The Mabinogion

The Mabinogion, in Sioned Davies's translation published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford World's Classics series in 2007, is the standard modern scholarly English translation of the medieval Welsh prose tales that preserve much of what survives of pre-Christian and early medieval Welsh mythological and heroic tradition. Its authority rests on Davies's standing as a specialist in medieval Welsh literature and on Oxford World's Classics' editorial standards for producing translations aimed at both scholarly and general readers with accompanying critical apparatus. Its limit is the same one every translation of a medieval vernacular text carries: the underlying tales survive in later medieval manuscripts reflecting centuries of oral and scribal transmission, so a specific claim about an earlier, pre-manuscript form of a story is a matter of scholarly reconstruction rather than something the text itself directly documents.