Post by megli on Jul 22, 2008 12:23:05 GMT -1
New blog article on C. Matthews' Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain. Might be of interest to some.
M
Caitlín Matthews is a spiritual author, living in Oxford, who has published widely on the Celtic spiritual tradition. She writes gracefully and beautifully, and clearly has some understanding of the languages involved. I say 'some' not to decry her, but because I find her degree of Celtic linguistic expertise hard to assess. Sometimes she says straightforwardly that translations from Middle Welsh and Old and Middle Irish are her own - and very nice they are, often - but I've also spotted some pretty big mistakes. I suspect, given that I work in the field, that Caitlín uses previous translations to help her construe the grammar of the original text, i.e. as a crib, and then writes her own poetic English versions. This is what nearly everyone does to start with, which is why it's a Good Thing for a scholar to edit a text that has languished in manuscript, comparing versions to get the best reading, and making their own translation. It shows you have sufficient expertise with the languages to work without a safety net. In the only place I have seen translations in which Caitlín has had a hand for which a decent scholarly crib did NOT (at the time) exist - that is, for the various poems from the Book of Taliesin in her and her husband's Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman - the results were not encouranging.
But why should they be? These are, after all, very, very difficult languages and texts. Old Irish, in particular, is one of the hardest European languages, and much older Welsh poetry is of a similar level of difficulty. But it is fairly clear, I think, that Caitlín hasn't studied the languages with an expert and experienced teacher. She comes across as a sensitive and highly intelligent autodidact. Unfortunately, the nature of the material means that she is at a huge disadvantage as a result. I mean no disrespect; but it's just not the kind of thing one can teach oneself.
This has so far been a discussion of core skills. The next problem is one of approach, and here I will focus on Mabon more specifically. Caitlín's main problem is that the 'Celtic' is treated as a homogenous mass, both in space and time. Thus a 19th century Irish folktale will be laid beside an 11th century Welsh text and a quotation from Julius Caesar, and the existence of an ancient, 'Celtic' spiritual insight deduced therefrom. This approach is liable to engender massive distortions. Caitlín's Mabinogion is located in a misty Celtic neverwhen; one would never know from her book that the Four Branches took their current form around 1100, or, for example, that they show signs of legal expertise on the part of the redactor. She never points out that Culhwch shows evidence of a south Walian provenance. In other words, she shows no real, engaged interest in the culture and history of medieval Wales from which the stories actually emerge; everything is focused on unattested, irrecoverable Ancient Celtic Mysteries. She takes a deeply old-fashioned approach to the stories, wherby she looks through the actual, medieval texts for glimpses of the 'many-coloured land' of supposedly-primordial Celtic tradition beyond. Her mainstay for scholarship on the Four Branches is W. J. Gruffydd, a Welsh scholar whose ingenious reconstructions of the prehistory of the texts are fascinating, but alarmingly airborne. His theories went very out of fashion forty years ago, because they are essentially untestable. Given that we don't actually have any of these ancient myths of the goddesses Epona, Rigantona and Matrona, it's impossible to know quite how far the Four Branches reflect them. Gruffydd is the scholarly source to which Matthews owes most in Mabon. For a survey of work on the Four Branches, see Will Parker's superb essay here:
www.mabinogi.net/bibliog_essay.htm
Now I'm of the opinion that pagans and druids are a strong-minded, intelligent group of people, and can cope with actual history and up-to-date scholarship. Once the deadening jargon of academia is stripped away a bit, scholarship on the Four Branches is not hard to understand, nor is it incompatible with a spiritual, creative approach. Many people that I've spoken to are excited and intrigued by actual texts and their history, and want to understand them and get to grips with them - rushing to buy Sioned Davies' fine new translation, for example, or Will Parker's interesting and classy The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Celtic Myth and Medieval Reality. The thing that's sometimes hard to swallow is the idea that we can't reach the beliefs of the ancient druids through these medieval texts. It's simply not in the nature of the material. No amount of scholarly readings, Irish parallels, or philological expertise can ever (re)create them. Sad, but true.
To conclude, I'll quote the folklorist Juliette Wood's quietly devastating review of Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain, Folklore 99 (1988), p. 262.
* * *
The rather charming illustration to the preface to this book is entitled 'Into the Other World'. Another world it certainly is, though one created in the author's imagination, and definitely not to be found in the collection of stroies known since their translation in the nineteenth century as the Mabinogion.
