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A review by elenajohansen
The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn / The Children of Llyr / The Song of Rhiannon / The Island of the Mighty by Evangeline Walton
3.0
As far as the stories go, I was totally on board for the first three books of the tetralogy. They were engaging and descriptive, with clear character motivations and (despite the formal language) decent pacing.
Then I got to the fourth book and the wheels fell off the wagon. It's the longest of the four by far, weighed down with lengthy philosophical reveries about the nature of marriage, free will, fatherhood, and family. I get that a major theme of all the stories is change: old vs. new, matrilineal descent vs. patrilineal descent as in the Old and New Tribes. But the tone of the final book shifted greatly towards the cerebral, and it also shifted anti-women in a big way. Women were glorified in the first three books, but in the final story they were unabashedly the villians. Arianrhod was a deceitful, cunning woman so in love with her self-image she would do anything to keep it, even denying her own children; and Blodeuwedd was a cheating wife who betrayed her husband to his death.
Okay, fine, women can be villains--but in both cases, it was the male main characters who were the root of their actions. Arianrhod never wanted to be a mother, but her brother Gwydion needed her to bear his heir, so he caused her to give birth via magic (though he points out repeatedly there would have been no children in her body to have if she had been virgin as she claimed) and keeps one of the children to raise himself. Blodeuwedd was actually created via Mâth's and Gwydion's magic to be a wife to that child, Llew, in his manhood--and when she fell in love with another man, she who was created solely as a companion to Llew, she fell into scheming to solve her difficulties.
Now, I'm not trying to absolve these two "villians" of all of their culpability, but Gwydion is the main character of the book, his need for an heir and the obtaining and raising of such being the main storyline--and the book constantly excuses his actions. If this were a moral tale and he suffered some sort of downfall in the end, that would be one thing--but the ending is unsatisfactory in that regard, and in others, because the book just kind of... stops. Llew is reborn from his eagle form (which was his "death") and then... nothing happens. So clearly, I'm missing something, or the book is.
And speaking of the physical book itself, I'm disappointed in its quality as well. For something that cost me $35, I expect it not to be riddled with typos and inconsistencies. There were punctuation and capitalization mistakes once every fifteen to twenty pages, or so, and the spelling errors seemed to be centered on the names. Welsh is difficult to spell for the uninitiated--but it was as if the entire book had been typeset by scanning then left unproofed, because the errors were almost always shape-based. Pryderi became Prydern, mashing the R and I together. Geyr became Gew, combining the Y and R. And on top of that, some of the names in the fourth book were spelled differently from in the first three, even when they were clearly referring to the same characters. I would expect that if I were reading different sources telling the same tales (Gawaine vs. Gawain in Arthurian mythos, etc.) but not in a single compilation volume from the same author.
I'm glad I finally read it after it sat on my shelf so long, but I can't help but be disappointed.
Then I got to the fourth book and the wheels fell off the wagon. It's the longest of the four by far, weighed down with lengthy philosophical reveries about the nature of marriage, free will, fatherhood, and family. I get that a major theme of all the stories is change: old vs. new, matrilineal descent vs. patrilineal descent as in the Old and New Tribes. But the tone of the final book shifted greatly towards the cerebral, and it also shifted anti-women in a big way. Women were glorified in the first three books, but in the final story they were unabashedly the villians. Arianrhod was a deceitful, cunning woman so in love with her self-image she would do anything to keep it, even denying her own children; and Blodeuwedd was a cheating wife who betrayed her husband to his death.
Okay, fine, women can be villains--but in both cases, it was the male main characters who were the root of their actions. Arianrhod never wanted to be a mother, but her brother Gwydion needed her to bear his heir, so he caused her to give birth via magic (though he points out repeatedly there would have been no children in her body to have if she had been virgin as she claimed) and keeps one of the children to raise himself. Blodeuwedd was actually created via Mâth's and Gwydion's magic to be a wife to that child, Llew, in his manhood--and when she fell in love with another man, she who was created solely as a companion to Llew, she fell into scheming to solve her difficulties.
Now, I'm not trying to absolve these two "villians" of all of their culpability, but Gwydion is the main character of the book, his need for an heir and the obtaining and raising of such being the main storyline--and the book constantly excuses his actions. If this were a moral tale and he suffered some sort of downfall in the end, that would be one thing--but the ending is unsatisfactory in that regard, and in others, because the book just kind of... stops. Llew is reborn from his eagle form (which was his "death") and then... nothing happens. So clearly, I'm missing something, or the book is.
And speaking of the physical book itself, I'm disappointed in its quality as well. For something that cost me $35, I expect it not to be riddled with typos and inconsistencies. There were punctuation and capitalization mistakes once every fifteen to twenty pages, or so, and the spelling errors seemed to be centered on the names. Welsh is difficult to spell for the uninitiated--but it was as if the entire book had been typeset by scanning then left unproofed, because the errors were almost always shape-based. Pryderi became Prydern, mashing the R and I together. Geyr became Gew, combining the Y and R. And on top of that, some of the names in the fourth book were spelled differently from in the first three, even when they were clearly referring to the same characters. I would expect that if I were reading different sources telling the same tales (Gawaine vs. Gawain in Arthurian mythos, etc.) but not in a single compilation volume from the same author.
I'm glad I finally read it after it sat on my shelf so long, but I can't help but be disappointed.