马比诺吉昂

Pwyll, prince of Dyfed in south Wales, was hunting a white stag with his hounds when he blundered straight into the hunting ground of Arawn, king of the Otherworld — and set his dogs on Arawn's own kill. The Otherworld here is no underworld of the dead, just another hunting ground next door to the human one, and the law is just as strict: whoever gives offense pays with a year of his life. Pwyll owed the debt. Arawn proposed something stranger: for one year they would swap shapes, thrones, even wives, and neither would cross a line. Pwyll went. In Arawn's kingdom he killed Hafgan, his friend's old enemy, and treated Arawn's wife with nothing but perfect courtesy the whole year. When the year ended and the two traded back, each found the other had kept faith completely — and from then on they were bound as friends for life.

On the way home, strange things kept happening, one after another. A pale-coated horse walked past at an unhurried amble, and when Pwyll gave the order, his whole company spurred to a full gallop — nobody could catch her. The horse took the same road the next day. And the day after that. Finally he called out to ask who the lady on horseback was. That was how Rhiannon introduced herself — and it was she who proposed to the prince, not the other way around.

The Mabinogion is a collection of myths that an English noblewoman, Lady Charlotte Guest — later Lady Charlotte Schreiber, after remarrying — gathered and translated from medieval Welsh manuscripts in the mid-nineteenth century. No author is known for the original Welsh; the oral tradition behind it runs far older than the written copies, which survive on parchment rolls from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The stories collected here are among the oldest prose narratives to survive anywhere in the British Isles. Next to the Norse myths on the usual bookshelf, this is far stranger, and far less familiar.

One fact is worth holding onto: the Arthur here is not the aging king Malory seats at the head of the Round Table, and not the plate-armored captain of Hollywood's knights. He is barely twenty, loud, and leads by charging in first. Arthur only appears once in the whole book, briefly, in the final tale, a wooing-quest: his court is rough, his warriors get things done through sheer nerve, and there is no chivalric ceremony and no golden hall.

The whole setting can be summed up in one line: only a thin veil separates the human world from the Otherworld. In the woods of Dyfed there is a mound you can walk into and come out in Annwn, the Otherworld — not hell, just another hunting ground next door to ours. Its king Arawn stands the same height as any man and talks just as much sense; only the kingdom is different. Overnight a magic mist can settle over all of Dyfed and empty it of every living soul, people included. A sorcerer can turn leaves into horses and toadstools into leather, and trick a neighboring prince into handing over his cattle for nothing.

The characters fall into four groups. Pwyll of Dyfed, Rhiannon, and their son Pryderi anchor the First and Third Branches. Bendigeidfran, the giant king of Britain, his sister Branwen, and their half-brother Efnysien carry the Second. Bendigeidfran's brother Manawydan marries the widowed Rhiannon and sets off the Third Branch's tale of mist and a mother mouse. King Math of Gwynedd, his nephew Gwydion, the cursed child Lleu, and Blodeuwedd, the woman conjured from flowers, make up the Fourth. Pryderi is the only figure who survives from the First Branch into the Fourth — where he finally dies on Gwydion's sword.

The year Rhiannon married Pwyll, she gave birth to their son Pryderi. That same night the baby vanished without a trace. The women standing watch panicked — in that age, letting a prince go missing on your watch meant your head — so they killed a puppy, smeared its blood on Rhiannon's mouth and hands, and swore she had eaten her own child. Rhiannon's sentence: to crouch by the horse-block in the palace yard like a beast of burden and carry every visitor who arrived on her back. A year. Two years. Three. She had never laid a finger on the boy.

Meanwhile a horse-breeder named Teyrnon caught a monster stealing foals from his own stable. He beat it back and pulled a swaddled baby boy out from under its claws — a boy who looked exactly like Pwyll. Teyrnon raised the child until he could walk, then returned him to the palace. Only when Pryderi came home was Rhiannon's sentence lifted. One panicked lie from a servant had cost a mother years of her life.

The next generation of the same family plays out on a far more violent stage. Pryderi's aunt Branwen was married off to the king of Ireland to bind the two islands together, but her half-brother Efnysien flew into a rage at not being consulted about the match — and mutilated the Irish king's horses one by one, breaking their backs, slicing their ears, cropping their tails. Matholwch, the Irish king, turned all his fury on the bride: Branwen was demoted from queen to kitchen drudge, put to work every day and struck across the face every day besides.

In the kitchen she tamed a starling and trained it to carry one sentence across the Irish Sea to Britain. The bird flew into the hall of the giant king Bendigeidfran and repeated the news of his sister's humiliation in a foreign kitchen. Bendigeidfran rose to his feet — he was so large that no house in Britain could hold him and no ship could carry him — and waded across the sea himself, his fleet following behind.

In the war that followed, the Irish began reviving their fallen soldiers out of a magic cauldron, and the British army faced being ground down by enemies who could never stay dead. Efnysien — the same half-brother who had started the whole conflict — threw himself into the scalding cauldron and broke it apart with his own death. Bendigeidfran took a mortal wound and gave an order no one expected: cut off his head and carry it back to London. His men did. The severed head went on talking, went on presiding over feasts, for eighty-seven years, in what came to be called the Assembly of the Noble Head. Branwen, sailing home, heard the news of her brother's death and died of a broken heart.

Bendigeidfran's brother Manawydan married the widowed Rhiannon and settled in Dyfed with his stepson Pryderi's family. One night a magic mist descended, and every person and animal in the kingdom vanished at once — they woke to find empty wilderness all around them, with only the four of them left. First a white boar lured Pryderi into an enchanted fortress, and he disappeared. Rhiannon went looking for her son and disappeared too. All of Dyfed was left with just Manawydan and his daughter-in-law, Cigfa.

