Pennod 3 – Y Chwedlau Brodorol

This episode considers The Mabinogion, but we have to explain first that this is not the best way of describing these medieval Welsh tales! It’s likely that William Owen Pughe (1759-1835) created the label, but it is because of the English translations published by Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-1895) that people all over the world came to refer to these tales as The Mabinogion. It’s thus a recent English tendency which has effected how Welsh speakers discuss this important body of their language’s literature!

There are 11 of these tales, but the word mabinogi only appears in four of them (and only once as mabinogion, and that word is a mistake, most likely). We prefer to describe them as ‘The Native Prose Tales’; although there is a great amount of medieval Welsh prose which has survived, most of it was translated from other languages. What makes this group of medieval stories special is the fact that they were written originally in the Welsh language. In them we have the products of the imagination of medieval Welsh storytellers. But is it right that we set them apart in this way? These tales are preserved in two manuscripts – The White Book of Rhyddech (c.1350) and The Red Book of Hergest (c.1400), and these important collections contain other types of medieval Welsh literature as well.