The Mabinogion

The Mabinogion is the modern collective title for eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, compiled in Middle Welsh during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from older oral tradition and preserved principally in two manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch of around 1350 and the Red Book of Hergest of about 1382 to 1410. The collection includes the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a set of interlinked mythological narratives centered on figures such as Pwyll, Rhiannon and Branwen; further native Welsh tales including the Arthurian hero quest Culhwch and Olwen, one of the earliest surviving Arthurian narratives in any language; and three later romances that parallel material found in the French Arthurian tradition. Ranging across myth, romance, tragedy and comedy, the tales combine an oral storyteller's directness with sophisticated narrative structure, and they preserve some of the fullest surviving evidence of early Welsh legend, personal names and cultural custom. Long regarded merely as fragmentary folklore, the Mabinogion is now recognized by scholars as a sophisticated and deliberately shaped narrative tradition in its own right, and it remains the principal source for early Welsh mythology and for the Welsh strand within the wider medieval Arthurian and Celtic literary traditions.