Three books that affected me I

[sollers]

My thoughts on this were triggered by re-watching the Doctor Who episode "Silence in the Library" with the knowledge that it was shot in the old Swansea Central Library.

A close friend of my mother's ("Uncle Les") was chief librarian in my childhood, and on one visit to Swansea he took me round, and I was awestruck. I think that that experience, at the age of about 7, triggered my continuing love for libraries.

But also of lasting effect was the book he gave me: "Welsh Legends and Folk Tales" by Gwyn Jones. I occasionally tell some of the folk tales at story telling sessions ("High Eden" is particularly good - not only does the dog see off the Devil, he gets into Heaven at the end), but most important of all, it led me to the Mabinogion. At the moment I have on my shelves no less than four versions - Welsh with modernised spelling, the original Everyman translation that I bought as soon as I could, a newer and better translation, and Lady Charlotte Guest's translation for the sake of the extra stories in the footnotes, which include extra information on Arthur's womanising.

As anybody acquainted with the work may have guessed, I mostly focussed on "Culhwch and Olwen"*. There's a fair bit of myth and magic in it, but the lists of the men and women of Arthur's court fascinated me. Once you winnow out the frankly mythical and the outright anachronistic characters (Rachel Bromwich's "Trioedd Ynys Prydein" is very helpful for this) what you are left with is a manageable number of very plausible people, including a sprinkling of Irish and Saxons.

Some of the descriptions of this hardcore are taken for mythical/magical, but I'm not so sure. A lot of them are firmly in the tradition of the Welsh sense of humour: the shaggy dog story. A good example is the very successful farmer who lost his cows one day: he found them eventually, hiding under a rhubarb leaf. Another is the man working on a rooftop one bitterly cold day who dropped his hammer. He had a bucket of water with him, so he poured it down onto the hammer. It froze as it went so he was able to pick up the hammer by the icicle that had frozen to it.

Compare this with Osla Big-knife. In the "Dream of Rhonabwy" it is stated that he was a Saxon who joined Arthur after the battle of Badon, which makes it extremely likely that his big knife was a seax. Some of them are big... but not as big as the description of him laying his knife across rivers to use as a bridge. But that's well within the tradition of humorous exaggeration.

Anyway, the consequence of all this is that I was hooked on the Welsh Arthurian traditions, which are a million miles from the Anglo-Norman and derived traditions: you can't imagine a French writer, or even Malory, telling the story from one saint's life. Arthur, Cei and Bedwyr see someone abducting a woman. Arthur's initial reaction is to ride down and grab the woman for himself. The other two remind him that they are supposed to be the goodies, so they ride down and rescue her and return her to her family.

And in the Welsh stories, he isn't King Arthur; he's proclaimed Emperor in Carlisle after a major victory in the North.

So when I go looking for the historical Arthur, I'm looking in a different place. I've had a fascinating journey for decades, and it's all due to that book.

*Though the Four Branches also had an impact: I made a needlepoint panel telling the story of the First Branch that now hangs over the door between my living room and the kitchen

Comments

[sollers]

I've never been quite sure. The first part explains why Pwyll was known as "head of Annwfn", but that doesn't really have anything to do with the second part. What I'm inclined to suspect that the first part contains one, and the second part contains two, of what was originally a much longer cycle of stories (a fourth part is briefly alluded to in another Branch).

The problem is that the stories were written down so late. That the traditions of the stories go back a long way is suggested by a story that can be pieced together from several Triads, which is a version of the Roman conquest that doesn't owe much to the Roman writers.(actually, it would make a lovely opera). And there's a tale about Drustan and Esyllt that has a lot in common with the story of Persephone. And then there's the story of Rhitta of the Beards, where the cloak is made in a manner that certainly was not used in Britain after the Iron Age. Best of all is the marginalium in the "Gododdin", "Pais Dinogad", which is only really compatible with Mesolithic society at the latest.

So I think we have scraps that do belong together, but the stories that should have come between them have been lost.