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labingiContinuing the Mabinogion Tetrology discussion started here.
Walton's adaptation of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh Mabinogi is her first major book, written in the 1930s, and this may be why it's a bit rough. It also inherits an oddly structured, complex story and navigates it faithfully. It's an ambitious attempt at adding modern psychological depth and realism to this tale, and it's a great idea but not successfully executed, in my opinion. For me as a non-Welsh, lay reader, this is an endeavor that deserves to be redone. The potential is there, but the story falters for two main reasons: too much telling vs. showing and the fact that it's just hard to write a compelling story about unlikable characters.
See my previous post for a spoilery summary. Spoilery thoughts follow...
Structural Difficulty
Walton was stuck with a structure that is really odd for a novel. It's a series of incidents tied together as significant moments in the life of trickster magician and amazing bard, Gwydion. Walton frames them as stories that show his moral maturation over maybe twenty-five years, and that may be a theme in the Mabinogi too. It's a good idea, but it doesn't track very organically because the stories are so disconnected. I don't envy her the task, yet I agree it's artistically worth pursuing.
Gwydion
I have no scholarly background here, but Gwydion seems to me a potentially fascinating character. He's morally gray—at times very dark gray—ambitious, dangerous, somewhat self-centered, and prone to the cardinal sin of loving knowledge/achievement more than goodness. He is also genuinely caring, thoughtful, usually politically sagacious, and capable learning and self-critique. This could be very rich to dig into.
The problem for me is that his character development doesn't feel organic. As a young man, he masterminds both a rape and a robbery, which plunges his country into a bloody war and ends in his killing Pryderi, a good king whose only crime was being tricked by Gwydion's abuse of his hospitality.
But to go back to Gwydion's orchestration of his brother's rape of Goewyn, Mâth punishes him and his brother, Gilvaethwy, by turning them into animals for a few years, in which form each gives birth to at least one son (three total, later turned back into humans). I love this punishment, and it's one of the things that makes me feel the core narrative comes from a female perspective. I've never encountered this punishment for rape in a story before, including many stories where magic abounds, yet it is absolutely the kind of perfect "punishment fits the crime" that a woman might imagine.
And Gwydion seems to learning nothing from it. The whole sequence is glossed over fast and, apart from a little verbiage about how he is now less rash in his decisions, it barely seems to register that the rape was wrong. Being an animal and giving birth as one doesn't seem to register emotionally at all. In a story centrally about Gwydion's wanting to be a father, it's weird that his pig-child disappears completely from the narrative and apparently from all Gwydion's parental instincts, which are intense when it comes to his son/nephew, Llew.
For his next feat, Gwydion tricks his sister (and sometime lover) Arianrhod into bearing his child. That is, she boasts of being a virgin but fails a test, which triggers an instant pregnancy and her giving birth to two sons, Dylan, the son of a sea god, and Llew. Let's think about this for a moment: after having orchestrated a rape and being punished by living as a pig and giving birth to a pig, this man immediately forces his sister to give birth to a child explicitly against her will. To this, I say, a) it vitiates his punishment, suggesting he has learned absolute zero, and b) it suggests that Walton as author didn't really understand that forcing pregnancy on someone is... bad, not just an inconvenience or a crappy way to treat your sister (which the story acknowledges) but profoundly traumatic.
Now, I know Walton inherited the bones of the story, but it needed better handling. It needed some attention to why this falls out this way. I mean, maybe Gwydion loved being a mother pig and assumed all women must be like this. I don't know. But it needed some explanation besides the implication that enforced pregnancy/motherhood is no more than a nuisance.
Beyond this point, it's pretty much fine. Gwydion is convincingly portrayed as a loving father to Llew, though having to deal with some "karma," also visited on Llew, for his previous trickery. But whole feels psychologically filled with gaps.
