#please read culhwch ac olwen

[beani-ed]

THATS CAUSE HE IS THE OG ARTHUR!!! FUCK THE FRENCH FUCK THE ENGLISH LONG LIVE WELSH/ROMANO-BRITTON ARTHUR!!! (I am writing a research proposal about this)

I love how pagan BBCs Merlin is. Like is this Arthur even Christian like in most preserved texts? I doubt it! He celebrates all the pagan holidays. The holy grail? Nay, the cup of life. He's also?? Not? English??? Like the Saxons are a separate entity and are against him? Merlin's Camelot comes across as an entirely fictional place rather than a place in England anyhow. The druids and magic are called the Old Religion, but there isn't like a New Religion in the show. Uther was just like enough of this sorcery we are going Secular!

[gingersnaptaff]

hi anon again and no you didn't bore me at ALL!! i loved hearing about the welsh arthurian mythos and i want to know more. please tell me where i can read about them and tell me interesting facts you like about it!!!!!!!!

Anon, I am hugging u. Thank u for saying I didn't bore u!!! So glad u liked my mad ramblings!!!

Okay, so The Mabinogion is probably a good place to start. It contains four branches of Welsh mythology which sorta ties into Welsh Arthuriana because some of the gods (Manawydan, Pryderi, Gwyn ap Nudd, Mabon ap Modron, Bendigeidfran's head.) pop up in both. Also, it contains Culhwch and Olwen which is a tale concerning Arthur's cousin Culhwch going on a quest with Arthur and his knights so he can marry Ysbaddaden Pencawr's daughter, Olwen. It's believed to be the earliest-written Arthurian romance preserved in manuscripts. It also contains three other Arthurian romances which are either Welsh tales that have been adapted by De Troyes and then back into Welsh but with a twist, or just based on French romance tales that have been repressed for the Welsh. (Idk really know which one is true but they're all fun!!!)

There's also the tales of Lludd and Llefelys (a personal fave.), The Dream of Rhonabwy (a fictional dream containing Arthurian characters but also actually REAL LIFE Welsh ruler Madog ap Maredudd.), AND The Dream of Macsen Wledig which is essentially one man's quest to bonk a hot lady in Caernarfon. (Tbf, Macsen Wledig is somewhat of an Arthurian figure in his own right cuz he too is seen as a Mab Darogan (prophecised son) in Welsh Culture because he united the Welsh under one banner, and then died, and then Wales immediately split into kingdoms again.)

You can either access Charlotte Guest's translation which I am sure @queer-ragnelle has scanned, or Sioned Davies' new translation which has handy dandy footnotes and such.

There's also Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones translation which uses a lot of the medieval language but was also made into a beautifully illustrated book by Alan Lee (An illustrator who is famous for LOTR illustrations). Jeffrey Gantz's edition is, I think, the most recently published edition but you can tear Sioned Davies from my COLD DEAD HANDS. Or, if you like poetry, one of my old English lit lecturers, Matthew Francis, has done a poetry version of the four branches! It's amazing!!!!

Also, Naxos has an audiobook version read by Matt Addis which uses Guest's translation but is good for listening to. I love it.

(You'll also want Trystan ac Essyllt, 'The Triads of Britain' and 'The Arthur of the Welsh' which are written by Rachel Bromwich, and I recommend O.J. Padel's 'Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature' for more on how he's portrayed through that. And if you like modern re-tellings Seren Books has a box set of them! Each one is a re-telling of each branch of the Mabinogi, Culhwch and Olwen, the three romances, and the others. Very fun!)

Now in terms of my favourite things: Peredur being Urien's first cousin irl made me be like WHAT? Like, they're SO interconnected it's MADNESS. Urien, Owain, and Peredur are all related. Also, the fact that Welsh Arthuriana has swallowed up eight irl monarchs (Edern ap Nudd, Cunedda, Owain, Urien, Geraint, Peredur, Macsen Wledig, Cynon ap Clydno (Owain's sister, Morfudd's, lover), and Cynyr Ceinfarfog (Cai's dad), one poetic genius (Taliesin - who wrote about Urien as it goes!!! BTW read the tale of Taliesin. Sjdddkxk. The Jones and Jones translation has it, the Davies translation of the Mabinogi does not.), Emrys Wyllt who was the inspiration for Merlin, and sixty-seven thousand gods, as well as a few saints.

