I received the third chapter of Will Parker's Mabinogi book yesterday, but I'm still reading the chapter on Pwyll. This third chapter covers the Second Branch, Branwen. I also started dipping into W.J. Gruffydd's Rhiannon, which looks mainly at the first and third branvhes. The first few pages are full of sound observations, but then he gives his entire reconstruction of the supposed original story of Pryderi, which is so at odds with the actual Mabinogi that it can only be wishful thinking. I'm sure that there's a lot more good material to come though.

Probably the best website for an introduction to Celtic scholarship is Lisa L. Spangenberg's . There's a good amount of material there, reliable reading lists and information, and she has her own blog, which isn't updated often enough. (I can talk!)

However, Lisa can be rather on the scathing side when it comes to the less careful popular scholarship, especially neo-Pagan stuff. I agree with most of what she says, but her occasional rants make for unpleasant reading. (She does describe herself as an "opinionated digital medievalist.") Some of her criticisms are out of proportion, and I feel that she is missing the point with the neo-Pagan books which, however much they may try (or pretend) to be scholarly, are not written for academic purposes. Her "Advice for Neo-Pagan Authors" is fairly useless because, although the advice is sound academic practice, the article quickly becomes an attack on those authors.

All of this means that she should be a bit more careful herself in providing accurate information. Her essay on Taliesin contains quite a few inaccuracies, though it is generally a sound introduction to the figure of Taliesin in poetry and story. For instance, "There are other, later versions of this text, including two from the hand of the often inventive Iolo Morgonwg/Edward Morgan (this is one of the mansucripts used by Lady Charlotte Guest for her Mabinogion translation)." Now, Iolo spelled his bardic surname "Morganwg", not "Morgonwg", and his given name was Edward Williams, not Edward Morgan. Worse still, she uses this spelling on her Advice for Neo-Pagan Authors page, which criticises others for sloppy standards.

Then, "The earliest text of Ystoria Taliesin is that of Elis Gruffydd, where the tales is part of two episodes in Gruffydd's Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World. This is National Library of Wales MS 5276, compiled during the first half of the sixteenth century, and edited by Patrick Ford (Ford, 1992), and translated by Ford a few years later (Ford 1999)." This is not strictly true, since Ford published a translation of Gruffydd's Gwion Bach and Taliesin stories many years earlier, in 1977, in his The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales. The two translations that Ford has made (his 1977 one in Mabinogi, and his 1999 one in The Celtic Poets) are quite different. I suppose the 1999 one can be said to be the first translation of Ford's 1992 text, so this is quibbling on my behalf. But her reference to Iolo Morgonwg is a real howler.

So, a recommended site, but one that sometimes leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

A three week trip to Britain has kept me from posting again. But I should catch up with a few posts today. during the trip, I met up with Will Parker, author of the forthcoming book The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Celtic Myth and Medieval Reality. Will and I stayed up to the small hours discussing all sorts of stuff, but mainly the material pertaining to Celtic mythology. He recently sent me his chapter on the first branch, Pwyll. It has some fascinating stuff on Annwfn (annwn), and an intriguing theory of the origins of the characters Pwyll and Prideri (which hasn't yet convinced me completely.)

The Bardic Press website will be down for a couple of days since I am changing hosts, and the domain name needs to propogate.