The author's argument, that the Mabinogion contains the remnants of a British Mystery Tradition centering around the figure of Mabon, who includes all the young heroes mentioned in the tales, as son of a divine mother, a figure who includes all the female characters in the tales, is not really sustainable. It is remiscent of Jessie Weston's view of the Grail romances as a literary expression of the cult of the dying god, and suffers from much the same fallacy. There really is no concrete evidence for such a cult, and lacking this, it is difficult to see how complex literature written at a comparatively late period could contain remnants of one. While one would not deny the existence of many of the themes singled out by the author, such as the search for a magic otherworld object, or the quest on which the questor himself undergoes change, it is difficult to see how these are linked to any religious ritual outside, and prior to, the texts themselves. Without doubt, similar themes appear in many stories. This is one of the most striking and intriguing features of comparative literature, but it does not follow that an original story (or in this instance, a religious myth) can be reconstructed by putting all the elements together.
The author does show awareness of the critical background to the Mabinogion, at least that which has appeared in English, and provides the reader with footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Unfortunately, however, she relies on translations rather than the Welsh texts. This is particularly difficult when she deals with the poetry related to the Mabinogion, such as 'Preiddeu Annwn' for which she uses R. S. Loomis' outdated and far from correct translation, and the 'Hanes Taliesin' poetry which was translated by Lady Charlotte Guest with numerous errors. Miss Matthews' argument is at its weakest when she departs from her secondary sources and ventures into linguistic speculation herself. For example, 'Culhwch' as a compound of cú in Irish and Llwch as a Welsh pronunciation of the name Lugh (p. 106), or 'Mabonograin' as 'son of the sun' from mabon, 'divine son' in Welsh, and grian, 'sun' in Irish (p. 156), are too fanciful; they are typical of numerous errors in the book stemming from the author's reliance on translations and secondary sources.
One does not wish to be too dismissive of the book, however. The author is not claiming to be writing serious criticism, but rather to enable the general reader to gain a better understanding of the stories. Unfortunately, presenting the Mabinogion as a 'treasure trove' of symbols for rather dubious British Mysteries can hardly be said to contribute much to an understanding of the tales for any reader.
Nevertheless, the book is an enjoyable example of the kind of amiable dottiness that characterises the Celtic Fringe.
M
Caitlín Matthews is a spiritual author, living in Oxford, who has published widely on the Celtic spiritual tradition. She writes gracefully and beautifully, and clearly has some understanding of the languages involved. I say 'some' not to decry her, but because I find her degree of Celtic linguistic expertise hard to assess. Sometimes she says straightforwardly that translations from Middle Welsh and Old and Middle Irish are her own - and very nice they are, often - but I've also spotted some pretty big mistakes. I suspect, given that I work in the field, that Caitlín uses previous translations to help her construe the grammar of the original text, i.e. as a crib, and then writes her own poetic English versions. This is what nearly everyone does to start with, which is why it's a Good Thing for a scholar to edit a text that has languished in manuscript, comparing versions to get the best reading, and making their own translation. It shows you have sufficient expertise with the languages to work without a safety net. In the only place I have seen translations in which Caitlín has had a hand for which a decent scholarly crib did NOT (at the time) exist - that is, for the various poems from the Book of Taliesin in her and her husband's Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman - the results were not encouranging.
But why should they be? These are, after all, very, very difficult languages and texts. Old Irish, in particular, is one of the hardest European languages, and much older Welsh poetry is of a similar level of difficulty. But it is fairly clear, I think, that Caitlín hasn't studied the languages with an expert and experienced teacher. She comes across as a sensitive and highly intelligent autodidact. Unfortunately, the nature of the material means that she is at a huge disadvantage as a result. I mean no disrespect; but it's just not the kind of thing one can teach oneself.
