Excerpt from The Mabinogion
They divide themselves naturally into four groups as follows: -
(1) The Mabinogion proper, or, to speak accurately, the Mabinogi of the four-branches, viz. Pwyll, Branwen, Manawyddan and Math.
(2) The two short, old-world Welsh tales of Maxen"s Dream, and Lludd and Llevelys.
(3) Stories of Arthur - viz. Kilhwch and Olwen, Rhonabwy"s Dream the Lady of the Fountain, Peredur and Geraint.
(4) The story of Taliesin.
(1) 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 medi?val 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 of 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.
(2) The two tales of Maxen"s Dream and Lludd and Llevelys carry us back to the Roman administration of Britain. They have a substratum of history. In the Mabinogi the story-teller strove, perhaps without knowing it, to give historical reality to myth; here he lets his imagination and fancy play around real persons. The two stories challenge comparison with the Historia Regum Britannia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but it is not safe to assert that there is any real connection between them.
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