The Influence of The Mabinogion on Modern Fantasy Literature

Pentre Ifan, by C.W. Sullivan III

[The late] Sir Isaiah Berlin once noted that critics are like hedgehogs or they are like foxes. Like foxes they can be very clever, knowing many things, tricking and troubling us in many clever ways with a seemingly infinite fund of intelligence that never fails to come up with something new and delightfully incisive. Or, like hedgehogs, they can know a single thing which they repeat over and over and over. It may well be a very important thing they know. But it is that and that alone which makes them worth reading. (Delany 7)

Though I might prefer to think of myself as a critical fox, never failing to come up with something new and delightful, I realize that in this paper I write as a hedgehog, worrying again a topic which I have been assessing and addressing for years: the ways in which the materials from the Four Branches of the Mabinogi have influenced twentieth-century fantasy literature. Like a good hedgehog, I wish, first, to rehearse some of that rumination, and maybe, just a little fox-like, I will have something new to say.

In 1903, almost 100 years ago now, William Butler Yeats, acknowledging the comments of Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan on the influence of Celtic mythology, maintained that ancient literature is imaginative in proportion to its closeness to what he called the "old way" of looking at the world. This "old way," Yeats felt, was a vision of the world expressed by people who believed that "trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among shadows; and that . . . almost all things under the sun and the moon, and the sun and the moon [themselves], were not less divine and changeable." Further, Yeats suggested that the "old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way than did the makers of the Kalevala, had more of it than the makers of the sagas" (Yeats 272-274).

To Arnold's comment that English literature got "much of its melancholy from a Celtic source . . . and nearly all of its natural magic," Yeats replied that:

But what Yeats foresaw did not happen. First, Celtic Studies as an academic discipline went in another direction. When Matthew Arnold entered the discussion with his 1865 lecture, "On the Study of Celtic Literature," he urged the application of a scientific approach to the study of the Celtic materials, and he found that approach in philology. Arnold offered the philological approach as a way to avoid the more "emotional" approaches of those he termed "Celt-Lovers" and "Celt-Haters." He further suggested that philology be used to date the composition of the remaining Celtic materials and to trace the influence of those materials into British literature. Celtic Studies has followed the first of Arnold's suggestions and has centered, it seems to me, on matters of language and translation but paid scant attention, especially in the United States, to the possibilities of a Celtic influence on subsequent literatures. Were I to edit another anthology, I would like to bring together a number of those existing disparate articles which find a Celtic influence in such authors as Blake, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowell, and Walt Whitman as well as in the more obvious Yeats and Joyce; a collection of those essays would be, as it were, greater than the sum of its parts in its proof of a continuing Celtic influence on British and American literature.[1]

It may be, however, that Celtic Studies' reticence to deal with matters of literary influence down through the ages and its seeming desire to remain a small and specialized discipline have been ironically justified by the current New Age movement and its interest in the kind of Celtic mysticism that Kenneth Jackson railed against when he said that "the Celtic literatures are about as little given to mysticism or sentimentality as it is possible to be" (20). For example: in addition to some valuable materials in the field of Celtic Studies, such as a series of lives of Celtic saints from Brendan to Patrick, the Lindisfarne Press Readers Catalogue contains such questionable titles as Richard Seddon's The Mystery of Arthur at Tintagel, which, according to the catalog advertisement, "sees the Arthurian mysteries as a path of self-development," and Ernest Anderson's Living a Spiritual Year, which "outlines an entirely new cycle of festivals which allow us to experience and understand the significance of the Earth-Soul and at the same time intimately connect this experience and understanding to the Christ-Power" (27). I expect books like these to be displayed in the "self-help" section of the bookstore, not in the "mythology" section.

