Forget the shiny armor and Camelot. In the earliest Welsh prose tales, King Arthur is a gritty warlord ruling from a court called Celliwig in Cornwall, surrounded by a warband with terrifying magical abilities. This episode explores the Mabinogion, compiled in Middle Welsh in the 12th and 13th centuries and preserved in just two manuscripts: the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest.

We unpack how the title itself is a medieval scribe's typo that Lady Charlotte Guest locked into history, why scholars argue only the Four Branches truly deserve the name Mabinogi, and how the character Pryderi threads them together. We also cover the satire of The Dream of Rhonabwy, the debate over whether the Welsh romances or Chretien de Troyes came first, the shift in scholarly respect since the 1970s, and the text's fingerprints on Tolkien, L ...