This has so far been a discussion of core skills. The next problem is one of approach, and here I will focus on Mabon more specifically. Caitlín's main problem is that the 'Celtic' is treated as a homogenous mass, both in space and time. Thus a 19th century Irish folktale will be laid beside an 11th century Welsh text and a quotation from Julius Caesar, and the existence of an ancient, 'Celtic' spiritual insight deduced therefrom. This approach is liable to engender massive distortions. Caitlín's Mabinogion is located in a misty Celtic neverwhen; one would never know from her book that the Four Branches took their current form around 1100, or, for example, that they show signs of legal expertise on the part of the redactor. She never points out that Culhwch shows evidence of a south Walian provenance. In other words, she shows no real, engaged interest in the culture and history of medieval Wales from which the stories actually emerge; everything is focused on unattested, irrecoverable Ancient Celtic Mysteries. She takes a deeply old-fashioned approach to the stories, wherby she looks through the actual, medieval texts for glimpses of the 'many-coloured land' of supposedly-primordial Celtic tradition beyond. Her mainstay for scholarship on the Four Branches is W. J. Gruffydd, a Welsh scholar whose ingenious reconstructions of the prehistory of the texts are fascinating, but alarmingly airborne. His theories went very out of fashion forty years ago, because they are essentially untestable. Given that we don't actually have any of these ancient myths of the goddesses Epona, Rigantona and Matrona, it's impossible to know quite how far the Four Branches reflect them. Gruffydd is the scholarly source to which Matthews owes most in Mabon. For a survey of work on the Four Branches, see Will Parker's superb essay here:
www.mabinogi.net/bibliog_essay.htm
Now I'm of the opinion that pagans and druids are a strong-minded, intelligent group of people, and can cope with actual history and up-to-date scholarship. Once the deadening jargon of academia is stripped away a bit, scholarship on the Four Branches is not hard to understand, nor is it incompatible with a spiritual, creative approach. Many people that I've spoken to are excited and intrigued by actual texts and their history, and want to understand them and get to grips with them - rushing to buy Sioned Davies' fine new translation, for example, or Will Parker's interesting and classy The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Celtic Myth and Medieval Reality. The thing that's sometimes hard to swallow is the idea that we can't reach the beliefs of the ancient druids through these medieval texts. It's simply not in the nature of the material. No amount of scholarly readings, Irish parallels, or philological expertise can ever (re)create them. Sad, but true.
To conclude, I'll quote the folklorist Juliette Wood's quietly devastating review of Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain, Folklore 99 (1988), p. 262.
* * *
The rather charming illustration to the preface to this book is entitled 'Into the Other World'. Another world it certainly is, though one created in the author's imagination, and definitely not to be found in the collection of stroies known since their translation in the nineteenth century as the Mabinogion.
The author's argument, that the Mabinogion contains the remnants of a British Mystery Tradition centering around the figure of Mabon, who includes all the young heroes mentioned in the tales, as son of a divine mother, a figure who includes all the female characters in the tales, is not really sustainable. It is remiscent of Jessie Weston's view of the Grail romances as a literary expression of the cult of the dying god, and suffers from much the same fallacy. There really is no concrete evidence for such a cult, and lacking this, it is difficult to see how complex literature written at a comparatively late period could contain remnants of one. While one would not deny the existence of many of the themes singled out by the author, such as the search for a magic otherworld object, or the quest on which the questor himself undergoes change, it is difficult to see how these are linked to any religious ritual outside, and prior to, the texts themselves. Without doubt, similar themes appear in many stories. This is one of the most striking and intriguing features of comparative literature, but it does not follow that an original story (or in this instance, a religious myth) can be reconstructed by putting all the elements together.
The author does show awareness of the critical background to the Mabinogion, at least that which has appeared in English, and provides the reader with footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Unfortunately, however, she relies on translations rather than the Welsh texts. This is particularly difficult when she deals with the poetry related to the Mabinogion, such as 'Preiddeu Annwn' for which she uses R. S. Loomis' outdated and far from correct translation, and the 'Hanes Taliesin' poetry which was translated by Lady Charlotte Guest with numerous errors. Miss Matthews' argument is at its weakest when she departs from her secondary sources and ventures into linguistic speculation herself. For example, 'Culhwch' as a compound of cú in Irish and Llwch as a Welsh pronunciation of the name Lugh (p. 106), or 'Mabonograin' as 'son of the sun' from mabon, 'divine son' in Welsh, and grian, 'sun' in Irish (p. 156), are too fanciful; they are typical of numerous errors in the book stemming from the author's reliance on translations and secondary sources.
One does not wish to be too dismissive of the book, however. The author is not claiming to be writing serious criticism, but rather to enable the general reader to gain a better understanding of the stories. Unfortunately, presenting the Mabinogion as a 'treasure trove' of symbols for rather dubious British Mysteries can hardly be said to contribute much to an understanding of the tales for any reader.
Nevertheless, the book is an enjoyable example of the kind of amiable dottiness that characterises the Celtic Fringe.
) long before the actual tales themselves.