My favourite fact about Welsh Arthuriana is probably that Gwalchmai and Peredur probs had a relationship, Arthur is canonically in love with his boat, Cai literally says 'if u held my dick like that I'd die.' in Culhwch and Olwen, and Gwenhwyfar's a fuckin GIANTESS. 😍😍😍😍 I have many more facts but like I don't want to clutter the feed!!!!!

Hope my rambles were helpful in some way! Have a good day/night, anon! ☺️🧡

[theclockistickingwrite]

hey you once mentioned you did a paper comparing the raven boys to arthur for college once. would you want to share that please? i am very interested!

Hi friend! Ah, I did dig through my files and realized I remembered wrong. Just comparing to Arthur is a tad misleading: the paper was a comparison of how magic functions in the raven boys and a medieval welsh story from the Mabinogion called “How Culhwch Won Olwen.” I argued that magic lends the characters of both texts authority and is also a reflection of their personalities. My thesis was several sentences, there was a lot going on. This paper is a MESS.

I did have a little bit (I think a page or two) about Arthur and Gansey, but it wasn’t the whole focus of the paper. I did close read the church scene tm, specifically pointing out how word choice reinforces Gansey’s role as a leader and the power of his position in the narrative with the word “command” and the nature of how magic can he linked to strong emotion. I also have a footnote in there about how reckless Gansey is and directly draw that comparison to Arthur haha

I do also think I have a footnote about Ronan that essentially says “there’s so much going on here I could write an entire thesis but we just don’t have time”

I’m not super comfy sharing my messy, unpublished 15 page analysis from 6 years ago online, removed from the context of my class, but here are some sources I cited that I think you might find interesting!

Merlin’s Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy by Charlotte Spivack

Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy by CW Sullivan III

Magic and the Supernatural in Early Welsh Arthurian Narrative: Culchwch Ac Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy by Helen Fulton (this is in a larger volume called Arthurian Literature XXX edited by Elizabeth Archibald and David F Johnson)

[itonje]

How did you get into Arthurian legend? I don't know where to start!

hi omg sorry for getting to this late but uh i alwaysss recommend my mutual @/gringolet's post on an intro to arthuriana which covers most of it but hmmm if you're asking me how i went about it i started semi chronologically with uh some early arthurian adjacent docs irt to subroman britain (i dont recommend this. dont do this have fun) and made my way up to historia regum britanniae (i do recommend this one but you can just read the arthurian parts if you dont want to read anything else lol..) also i recommend reading other pseudohistories! layamon's brut and historia gentis scotorum are my favs but wace's roman de brut is good as well..then when you get to romances most famously there are the romances of chretien de troyes. my favorite is lancelot, knight of the cart but it is...a lot. yvain, knight of the lion is also very good i recommend that as well. perceval, or the story of the grail is unfinished so fair warning but there are lots of other grail narratives if thats your thing (my personal favorites are parzival, peredur fab effrawg, and the didot perceval. i really like perceval stories lol) also theres the epigonal romances and like thats an entire thing in itself but my favorite of all of them has to be meraugis de portlesguez it is so entertaining it is more entertaining than a lot of modern stuff ive read honestly.

if you're looking for prose romances, there is...the lancelot grail cycle, or the vulgate, which is really long and has a lot of content it is where most of the most popular arthurian traditions originate. then there's the post vulgate which is a sort of a condensed version of it? ive not read either i dont know how much they differ lol. i know that it features more tristan and iseult stuff which is like, if you like or want to read tristan and iseult stuff this post is really good also by my mutual @/tillman i personally am not really invested in the tristan and iseult stuff but like. that is a personal thing lol. also irt to prose stuff the three romances of the mabinogi + culhwch ac olwen + breuddwyd rhonabwy are the arthurian stories in the book but i just recommend it in general it is so good. it is so good please god read the mabinogion im a big fan of welsh arthuriana in general so if you want to have more recs for that specifically lol...

