October 25, 2024—The Mabinogion, by Anonymous

 The next meeting of Great Books KC will be October 25, 2024.    

We will discuss The Mabinogion, by Anonymous

Meeting Date & Time:
Date: October 25, 2024 
Time: 7:00 pm

Zoom/Meeting:
— No in-person option available for this meeting (room not available).
— Zoom attendance, link sent to mailing list.
— Request mailing list addition, send to GreatBooksKC@gmail.com

About the Book:
The Mabinogion are the earliest Welsh prose stories, and belong to the Matter of Britain. The stories were compiled in Middle Welsh in the 12th–13th centuries from earlier oral traditions. There are two main source manuscripts, created c. 1350–1410, as well as a few earlier fragments. The title covers a collection of eleven prose stories of widely different types, offering drama, philosophy, romance, tragedy, fantasy and humour, and created by various narrators over time. There is a classic hero quest, "Culhwch and Olwen"; a historic legend in "Lludd and Llefelys", complete with glimpses of a far off age; and other tales portray a very different King Arthur from the later popular versions. The highly sophisticated complexity of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi defies categorisation. The stories are so diverse that it has been argued that they are not even a true collection.