Mabinogion
Collection of eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, transmitted through two principal fourteenth-century manuscripts —the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest— though their original composition is clearly earlier and incorporates narrative and mythological material of much older origin, drawn from Wales's pre-Christian Celtic oral tradition, transmitted for centuries by professional bards before being fixed in writing. The name 'Mabinogion' was actually coined in the nineteenth century by the translator Lady Charlotte Guest, who popularised these texts in English under this philologically inaccurate collective title, since it originally designated properly only the four central branches of the collection, today known as the 'Four Branches of the Mabinogi' (Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math), a unified narrative cycle centred on figures such as Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and Pryderi, his son, a recurring protagonist running through all four branches who displays traits typical of a mythic hero associated with themes of sovereignty, transformation, magic and complex relations between the human world and the Celtic Otherworld (Annwn). Beyond these four core branches, the collection includes other independent tales of diverse origin and character, notably four Arthurian romances —Culhwch and Olwen, regarded as the oldest surviving Arthurian tale in Welsh and notable for its fantastical list of impossible tasks imposed on the protagonist, and three later romances with clear parallels to the French tradition of Chrétien de Troyes— which attest to the circulation and Welsh adaptation of the Arthurian cycle independently of the better-known continental versions. The Mabinogion tales constitute the most important and complete surviving source of pre-Christian Welsh mythology and traditional narrative, and their study has been essential for reconstructing aspects of insular Celtic religion, as well as a recurring source of literary inspiration for modern Welsh and British writers interested in recovering this insular legendary tradition.