Celtic tourism has also occasioned criticism from the academics, a situation I touched on briefly in an article in Planet some years ago entitled "A Wizard Behind Every Bush." In that article, I suggested that fantasy literature was, in part, responsible for tourists, and especially American tourists, coming to Wales expecting to find "a bard on every corner and a wizard behind every bush" (47). In addition to fantasy, I continued, realistic fiction often presents an unrealistic view of modern Wales, both popular and scholarly non-fiction seems to concentrate on the Wales of long ago, and the British Tourist Board and the Wales Tourist Board have been actively promoting a Wales of castles and traditional farms (not slate quarries or nuclear reactors). If tourists flock, then, it will be to Celtica to "experience the mysterious and magical world of the Celts" (cover, Celtica advertising brochure, 1996), not to the National Library to read philological essays in the NLW Journal, Studia Celtica, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, or any of the other journals. Scholars feel, and not without some cause, that such tourism - however good for the country's economy - might have an adverse effect on the status of Celtic Studies by reinforcing stereotypes of pagan warriors and druid sacrifices, stereotypes first promulgated by Julius Caesar.

A second and perhaps more important reason for the Celtic materials' failure to become a major literary inspiration was that by the time Yeats suggested that the Celtic materials would be as important to the twentieth century as the Arthurian materials had been to the Middle Ages, literature - that is, mainstream or elite literature - was almost irretrievably realistic. Certainly H.G. Wells might rub elbows with Joseph Conrad at a dinner party or reception, but the die was cast. And it had been for a long time. Chaucer may have written the first realistic fiction in The Canterbury Tales, but realism came into vogue in the seventeenth century to such an extent that, after Shakespeare, the only successful and serious non-realistic literature was religious and the only successful and serious heroic epic, Paradise Lost, was written by a man who had given up an early ambition to write an Arthuriad and a middle-years ambition to do for the Matter of Britain what Virgil had done for the Matter of Rome.[2] But by Milton's time, Thomas Hobbes had already said that poetry should "please a reasonable, sober, urbane man without violating his sense of reality" (Mazzeo 237-238), and soon the eighteenth century would glory in its lack of fantasy. By the end of the nineteenth century, realism had entrenched itself as the serious fictional mode; those who wrote anything else - Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, and even, at times, Charles Dickens - were then or have since been labeled writers of fantasy or, perhaps even more damning, writers for children. In the twentieth century, and especially in the largest literary market, the United States, non-realistic imaginative literature (except for something "new" called "magic realism") has been ghettoized - placed in special categories by the publishers, special sections in the book stores, and special courses (if taught at all) by the schools.

What did happen, that Yeats probably could not have foreseen, was the development of this genre called fantasy literature. And the development of this genre was directly connected back, as James Burke might say, to the exclusion of fantasy from literature in the seventeenth century, to the celebration of the classics in the eighteenth century, and to the entrenchment of realism as the major fictional mode in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fantasy genre is also a product of the Romantic reaction to the eighteenth century classicism, of the publication of the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, in 1818, and of the rediscovery of Celtic and Scandinavian literatures - especially by William Morris. It is both ironic and logical that someone, in this case Lady Charlotte Guest, should translate The Mabinogion at mid century, just prior to the birth of the fantasy genre.

My own candidate for the first fantasy novel, William Morris' The Wood Beyond the World (1894), appeared only a few years before Yeats' essay. While not the first fiction to include supernatural or preternatural phenomena, I believe that Morris's novel was the first conscious attempt to create a novel which realistically portrayed an unreal world - what Tolkien would later call a Secondary World, a world as real as this one but consciously created from a different logic. This different logic was more than the appearance of three Christmas ghosts in otherwise realistic and contemporary London, was not a dream from which an Alice might return to her "real" life, was not a modified folktale about a Golden River or some goblins living underground, and certainly was not an allegory about swimming away to become a Water Baby. Morris - not coincidentally, I think, of Welsh stock - created the first logically-cohesive fantastic world and opened a floodgate for the imaginative fiction, imaginative in Yeats' sense of the word, that we now call fantasy. It is that genre which has been significantly influenced by the Mabinogi, and it is that fiction which I have made something of a specialty.

Having been introduced to Lloyd Alexander's books by my wife, I sought out books by Evangeline Walton, Kenneth Morris, Alan Garner, Nancy Bond, and Susan Cooper - more or less in that order. I then did what any good scholar does, I wrote an article. The article became a doctoral dissertation, the doctoral dissertation a book. In that book, Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy, after discussing some of the scattered documented cases of Welsh influence on other and subsequent literatures from Beowulf to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," I suggested that modern fantasy writers used the Welsh materials in one of three ways.

