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    The Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Pryderi
    The Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Pryderi
    The Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Pryderi
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    The Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Pryderi

    By Fiona Collins

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    About this ebook

    The Four Branches of the Mabinogion are a rich treasure trove of tales. These magical, quintessentially Welsh stories are confusing, but it would be hard to match their splendid strangeness. The Four Branches tell of the kings and queens of Wales in the time of’ ‘Once upon a time’. Only one character appears in all Four Branches. He is Pryderi, and the story of his life journey is told in this book. Pryderi is brave and bold: sometimes foolhardy, always fiercely loyal. The stories of two beautiful, powerful women entwine with his: Rhiannon of the Birds, his mother, and Cigfa, his wife. Both accompany him on his life path. But, at the last, Pryderi must go on alone. Here, for the first time, his tale is told from beginning to end.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateApr 8, 2013
    ISBN9780752493695
    The Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Pryderi
    Author

    Fiona Collins

    Fiona Collins is a storyteller telling traditional tales from around the world to adults and children. She have been a storyteller since 1989 and is known for her attention to detail, love of language, and ability to make a connection with her audience. Her most recent book for The History Press was Folk Tales for Bold Girls. She lives in North Wales.

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      Book preview

      The Ancient Legends Retold - Fiona Collins

      I Marian.

      Bydded i’r adar gyd-ganu

      yn gerddgar i ti

      Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Ancient Legends Retold: An Introduction to the Series

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      The Names in the Story

      The Legend of Pryderi

      Some recommended versions of The Four Branches of the Mabinogion

      Copyright

      Ancient Legends Retold:

      An Introduction

      to the Series

      This book represents a new and exciting collaboration between publishers and storytellers. It is part of a series in which each book contains an ancient legend, reworked for the page by a storyteller who has lived with and told the story for a long time.

      Storytelling is the art of sharing spoken versions of traditional tales. Today’s storytellers are the carriers of a rich oral culture, which is flourishing across Britain in storytelling clubs, theatres, cafés, bars and meeting places, both indoors and out. These storytellers, members of the storytelling revival, draw on books of traditional tales for much of their repertoire.

      The partnership between The History Press and professional storytellers is introducing a new and important dimension to the storytelling revival. Some of the best contemporary storytellers are creating definitive versions of the tales they love for this series. In this way, stories first found on the page, but shaped ‘on the wind’ of a storyteller’s breath, are once more appearing in written form, imbued with new life and energy.

      My thanks go first to Nicola Guy, a commissioning editor at The History Press, who has championed the series, and secondly to my friends and fellow storytellers, who have dared to be part of something new.

      Fiona Collins, Series Originator, 2013

      Acknowledgements

      My thanks first to my partner Ed Fisher: for his beautiful illustrations to the story, for living through the whole process of writing and telling Pryderi’s story with me, and for his love and support.

      Next I would like to thank these friends and fellow storytellers, who have advised and supported me during my journey: Ronnie Aaronson, Katy Cawkwell, Wendy Dacre, Amy Douglas, Fiona Eadie and June Peters.

      My thanks to Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival, the Spirit Horse Foundation and Stroud Storytelling Circle for opportunities to tell Pryderi’s story, and to the musician Jem Hammond who worked on it with me in performance.

      I first published a written version of the story of Rhiannon’s meeting with Pwyll as a short story, ‘Rhiannon: Lady of the Horse People’, which appeared in the anthology A Stone for Remembrance, published by Y Lolfa. Some material from that version is reworked here, with the publisher’s permission.

      I am grateful to my friends and fellow Welsh learners, the tutor Maria Haines and the poet Peter Jones for help with the section on pronunciation, to the team at Network News for generously offering me the chance to begin writing Pryderi, and most of all to my editor at The History Press, Nicola Guy, whose enthusiasm and commitment brought this series of Ancient Legends Retold into being.

      Finally, my thanks to my friend Robin Aaronson, who chose to dedicate this book to the memory of his mother Marian, in support of the Forest of Dreams, a noble cause to which he, I and our friends have long been committed. The Forest of Dreams is a charity set up to care for a beautiful valley in mid-Wales and to preserve it as a place of sanctuary for humans and the wild.

      www.forestofdreams.org.uk

      Introduction

      Storytelling is a vital part of the way we humans make sense of the world and, as such, it has existed since the earliest times. The stories known as The Four Branches of the Mabinogion, from which ‘The Legend of Pryderi’ is drawn, come from an ancient and authentic source. The oldest surviving versions of these tales are found in two fourteenth-century Welsh language manuscripts: the White Book of Rhydderch, written about 1350, and the Red Book of Hergest, dated between 1382 and 1410. The first is in the care of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, the second in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and both can be consulted online.

      The Four Branches first came to the attention of a modern audience when Lady Charlotte Guest published them, together with eight other tales from the manuscripts, in a scholarly, bilingual work, which she brought out in seven volumes between 1838 and 1849. New versions continue to be published today, in Welsh, English and other languages.

      It is clear, from their structure and form, that the medieval manuscripts are written forms of oral tales. As such, the stories may be much older than the versions in the Red and White Books.

      Storytellers living in Wales, and of Welsh descent everywhere, have reason to be proud of these stories, though nothing can be known of their earliest tellers. Some scholars have suggested that they were composed for, or even by, the Welsh princess Gwenllian at her court in Deheubarth in south-west Wales, during the early twelfth century. They are unique in the oral corpus of the islands of Britain, and still intrigue us today.

      Only one character appears in all Four Branches. He is Pryderi, the hero of this book. My interest in Pryderi comes from long exploration of the material of the Four Branches and from my work as a storyteller, retelling the tales in my own words, first in English, and more recently in Welsh, to people of all ages. I have always searched for ways to make this material speak clearly to modern listeners. I have also explored the connections of the Four Branches with the landscape of Wales. I have done this by walking the land, returning again and again to places associated with the stories, and also by taking part, during the late 1990s, in some of the courses on ‘Storytelling and the Mythological Landscape’, which are still run annually by my fellow storytellers Hugh Lupton and Eric Maddern at Ty Newydd Writers’ Centre in north-west Wales.

      In 2008, I had the good fortune to be invited to write for Network News, a monthly publication which the editors call a ‘guide to inspiring events in North Wales’. They had been thinking, for some time, of including a story in the magazine, to run as a serial over twelve months. They kindly agreed to let me choose my own subject matter, and so, thanks to them, I was able to explore Pryderi’s story in depth over an extended period, tracing it through all Four Branches. This was the genesis of my performance work with the story and, eventually, this book.

      Following Pryderi from Branch to Branch has enabled me to make many important connections which are not obvious in the Branches themselves, for though Pryderi is a principal character in both the First and the Third Branches, the parts he plays in the other two are much smaller. I found that focusing on his role shed new light on events and characters throughout the stories. For example, the first time that the Birds of Rhiannon are mentioned is in the Second Branch, when they are heard singing at Harlech by the seven warriors who are the sole survivors of a war in Ireland: when I realised that one of the seven was Pryderi, Rhiannon’s son, the song of her

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