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labingiI have just finished The Mabinogion Tetrology by Evangeline Walton, compiled novelizations of the Four Branches of the medieval Welsh Mabinogi. I highly recommend this work to fantasy fans who like tie-ins to traditional stories and don't mind a non-scholarly approach from a cultural outsider (Walton was American). It's a very "faithful" adaptation in that it takes virtually nothing out. The Four Branches themselves are just a few pages each, so Walton interpolates a lot, clearly from a 20th-century cultural standpoint (including idolization of "progress" and a surprising amount of Buddhism). One book was published in the 1930s, the others in the 1970s. The whole work is about 650 pages long, with the first three branches being novellas and the fourth a short novel.
Speaking as a cultural outsider and lay reader myself, I think she does this quite well. Specifically, I think she does good work with the First Branch (The Prince of Annwn), and the Second (The Children of Llyr) and Third (The Song of Rhiannon) are among the most engaging and rewarding works I've read in a very long time! The Fourth Branch (The Island of the Mighty, a.k.a. The Virgin and the Swine), which was the first she wrote, is hit and miss for me but still worth reading. The whole work is generally quite feminist; I have no doubt was a huge influence on The Mists of Avalon.Spoilery review follows...
Note: I'm going to use Walton's spellings which are sometimes rather different from the version of the Mabinogi I have.
Summary
I would divide this work in two: the first three branches read as a unit and the fourth as a standalone. Taken together, the first three might be described as the story of the Rhiannon–Llyr family. The Prince of Annwn tells of Pwyll, king of Dyved, having an adventure in Annwn, the land of the dead, and then venturing to another Otherworld, where he wins Rhiannon in marriage. (The Mabinogi is a Christian-era work that likely has pagan roots, but Walton goes full ancient paganism and explicitly identifies Rhiannon as a sort of avatar of the Mother goddess.)
The Children of Llyr discusses—guess who? Specifically, it discusses the five children of Penardim, the wife of Llyr, three of whom are Llyr's and two the twin sons of a man who coerced her into sleeping with him in order to save Llyr. Of these five, four are quite good people and one of the twins really awful. He catalyzes a series of events that lead to the lone daughter, Branwen, being in an abusive marriage to an Irish king, which culminates in a bloody war with Ireland. (For those who remember Disney in the '80s, this story is the very distant ancestor of The Black Cauldron.) This epic tale ends with almost everyone dead, except the second oldest brother, Manawyddan, and Pryderi, the now-grown son of Pwyll and Rhiannon.
The Song of Rhiannon picks up where The Children of Llyr left off, with Pryderi inviting Manawyddan to come to Dyved with him and marry his now-widowed mother. This Manawyddan is glad to do, not least because Pryderi is actually his biological son, due to a complicated situation that left Pwyll unable to beget children. Manawyddan and Rhiannon, and Pryderi and his wife, Kigva (this spelling is super not Welsh) are quite happy until Pryderi gets tricked by some old enemies of his parents from the Otherworld, leading to everyone disappearing from Dyved except Manawyddan and Kigva, who spend most of the rest of the story trying to figure out how to respond to this. With true fairytale logic, things eventually get sorted out and the four are all happily reunited. This is the close of this family's main arc.
Then, we skip about twenty years (and go back forty years in terms of when Walton was publishing) and head off to Gwynedd, the realm of Mâth the Ancient and his family. The Virgin and the Swine, which is a better title than The Island of the Mighty, is essentially the story of Gwydion, Mâth's nephew and heir, ingenious magician and trickster figure, whose deeds range from truly horrible to rather laudable over the course of, oh, maybe twenty-five years.
In the truly horrible category, he tricks now middle-aged Pryderi out of some pigs, which launches a bloody war between Dyved and Gwynedd, while also serving as a distraction to allow his brother to rape the titular virgin. He also ends up killing Pryderi.
