[W] “The Four Branches of the Mabinogion” is a collection of medieval Welsh tales that form the mainstream of Welsh mythology. The tales are preserved in two Welsh sources: The White Book of Rhydderch (1300–1325) and the Red Book of Hergest (1375–1425). The evidence is that these tales originated far earlier than the surviving forms. The style used in the story of “Culhwch and Olwen,” for example, shows forms of eleventh century style, vocabulary, and custom. This is, incidentally, the earliest surviving Arthurian tale in Welsh. Archaism in language and custom reflect that the tales belonged to an ancient time and had been handed down by oral tradition until being written down.
The term mabinogi has been variously explained. Sir John Rhys [Preface to the Red Book of Hergest, I, vii (1887)] interpreted it as “the collection of things that formed the literary training of the mabinog,” who was “a young man who had not yet acquired the art of making verse but one who received instruction from a qualified bard.” The word maban, the diminutive of mab, meant a son or youth. Cecile O’Rahilly favours a theory put forward by Professors T. Gwynn Jones and J. Lloyd Jones that the word mabinogi is identical with the Irish mac ind óc, the name applied to Aengus (Aonghus), son of the Dagda, the “son of the ever young.” In Welsh tradition Pryderi is the mac ind óc. O’Rahilly points out:
Nowhere is the essential kinship of Welsh and Irish literature more marked than in the Welsh prose tales popularly known as the Mabinogion. The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, in particular, dealing as they do with the adventures of the Children of Don, the Welsh counterpart of the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, exhibit this kinship in a marked degree.
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