arthurbdd's review against another edition
3.0
Valiant attempt at crafting the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into a coherent narrative arc, but fails in part because Walton fails to recognise when the original material calls for comedy instead of seriousness and in part because her own inventions don't quite fit. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/repairing-the-tapestry-of-the-mabinogion/
mkpatter's review against another edition
3.0
This series is WEIRD, but kind of delightfully so, and definitely a must read if you want to read the feminist fantasy canon.
pnknrrd85's review against another edition
I loved it I just got distracted by other stuff.
peregrineace's review against another edition
4.0
This is a worthy, slow read. Broken into four "books", these stories start out very much like The Silmarillion but improve from there (I know, blasphemy). I don't know much about mythology from this corner of the world, so I'm sure quite a few references went over my head. Nonetheless, Walton tells many engaging stories with the air of timelessness that all the best fairy tales have. There were quite a few passages that I marked to save as quotes.
Definitely a good choice for readers interested in mythologies of different cultures.
Definitely a good choice for readers interested in mythologies of different cultures.
julieputty's review
3.0
I could never get engrossed in this dense, distant work. I ran out of library time long before I completed it.
unevendays's review
4.0
I enjoyed this retelling of the Mabinogion tales - which I knew from having read Lady Guest's translation previously. I liked the way Walton managed to keep an archaic turn of phrase without making the book too much hard work to read. It flowed well and I liked her expansions and reimaginings of certain aspects of the stories. I did feel, however, that she was telling them with a very modern, knowing, perspective and certainly with an agenda of her own (whether this was deliberate or not).
elenajohansen's review
3.0
As far as the stories go, I was totally on board for the first three books of the tetralogy. They were engaging and descriptive, with clear character motivations and (despite the formal language) decent pacing.
Then I got to the fourth book and the wheels fell off the wagon. It's the longest of the four by far, weighed down with lengthy philosophical reveries about the nature of marriage, free will, fatherhood, and family. I get that a major theme of all the stories is change: old vs. new, matrilineal descent vs. patrilineal descent as in the Old and New Tribes. But the tone of the final book shifted greatly towards the cerebral, and it also shifted anti-women in a big way. Women were glorified in the first three books, but in the final story they were unabashedly the villians. Arianrhod was a deceitful, cunning woman so in love with her self-image she would do anything to keep it, even denying her own children; and Blodeuwedd was a cheating wife who betrayed her husband to his death.
Okay, fine, women can be villains--but in both cases, it was the male main characters who were the root of their actions. Arianrhod never wanted to be a mother, but her brother Gwydion needed her to bear his heir, so he caused her to give birth via magic (though he points out repeatedly there would have been no children in her body to have if she had been virgin as she claimed) and keeps one of the children to raise himself. Blodeuwedd was actually created via Mâth's and Gwydion's magic to be a wife to that child, Llew, in his manhood--and when she fell in love with another man, she who was created solely as a companion to Llew, she fell into scheming to solve her difficulties.
Now, I'm not trying to absolve these two "villians" of all of their culpability, but Gwydion is the main character of the book, his need for an heir and the obtaining and raising of such being the main storyline--and the book constantly excuses his actions. If this were a moral tale and he suffered some sort of downfall in the end, that would be one thing--but the ending is unsatisfactory in that regard, and in others, because the book just kind of... stops. Llew is reborn from his eagle form (which was his "death") and then... nothing happens. So clearly, I'm missing something, or the book is.
And speaking of the physical book itself, I'm disappointed in its quality as well. For something that cost me $35, I expect it not to be riddled with typos and inconsistencies. There were punctuation and capitalization mistakes once every fifteen to twenty pages, or so, and the spelling errors seemed to be centered on the names. Welsh is difficult to spell for the uninitiated--but it was as if the entire book had been typeset by scanning then left unproofed, because the errors were almost always shape-based. Pryderi became Prydern, mashing the R and I together. Geyr became Gew, combining the Y and R. And on top of that, some of the names in the fourth book were spelled differently from in the first three, even when they were clearly referring to the same characters. I would expect that if I were reading different sources telling the same tales (Gawaine vs. Gawain in Arthurian mythos, etc.) but not in a single compilation volume from the same author.
I'm glad I finally read it after it sat on my shelf so long, but I can't help but be disappointed.
Then I got to the fourth book and the wheels fell off the wagon. It's the longest of the four by far, weighed down with lengthy philosophical reveries about the nature of marriage, free will, fatherhood, and family. I get that a major theme of all the stories is change: old vs. new, matrilineal descent vs. patrilineal descent as in the Old and New Tribes. But the tone of the final book shifted greatly towards the cerebral, and it also shifted anti-women in a big way. Women were glorified in the first three books, but in the final story they were unabashedly the villians. Arianrhod was a deceitful, cunning woman so in love with her self-image she would do anything to keep it, even denying her own children; and Blodeuwedd was a cheating wife who betrayed her husband to his death.
