Mabinogi Bibliography

In the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Rhiannon is falsely accused of destroying her own child. As punishment, she is forced to tell strangers the story of her supposed wrongdoing and carry them on her back like a horse. In the lively debate surrounding Rhiannon’s equine punishment, academics have largely overlooked the second facet of her penance: the forced recounting of a false narrative, which turns her intelligent voice into the instrument of her suffering. Rhiannon’s plight is echoed in the Mabinogi’s Second Branch, when a scorned Branwen teaches a starling to speak and has it deliver a letter telling the story of her mistreatment. Both characters are variations on the folklore motif of the Calumniated Wife, an international tale type featuring a woman outcast after marriage. But in Rhiannon and Branwen, the author of the Mabinogi re-writes the motif, empowering the unjustly ostracized women to reclaim their narratives. The storytelling of the Calumniated Wives conflates patterns of subversive female speech in the Mabinogi with the predominantly male generative act of storytelling. In re-telling their stories, the Calumniated Wives assert their innocence and ultimately escape their punishments. By reading Rhiannon and Branwen as pur posefully empowering re-writings of the Calumniated Wife motif, this paper illuminates a tradition of subversive female storytelling in the Four Branches and complicates the discussion surrounding the possibility of female authorship of the Mabinogi itself.