Doubling and Incest in the Mabinogi

Abstract

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi is a work, or perhaps a cycle of four related works, composed in Middle Welsh prose probably near the end of the eleventh century and perhaps in southwest Wales. It is the most important surviving prose fiction produced in Britain before the romances of Malory four centuries later and is all the more valuable in that we do not have from medieval Britain, as we do from Ireland, a rich legacy of vernacular prose fiction. It draws freely from a broad background of traditional narratives, many known to us primarily as oral folktales, and yet is certainly the work of an author, composed in writing: few of the telltale signs of oral composition appear in its controlled and economical style.' The artistry of the unknown author is evident, but the meaning of his story is not. Both factors have attracted scholarly analysis and critical interpretation for more than a century. In general, those studies have assumed that the narrative lacks structure and coherence, a lack which is often explained by seeing the Mabinogi as composed of, or in some way embodying, the fragmentary remains of some lost earlier work a complete heroic about the mysterious birth, victorious career, and tragic death of a legendary hero or a coherent body of recounting the archetypal exploits of Celtic gods long since forgotten. The saga and the mythology approaches are both standard views of The Four Branches with a long history, and they are not mutually exclusive, having at times been combined in studies that find in the medieval Welsh work survivals of a lost heroic which was itself based on an even older body of mythology. Interpretations such as these are rooted in the late-nineteenth-century theory of survivals, a way of seeing older literary works as the relics of lost myths, rituals, or national epics. There is a curious ambivalence, as some of those interpretations acknowledge, in a critical approach that admires the accomplishment of an author's style even as it argues that his story is badly in need of reconstruction.2