Arianrhod
Walton depicts Arianrhod as a wholesale narcissist. That word is overused in our 2020's, but it fits here. She is obsessed with her life, grandeur, power, and is almost completely incapable of thinking about the welfare of anyone else. This is a reasonable read of the Mabinogi—but so too would be letting her be more complex. The choice to make her so one note has a couple of disadvantages. First, it makes it difficult to hold Gwydion accountable for harming her (see above) because the narrative has to tease out how much she's really been wronged vs. just being a nasty, vindictive person who takes umbrage at slights and deserves what she gets anyway for not being a "natural" mother. In a word, it feels really misogynistic, as if it's saying not wanting to have a baby equals grotesque narcissism (the kind of reasoning that keeps abortion rights in jeopardy). Second, it makes it almost impossible to sell the love of Gwydion and Arianrhod.
A Missed Opportunity for a Love Story
The text tells us that Gwydion and Arianrhod once loved each other and the collapse of their relationship is a great pain in their lives. The trouble is while we see the collapse we don't see the love. We're only introduced to them when he's in the course of tricking and betraying her. They have one amicable scene (while he's lying to her), and that's about it. I buy that they grew up close and bonded over both being powerful magic wielders, but Arianrhod is presented as almost incapable of love, and Gwydion always puts himself first until he puts Llew first, so all in all, why should I care?
This messed up couple could have been a Cathy and Heathcliff. They could have been real soulmates destined to decay into bitter nemeses (not saying that's C&H, just potential for G&A). It could have been truly moving, but it would require these things: 1) showing them actually being soulmates, the stuff before the betrayal and enmity; 2) taking the wrong done to Arianrhod seriously; 3) having Arianrhod be a person with enough emotional range to be capable of love. With none of this in place, it feels like a misogynistic beatdown of a vile woman by a fairly unsympathetic male character, which is just frustrating and depressing.
Confusing Gender Worldbuilding
Walton nailed her commentary on gender in the later books from the 1970s. Here, it feels not fully formed. She frames Gwynedd as oldest of the Old Tribes, the furthest from our patriarchal order, a land that is not only not patrilineal (like Dyved) but doesn't even have marriage or a strong concept of fatherhood (like Harlech). In Gwynedd, women are free to sleep with whoever they want, and there's no such thing as a "whore," except for the very early rumblings of the cult of virginity adopted from the New Tribes, but that is far from fully gelled.
This seems like quite a nice social space for women—except the culture barely seems to comprehend the concept of withholding sexual consent. Choosing to sleep with anyone—fine. Refusing to sleep with someone—baffling. At least, Gilvaethwy is baffled that the woman he violently rapes seems not to want his advances. Gwydion may be less utterly baffled, but he doesn't seem to fully register the crime as a crime either. To the extent it does register, it's largely as a betrayal of Mâth, by way of deflowering his foot holder, who is required to be a virgin (for some magic or ritual reason that's unclear to me).
I can't get these two things to go together. It seems to me either women have a high degree of bodily autonomy or they don't. The best I can make out is that it's a sort of "Rocky Horror" sexual ethics, where the presumption is that only prudery prevents people from wanting to have sex all the time, so when you remove the prudery, the norm is everyone always wants sex; thus, withholding sex is close to unheard of. I don't really think Walton thought that, but I'm not sure what she was going for. With this culture's matrilineal focus, it seems like you'd either have high respect for women and consent or a totally brutalizing culture in which women are just used willy nilly because there's no "sexual purity" for men to protect as their own property right (i.e. women, in general, would be treated as slave women traditionally have been). Walton depicts some of both, and I find it incoherent and, as we'd say today, "uncomfortable."
In Sum
The rest is fine. Mâth the Ancient as a truly wise sort of almost bodhisattva is well executed. Gwydion and Llew's relationship is fairly well developed and relatable. Llew's misadventures work fine. The side characters are well delineated in brief page space. But the core narrative needed some more attention.
I don't know if there are other modern/novelistic attempts out there at rendering Gwydion's character and/or Arianrhod's, but I'd be interested to know if anyone knows one they'd recommend.