Also in the truly horrible category—though Walton seems not to fully get this—he tricks his sister, Arianrhod, into revealing that she is not the virgin she claims to be via a spell that causes her to instantly get pregnant and give birth to two sons, Dylan and Llew. Dylan, whose father is a sea god, whisks off to sea. Llew is the child of Gwydion and Arianrhod, which is marginally less weird than it sounds, because Walton presents the culture of Gwynedd as not fully understanding how fatherhood works and, thus, not fully perceiving a need for incest taboos. Officially, Llew is important because he is Gwydion's nephew, and therefore, in this matrilineal culture, his heir. Unofficially, Gwydion has a burning desire to be a father and, thus, views Llew as the culmination of his life's ambitions.
Arianrhod, meanwhile, is both wronged and a total narcissist, which leads to her utter rejection of both her sons. Dylan is out of play, but for Llew, this leads to her imposing a series of curses on him (he'll get no name, he'll get no arms, he'll get no woman), which Gwydion has to cunningly overcome. (She eventually contrives Dylan's death and then dies herself through what Walton's notes describe as extrapolation on a couple of separate Welsh tales.)
Meanwhile, Gwydion and Mâth overcome the no-woman problem by creating a not-really-human woman for Llew to marry. She's very pretty and compliant, but not being a full human, she is also extremely easily seduced by the first handsome stranger who comes along, and they end up plotting to kill Llew, which they more or less do. But with a great deal of work, Gwydion is able to find Llew's soul and restore him. Gwydion punishes the wife by turning her into an owl and Llew kills his killer, and that's as happy an ending as we are going to get.
Some Things I Love about the First Three
Well-Drawn "Very Good" Characters
I'm drawn to stories that present very good people without making them boring, which is sufficient to explain why I like the first three branches and find the fourth frustrating. Most people we meet in the first three are good, but Manawyddan, Rhiannon, and generally Pwyll are Very Good in interesting ways, and I find the unfolding of their lives fascinating and ultimately heartwarming as a truly earned happy ending.
I came across a comment on a YouTube video once that took issue with the idea the good characters need psychological arcs. He argued that some literatures are famous and beloved with quite static characters and, being Indian, he cited the Mahabharata. I thought about that and thought, "Yeah, I can see it. The main characters in the Mahabharata are pretty static but also fascinating." I find Rhiannon and Manawyddan, in particular, similar in that respect. They both change a little with age; their "energy" changes. Walton does an especially good job at showing Manawyddan gradually slowing down over the twenty or so years we follow his life. But they don't really learn any great lesson or have any great fall. They're very competently highly moral, skillful people when we meet them and stay that way. And it's fascinating. It manages to feel very real. One reason for this, I think, is that they are not impervious to sorrow, and watching how they handle their sorrows is compelling.
Some Literary Touchstones
Tolkien:
This type of character reminds me a lot of Tolkien—or perhaps it's more accurate to say Tolkien took ("appropriated"?) a lot from Welsh tales. I have truly never read another body of work that feels culturally so much like Middle-earth, especially Silmarillion Middle-earth, as The Children of Llyr.
I did a thought experiment of imagining how an Elf from Middle-earth would respond to this story and came to the conclusion that they'd understand it perfectly well with little-to-no outside explanation, except for the status of women, which, in some ways, is higher than in Middle-earth. I think they'd be morally perplexed by Pwyll asking Manawyddan to sleep with his wife (though plotwise, they'd follow the reasoning) and probably chock it up to Men being Men, but everything else would track.
The Mahabharata:
I've already alluded to the Mahabharata, but it really astounds me how similar The Children of Llyr is to its main plot. Both have a set of brothers going to war, united by an insult to a central woman in their lives (though in Llyr, it is their sister, not wife). Both feature underdeveloped younger twins of a semi-different parentage (though in Llyr, one is evil). Of the remaining brothers, I would argue that Manawyddan has much the personality of a Yudhishthira: thoughtful, moral, reserved, and reluctant to assume power—though, as the oldest (and following his dharma) Yudhishthira has to assume the kingship, while Manawyddan, for various reasons, never does and is perfectly happy that way. Bran, meanwhile, though the eldest and king, has something of the presence of a Bhima, being very large, impressive, and comparatively bombastic (though Bhima's more bombastic). This leaves Team Llyr lacking an Arjuna, which is an oddly central figure to lack. I found myself wondering if Pwyll might fit here. He does have the Arjuna characteristic of going off on side quests and finding impressive women (well, Pwyll only finds one). I have no idea if these similarities point to some ancient Indo-European cross-pollination or if it's coincidence, or "archetype." But I find the parallels really interesting.
