The tales were shaped by unnamed Welsh storytellers, the cyfarwyddiaid, who carried native legend in oral performance and whose art was written down by scribes between about the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries; scholars have proposed single authors for the Four Branches, but no name is known. They survive chiefly in two manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1382-1410). The translator, Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-1895), born Lady Charlotte Bertie in Lincolnshire, learned Welsh after her marriage to the ironmaster John Josiah Guest of Dowlais, near Merthyr Tydfil. Helped by Welsh scholars such as John Jones (Tegid) and Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), she published the tales in parts from 1838, with full notes, and later, as Lady Charlotte Schreiber, became a noted collector of ceramics, fans and playing cards.
“So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.”
11th-14th century (manuscripts c. 1350-1410) · Medieval · Collection
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.