also yes i will talk about the english stuff now cause thats what people like well layamons brut is in like..extremely archaic english but there's also the prose merlin (highly recommend but it is hard to find a translation online that's in like. contemporary english), there's also lancelot of the laik which is great, the alliterative morte arthure which is probably one of my favs it is excellent but then again i like the iliad so maybe i'm a biased slut for war epics (also yeah its a war epic lol). um also theres sir gawain and the green knight which i know is like the most famous of all of them and theres a movie coming out and whatnot and like its fine. its a good starter because it tells a very contained story on its own it doesnt expect you to understand everything ab arthurs court its very entertaining but imo i would read other romances featuring gawaine before this one (which is basically like. all the verse romances lol hes a popular character. my little meow meow). speaking of gawaine the dutch romances (which feature him. heavily) are good. theyre very good and i recommend them highly they also tell contained, highly entertaining stories um id start with moriaen (which is what i started with) and then skip around from there they're all great tho.

um now everyone's wanting me to say it which is uh. lets talk about le morte darthur! i dont recommend it as a starter text even tho i read it like really early on myself so do what you want however id say get one of those like, condensed versions like howard pyles king arthur, andrew langs book of romance, beatrice clay rodger lancelyn green and henry firth bc they all tell condensions of it and id keep it on you while youre reading the original thing just in case like things dont make sense or whatever lol plotwise. le morte is a very late text, and it is very strange for an arthurian text so like idk why people say to read it first because. if i had to say read any arthurian medieval text last. it would honestly be this one because there is such a beautiful finality to it.

i do recommend it though but fair warning that things presented in le morte are like. not the same across all texts? thats something you should keep in mind in general like a lot of these texts are from diff cultures diff languages with their own shifted traditions of arthurian stuff so just in case theres contradictions or whatever between them even in the texts itself (i am looking at you geoffrey of monmouth and anna's family tree) like, dont sweat it or whatever theyre just weird like that. its like comics or whatnot.

anyways this is all to say you have a lot of places to start and pick around from id recommend shorter stuff first and stuff whose translations are usually pretty accessible and contemporary (this is why i highly recommend de troyes' romances in the beginning) just to get used to it cause the 'plot' structure of these things esp in the verse romances is like a bit different than modern lit so i know that can be offputting for some people. like i said like modern condensions of arthurian stuff are invaluable, so are um indexes? there's a couple i don't know if there are any pdfs floating online but i know they usually carry them at libraries and whatnot...

there's a lot of modern modern stuff i dont know about any of it. i couldnt even tell you about bbc merlin i am quite stupid in regard to it. i do know a fair bit about victorian stuff which is modern tho! i should make a post on that but like tldr victorian arthurian poetry good. most of it. victorian arthurian content tho is really in a whole different world as compared to medieval lit so like. well leave all the generally post medieval stuff off for a min asjkldfskld

so like. yeah have fun i know i didnt leave any links on this post (mostly) but if you want any text i mention here please please ask me i WILL send you a pdf guaranteed except for the vulgate and the post vulgate i have not read those and afaik they are hard to come by. i dont know of any pdfs of arthurian indexes if you want one but i could try to find one..?

anyways yeah if this is confusing im sorry 😭😭😭ive answered a question like this a couple times as well jic ehehe https://itonje.tumblr.com/post/641224624484581376/could-i-ask-how-you-got-started-in-arthurian

https://itonje.tumblr.com/post/651581606366265344/hey-finny-im-so-sorry-to-bother-you-but-a-week

[tillman]

thank you for posting green knight spoilers bc i hated sgatgk and it is the only arthurian lit other than like, culhwch ac olwen, that i have ever read, and so i was SO MAD that they made a MOVIE out of ALL THAT but now i will watch it >:] apologies for bothering you twice in one day & farewell

bro always i am only on tumblr to be bothered but like LMAO YEAH GOD. okay i have complicated feelings about sgatgk mainly that it is interesting when in the context of the rest of arthuriana and how gawain as a character is written as this kinda slutty very murderous dude and how the views of the time were changing and trying to make him into the icon of chivalry they needed but like. no one ever talks about that angle of sgatgk. ever. ever ever. so sgatgk to me is just this stupid fucking awful text that is a slog and is just Bad that people for some reason call gay and sooooo cool like noooo oh my god. please.

but yeah the movie felt very much to me like a fuck you to that which i enjoyed so so much. thank you whoever made that. thank you dev patel for being sexy. fun adventure i loved when they had divorce.