Arthur:
Obviously, the Mabinogi is very close to the cultural home of Arthur, and one thing these stories have given me some insight into is why Arthur is strongly associated with his nephews and not his sons, except Mordred, who is both. In fact, it makes the Arthurian incest plot feel a bit less out of left field. It makes sense as a story evolution from a matrilineal to patrilineal culture to have Mordred's existence combine the two. This is similar to Bradley's insight that Arthurian legend shows the traces of a matrifocal society transforming into a full patriarchy, leaving traces like the Lady of the Lake as an echo female power in appointing the king. Which brings us to...
Feminism
This is good feminism! There's a debate about whether the Mabinogi itself was written by a woman, but whether it was or not, it is highly attuned to women's experience. As Celtic Source observes, the Four Branches show that if a woman is honored and a marriage is loving, things turn out well, but if she is mistreated, they turn out badly. Women's goals and (mis)adventures drive much of the stories.
In the first three branches, Walton took this idea and ran with it. As Bradley would later in The Mists of Avalon, Walton presents a world in which the Old Tribes' matrilineal order is slowly succumbing to the New Tribes' patrilineal order, with a somber sense that this will spell the oppression of women for a very long time. Walton makes the stories pre-Christian, but she explicitly figures Christianity as a further crushing blow to come in the future. She paints an interesting portrait of female power being invested through family lines, motherhood, wisdom, and arcane knowledge with no need to assert power by taking on traditionally masculine roles, like warrior woman.
Now, there's a space in my heart for women in traditionally masculine roles, but our dominant feminism leans on this too much, and I find it relaxing and enlivening to be immersed in a world where women are respected (not dismissed or taken for granted) for things women have traditionally done. And filling a niche that Bradley did not, Walton expressed much of this from a male point of view, which is needed and validating. We still need a lot more of this kind of worldbuilding zone today.
In sum, I am not easy to please as a reader, but these first three branches delighted me so thoroughly I find it remarkable. They're not long or deeply detailed stories, yet they convey an immense and pleasing humanity, presented through the lens of a society with genuine (if fading) respect for femaleness. The Virgin and the Swine is a different experience, as I'll expound on next.
Speaking as a cultural outsider and lay reader myself, I think she does this quite well. Specifically, I think she does good work with the First Branch (The Prince of Annwn), and the Second (The Children of Llyr) and Third (The Song of Rhiannon) are among the most engaging and rewarding works I've read in a very long time! The Fourth Branch (The Island of the Mighty, a.k.a. The Virgin and the Swine), which was the first she wrote, is hit and miss for me but still worth reading. The whole work is generally quite feminist; I have no doubt was a huge influence on The Mists of Avalon.Spoilery review follows...
Note: I'm going to use Walton's spellings which are sometimes rather different from the version of the Mabinogi I have.
Summary
I would divide this work in two: the first three branches read as a unit and the fourth as a standalone. Taken together, the first three might be described as the story of the Rhiannon–Llyr family. The Prince of Annwn tells of Pwyll, king of Dyved, having an adventure in Annwn, the land of the dead, and then venturing to another Otherworld, where he wins Rhiannon in marriage. (The Mabinogi is a Christian-era work that likely has pagan roots, but Walton goes full ancient paganism and explicitly identifies Rhiannon as a sort of avatar of the Mother goddess.)
The Children of Llyr discusses—guess who? Specifically, it discusses the five children of Penardim, the wife of Llyr, three of whom are Llyr's and two the twin sons of a man who coerced her into sleeping with him in order to save Llyr. Of these five, four are quite good people and one of the twins really awful. He catalyzes a series of events that lead to the lone daughter, Branwen, being in an abusive marriage to an Irish king, which culminates in a bloody war with Ireland. (For those who remember Disney in the '80s, this story is the very distant ancestor of The Black Cauldron.) This epic tale ends with almost everyone dead, except the second oldest brother, Manawyddan, and Pryderi, the now-grown son of Pwyll and Rhiannon.
