The Mabinogion Book

The Mabinogion is a collection of Welsh stories preserved in manuscripts from the fourteenth century, but it's assumed that the stories are older than that, they have been translated into English since the eighteenth century and this collection is in that tradition.

The odd thing about collections like this is the need to drop any idea of an original version of the stories. Stories are told and changed, always in flux until they are caught between the pages of a book. Then a version is set in ink, the way that maybe one person told them in one place and at one time. For instance some of the stories have digressions giving spurious reasons for the names of places. It is easy to imagine a storyteller changing those as they went from place to place to set their heroes in the immediate local landscape.

Some of the stories in this collection lead into, or are on the other fringes of, the Arthurian tradition, others have pagan echoes even while God and his mother are frequently evoked. Evocative and frequently strange.