Guest, Charlotte
About the Author:
Lady Charlotte Guest was born in 1812, the daughter of the 9th Earl of Lindsey. At the age of twenty-one she moved to London and married the Welsh industrialist John Guest.
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3 out of 5
(1 book)
The Mabinogion
Twelve stories from Welsh mythology and Arthurian romances, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest from anonymous medieval authors.
I recently read T. H. White's 'The Once and Future King' but found it quite tedious. I was surprised, therefore, to find this much older collection of stories about knights, chivalry and questing to be more engaging altogether. I think what made the difference was my interest in mythology and seeing how these ancient Welsh tales are interwoven with elements of the Gaelic mythology of Ireland, the themes of classical Greek mythology and the later Arthurian romances popular across Europe. The bards who would once have told these tales certainly would have been familiar with all of the above and it seems very fitting to see them woven together.
Certainly my recommendation to any reader would be to read them if you (like me) have an interest in myth and legend but not if you were looking for an engaging narrative in and of itself. Truth be told, like much mythology, this book contains a great deal of repetition, self-contradiction and an endless tirade of names you'd never remember without a genealogical map. The gist is that this isn't an easy or particularly flowing read but it is, at least, only about a third as long as T. H. White's book of Arthurian tales.
Lady Charlotte Guest's translation is not necessarily considered the best, with her 19th Century aristocratic lady's predilections apparently editing out most of the raunchier or more gory elements of the original, but it was the first and therefore probably the most influential to what came after (including Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'). Also, to be fair, the amount of rape and spousal abuse obliquely suggested in this sanitised version of the tales was more than enough, so I don't think I'd particularly want to read the full unfiltered versions.
3 out of 5
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Mythology (here)