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of the myths that is examined later in this book (Pwyll)3; it was adopted first by Pugh (1835), and later by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838), as a title for their now famous translations of Welsh mythology (Bromwich 1996, 6). Consequently, the title has stuck to describe the material that is contained within their translations and, while it is a somewhat inaccurate way to describe the myths,4 it has the virtues of being both a succinct and widely recognised signifier. The term has come to signify eight myths5 or, perhaps more accurately, eight groups of myths,6which are all present in the late-fourteenth-century manuscript Llyfr Coch Hergest (The red book of hergest), and all but one can be found in the slightly earlier Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (The white book of rhydderch; Huws 2000, 36–64). Indeed, the missing tale may once have been in Llyfr Gwyn, for a section of the manuscript is damaged which would be about the right size to incorporate the missing text (Evans 1907, x).
The myths which are contained within (though not confined to) these collections are, at a narrative level, a rich and diverse collection; however, I intend to demonstrate that all of these myths operate according to the principles of an abstract organisational structure. Each myth is taken in turn and, after a brief exploration of its provenance, the material is analysed using the neostructuralist technique. Each section builds upon the work discussed in the section before it, and the myths are looked at both individually and in relation to each other. Throughout the analysis, I have followed the general academic trend of using editions that draw primarily from Llyfr Gwyn and supplemented it with material from Llyfr Coch where Llyfr Gwyn is shown to be lacking. I believe this approach to be justified by the close geographical and temporal proximity of the two, and the closeness of the content, which is so similar that it was once commonly believed that Llyfr Coch was directly copied from Llyfr Gwyn (ibid.). Although scholars are now generally of the opinion that they are both copies of a lost exemplar, they are nevertheless very closely related (R. Thomson 1986b, xi).
The first chapter of the analysis (chapter 3) explores the structure of the four branches of the Mabinogi, which then act as a key myth for the exploration of subsequent material. The analysis in this chapter begins