Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(6/30/05 8:29 pm)
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Re: Welsh myth questions...
From Gwyn Jones' introduction to her translation of The
Mabinogion (Everyman's Library):
“The stories have been preserved in two Welsh manuscript collections, the White Book of Rhydderch (Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch), written down about 1300-25, and the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest), of the period 1375-1425. The White Book is preserved in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, the Red Book in the Library of Jesus College, Oxford. In addition, MSS. Peniarth 6, 7, 14 and 16 (all in the National Library of Wales) contain portions of various of the stories, some of them written down a hundred years before the White Book. Certain of the stories must have been known in their present (that is, their latest) redaction well before the time of the earliest of these manuscripts. The likeliest date for the Four Branches would appear to be early in the second half of the eleventh century; Culhwch and Olwen is earlier still its orthography, glosses, vocabulary and syntax, and its glimpses of a more primitive social code, take parts of it back a further hundred years; and no one doubts that much of the subject matter of these stories is very old indeed, coeval maybe with the dawn of the Celtic world. But paradoxically the title ‘Mabinogion’, by which the stories are now collectively known, is a modern one. It was used by Lady Charlotte Guest as the title of her translations from the Red Book of Hergest and of the Hanes Taliesin (first found in a sixteenth-century copy). She understood it to be the plural of mabinogi, to which in common with the Welsh scholars of her time she attributed an incorrect meaning. But the word mabynnogyon occurs once only in the manuscripts, and it is as certain as such things can be that it is a scribal error of a common enough kind. In any case, the term mabinogi can apply only to the Four Branches of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math, and not to the other contents of the White Book or the Red.”
Heidi
Edited by: Heidi Anne Heiner at: 6/30/05 8:31 pm
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