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Updated: June 25, 2025
In comparing the Breton cycle as the French trouveres knew it, and the same cycle as it is to be found in the text of the Mabinogion, one might be tempted to believe that the European imagination, enthralled by these brilliant fables, added to them some poetical themes unknown to the Welsh.
The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright with glancing colour.
Arthur, in the Mabinogion, exhibits no characteristics of patriotic resistance; his part is limited to uniting heroes around him, to maintaining the retainers of his palace, and to enforcing the laws of his order of chivalry. He is too strong for any one to dream of attacking him.
We naturally expect Arthur, now become the representative of Welsh nationality, to sustain in the Mabinogion a character analogous to this role, and therein, as in Nennius, to serve the hatred of the vanquished against the Saxons. But such is not the case.
This book was printed a few years since by the pale-faced, intelligent-looking man who is standing behind her chair, Mr. Rees, a printer in an obscure Welsh hamlet, named Llandovery. He has, with perfect propriety, been termed the Welsh Elzevir; and certainly a finer specimen of typography than that furnished by the "Mabinogion" can scarcely be produced. The chairman is a pompous old nobody.
The story goes on to tell how good King Ludd freed the island of Britain from all three plagues and lived in peace all the days of his life. In five of the stories of The Mabinogion, King Arthur appears. And, although these were all written in Welsh, it has been thought that some may have been brought to Wales from France. This seems strange, but it comes about in this way.
It is also to be added that the latter in later editions changes the spelling of his hero's name from Oisin to Usheen. V. BRAN The story of Bran and his sister Branwen may be found most fully given in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the "Mabinogion," ed. 1877, pp. 369, 384.
'Pryderi has had the knockers of the gate of my palace hung about him, and Rhiannon has carried the collars of my asses around her neck, said the bishop with a smile. From the 'Mabinogion. ONCE upon a time there dwelt in the land of Erin a young man who was seeking a wife, and of all the maidens round about none pleased him as well as the only daughter of a farmer.
He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows: Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads? I doubt it, said Stephen gravely. Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray? I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion.
Two of the most celebrated heroes of the continental Breton romances, Lancelot and Tristan, do not figure in the Mabinogion; on the other hand, the characteristics of the Holy Grail are presented in a totally different way from that which we find in the French and German poets. A more attentive study shows that these elements, apparently added by the French poets, are in reality of Cymric origin.
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