Google fusion table showing relationships of characters in Pwyll:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=15v6OMzslLUx80zrl54n2Y8kQQMs9w-E5vhOb47mj
Google fusion table showing relationships of characters in Owein:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1TwRls-WPKoz4LBa7lM5zSYyZKzA79jjad05_dQte
Digital humanities is all about maps. Unfortunately, while there are a myriad of programs available for mapping data onto real geography, I have not yet discovered a mapping tool that can handle journeys to and from the Otherworld… (If you know of one, please tell me!)
However, what “mapping” is really all about is discovering patterns. I first tried charting the journeys and events of Pwyll and Owein through graphing them, using Excel spread sheets. This is what I ended up with:
It gives an idea of overall pattern, but unless you know the story cold, it isn’t particularly helpful (or maybe my Excel skills are not all they could be).
I ended up making color-coded charts in an Excel spreadsheet, because that’s what gave me the most control over what I wanted to convey. The first set shows the events of the stories charted by place.
This second set charts the events, focusing on the characters:
I feel like these charts start to illustrate some of the patterning in the stories, but are not entirely satisfactory. For one thing, because they are so large, it’s hard to see what’s happening. Ultimately, what I would really like to do is map the travels of all the characters in the Mabinogion on layers that can be stacked up to see patterns across the stories. For instance, taking just the PKM, the stories alternate between North and South Wales, with characters traveling “within” Dyfed in the First Branch (i.e., to coterminus Otherworlds, the realms of Arawn and Hyfaidd); from Harlech in North Wales west to Ireland and back (with some roundaboutation at the end) in the Second Branch; from Dyfed east to Hereford and environs in England and back in the Third Branch; and from Gwynedd to Dyfed–north to south–and back in the Fourth Branch. Many people have written on the itineraries in these stories, with a great deal of effort to identify the places named, for example, in Gwydion’s pig-drive northwards in the Fourth Branch.
All well and good, but what about when you get to the Arthurian stories? Owein, Peredur, and Geraint all take off for the wildernesses in their respective tales, and while Arthur’s court serves as a focal point for them to come back to (and leave again), all their adventures take place Elsewhere. I am inclined to think that Owein’s adventures, which occur “beyond the limits of the world,” happen in Scotland, beyond the remains of Hadrian’s Wall, but this is an assumption based on the fact that the historical Owein ap Urien belonged to the kingdom of Rheged, which spanned the western end of the Wall. Even with that small assumption, it’s impossible to geographically map the events of these three stories.
I created these clouds by turning the texts of Pwyll and Owein (trans. Sioned Davies) into word lists, sorting them, and cleaning them up by 1) eliminating pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions; 2) turning all verbs to present tense; 3) consolidating similar terms (such as using kingdom for both realm and kingdom); and 4) deleting words that occur fewer than three times for Pwyll and four times for Owein (which, as a longer story, has a larger vocabulary).
created in Wordle (wordle.net)
As you might expect, our hero, Pwyll, is the name most mentioned, but far and away the commonest verb is a form of say, which reflects the amount of dialog in the story. Come, give, and see are important verbs, followed by get, know, sit; court, kingdom, and horse pop out as important nouns. Rhiannon and Teyrnon are the most important names after Pwyll, and Annwfn and Dyfed are about of equal weight as locations. There is also a lovely little cluster of company, carouse, and feast. Altogether, the cloud gives the impression of a story concerned with rulership and family relationships, which is hardly surprising to anyone who has read the First Branch, but also concerned with the passage of time (the size of year, for instance), and ideas about friendship and communication.
Here is the cloud for Owein:
created with Wordle (wordle.net)
Obviously, while the name of the main character is important in both stories, in Owein, our hero’s name is more important than anything, while in Pwyll, speaking (“say”) is even more important. The little cluster in the right center of knight, lion, and horse confirm that, like Chretien’s version, this is very much a story about a the Knight with the Lion. The big vocabulary is of an upper class world of knights, countesses, castles, and the ever popular brocaded silk; the characters come, go, and take, but they also hear noises (an over-all terms for shrieks, yells, wails, and other sounds), look, know, and fight.
I have to admit, however, that as I was creating the lists that underlie these clouds, I was increasingly aware that the frequency of some words was skewed by translation. I think Davies often used different English vocabulary to translate the same Middle Welsh word just to keep the English text from becoming tedious–which is, after all, a valid choice for a translator. The reason I didn’t go straight to analyzing the original Welsh texts is that I wanted to do a test run in English to see if it was useful. Creating word clouds entails making a regularized list of each instance of a word’s occurrence, which in turn involves a lot of sorting into alphabetical order. This is a long and tedious task in modern English; it is, to put it mildly, exponentially more work in Welsh due to initial mutation, and even worse in Middle Welsh texts with their unstable orthography.
Word clouds look snazzy, but for analyzing Middle Welsh prose texts, they may be more trouble than they’re worth.
A timeline showing the interrelationship of historical events and the stories of the Mabinogion.
Created using Timeline.JS (timeline.knightlab.com)
This timeline looks nice, but what I really wanted was to show how the settings of the stories in the Mabinogion fit into the interstices of British history just before or after a period of conquest–the PKM occur in the period between Caesar’s first incursion and full Roman colonization; Maxen Wledig takes place at the very end of the Roman period, and all the Arthurian stories in the period between the Roman and Saxon eras; Rhonabwy takes place just around the time of Norman dominance and looks back to the Arthurian era; and the writing of the tales themselves in the White and Red Books occurred during a period of relative Welsh independence from the domination of the English.
In all, I think that a static timeline would have made my point better, but this kind of timeline is useful for making narrative points.
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