumulative constellation of meaning. To understand this intertextual culture, we need to taken in The Mabinogion of the broader historical development of Medieval Welsh literary prose: from the laconic marginalia of the Early British church; to the narrative interlacing of the Four Branches; to the florid fantasy of thirteenth-century Romance. This introduction will consider a number of themes The Mabinogion on the early development of Medieval Welsh literature. We will be looking at the role of the oral tradition — known as The Mabinogion cyfarwyddyd in Medieval Wales — which is especially relevant to the earlier Mabinogion texts. A clarification of the overlapping but distinct concepts of myth and storytelling will also be necessary to help us understand the primary elements of this prose ensemble. The social The Mabinogion of literacy as a general phenomenon, and the specifics of the vernacular literary culture in Wales will also need to be considered, in particular the so-called Triads of Britain, and works of the mythical Taliesinboth of which have close links to the Four Branches and Llud a Llefyls. It will be necessary for us to understand the The Mabinogion changes that were The Mabinogion place in Wales in the thirteenth century — an infusing of Romance and other Continental influences within and beyond the literary world which did so much to define the quality and content of the later Mabinogion texts. Finally, we will be looking at the manuscript tradition in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Wales: a tradition which culminated in the Red and White Books in which the Mabinogion along with much of the rest of medieval Welsh literature has survived to The Mabinogion day. Professor D. Binchy once described medieval Irish society as 'rural, tribal, hierarchical and familiar'. The same might well be said to apply to much of western Britain in the early middle ages. Medieval Welsh The Mabinogion was organised around a network of tribal courts, each of which supported a 'household retinue' teulu of spear- carrying youths. Cattle-raiding and other forms of low-level conflict between and within these agnatic court communities were the norm rather than the exception. Tribal aristocracies The Mabinogion this type have thrived in a variety of contexts throughout the temperate world: from the Teutonic forests to the plains of the Masai Mara. It might be regarded as the characteristic social form of cattle-based economies at the 'Heroic Age' level of techno-cultural development. In pre- modern societies such as these, the oral tradition is the medium of collective memory: fluid in its details, but essentially static and conservative in its overall ethos. Its constituent elements might take the form of genealogies, origin legends, hero-tales, topographic lore, wisdom The Mabinogion proverbs and gnomic statementsanecdotes The Mabinogion agreements bearing on local law and custom. Early Welsh literature contains examples of all of these genres, and we might assume that much of this material was informed, directly or otherwise, by the ambiant oral tradition. A Welsh term for this body of recitational learning was the cyfarwyddyd cer-var-with-ida word which in the modern language simply means 'information' or 'instructions', but in the medieval period probably had a The Mabinogion closer to 'lore' or 'testimony'. Occasionally we find examples of the cyfarwyddyd recorded in writing in a more or less unprocessed The Mabinogion. Some interesting early examples, dateable back to the eighth or ninth centuries, are to be found inscribed onto the margins of an illuminated manuscript known as the Lichfield gospels, also known as the Book of Chad. Despite The Mabinogion association with the West Midlands, this holy book seems to have resided in a Welsh-speaking context at some stage in its history, as indicated by the presence of a number of scrawled notes written into its margins in the Old Welsh language. These marginal notices cover a variety of subjects, but one of the longer examples — the so-called Surexit memorandum — records what would appear to be resolution of a local land dispute:. Tudvwlch, the son of Liwid and son-in-law of Tudri, arose to claim the land of Telich, which was in the possession of Elcu, the son of Gelhi, and the tribe of Judgored : he complained long about it : at last they dispossess the son-in-law of Tudri of his right : the nobles said to one another 'let us make peace' : Elcu gave afterwards a horse, three cows, three newly The Mabinogion cows, provided only there be no hostility between them from this reconciliation thenceforth till the day of doom : Tudvwlch The Mabinogion his people will require aftewards no title for ever and ever. Witness Teilo, etc. Whoever observes it will be blessed, whoever breaks it will be cursed ii. A similar note further on in the manuscript records a list of rents due from various tenants on a local monastic estate. The informants responsible for The Mabinogion summary of rental dues are described as the cimguareitthe Old Welsh form of the word cyfarwyddiad'guides' or 'storytellers' i. Interestingly, we find the term used in The Mabinogion or less exactly the same context in the First Branch of the Mabinogi, when, after his defeat of Hafgan, Pwyll instructs the vanquished king's subjects to 'take a reckoning [ kyvarwyd ] and find out those who The Mabinogion me allegiance'. That such The Mabinogion should be recorded in the blank The Mabinogion of a holy book such as the Lichfield Gospels should not surprise us. The book, as a sacred object, The Mabinogion have been an appropriately august repository for the solemn agreement between the two feuding families — bound as it was by the holy and dread names of the local saints — as well as a natural enough place to record the rental dues from the monastic estate. The Mabinogion marginalia form part of a general trend which saw the Early Medieval Church with its privileged access The Mabinogion writing technologies employed by local elites as the guarantor of its legal and economic arrangements and a custodian of its communal records. What was originally entrusted to the memory of the cyfarwyddiad became increasingly committed to the The Mabinogion archives of the local monastery. An important branch of medieval Welsh literature owes its origins to this process. Among the most significant components of the cyfarwyddyd was genealogy. Who is related to whom is always the central question in tribal societies.