The Mabinogion — the collection of medieval Welsh tales preserved primarily in the White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1400) — is the strangest body of folk literature in the European tradition. Strange in the technical sense: it does not look like anything else. The stories are episodic without being random, mythic without being explicit about it, and saturated with what feels like dream-logic from a tradition we no longer have direct access to. They were old when they were written down.

They are also, frankly, mostly inappropriate for children as written. Severed heads talk for years. Women are conjured from flowers and then turned into owls as punishment for sleeping with men they preferred to their husbands. People are transformed into deer, then into pigs, then back, as a sentence for various crimes. The Mabinogion is not bedtime material.

But — and this is the interesting part — there is a small inner core of the collection that is among the most beautiful folk material for children we know, once carefully selected and gently retold.

The three tales to start with

1. The Tale of Pwyll and Rhiannon (from the First Branch)

A young prince meets a mysterious woman on a horse he cannot catch up with, no matter how fast his horse runs. He calls out to her. She stops immediately. “I was waiting for you to ask.” They are married. She is, it turns out, of the Otherworld — a horse-goddess in mortal form, though the tale never quite says so.

This is the most accessible Mabinogion tale for children. It is short (about 15 minutes read aloud, in the right edition), it has a clear and gentle love story, the supernatural element is present but not frightening, and the central image — the woman whose horse cannot be caught until you politely ask her to stop — is one of the most quietly beautiful images in medieval European literature.

2. The Tale of Branwen (from the Second Branch)

Longer and more complex, with a sad ending. We recommend it for ages 9+, in a careful retelling. The central image of Bendigeidfran’s giant body becoming a bridge across the Irish Sea (“a man who is a leader, let him be a bridge”) is a moment of folk-philosophical density that children remember for life.

3. The Hunt for the Twrch Trwyth (from “Culhwch and Olwen”)

A magnificent boar-hunt across Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall, with the hero Culhwch attempting to win the hand of Olwen by completing forty impossible tasks. The list of impossible tasks alone is one of the great catalogs of medieval European literature. For older children, the tale is unmatched as adventure.

Which edition

The standard scholarly translation (Jeffrey Gantz, Penguin Classics, 1976) is faithful but reads heavily. For families: Lady Charlotte Guest’s 1849 translation (now in the public domain) reads aloud beautifully, and the Kevin Crossley-Holland Tales from the Mabinogion (illustrated by Margaret Jones, 1985) is the children’s edition we recommend without reservation.

Avoid the “Magic of the Mabinogion” series and most of the late-1990s American retellings — they smooth out the strangeness, which is the entire reason to read the tales.

A note on Welsh

Reading these tales is also — quietly — an act of cultural preservation. The Welsh language has approximately 800,000 speakers; the Mabinogion is one of the major reasons Welsh has retained any literary prestige in the broader anglophone imagination. If you have any Welsh in the family, even distantly, these are your tales. If you don’t, they are still some of the strangest and most rewarding folk literature in Europe.

— Source: Guest, Lady C., The Mabinogion, 3 vols., London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1849. Public domain.