Werner's Reviews > The Mabinogion

This isn't really a review, just a short note as why I quit reading this book without finishing it. It was selected as a group read in a classics group I belong to here on Goodreads, and I was actually the person who nominated it. At that time, I was under the mistaken impression that it was an original source for the content of pre-Christian Celtic mythology, which I'm interested in reading up on as background for a read, someday, of Lloyd Alexander's The Prydain Chronicles. I quickly learned that that's not the case; the stories it collects, though they use older mythology and folklore as a grab-bag for plot elements, is essentially a medieval version of imaginative literary fantasy fiction in pseudo-historical garb (it's more like Malory's Morte d'Arthur than, say, The Prose Edda).

Even after discovering this, I persisted in the read for some 44 pages. But besides not being what I expected, it's not even, in my estimation, very good reading. The stories are far-fetched to the point of being surreal (and generally speaking, I dislike surrealism!), with deus ex machina magic operating as a literary loose cannon with no rhyme or reason. It's impossible to identify with or care very much about the characters, because they're undeveloped stick figures with usually unpronounceable names who have no motivations for their often bizarre and incomprehensible actions (which are sometimes abhorrent, like child murder and animal mutilations). We have plots, in a sense, in that sequences of weird events happen, and come to some sort of resolution; but (at least as far as I read), there are no dynamic character arcs and no story arcs that provide any events of meaningful significance that the reader might have any cause to care about. The heaping up of pointless far-out elements just bored me rather than excited me, and I soon realized that I wasn't looking forward to my reading sessions AT ALL; so it was definitely time to bail!