Walton's adaptation of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh Mabinogi is her first major book, written in the 1930s, and this may be why it's a bit rough. It also inherits an oddly structured, complex story and navigates it faithfully. It's an ambitious attempt at adding modern psychological depth and realism to this tale, and it's a great idea but not successfully executed, in my opinion. For me as a non-Welsh, lay reader, this is an endeavor that deserves to be redone. The potential is there, but the story falters for two main reasons: too much telling vs. showing and the fact that it's just hard to write a compelling story about unlikable characters.
See my previous post for a spoilery summary. Spoilery thoughts follow...
Structural Difficulty
Walton was stuck with a structure that is really odd for a novel. It's a series of incidents tied together as significant moments in the life of trickster magician and amazing bard, Gwydion. Walton frames them as stories that show his moral maturation over maybe twenty-five years, and that may be a theme in the Mabinogi too. It's a good idea, but it doesn't track very organically because the stories are so disconnected. I don't envy her the task, yet I agree it's artistically worth pursuing.
Gwydion
I have no scholarly background here, but Gwydion seems to me a potentially fascinating character. He's morally gray—at times very dark gray—ambitious, dangerous, somewhat self-centered, and prone to the cardinal sin of loving knowledge/achievement more than goodness. He is also genuinely caring, thoughtful, usually politically sagacious, and capable learning and self-critique. This could be very rich to dig into.
The problem for me is that his character development doesn't feel organic. As a young man, he masterminds both a rape and a robbery, which plunges his country into a bloody war and ends in his killing Pryderi, a good king whose only crime was being tricked by Gwydion's abuse of his hospitality.
But to go back to Gwydion's orchestration of his brother's rape of Goewyn, Mâth punishes him and his brother, Gilvaethwy, by turning them into animals for a few years, in which form each gives birth to at least one son (three total, later turned back into humans). I love this punishment, and it's one of the things that makes me feel the core narrative comes from a female perspective. I've never encountered this punishment for rape in a story before, including many stories where magic abounds, yet it is absolutely the kind of perfect "punishment fits the crime" that a woman might imagine.
And Gwydion seems to learning nothing from it. The whole sequence is glossed over fast and, apart from a little verbiage about how he is now less rash in his decisions, it barely seems to register that the rape was wrong. Being an animal and giving birth as one doesn't seem to register emotionally at all. In a story centrally about Gwydion's wanting to be a father, it's weird that his pig-child disappears completely from the narrative and apparently from all Gwydion's parental instincts, which are intense when it comes to his son/nephew, Llew.
For his next feat, Gwydion tricks his sister (and sometime lover) Arianrhod into bearing his child. That is, she boasts of being a virgin but fails a test, which triggers an instant pregnancy and her giving birth to two sons, Dylan, the son of a sea god, and Llew. Let's think about this for a moment: after having orchestrated a rape and being punished by living as a pig and giving birth to a pig, this man immediately forces his sister to give birth to a child explicitly against her will. To this, I say, a) it vitiates his punishment, suggesting he has learned absolute zero, and b) it suggests that Walton as author didn't really understand that forcing pregnancy on someone is... bad, not just an inconvenience or a crappy way to treat your sister (which the story acknowledges) but profoundly traumatic.
Now, I know Walton inherited the bones of the story, but it needed better handling. It needed some attention to why this falls out this way. I mean, maybe Gwydion loved being a mother pig and assumed all women must be like this. I don't know. But it needed some explanation besides the implication that enforced pregnancy/motherhood is no more than a nuisance.
Beyond this point, it's pretty much fine. Gwydion is convincingly portrayed as a loving father to Llew, though having to deal with some "karma," also visited on Llew, for his previous trickery. But whole feels psychologically filled with gaps.