To oversimplify: Authors like Evangeline Walton and Alan Garner expand basic stories from the Four Branches into whole novels. In Walton's case, the 20 pages of the Fourth Branch become a 400-page novel without significant changes in the plot. Garner, too, expands the Fourth Branch, or at least a part of it, into a novel, and he also brings the action into a twentieth-century Welsh village where contemporary characters live out, again, the final episode of the Fourth Branch.

Other authors, like Kenneth Morris and Nancy Bond, take characters, actions, and scenes from the original material and interweave them with their own creations, the Welsh materials easily recognizable within the narrative as a whole. Morris takes characters and set piece scenes from the Second and Fourth Branches and incorporates them into a tale in which the very gods are threatened if Manawydan cannot save them. Bond tells of the son of a visiting American professor who finds Taliesin's harp key and must return it to him over the centuries; along the way, much of the poet's life story is retold.

Still other authors, especially Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper, create their own stories and use characters and materials from the Welsh myths and legends to add depth and texture to rather traditional and somewhat formulaic plots. In the Chronicles of Prydain, Alexander's four main characters and their story are of his own invention, but they are surrounded by characters and items from The Mabinogi in particular and Welsh legend in general. Cooper's Dark is Rising series connects five twentieth-century young people to characters and events of the past, from Arthur and Guenevere to Owain Glyndwr, in a centuries-long battle between the Light and the Dark. In both instances, the Welsh materials add thematic layers to an otherwise whole story.

In Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy, I speculated at some length that the Welsh materials were particularly suited to modern fantasy because the original aims or functions of a mythology paralleled the aims or functions of a contemporary fantasy novel. I took Joseph Campbell as my guide. Campbell argued for four essential functions of a mythology:

It is obvious, I think, that a fantasy is supposed to create in and for its reader a sense of wonder and to present the reader with a cosmology that supports and is supported by that sense of wonder. As Tolkien indirectly suggested in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and later directly expounded in "On Fairy Stories," the fantasy world is a place in which the Hero and the Dragon are natural elements and natural adversaries, in which magic is a reality governed by natural (or supernatural) laws, and in which no Hero says, as would a character in a realistic novel, "There are no such things as dragons." What is impossible and full of wonder for the reader is very real to the inhabitants of what Tolkien calls the Secondary World - Thorin Oakenshield, you remember, does not survive the events of Tolkien's first novel. Nor does the dragon.

Evangeline Walton, Kenneth Morris, and Lloyd Alexander each create a pure High Fantasy world which does not connect with the world the reader inhabits except that it might be in this world's mythological past. The magic of Gwydion, who appears in all three writers' novels, actually works. Walton's Gwydion and his uncle Math create a woman from the flowers of the oak, meadowsweet, and broom. Morris's Gwydion is one of the gods living on Wyddfa Mountain. Alexander's Gwydion can weave several blades of grass together, say a few words, and cast a net over enemy warriors. And all three Gwydions are masterful storytellers and masters of disguise.

Alan Garner, Nancy Bond, and Susan Cooper all bring the magic into the present. In Garner's remote Welsh village, paper owls fly away. A harp key connects Bond's young main character, Peter, with Taliesin and his historical time. Merlin inhabits the twentieth century in Cooper's series, continuing to guide the Light in its centuries-long battle with the Dark. Although the twentieth century is less hospitable to magic than the mythological past, any doubters in the books are convinced by the time the novel concludes.

Campbell's second set of functions are also present in the novels. Each of the heroes must grow up in and into his or her society, often becoming in the end the society's leader and its most representative person, its Hero. Along the way, the Hero must also confront his or her own failings and triumph over them. It has been suggested by those who believe in the affective power of literature that the same transformation may take place, to some extent, in the reader. Ursula K. Le Guin insists that fantasy "is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you " (84). And Benjamin DeMott, speaking specifically of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, comments, "Not for some time have I read a work as funny, thoughtful, passionate or large-souled. Rightly used, it could inspire as well as comfort us. Winter's Tale is a great gift at an hour of great need" (22).

