Transcribed from the 1902 Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
THE MABINOGION
TRANSLATED FROM THE RED BOOK OF HERGEST BY LADY CHARLOTTE GUEST
VOL. II. LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
11 PATERNOSTER
BUILDINGS. MXCII
INTRODUCTION.
In this second volume, as in the first, I have given Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation exactly as she wrote it. It would have been easy to make it a more faithful reproduction of the Welsh by occasionally changing a word, or by making a phrase more simple in diction. But the reader would not have forgiven me for placing before him a translation that was not Lady Charlotte Guest’s. I have again ventured, however, after a careful comparison of the translation with the original, to put in the form of footnotes a more accurate or more literal rendering of passages which Lady Charlotte Guest did not read aright, passages which she has omitted, and passages the real meaning of which she seems to me to have failed to grasp.
The first two tales in this volume make up, with “The Dream of Rhonabwy,” the second volume of the original edition. “The Dream of Rhonabwy” was placed in my first volume, with “The Lady of
the Fountain” and “Peredur”—the two tales that form the first volume of the original edition. The oldest of the tales—the Mabinogion proper—will all be included in the third volume.
OWEN EDWARDS.