The Mabinogi and the Shadow of Celtic Mythology

In March 2015, Aberystwyth Arts Centre hosted the 'Mabinogi Project', advertised on its website as 'an unedited bi-lingual day-long illustrated telling of the four branches of Y Mabinogi'. 2The use of the word 'unedited' struck me as peculiar, and led me to wonder what a really unedited version of the Four Branches would look like.Now, one can see, without leaving the house, excellent colour reproductions of the two most important medieval manuscripts which contain the Four Branches, namely the White Book of Rhydderch of c. 1350, and the Red Book of Hergest of c. 1400, both of which have been digitized and are available for free on the internet. 3But even these do not represent 'unedited' versions of the text.We know that the Four Branches existed in earlier manuscripts because we have fragments (Peniarth 6i and ii) dating from the second half of the thirteenth century. 4 Assuming for now that all of these manuscript versions descend independently from a common lost exemplar, 5 we can see that at least some of the copyists have altered (or 'edited') the text in small, but sometimes significant, ways (see, e.g., Hughes, 2007a, xix).How faithfully the exemplar recorded the words of the author is anyone's guess.Unfortunately we don't know who that author was, or where or when he wrote (McKenna, 2003, 107, 116; Rodway, 2007, 58-59).It has been claimed that he was a 'she'.This is not impossible, but, sadly, it is statistically unlikely: we have no conclusive proof of literature by women in Welsh before the fifteenth century, and the evidence advanced in favour of female authorship for the Four Branches (e.g. in Breeze, 2009) is circumstantial. 6It is also possible that some or all of the Branches were composed by different authors. 7I am quite prepared to entertain this latter possibility.Nonetheless, as it does not much affect my concerns in this paper, I shall for now accept the traditional idea that there was one author and that he was a man: I hope that I can be forgiven for my use of the masculine pronoun in what follows.Of course, he was using traditional material, disseminated orally.He may have merely written down tales from the storytellers' repertoire without changing very much at all.Many have assumed this.Even so, he must surely have indulged in a certain amount of 'editing ' (cf.Davies, 1989, 18; Hughes, 2017, xvii).