The main characters in Walton, Morris, and Alexander all triumph in essentially traditional terms. Each novel or series takes a hero who is initially ignorant of his place in the world and leads him through a series of challenges to the point at which he becomes the leader of his society. Alexander's series is the most explicit; Taran begins as an "Assistant Pig-Keeper" and becomes the High King. In addition, by the end of each novel or series, each character has come to an awareness of self that allows him to act in what we might call "good conscience." The heroes grow and change, becoming better people - better for their societies and better in and of themselves. At the end of The High King, Taran refuses the opportunity to go to the Summer Country with Gwydion and the rest saying that he has accepted responsibilities he must fulfill.

The twentieth-century settings of Garner, Bond, and Cooper mitigate against a traditional ending and the crowning of a High King, but in each of these novels, too, there is a growth to awareness. Garner's ending is the most difficult because, while we want Gwyn to triumph, it is Roger who can rise above the personal to help Alison. In Bond's book, the reader has to be satisfied with Peter's being able to avoid a possessive museum curator and return the harp key to its rightful owner, Taliesin. Most of Cooper's young main characters are made to forget what happened - a very irresponsible ending, I think - but Bran chooses to stay on Earth rather than go with his father, King Arthur, realizing that the bonds which bind him here are above even the High Magic. These heroes, too, grow and change and become leaders, albeit perhaps in less obvious ways than the ones who become High Kings.

Please do not let my focus on the structural similarities among these novels be mistaken for a negative criticism of them. Let me clarify. Fantasy authors have long been accused of telling the same old story; and, to some extent, they are. Structuralists concluded some time ago that the structure of the Märchen, or magic tale, was the pattern of the fantasy novel:

Any folklorist knows that the job of the traditional performer is not to come up with an original performance each time, but rather to do the best job he or she can of re-presenting a traditional performance. Thus, the traditional story teller tells the same stories over and over again, and the traditional musician plays the same old songs. Moreover, we, in the audience, do not even want them to play new songs; we want to hear the "good old songs" or "good old stories" done well. Discussing the education of a druid or bard, Gerhard Herm speculates:

Toward the end of Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy, I speculated a bit - and not terribly conclusively, I fear - on why it was the Celtic materials, and especially the Welsh materials from the Mabinogi, which had inspired these, and other, authors in ways that no other culture's myths and legends have. There are some successful fantasies based on Scandinavian or Teutonic materials. There is almost none based on Greek and Roman. Here, I would like to expand that previous discussion of the popularity of the Welsh materials.

One reason, I suggested, was that the Welsh materials had had less time to develop from myth into literature in their own culture than had the Greek materials in theirs. Equivalents of the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, for example, plays in which mythic materials become the vehicles for philosophical speculation and debate, do not exist in Welsh literature as a next logical and chronological step from the original myths and legends. Invasion from the east, beginning just after the birth of Christ and continuing, perhaps, to this day, curtailed that development and changed the orientation of the British Isles from its Celtic and Scandinavian heritage to a made-up heritage by which the Britons became descendants, via Aeneas, of the Trojans. The opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sketches in what S.K. Henniger calls "The Tudor Myth of Troy-Novant."

It was the noble Aeneas and his high kin.
That afterwards subjugated provinces and became Lords
Well-nigh of all the wealth in the western Isles.
When noble Romulus to Rome proceeded quickly,
With great pomp that city he built right away,
And named it with his own name, as it now has;
Tirius to Tuscany and began houses,
Langobard in Lombardy raised up homes,
And far over the French flood, Felix Brutus
On many broad hillsides founded Britain
with joy.
(my translation)

Thus, in about the year 1400, the English were already hard at work creating Trojan ancestors and a classical heritage for themselves.

The Welsh stories, then, might be called rougher or less sophisticated than the Greek. They were certainly thought to be so during the early stages of the Renaissance when an England struggling to be civilized turned its back on its own heritage, leaving behind its Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Celtic roots, embracing what we now call the Classics (setting the stage for the neo-Classicism of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and wontonly mislabeling the immediate post-Roman period of western European history "the Dark Ages." Wallace Ferguson's analysis is cogent here:

Rather than saying that the Welsh stories are rougher or less sophisticated than the Greek, it might be more accurate to see them as purer and closer to their sources than the Greek, preserving - in Yeatsian terms - an older cultural worldview, a cultural worldview which saw the world as an animate creation, not a mechanistic one. Not for the Welsh those models of the solar system we had in school with their chains and cranks making the moon revolve around the earth and the earth around the sun; for the ancient Celts (as for most ancient peoples), the sun, moon, and earth moved as they did because their inherent spirits - goddesses and gods, if you will - controlled them. The Welsh stories are closer to Beowulf than to Sophocles' plays, closer to that great poem in which, as Tolkien said, the monsters must be read, first, as real. There are fewer monsters in the Welsh myths and legends, but there is magic, if you will, and the magic is decidedly real. Gwydion can actually change toad stools into horses - at least for a time.