The Song of Rhiannon picks up where The Children of Llyr left off, with Pryderi inviting Manawyddan to come to Dyved with him and marry his now-widowed mother. This Manawyddan is glad to do, not least because Pryderi is actually his biological son, due to a complicated situation that left Pwyll unable to beget children. Manawyddan and Rhiannon, and Pryderi and his wife, Kigva (this spelling is super not Welsh) are quite happy until Pryderi gets tricked by some old enemies of his parents from the Otherworld, leading to everyone disappearing from Dyved except Manawyddan and Kigva, who spend most of the rest of the story trying to figure out how to respond to this. With true fairytale logic, things eventually get sorted out and the four are all happily reunited. This is the close of this family's main arc.
Then, we skip about twenty years (and go back forty years in terms of when Walton was publishing) and head off to Gwynedd, the realm of Mâth the Ancient and his family. The Virgin and the Swine, which is a better title than The Island of the Mighty, is essentially the story of Gwydion, Mâth's nephew and heir, ingenious magician and trickster figure, whose deeds range from truly horrible to rather laudable over the course of, oh, maybe twenty-five years.
In the truly horrible category, he tricks now middle-aged Pryderi out of some pigs, which launches a bloody war between Dyved and Gwynedd, while also serving as a distraction to allow his brother to rape the titular virgin. He also ends up killing Pryderi.
Also in the truly horrible category—though Walton seems not to fully get this—he tricks his sister, Arianrhod, into revealing that she is not the virgin she claims to be via a spell that causes her to instantly get pregnant and give birth to two sons, Dylan and Llew. Dylan, whose father is a sea god, whisks off to sea. Llew is the child of Gwydion and Arianrhod, which is marginally less weird than it sounds, because Walton presents the culture of Gwynedd as not fully understanding how fatherhood works and, thus, not fully perceiving a need for incest taboos. Officially, Llew is important because he is Gwydion's nephew, and therefore, in this matrilineal culture, his heir. Unofficially, Gwydion has a burning desire to be a father and, thus, views Llew as the culmination of his life's ambitions.
Arianrhod, meanwhile, is both wronged and a total narcissist, which leads to her utter rejection of both her sons. Dylan is out of play, but for Llew, this leads to her imposing a series of curses on him (he'll get no name, he'll get no arms, he'll get no woman), which Gwydion has to cunningly overcome. (She eventually contrives Dylan's death and then dies herself through what Walton's notes describe as extrapolation on a couple of separate Welsh tales.)
Meanwhile, Gwydion and Mâth overcome the no-woman problem by creating a not-really-human woman for Llew to marry. She's very pretty and compliant, but not being a full human, she is also extremely easily seduced by the first handsome stranger who comes along, and they end up plotting to kill Llew, which they more or less do. But with a great deal of work, Gwydion is able to find Llew's soul and restore him. Gwydion punishes the wife by turning her into an owl and Llew kills his killer, and that's as happy an ending as we are going to get.
Some Things I Love about the First Three
Well-Drawn "Very Good" Characters
I'm drawn to stories that present very good people without making them boring, which is sufficient to explain why I like the first three branches and find the fourth frustrating. Most people we meet in the first three are good, but Manawyddan, Rhiannon, and generally Pwyll are Very Good in interesting ways, and I find the unfolding of their lives fascinating and ultimately heartwarming as a truly earned happy ending.
I came across a comment on a YouTube video once that took issue with the idea the good characters need psychological arcs. He argued that some literatures are famous and beloved with quite static characters and, being Indian, he cited the Mahabharata. I thought about that and thought, "Yeah, I can see it. The main characters in the Mahabharata are pretty static but also fascinating." I find Rhiannon and Manawyddan, in particular, similar in that respect. They both change a little with age; their "energy" changes. Walton does an especially good job at showing Manawyddan gradually slowing down over the twenty or so years we follow his life. But they don't really learn any great lesson or have any great fall. They're very competently highly moral, skillful people when we meet them and stay that way. And it's fascinating. It manages to feel very real. One reason for this, I think, is that they are not impervious to sorrow, and watching how they handle their sorrows is compelling.
