A Beginner's Guide to Welsh Myth Cycles

What the Mabinogion Actually Is

The word Mabinogion is a slight accident of history. Lady Charlotte Guest used it as the title of her translations in the 1830s, taking a plural from mabinogi, a word that properly belongs to just four of the tales. The name stuck, and it now covers eleven stories preserved in two great medieval manuscripts: the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest.

The stories themselves were written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they carry material far older — oral traditions, half-remembered gods, and a landscape of magic that predates the Norman castles by centuries. You do not need Welsh to enjoy them. You do need a little patience, and a willingness to accept that a story may end abruptly, or that a hero may spend a year as a pig.

The Four Branches

The heart of the collection is the Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi, the Four Branches. They are linked by recurring characters, and they move in a cycle from birth to loss to restoration. Read them in order if you can.

• Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. Pwyll offends Arawn, king of Annwn, and must swap places with him for a year, then strike a single blow at exactly the right moment. He wins the hand of Rhiannon, loses his newborn son to a mysterious claw, and finds the child again. The first branch sets out the themes that run through the rest: hospitality, obligation, and the thin border between this world and the next.
• Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr. Branwen is married to the King of Ireland and treated cruelly there. Her brother Bendigeidfran, a giant who wades across the Irish Sea because no ship will hold him, comes to avenge her. This is the darkest branch: a cauldron that brings dead warriors back to fight, a feast lasting seven years, and a severed head that keeps talking.
• Manawydan, son of Llŷr. After the slaughter, Dyfed is emptied of every living thing by an enchantment. Manawydan, Rhiannon and Pryderi are left in a silent land with no neighbours and no game. The branch ends with one of the strangest scenes in Welsh literature: a mouse, a game of gwyddbwyll, and a bishop with a secret.
• Math, son of Mathonwy. The wildest of the four. Two brothers are transformed into a pair of deer, then pigs, then wolves, each time bearing a child. A woman is built out of flowers to be a wife, and turns into an owl. A man is killed by a spear and reborn as an eagle. If you read only one branch, read this one.

Beyond the Four Branches

The remaining tales are usually grouped separately, and they are worth exploring once the Four Branches are behind you. Culhwch and Olwen is the oldest and longest, and gives us Arthur before the French romances got hold of him — a demanding, generous, faintly absurd warlord surrounded by a roster of heroes with extraordinary talents and unpronounceable names. The three later romances, Owain, Geraint and Peredur, run alongside French versions of the same stories and show how Welsh storytellers handled shared material in their own way. Lludd and Llefelys offers a neat puzzle: three plagues afflicting Britain, and two brothers clever enough to end them. Save The Dream of Rhonabwy for last; it is a wonderfully odd satire that makes far more sense once you know the conventions it is teasing.

What to Notice as You Read

Three things repay close attention. First, transformation: people become animals, birds and flowers, and the change is rarely a straightforward punishment in the way later fairy tales make it. It is often a lesson, a sentence, or simply a fact of the world. Second, women: Rhiannon, Branwen and Blodeuwedd drive the action, and their grievances carry real weight in a society that the stories show to be bound by law and insult. Third, place: these tales are rooted in real geography — Dyfed, Gwynedd, Harlech, the mountains of Snowdonia — and walking the sites is one of the quiet pleasures of reading them.

Choosing a Translation

There is no shortage of good options, and the differences between them are worth knowing before you commit.

• Sioned Davies is the best place to start. Her translation is brisk, modern and attentive to the oral rhythm of the Welsh, with helpful notes on names and pronunciation.
• Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones is the classic version, more formal and slightly archaic in feel, but it captures the cadence of the originals beautifully.
• Jeffrey Gantz reads quickly and keeps the narrative momentum going, which makes it a good choice if you want the stories without the scholarly apparatus.
• Patrick Ford is useful for comparison, setting the Welsh tales alongside related Irish material and showing where motifs overlap.

Whichever you choose, read the first branch aloud, keep a scribbled list of who is related to whom, and do not worry about pronunciation. Welsh names look forbidding but the rules are consistent: ll is a breathy l, dd is a soft th, and f is a v. Nobody minds if you get it wrong, and the stories are sturdy enough to survive it.