It is certainly this animate cultural worldview that makes the Welsh materials so suitable to fantastic rather than realistic literature. Kathryn Hume has argued that fantasy is "any departure from consensus reality" (21), and contemporary consensus reality certainly does not include a king and his hounds from the Otherworld, a man large enough to wade the sea between Wales and Ireland, an Otherworld queen changed into a mouse and then back into a woman again, or a maiden made from flowers. Remember, please, that I said consensus reality, not unanimous belief; there will always be some who continue to believe in faeries and the Otherworld. But my point is that the Welsh materials in the Mabinogi and the Celtic materials in general certainly have the elements (and may have originated some of them) which have become so much a part of twentieth-century fantasy literature.

In addition to being culturally remote from the Greek and Roman myths and legends, the Welsh stories are also more intellectually or academically remote. The wholesale adoption (by English and American educators) of classical Mediterranean culture enshrined the Greek myths in our educational system to the virtual exclusion of any Celtic materials at all. The main collections - Edith Hamilton and Thomas Bulfinch - showcase the Greek and Roman stories, include the most prominent Scandinavian materials, and except for Bulfinch's inclusion of the Arthurian stories and a few others, ignore the Celtic almost completely. Thus, generations of students have come through the western educational system learning next to nothing about the Celtic materials so that authors who wrote and academics who analized concentrated on the the Greek. Douglas Bush's Mythology in English Poetry is just one example of literary criticism which makes no mention of Welsh or Celtic influences, although they are clearly there in many of the poets he discusses - Blake and Wordsworth, among them.

This intellectual remoteness, however, does - or, perhaps, did - make the Welsh materials a good source for authors looking for a new source of ancient materials which might give their fiction depth and texture. Of the six authors I treated in some depth, Lloyd Alexander, Nancy Bond, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner all published their novels in the 1960s and 1970s; Kenneth Morris's novels were much earlier, of course, published in 1915 and 1930, but only one of Evangeline Walton's four predated 1970 - and it was the reprinting of that one, retitled The Island of the Mighty from its original title, The Virgin and the Swine - that occasioned the publication of three more. And there have been a host of authors since who have based their fiction on Welsh and Irish Celtic stories - Clare Cooper, Jane Louise Curry, Tom Deitz, Charles De Lint, Kenneth C. Flint, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Morgan Llewelyn, and Francis Thomas being perhaps the best known of them. And I did not even include the even larger number of writers, the most successful of which is Marion Zimmer Bradley in her novel, The Mists of Avalon, recasting the Arthurian materials and reinvigorating those well-known and well-told stories with elements from Welsh and Irish traditions.

A third factor which makes the Welsh materials both remote from the twentieth century and particularly useful to fantasy writers is the cultural material which suggests an ancient matrilineal orientation among the Celts. According to one school of thought, the matrilineal, Earth Mother-worshipping cultures of western Europe were in the process of changing to partilineal, Sun God worshipping cultures when Christianity swept through the region, reinforcing patrilineality on the social level and freezing the change on the mythological level. Those mythologies whose development was halted by the spread of Christianity show an interesting east to west progression, mirroring the east to west direction in which the patrilineal culture had swept over the matrilineal culture some centuries before. The one male god of the Hebrews gives way to the ruling pair of the Greeks in which Zeus is clearly Hera's superior. The Greek pair gives way to the Scandinavian pair, Odin and Frigga, each of whom leads followers, the Aesir and the Vanir, still engaged in a male-female conflict of which the outcome seems in little doubt. The Scandinavian myths give way to the Celtic in which the highest position is held by Don/Danu whose partner, Beli, is a consort and is referred to, appropriately enough, as the King of the Sun.