Arianrhod
Walton depicts Arianrhod as a wholesale narcissist. That word is overused in our 2020's, but it fits here. She is obsessed with her life, grandeur, power, and is almost completely incapable of thinking about the welfare of anyone else. This is a reasonable read of the Mabinogi—but so too would be letting her be more complex. The choice to make her so one note has a couple of disadvantages. First, it makes it difficult to hold Gwydion accountable for harming her (see above) because the narrative has to tease out how much she's really been wronged vs. just being a nasty, vindictive person who takes umbrage at slights and deserves what she gets anyway for not being a "natural" mother. In a word, it feels really misogynistic, as if it's saying not wanting to have a baby equals grotesque narcissism (the kind of reasoning that keeps abortion rights in jeopardy). Second, it makes it almost impossible to sell the love of Gwydion and Arianrhod.
A Missed Opportunity for a Love Story
The text tells us that Gwydion and Arianrhod once loved each other and the collapse of their relationship is a great pain in their lives. The trouble is while we see the collapse we don't see the love. We're only introduced to them when he's in the course of tricking and betraying her. They have one amicable scene (while he's lying to her), and that's about it. I buy that they grew up close and bonded over both being powerful magic wielders, but Arianrhod is presented as almost incapable of love, and Gwydion always puts himself first until he puts Llew first, so all in all, why should I care?
This messed up couple could have been a Cathy and Heathcliff. They could have been real soulmates destined to decay into bitter nemeses (not saying that's C&H, just potential for G&A). It could have been truly moving, but it would require these things: 1) showing them actually being soulmates, the stuff before the betrayal and enmity; 2) taking the wrong done to Arianrhod seriously; 3) having Arianrhod be a person with enough emotional range to be capable of love. With none of this in place, it feels like a misogynistic beatdown of a vile woman by a fairly unsympathetic male character, which is just frustrating and depressing.
Confusing Gender Worldbuilding
Walton nailed her commentary on gender in the later books from the 1970s. Here, it feels not fully formed. She frames Gwynedd as oldest of the Old Tribes, the furthest from our patriarchal order, a land that is not only not patrilineal (like Dyved) but doesn't even have marriage or a strong concept of fatherhood (like Harlech). In Gwynedd, women are free to sleep with whoever they want, and there's no such thing as a "whore," except for the very early rumblings of the cult of virginity adopted from the New Tribes, but that is far from fully gelled.
This seems like quite a nice social space for women—except the culture barely seems to comprehend the concept of withholding sexual consent. Choosing to sleep with anyone—fine. Refusing to sleep with someone—baffling. At least, Gilvaethwy is baffled that the woman he violently rapes seems not to want his advances. Gwydion may be less utterly baffled, but he doesn't seem to fully register the crime as a crime either. To the extent it does register, it's largely as a betrayal of Mâth, by way of deflowering his foot holder, who is required to be a virgin (for some magic or ritual reason that's unclear to me).
I can't get these two things to go together. It seems to me either women have a high degree of bodily autonomy or they don't. The best I can make out is that it's a sort of "Rocky Horror" sexual ethics, where the presumption is that only prudery prevents people from wanting to have sex all the time, so when you remove the prudery, the norm is everyone always wants sex; thus, withholding sex is close to unheard of. I don't really think Walton thought that, but I'm not sure what she was going for. With this culture's matrilineal focus, it seems like you'd either have high respect for women and consent or a totally brutalizing culture in which women are just used willy nilly because there's no "sexual purity" for men to protect as their own property right (i.e. women, in general, would be treated as slave women traditionally have been). Walton depicts some of both, and I find it incoherent and, as we'd say today, "uncomfortable."
In Sum
The rest is fine. Mâth the Ancient as a truly wise sort of almost bodhisattva is well executed. Gwydion and Llew's relationship is fairly well developed and relatable. Llew's misadventures work fine. The side characters are well delineated in brief page space. But the core narrative needed some more attention.
I don't know if there are other modern/novelistic attempts out there at rendering Gwydion's character and/or Arianrhod's, but I'd be interested to know if anyone knows one they'd recommend.
