Welsh Mythology: A Neo-Structuralist Analysis By Jonathan Miles- ...

of myth from strict functionalist approaches¹⁰ that, as Lévi-Straus (1963, 207) suggested, make the mistake of believing that a myth about an evil grandmother means that all grandmothers in that society are evil.

Instead, the definition of myth used for the purpose of this analysis is open-ended, and I demonstrate, through subsequent analysis, that many things (such as history or science) that are seen as opposed to myth can be viewed as myth, which is to say that they are organised according to mythic principles. For the purpose of this analysis, then, myth is taken to be a significantly complex,¹¹ communally held account (either oral or written). It is therefore a malleable term that at once applies to the whole and the specific; thus, one can happily talk of both biblical myth and the myth of Cain and Abel. Throughout the analysis, I apply the term myth in this dual way to mean at once the whole and the specific; however, the context of the statement means that there is never any possibility for confusion. Furthermore, it is important to note that when discussing the material, I make reference to elements of the mythic whole that may seem somewhat arbitrarily divided. Thus, during my discussion of Owein, I refer to the myth of Owein and the lion and the myth of Owein the wild man; while these divisions sometimes correspond to textual markers,¹² they at other times have no such correspondence. This is because such features are surface-level, narrative features and this book is concerned with more underlying structural features and, as such, divides the material into sections that are meaningful at this deep, structural level.¹³

This mythic division does not necessarily imply that each distinct section would have been consciously perceived as such, nor does it imply that these sections were once historically distinct; such concerns are beyond the interest of this book. Rather, the division suggests that at a fundamental level, these segments contain an area of structural interest. That is to say, they can be analysed in order to highlight an element of the deep structure; however, it is important to understand that it is only when all these segments are looked at together that the structure becomes clear.¹⁴ This is clearly demonstrated by the opening chapter of analysis, which begins by looking at a segment of Branwen, which has been chosen as a ‘key myth’ and is therefore the analogue of Lévi-Strauss’ myth of the