As Campbell suggests in his third function of a mythology, mythology and culture are inextricably intertwined, and the strong women of the Celtic myths and legends are reflected in the roles and rights of actual women in Celtic society. The power of Rhiannon and Aranhod is obviously reflected in such Celtic queens as Boudicca, but the status of women in the Celtic countries is also reflected in the laws governing such everyday matters as marriage and divorce. The multiple categories of marriage listed in the Irish and Welsh laws, the right of women in some regions to name the first-born child with their family names, and the right of women in divorce proceedings all attest to a status for women in Celtic countries that was not available to women in the Mediterranean area or the Near East.[3]

Strong female figures do have major roles in fantasy literature. To be sure, the more formulaic novels and short stories feature the witch or the stereotypical damsel-in-distress to be menaced by the villain and rescued, usually just in time, by the hero; but fantastic literature is also a literature of powerful women. Certainly Alexander's Eilonwy, Bond's Jennifer Morgan, and Cooper's Jane Drew - especially in Greenwitch - owe some of their strength of character to the Welsh materials their authors studied. Other novels such as Louise Lawrence's The Earth Witch (1981) and Mildred Downey Broxon's Too Long a Sacrifice (1981) owe a similar, if slightly less obvious, debt to Welsh sources. Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982), in which the Arthurian story is retold by the women, and especially by Morgaine (Morgan le Fey), is heavily indebted to Welsh and Irish stories not only for its strong female characters but also for the basic conflicts between the New Ways and the Old Ways (that is, Christian and pre-Christian or patrilineal and matrilineal), those forces which rend the Round Table and cause Camelot to collapse.

The difference in cultural worldview, the intellectual remoteness, and the presence of strong female figures are certainly major elements which have made the Welsh materials so popular with twentieth-century fantasy authors, but there is also an important imaginative level to the Welsh stories that makes them appealing to fantasy writers. The description of what we would call extraordinary events - riding from this world into the other world, striding through the sea from Wales to Ireland, causing the people and animals of an entire kingdom to disappear, or creating a maiden from meadowsweet and broom - in the most ordinary and straightforward language is in itself a most remarkable feat of style and imagination. We can not know how people of the time felt about what we would call the reality or impossibility of the events in The Mabinogion; indeed, those terms - reality and impossibility - might well have made no sense to them at all. But a modern fantasy writer, or reader, for that matter, must marvel at the spare prose which evokes so much more than the sum of the individual words.

It is, then, finally, the imaginative power of the Four Branches in particular and the other materials translated with them as The Mabinogion that has made these medieval Welsh pieces so influential in the twentieth century. Even Kenneth Jackson, after rejecting Celtic mysticism, admits that the Celtic literatures' "most outstanding characteristic is their astonishing power of imagination" (20). American critic Gary Wolfe has argued that, to be considered fantasy, a work must deal with the impossible and that the "criterion of the impossible . . . may indeed be the first principle generally agreed upon for the study of fantasy" (1-2); and I have argued that, if Wolfe is correct, "the second principle must be the criterion of the logically conceived world" (96). It takes an astonishing power of imagination to create a cohesive Secondary World of which the impossible is a logical part, and when the author has done his or her work well, as Ursula Le Guin says, with "all his skill, all his art, and all his heart" (Cameron 130), the result is Kenneth Morris's Book of the Three Dragons, Evangeline Walton's Mabinogi Tetralogy, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, Nancy Bond's A String in the Harp, Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series, Alan Garner's The Owl Service, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - all directly influenced by and deeply indebted to the Four Branches, to The Mabinogion, and to Lady Charlotte Guest.