Some Literary Touchstones
Tolkien:
This type of character reminds me a lot of Tolkien—or perhaps it's more accurate to say Tolkien took ("appropriated"?) a lot from Welsh tales. I have truly never read another body of work that feels culturally so much like Middle-earth, especially Silmarillion Middle-earth, as The Children of Llyr.
I did a thought experiment of imagining how an Elf from Middle-earth would respond to this story and came to the conclusion that they'd understand it perfectly well with little-to-no outside explanation, except for the status of women, which, in some ways, is higher than in Middle-earth. I think they'd be morally perplexed by Pwyll asking Manawyddan to sleep with his wife (though plotwise, they'd follow the reasoning) and probably chock it up to Men being Men, but everything else would track.
The Mahabharata:
I've already alluded to the Mahabharata, but it really astounds me how similar The Children of Llyr is to its main plot. Both have a set of brothers going to war, united by an insult to a central woman in their lives (though in Llyr, it is their sister, not wife). Both feature underdeveloped younger twins of a semi-different parentage (though in Llyr, one is evil). Of the remaining brothers, I would argue that Manawyddan has much the personality of a Yudhishthira: thoughtful, moral, reserved, and reluctant to assume power—though, as the oldest (and following his dharma) Yudhishthira has to assume the kingship, while Manawyddan, for various reasons, never does and is perfectly happy that way. Bran, meanwhile, though the eldest and king, has something of the presence of a Bhima, being very large, impressive, and comparatively bombastic (though Bhima's more bombastic). This leaves Team Llyr lacking an Arjuna, which is an oddly central figure to lack. I found myself wondering if Pwyll might fit here. He does have the Arjuna characteristic of going off on side quests and finding impressive women (well, Pwyll only finds one). I have no idea if these similarities point to some ancient Indo-European cross-pollination or if it's coincidence, or "archetype." But I find the parallels really interesting.
Arthur:
Obviously, the Mabinogi is very close to the cultural home of Arthur, and one thing these stories have given me some insight into is why Arthur is strongly associated with his nephews and not his sons, except Mordred, who is both. In fact, it makes the Arthurian incest plot feel a bit less out of left field. It makes sense as a story evolution from a matrilineal to patrilineal culture to have Mordred's existence combine the two. This is similar to Bradley's insight that Arthurian legend shows the traces of a matrifocal society transforming into a full patriarchy, leaving traces like the Lady of the Lake as an echo female power in appointing the king. Which brings us to...
Feminism
This is good feminism! There's a debate about whether the Mabinogi itself was written by a woman, but whether it was or not, it is highly attuned to women's experience. As Celtic Source observes, the Four Branches show that if a woman is honored and a marriage is loving, things turn out well, but if she is mistreated, they turn out badly. Women's goals and (mis)adventures drive much of the stories.
In the first three branches, Walton took this idea and ran with it. As Bradley would later in The Mists of Avalon, Walton presents a world in which the Old Tribes' matrilineal order is slowly succumbing to the New Tribes' patrilineal order, with a somber sense that this will spell the oppression of women for a very long time. Walton makes the stories pre-Christian, but she explicitly figures Christianity as a further crushing blow to come in the future. She paints an interesting portrait of female power being invested through family lines, motherhood, wisdom, and arcane knowledge with no need to assert power by taking on traditionally masculine roles, like warrior woman.
Now, there's a space in my heart for women in traditionally masculine roles, but our dominant feminism leans on this too much, and I find it relaxing and enlivening to be immersed in a world where women are respected (not dismissed or taken for granted) for things women have traditionally done. And filling a niche that Bradley did not, Walton expressed much of this from a male point of view, which is needed and validating. We still need a lot more of this kind of worldbuilding zone today.
In sum, I am not easy to please as a reader, but these first three branches delighted me so thoroughly I find it remarkable. They're not long or deeply detailed stories, yet they convey an immense and pleasing humanity, presented through the lens of a society with genuine (if fading) respect for femaleness. The Virgin and the Swine is a different experience, as I'll expound on next.
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Date: 2025-10-01 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 12:31 am (UTC)