With nowhere else to go, the two of them cleared land and started farming. When the wheat ripened, a horde of mice came at night and stripped it bare. Manawydan kept watch for several nights and caught one fat, pregnant mouse, and announced he would hang her for it. She was only a mouse, and yet, strangely, a bishop turned up to beg for her life, came back again and again, and raised his offer each time — until the truth came out: the mouse was the wife of Llwyd, the sorcerer behind it all, who had cast the mist to avenge his old friend Gwawl. Manawydan spared the mouse, and got back his wife, his son, and all of Dyfed in the bargain.

Math, king of Gwynedd in north Wales, lived under a magic law: unless he was away at war, his feet had to rest in the lap of a virgin at all times. His nephew Gwydion, a powerful sorcerer with a devious streak, engineered a scheme: he turned leaves into horses and toadstools into leather by illusion and used them to trick the neighboring king Pryderi into a cattle deal bound to unravel. In the chaos that followed, Gwydion's brother Gilfaethwy took the opportunity to rape Math's foot-holder, Goewin. Pryderi came to Gwynedd to settle the matter in person and died on Gwydion's sword. The king, furious, punished the two brothers by turning them into a stag and a hind, then a boar and a sow, then a wolf and a she-wolf, and made them breed with each other for three years.

Math chose a new foot-holder — Gwydion's own sister, Arianrhod. Made to prove her virginity in a public trial, she gave birth to two sons on the spot, and in her shame and fury laid three curses on the younger one: he would never have a name, never bear arms, and never take a wife from among mortal women. Gwydion carried the boy off and raised him, then tricked and maneuvered Arianrhod into naming him with her own mouth — Lleu Llaw Gyffes — and arming him with her own hands. The third curse was the hardest to break. Gwydion and Math worked together, gathering blossoms from oak, broom, and meadowsweet, and by moonlight conjured a woman out of the flowers, named her Blodeuwedd, and married her to Lleu.

Blodeuwedd fell in love with a hunter, Gronw Pebr, and the two of them plotted to kill Lleu. Because he was born under a curse, there was only one posture in which Lleu could be killed: one foot on the rim of a bathtub, the other on the back of a goat, standing under a thatched roof that counted as neither indoors nor out. Between them they talked Lleu into demonstrating this exact, absurd position. Gronw struck him with a poisoned spear that had taken a year to forge, worked on only on Sundays. Lleu, speared, turned into an eagle and flew off, screaming.

It took Gwydion a year to track the eagle down and restore him to human form. The revenge that followed was thoroughly medieval: Gronw asked to shield himself with a gravestone against the return spear-throw — and the spear went straight through the stone anyway, and through him. Gwydion turned Blodeuwedd into an owl, condemned to fly by night ever after, her cry a thing of grief. A woman made from flowers, and betrayal turned her into a bird of the dark.

The book closes with "Culhwch and Olwen," widely recognized as the oldest surviving Arthurian tale, predating the French poet Chretien de Troyes and Malory by centuries. Culhwch is Arthur's cousin, cursed by his stepmother to marry no one but Olwen, daughter of a giant, or die trying. He turns to Arthur's court for help — and this Arthur is barely twenty, loud, and leads a war-band of noble fighters, a world away from the solemn king who later presides over the Round Table.

Olwen is the daughter of Ysbaddaden, chief of the giants; the legend has it that white clover springs up wherever she sets her foot. Ysbaddaden knows he is fated to die the day his daughter marries, so he draws up a bride-price list of impossible tasks, absurdly long, meant to wear every suitor down to death. Arthur's men work through the list one task at a time: hunting the great boar Twrch Trwyth to pull the comb and shears from between its ears; tracking down a lost knight's nails and beard; churning a river with an oar until a boulder is ground to pieces, and more. When the last task is done, the old giant is killed with a single axe stroke by Culhwch's companion Goreu, and Culhwch marries Olwen.

The four Branches share one trait: magic is never decoration, it is a set of rules that must be honored to the letter. Math's feet have to rest in a virgin's lap — and that single rule sets off the entire disaster of the Fourth Branch. Lleu can only be killed in that one absurd posture, so Blodeuwedd and her lover have to trick him into it first. Rhiannon is sentenced to serve as a mounting block, and she serves for years, exactly as ordered. Bendigeidfran's severed head is told to talk on the way to London, and it talks for eighty-seven years. The stories never explain why these laws hold. They simply expect you to accept them, then watch to see how you work around them.

One theme runs through every branch: an offense demands compensation, and short compensation always comes back around. Efnysien's fit of rage against a string of horses starts on a single animal's back and escalates to a princess beaten in a kitchen, then to a giant king wading across the sea for revenge, then to a war that leaves both sides ruined. Rhiannon is falsely accused, sentenced to carry riders on her back, trapped inside a magic mist — and the wronged women in these stories never walk away clean. They serve out the hard labor, survive the wasteland, and arrive at the end carrying their scars with them. It is an honesty with real cruelty in it.

These stories echo everywhere in what came after — Tolkien, later Arthurian writers, and the fantasy writers after them. A talking severed head, a wife conjured from flowers, an otherworldly woman no horse can catch, a bride won only by completing an impossible list of tasks — these motifs all trace back here, and they have traveled a long way since. But none of that later pedigree is really the point. What matters is how strange the prose itself still is. It doesn't read like any later English or French romance; it reads more like some storyteller deep in his cups on mead, somewhere in an oral tradition, feeding you mist and severed heads and mother mice and a spear that goes through stone, one piece at a time, by a winter fire. The first time I hit the pregnant mouse, I just sat there for a while. Where does an idea that strange even come from? Go read the book and find out.