This Paper was Originally an Address to the Welsh Academy on 9 November 1996

[1] An anthology of such articles might include: John Q. Anderson, "Lowell's 'The Washers of the Shroud' and the Celtic Legend of the Washer of the Ford," American Literature 35 (1963): 361-63; Brigit Bramsbäck, "W.B. Yeats and Folklore Material," Béaloideas 39-41 (1971-73): 56-68; Tom Peete Cross, "Alfred Tennyson as a Celticist," Modern Philology 18 (1921): 485-92; Peter F. Fischer, "Blake and the Druids," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 589-612; Arthur Johnston, "Gray's 'The Triumph of Owen'," Review of English Studies 11 (1960): 275-85; John V. Kelleher, "Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce's 'The Dead'," The Review of Politics 27 (1965): 414-33; Sheila O'Sullivan, "W.B. Yeats' Use of Irish Oral and Literary Tradition," Béaloideas 39-41 (1971-73): 266-79; Howard E. Rogers, "Irish Myth and the Plot of Ulysses," English Literary History 15 (1948): 306-27; Bruce A. Rosenberg, "Irish Folklore and The Song of Wandering Aengus," Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 527-35; Edward D. Snyder, "Thomas Gray's Interest in Celtic," Modern Philology 11 (1914): 559-79.

[2] The progression of seventeenth-century "Heroic" literature begins with Marlowe's, Spencer's, and Shakespeare's struggles to present heroic action in a complex society. The Romance framework collapses under the weight of allegory in Spencer's The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Faust and Shakespeare's Hamlet over intellectualize their respective situations until they are almost incapable of significant action, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Shakespeare's Macbeth cannot survive as lone heroes against an organized socio-political society. Jonson and the other playwrights who follow Shakespeare turn, generally speaking, to more realistic - and heroless - plots. Chapman retreats to the relative safety of the classics, but (adding a substantial number of line to Homer's original text) turns Odysseus into a Renaissance stoic. Davenant tries to present a Romance without any fantastic elements in Gondibert, and while Cowley and others praised his effort, it has not withstood the test of time. Cowley's Davideis was one of several religious poems which pointed the way for Milton. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes present the only larger-than-life heroic figures still acceptable in mid-seventeenth-century culture, heroes from the Bible. After Milton, various authors (and most prominently Alexander Pope) would create the mock heroic poem, using the conventions of the heroic poem to mock heroic action. For a longer discussion, see: C.W. Sullivan III, "Cultural Worldview: Marginalizing the Fantastic in the Seventeenth Century," Para*doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 1.3 (1995): 287-300.

[3] For additional information on women in Celtic culture, see: Peter Beresford Ellis, Celtic Inheritance, London: Muller, 1985 (especially pages 20-21); Jan Filip, Celtic Civilization and Its Heritage, Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1960 (especially page 94); all of the articles in Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd Owen, eds., The Welsh Law of Women, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980; Jean Markale, The Women of the Celts, London: Cremonesi, 1975 (especially pages 16-17); Anne Ross, The Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts, London: Batsford, 1970 (especially page 113); Roberta Valente, "Gwydion and Aranrhod: crossing the borders of gender in Math, " Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 35 (1988): 1-9; C.W. Sullivan III, "Inheritance and Lordship in Math, " Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1990): 45-63. The latter two articles are reprinted in C.W. Sullivan III, ed., The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, New York: Garland, 1996.

Arnold, Matthew. 1866. "On the Study of Celtic Literature." On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer. New York: Macmillan, 1913. 1-137.

Cameron, Eleanor. "High Fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea." Hornbook 47 (1971): 129-138.

Campbell, Joseph. 1964. Occidental Mythology. Volume III of The Masks of God. New York: Viking, 1970.

Dégh, Linda. "Folk Narrative." Folklore and Folklife. Ed. Richard Dorson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. 53-83.

Delany, Samuel R. "1985 Pilgrim Award Acceptance Speech." SFRA Newsletter 133 (August 1985): 7-15.

De Mott, Benjamin. "A Vision of the Just City." The New York Times Book Review, 4 September 1983, 1 & 21-22.

Ferguson, Wallace K. "An Interpretation of the Renaissance." Renaissance Essays. Ed. Paul O. Kristeller and Phillip P. Wiener. New York: Harper, 1966. 61-73.

Henninger, S.K., Jr. "The Tudor Myth of Troy-Novant." South Atlantic Quarterly 61 (1963): 378-387.

Hume Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984.

LeGuin, Ursula. "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie." The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Berkley, 1979. 73-86.

Sullivan, C.W. III. "A Wizard Behind Every Bush." Planet: The Welsh Internationalist 64 (1987): 47-51.

__________. Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.

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