The Mabinogion Set

One of the things I have learnt since coming to live in Wales is that the Welsh literary establishment really hates The Mabinogion. I think that’s partly because it is seen as fantasy, and Wales is still in the 20th century with regards to academic attitudes to genre fiction. But it is also partly because people have taken on board the English view that the stories in The Mabinogion are “badly written”, and probably are bad copies of stories from elsewhere.

Thankfully the world is not run by scholars of modern literature. There are many other types of academic. In particular, in this case, we have mediaevalists, who try to make sense of the very different way in which mediaeval people thought about the world. And we have people whose focus of study is on mediaeval literature, which is a whole mad thing of its own.

I reviewed Natalia Petrovskyia’s book about ‘Peredur’ in an earlier issue. I was very impressed, particularly by her insights into the triadic structure of the narrative. Her new book, The Mabinogion Set, expands upon this work and looks at the four branches of the Mabinogi. And guess what? They too are based on a triadic structure.

Petrovskyia identifies both triadic and tetradic structures in the stories, but these all relate back to triangles. A triangle has three sides, but if you divide an equilateral triangle into smaller triangles you will get four of them: one at each corner and one “hidden” in the middle. So a story can either have three components, or three and a fourth that acts as some sort of conclusion.

The title of the book, The Mabinogion Set, is a deliberate reference to the famous Mandelbrot Set of fractal theory. This is because the structure of the stories is fractal. A given story may have a beginning, a middle and an end, but within each of those there will be three sections, made up of three encounters, each told in three paragraphs. It seems fairly obvious that this was some sort of memory aid for oral storytellers. If the bard knows that everything comes in threes, it is easier for him (or her) to remember what comes next.

The fractal structure may also give some clues as to how the stories were told in an actual performance. As with Homer, the stories in the Mabinogi are too long to be told in one go. They sometimes have things that are weird and unexplained, and occasionally the bard will tell us about how a particular event is one of the Three such-and-such of Wales. Both of these things may be hooks that can lead us down to a deeper fractal layer, if the audience wants to go there, or can be passed over if the audience is already very familiar with the tales that would result.

Being an academic, Petrovskyia has to demonstrate all of this in considerable detail. (And even so I am sure that there are older academics who will dismiss her work as nonsense because it undermines their work.) So the book can drag a bit. But I found it well worth a read and it gave me a lot to think about. Also, of course, it makes it clear that the ancient Celtic bards were a lot smarter than modern scholars have given them credit for.

Petrovskyia is now planning to extend her analysis. I’d be very interested to think more about the Fourth Branch as possibly being a deliberate conclusion to the other three. But I think Petrovskyia will be looking at the other tales that make up The Mabinogion to see if any of those have the same triadic structure. I will be particularly interested in her analysis of ‘The Lady of the Well’ because it shares a lot of thematic elements with the French romance, ‘Yvain, the Knight of the Lion’. ‘Yvain’, very clearly, has the Dual Path structure that I talked about in my report on Metropolcon. If the Welsh version has a triadic structure, that would suggest that they both derive from a common ancestor, rather than the Welsh version being a poor copy of the French as English critics tend to claim.

Title: The Mabinogion Set
By: Natalia Petrovskyia
Publisher: University of Wales Press
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