[margridarnauds]

Something that should be noted is..............look, okay, would I recommend her translation to anyone who’s interested in this stuff? No. I would not. It’s outdated, inaccurate, and VERY, VERY Victorian. There have been better translations made since hers, and it is the reason for the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE, which is people lumping pretty much all the Welsh prose texts in with the Mabinogi. (KING ARTHUR DOES NOT SHOW UP IN THE FOUR BRANCHES. HE. DOES. NOT. CULHWCH AC OLWEN IS NOT PART OF THE FOUR BRANCHES.) 

BUT. But. That being said, perspective: She was working in the 19th century, without any of the resources that we have now, and the scope of her project was MASSIVE. To put it into perspective: As a Celticist who’s trained intensively for the last two years in Middle Welsh, with a fully prepared edition, glossary, and editor’s notes in front of me, I would do very well to get approximately 20 lines out of around..........600 or so of Pwyll done per week. Note: That is only the FIRST BRANCH of the Mabinogi. I had to do fifty lines of Brut y Brenhined this last week, relatively short because it was a two-column page, again, WITH a full edition, glossary, and notes, and that nearly killed me. I was working on overdrive for about three days to get it done, getting about 4-6 hours of sleep in 48 hours. Middle Welsh is actually quite meditative for me, most of the time, when my mind is in it, but it can be tedious, and parts of it don’t lend themselves well to English syntax. It’s the sort of thing I can do for about an hour or two and then have had enough for the week.

That’s not including other resources that are generally considered essential to studying Middle Welsh, like modern digitization of manuscripts, Simon Evans’ A Grammar of Middle Welsh, without any of our modern online dictionaries or glossaries that make dealing with the inconsistent orthography somewhat livable, without formally studying it. And she did that shit. For the ENTIRE MABINOGI, as well as a few other texts she lumped in. Honestly, a superhuman effort. I’m willing to say that I couldn’t do it. And, frankly, I’m not sure how many modern Celticists could, either. Not because we’re not good at our jobs, but because the landscape has changed SO MUCH since that time. 

I feel like there’s this Thing that happens in Celtic studies in particular where we get SO HYPED UP on reminding people that THESE SOURCES ARE VERY OLD, DON’T USE THEM, that we kind of....gloss over exactly how monumental they were at the time. And we pat ourselves on the shoulders because we’re Real Scholars, we have better sources than people who would rely on *Charlotte Guest.*  It’s EASY for us to talk shit, but could we have done the same in the exact same circumstances? And, you know what? How many people got into Welsh studies because of her translation? How many people went on to read the Mabinogi in the original Middle Welsh because she paved the way? I can say, on my end, that I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for people translating the Irish texts out, because that was what got me hooked. I wouldn’t recommend Lady Gregory to anyone really looking into seriously studying Old Irish for the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend Lady Guest, but I can acknowledge that, if I was to do half as much for the field as they did, I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams. (Also, ngl, a part of me, however small, does wonder how we would treat them if they were done by aristocratic men as opposed to aristocratic women -- I’m not saying that’s the ONLY factor, I’m not saying it’s a CONSCIOUS factor, but I am saying that the way they’re often talked about is Silly Aristocratic Women Dabbling In Things They Didn’t Know About.)

(But also: For the sake of your local Celticist’s sanity, DO please use “Mabinogi” when talking about the Four Branches, “Mabinogion” when talking about Lady Guest’s, and remember that the Four Branches ARE the Mabinogi. I can respect her work while still wanting to tear my hair out at that particular bit of her legacy. I’m not going to come into anyone’s houses to beat them with a baseball bat, but it helps me to know what we’re talking about.)

i'm taking a class on the mabinogion and the professor spent half of the first lecture mounting a full-throated defense of Lady Charlotte Guest