Reviews for The Mabinogion

The average rating for The Mabinogion based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-10-25 00:00:00 Stefanny Royer I'm splitting the difference between my love of the medieval collection (i.e. Y Mabinogi and other Welsh tales) and Lady Charlotte Guest's sometimes-bowdlerized, romanticized, nineteenth-century (and I mean that in the worst possible way) translation (which would garner at best two stars, because I'm feeling generous). The real advantage of this book is if you're interested in the history of how the Mabinogion has been treated in the English language; otherwise, you should decide if you want a.) a literal translation: in that case, go with the Jones and Jones translation of the 1950s (IIRC), offered by Everyman b.) a readable translation that also tries to give the flavor of the medieval original: in that case, go with Sioned Davies' translation from 2006. c.) a translation that focuses on the pre-Christian mythology of the non-Romance tales: in that case, go with the Patrick Ford translation from the 1970s. The advantage of Ford's translation is its inclusion of the earliest version of "The Story of Taliesin"; the disadvantage is it doesn't include the Three Romances ("Peredur", "Owain", and "Gereint"). d.) a translation that focuses on the environment of Wales: the Bollard translation is great for this.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-15 00:00:00 Bill Day 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.