New stories from the Mabinogion and Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi: Texts, Narratives and Tradition1

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the migration of narrative elements from four medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into four recent Englishlanguage novels which are part of Welsh publisher Seren’s series New Stories from the Mabinogion. Russel Celyn Jones’s The Ninth Wave, Owen Sheers’s White Ravens, Lloyd Jones’s See How They Run, and Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree bear an explicit textual relationship to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a textual whole of unknown authorship. This affords an opportunity to examine the workings of what constitutes a textual tradition, both diachronically and synchronically. The article relies on Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s structuralist theory of narrative, on Welsh philologist Sioned Davies’s analyses of the medieval tales, and on Slovak literary scholar Anton Popovič’s view of tradition in terms of prototexts and metatexts. The methodology chosen consists of identifying textual variables and invariables in order to capture possible ways of examining relationships between related texts of different periods and languages within a corpus of linguistically encoded messages of a geographically defined community.

Keywords

• tradition
• narrative
• structuralism
• anglo-welsh
• welsh
• celtic studies
• mabinogi
• seren