Okay, fine, women can be villains--but in both cases, it was the male main characters who were the root of their actions. Arianrhod never wanted to be a mother, but her brother Gwydion needed her to bear his heir, so he caused her to give birth via magic (though he points out repeatedly there would have been no children in her body to have if she had been virgin as she claimed) and keeps one of the children to raise himself. Blodeuwedd was actually created via Mâth's and Gwydion's magic to be a wife to that child, Llew, in his manhood--and when she fell in love with another man, she who was created solely as a companion to Llew, she fell into scheming to solve her difficulties.
Now, I'm not trying to absolve these two "villians" of all of their culpability, but Gwydion is the main character of the book, his need for an heir and the obtaining and raising of such being the main storyline--and the book constantly excuses his actions. If this were a moral tale and he suffered some sort of downfall in the end, that would be one thing--but the ending is unsatisfactory in that regard, and in others, because the book just kind of... stops. Llew is reborn from his eagle form (which was his "death") and then... nothing happens. So clearly, I'm missing something, or the book is.
And speaking of the physical book itself, I'm disappointed in its quality as well. For something that cost me $35, I expect it not to be riddled with typos and inconsistencies. There were punctuation and capitalization mistakes once every fifteen to twenty pages, or so, and the spelling errors seemed to be centered on the names. Welsh is difficult to spell for the uninitiated--but it was as if the entire book had been typeset by scanning then left unproofed, because the errors were almost always shape-based. Pryderi became Prydern, mashing the R and I together. Geyr became Gew, combining the Y and R. And on top of that, some of the names in the fourth book were spelled differently from in the first three, even when they were clearly referring to the same characters. I would expect that if I were reading different sources telling the same tales (Gawaine vs. Gawain in Arthurian mythos, etc.) but not in a single compilation volume from the same author.
I'm glad I finally read it after it sat on my shelf so long, but I can't help but be disappointed.
ehmannky's review
5.0
This book has been sitting on my bookshelf, partially read for 4 years now, and after reading it I am kicking myself over the knowledge I could have had 4 more years with this text. It is a beautiful, moving, vivid retelling of the Welsh legends contained in The Mabinogi that takes the Christianity out and the wild pagan-nature of the tales back in. Dealing in broad strokes with the anxiety around paternity and tradition versus progress, the texts follow three generations of heroes as the dawn of a new era in Britain's mythic past begins to pass. But besides these themes, you should read it for the beauty of the text. Walton's prose is honestly some of the most beautiful I have ever read. The whole damn thing is littered with beautifully wrought passages like this:
"The eyes and ears and the blood-dripping teeth of those strange dogs glowed red, red as fire, but their white bodies glittered more savagely, with an unnatural, deathlike brilliance of paleness. Blackness terrifies; it is sightlessness, it blinds a man and hides his enemies; yet the darkness within the earth is warm and life giving, the womb of the Mother, the source of all growth. But in snow or in white-hot flame nothing can grow. Whiteness means annihilation, that end from which can come no beginning" (The Prince of Annwn).
The power in these retellings comes from Walton seeing the humanity in these mythic figures and giving them rich, complex inner lives not found in the original text. I'm a massive fan of myth-retellings, especially those done by women. She does not impose modern sensibilities on these characters, and her men are often sexist and xenophobic and her women are not Strong Female Characters (no one rides into battle and cuts off someone's head). But I would say Walton's ability to treat her characters as fully-fledged human beings leads to wonderfully realized characters (male and especially female) and a fascinating look at gender and sexuality and the man-made constructed nature of both.
"The eyes and ears and the blood-dripping teeth of those strange dogs glowed red, red as fire, but their white bodies glittered more savagely, with an unnatural, deathlike brilliance of paleness. Blackness terrifies; it is sightlessness, it blinds a man and hides his enemies; yet the darkness within the earth is warm and life giving, the womb of the Mother, the source of all growth. But in snow or in white-hot flame nothing can grow. Whiteness means annihilation, that end from which can come no beginning" (The Prince of Annwn).
The power in these retellings comes from Walton seeing the humanity in these mythic figures and giving them rich, complex inner lives not found in the original text. I'm a massive fan of myth-retellings, especially those done by women. She does not impose modern sensibilities on these characters, and her men are often sexist and xenophobic and her women are not Strong Female Characters (no one rides into battle and cuts off someone's head). But I would say Walton's ability to treat her characters as fully-fledged human beings leads to wonderfully realized characters (male and especially female) and a fascinating look at gender and sexuality and the man-made constructed nature of both.
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