Like so many of the stories that make up the Western canon, the Mabinogion has its origins in an oral tradition. Specifically meant to be performed, the bards who told these Welsh tales often possessed formidable skills of memory, along with the ability to improvise. A bard was loosely akin to a skilled chef: someone who could produce a known dish, but also throw in flourishes of spices and personal touches.
Made up of eleven tales (the first four known as The Four Branches of the Mabinogi), these roughly 1,5000-year-old stories are jam-packed with some of the most bizarre events you’ll ever encounter — no hyperbole. Yet for all their inventiveness and intrigue, the Mabinogion aren’t particularly well known.
But BBC’s documentary, The Secret Life of Books: The Mabinogion is sure to bring new admirers to these great Welsh stories. These are stories full of Celtic myth, King Arthur intrigue, politics and romance gone awry, and a smorgasbord of characters and plots that stretch the imagination. In this succinct documentary, Cerys Matthews gives viewers an introduction to the context, substance, and continuing life of these incredible tales.
We don’t know exactly when they first came into being, but they’ve been around for a while, to say the least — possibly as early as 500 AD. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that a number of the specific landmarks — major and minor — that pop up the Mabinogion are still in existence today. Matthews draws our attention to a large stone with a hole in it, located in the north of Wales. Featured in the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, the stone perhaps isn’t the most awe-inspiring sight to see; but, as the story goes in the Mabinogion, an arrow went right through the stone and killed a fellow named Gronw. If poor Gronw could visit that site today, it’d probably evoke some feelings.
Landmarks and locations in general have a unique place in the Mabinogion. Some of the tales can be classified as onomastic tales — that is, they illuminate how a particular place came to receive its name. Indeed these tales meant a lot to its centuries of listeners. While full of adventure, otherworldly environments, and non-stop action, they also provided its listeners with shared customs, history, and examples of good and bad moral behavior.
These meaningful stories eventually came to be written down. The dates are a bit foggy, but by the end of the 14th century these oral tales were put to paper — as many oral stories eventually are. As Matthews tells us, they continued to have a popular and vibrant life until about the 17th century. At that point in time, they fell out of fashion.
But fortunately this wasn’t destined to be their fate. In the first half the 19th century, a brilliant woman named Charlotte Guest helped to revive them. A diligent, curious, and prodigious talent, Guest (along with the help of a couple Welsh scholars) resuscitated these incredible tales. Her complete English translation of the Mabinogion in 1849 spawned translations in other languages. Like a spark that becomes a fire, the tales once again had a robust life.
One of the amazing sources that kept the tales alive is The Red Book of Hergest. Now held at Oxford University, it’s an absolute thing of beauty. We get to see this impressive book in the film, as a professor gives us a brief taste of what these tales (written in middle Welsh) would have sounded like.
The tales of the Mabinogion are nowhere near as popular or well known as a number of King Arthur tales, or the many brilliant stories which make up the rich mass of literature of the medieval period. But they’re absolutely worth reading. They piqued Tolkien’s interest — among many others — and if you read even just a page of one of these dazzling stories, you’ll see why.
Spectatio 