The Mabinogion

These are the great medieval tales of Wales: the four branches of the Mabinogi, with Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, who changes places for a year with a king of the Otherworld, the giant Bendigeidfran wading across the sea to Ireland, and Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers who betrays her husband; and the Arthurian stories, among them Culhwch and Olwen, with its impossible tasks, and the romances of Owain, Peredur and Geraint.

The tales survive in Welsh manuscripts of the fourteenth century, though they are much older. Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–1895), an Englishwoman who learned Welsh and later became Lady Charlotte Schreiber on her second marriage, published the first English translation between 1838 and 1849 and gave the collection its name. Compare Tennyson's Arthurian Idylls of the King.