The Mabinogion

The Mabinogion is the oldest collection of stories that feature King Arthur and his knights. It features many popular Arthurian characters, such as Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere), Cai (Sir Kay), and Gwalchmai (Gawain). Precursor characters also feature, such as Morgan Tud who would later become Morgan le Fey. It is difficult to discern which characters are pure fiction and which may have had some tether to historical persons, as is the case with Emperor Maxen who was probably Magnus Maximus, emperor of Rome in 383AD. There is little consensus on the dates the stories were first written, generally considers to be around the 11th century, but it is clear they are the written form of much older oral tales that were baked into British culture, especially Welsh, long before the written forms existed. The full collection begins with the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, which are the most mythological in nature, featuring characters likely based on pre-Christian deities of Britain and Ireland and certainly features ancient cultural clues to the Celtic settlers of the British Isles. The subsequent chapters are additional entries, many of which feature King Arthur himself. The version of Arthur seen in The Mabinogion is especially useful as he has less of the later Christian majesty worked into his character, particularly as he is seen in How Culwch Met Olwen. The final chapter, The Tale of Taliesin, is featured only in some of the earlier versions of The Mabinogion, but is dropped from later editions, including the version by Sioned Davies, as the tale is clearly a far later addendum to the older stories. As these were collected from oral tales, it is unclear whether the original manuscripts, or some form of them, were used by writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, or whether those writers gleaned their tales from the same oral traditions and thus composed similar, but also different, versions of the tales and characters.