The Mabinogion

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The Mabinogion (Penguin Classics)

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format:Paperback Buy The Mabinogion Now
publisher:Penguin Classics
released:August 26, 1976
isbn:0140443223
isbn-13:9780140443226
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Customer Reviews

Mabionogion, mother of myth & legends in British Isles - Rated 4/5
Excellent book though I nearly died painstakingly trying to get the right pronunciation of all the characters. Thanks to my Welsh friends & pub crawls that saw me through:)). It may be the mother of all myth & legends for England and Wales (a little bit of Ireland too). The legend of Kind Arthur is only a subset of the other main characters. It will be little surprise if many movies of the Harry Porter & LOTR kind will be leaping out of the pages of this book soon enough. There are simpler versions which makes good bedtime reading for kids as well such as Tales from Wales.


Great stuff - Rated 4/5
The collection of Welsh classic legends. The stories are not gems of perfection - internal inconsistencies and unresolved plot elements abound - but I found myself nonetheless carried along by most of them. Oddly enough the one that grabbed me most was Peredur, the story that later became that of Perceval or Parsifal, with his peculiar series of deeply symbolic adventures.

The Penguin explanatory apparatus was a bit annoying. A page at the start of each story, explaining what happened, and a long introduction (24 pages of a 300 page book) which all combined to present the Mabinogion as an object to study rather than literature to be enjoyed.

With all that editorial effort, I would also have liked some unpacking of the basic concepts of the Welsh society portrayed. There is a little of this - the translator explains the shifting meanings of arvei meaning first "weapons" but later "armour", and marchawg which shifted from being a mere "horseman" to a full "knight". But there were other concepts which the translator puts directly into English expecting that we will automatically understand what was meant in the original medieval Welsh: "king", "court", "girl", "to sleep with".


Good, but look at the other options too. - Rated 4/5
This is a sound translation, though it reads a little stiffly, and includes all the tales Charlotte Guest included when she published the first version, except the tale of Taliesin, which is not from the same manuscript.

But you might also like to consider the new translation by Sioned Davies - The Mabinogion, OUP, ISBN 978-0-19-283242-9 which I find livelier and more up-to-date, and contains all the same stories.

For the older tales of the collection (the Four Branches, Culhuch and Olwen, Lludd and Lleuelyss) Patrick K. Ford's version (The Mabinogi,University of California) is very good if you can get hold of it, and also contains a translation of one of the original versions of Taliesin.


An Excellent Account of Welsh Celtic Mythology - Rated 4/5
The Mabinogion is an excellent collection of Welsh Celtic myths/legends. Certain tales are difficult to follow because of a large cast of characters and long list of events/deeds. Nevertheless, the Mabinogion portrays Celtic (Welsh) mythology well. There is an excellent summary of each tale, a guide to pronunciation of names and a map of the region. Together with the tales, these additions make this book exciting and easily accessible.


Excellent translation of an under-read classic - Rated 5/5
Jeffrey Gantz's translation of The Mabinogion is not only the most readable to the modern man, unlike Guest, he doesn't delete passages thought "indelicate" by Victorian society. This is the best representation of these Welsh classics, and includes Gantz's own study of the mythology of these texts, a book in it's own right, as a prologue and at the beginning of each tale. A must for every library.

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