Page:The Mabinogion Volume I.pdf/17

The story of ‘Pwyll’ is the first of the Four ‘Branches’ of the Mabinogi proper. There are two texts of the story: that of the Red Book (pp. 1 to 25), and that of the White Book (cols. 1 to 38). There are no subsidiary fragments. The two texts are complete, and follow one another very closely. A few words appear in the one which do not appear in the other, and there are occasional substitutions of one word for another with a similar or identical meaning, but such variations are rare. The Red Book is not, however, a verbatim copy of the White Book, for the texts have many orthographical, grammatical, and structural differences, of considerable importance to the philologist. These differences occur throughout the whole of the Four Branches, even when the texts otherwise correspond, and they establish that there was no strict ‘copying’ of the one text from the other; each reproduces the same story in the same sequence, employing the varying orthography and the like of the day in which it was written down. It is possible that the Red Book scribe had the White Book text before him, and transformed the latter into the current speech of his own time, just as a modern writer might modernize the diction of the Canterbury Tales; it is also possible that the two texts were transcribed, not copied verbatim, from a common original, which itself differed in grammatical form, though not in matter, as much from