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viii
Preface

readers have been able to become acquainted with these literary achievements of the medieval Welsh people. The faults of that translation are few, though at times important, and its charm and literary qualities will always ensure for it the foremost place in the field which Lady Guest was the first to explore completely. Before she published her translation, the story of ‘Pwyll’ had been translated into English, with the same suppressions, in the Cambrian Register, vol. i, pp. 177 et seq. (1795); in 1829 the Cambrian Quarterly produced a translation of ‘Math, the son of Mathonwy’; and in 1806 a translation of ‘Lludd and Llevelys’ and of ‘Macsen Wledig’ appeared in Y Greal.

Since her day, Mr. Alfred Nutt (1902) and Sir Owen M. Edwards (1902) have edited her text, and the latter, in a series of footnotes, drew attention to some of her mistakes. But, so far as we are aware, there has been no new translation into English of any of the romances, other than that of ‘Math, the son of Mathonwy’ by Professor W. J. Gruffydd, in a recent volume (Math vab Mathonwy, Cardiff, 1928) dealing with the origins of that story, published long after we had completed the translation of ‘Math’ which appears in this volume.

A noteworthy effort was made by Mr. J. M. Edwards in 1896–1901 to give a modernized Welsh version for the use of schools, and in 1908 and 1910 Professor Ifor Williams published the Welsh texts of the two disconnected stories with annotations in Welsh.

There have been attempts to translate the tales

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