Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Lady Charlotte Guest has insightful things to say about Welsh legends and mythology in her original introduction to her translation of what she called the Mabinogion,* but the quote following comes from an introduction to a later edition written by R. Williams, whose qualifications I don't know. The following excerpt is written about the section of the Mabinogion that includes Pwyll, Branwen, Manawyddan, and Math, arguably the oldest section of the collected tales that Guest translated.

Williams himself quotes another writer, Matthew Arnold, who is also unfamiliar to me. But interestingly, he talks about peasants using stones from ancient sites, including Ephesus. (Though he doesn't say it as such, he could well be describing a palimpsest!) He may as well have included Glastonbury among those sites he listed -- like the ruins at Ephesus, Glastonbury's ruins have ended up as parts of local farm fences and houses. From what I have been told, every so often, someone manages to pry stones loose from their own foundations and return them to the Abbey. But that could just be another story.

* Guest pluralized Mabinogi, which was (is?) the Welsh term for the traditional lore that must be known by a Mabinog, the word for what is roughly, as far as I can tell, an apprentice bard.

--

The stories of the first group, in their underlying substance, are pre-Christian and pre-historic; in their present form they are quasi-mythological. There is no reason to doubt the theory that they are a survival of the ancient mythology of the Celt; but the action of time and change has softened down the mythical element, without getting rid of it altogether. The gods have ceased to be gods, but they have not become ordinary men. In fact the substance is so much older than the form that the story-teller could not analyze his material even if he would. As Matthew Arnold says--"the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely: stones not of this building, but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical." The tales are saturated with magic and illusion.

...

In [the work of Lady Charlotte Guest] doubtless there are defects. Her transcript of the Red Book text was in parts inaccurate; her translation does not always give the literal meaning of the original, and, from motives easy to explain, she left a few passages here and there untranslated. But nowhere do her mistakes or her omissions detract seriously from the integrity of the story.