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language: English
country: USA
year: 1972
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 17.5.23-24.5.23
Evangeline Walton’s The Song of Rhiannon is a reworking of the Third Branch of the Mabinogi (Manawyddan fab Llŷr) in the form of a fantasy novel. this is an interesting choice to begin with because the Third Branch is not, I would say, the most obviously novelistic branch: the main characters spend much of it doing things like planting wheat fields, learning to be cobblers, and other “everyday” things, because Dyfed is under an enchantment that has caused all of its inhabitants to disappear and so they have to try to make their lives in either an empty world or somewhere else.
this creates, though, an interesting tension that Walton picks up on: Manawyddan, Rhiannon, Pryderi, and “Kigva” can’t live in “Dyved”, but they also can’t bring themselves to live anywhere else. I put “Kigva” and “Dyved” in quotation marks because despite allowing for “Manawyddan”, “Pryderi”, “Llyr”, “Mâth”, and “Fflam”, Walton annoyingly anglicizes things that start with C- before E/I/Y (as K) and also F (as V). (I say “anglicizes” because she’s clearly fine with the modern Welsh forms of MW Manawydan, Caswallawn, and in MW they were spelled Kicua and Dyuet, anyway.)
anyway. the book is pretty good overall. the writing is a good balance between archaically stylized and contemporary, with some very aesthetically pleasing passages. the handling of magic feels, for the most part, suitably magical. the characterization of Manawyddan, especially, is excellent — near-sole survivor of the devastating war with Ireland, conscious of the fact that he’s not as young as he used to be, ready to give up his power and live a “normal” life, but then in turn near-sole survivor of the emptying of Dyved and ultimately with only his daughter-in-law after Rhiannon and Pryderi are taken by magic.
it suffers, though, from its insistence on a Graves and Gimbutas-esque kind of ancient matriarchy, or ancient ~goddess religion~. I’m not, like, mad about it, exactly, but it get tiring rolling your eyes every time religion comes up, which is quite often. as her “For Pedants and Some Others” afterword makes explicit, the book is written from firmly within the conceptual frame of “Celtic mythology”, with all the dubious and often discredited presuppositions this brings with it. people can do what they want with adaptations, but this aspect of it didn’t work for me.
(also in spite of this it all ends up feeling weirdly Christian anyway, so, like, it didn’t even work.)
that said, I now really want to read her reworking of the Fourth Branch, which — absolutely unhingedly — was written first and published in 1936, and republished first, in 1970, followed by the rest of the tetralogy, which were written in the ’70s. I need to know how she handles the Gwydion and Gilfaethwy thing.
moods: mysterious, reflective