The Mabinogion

(Hardback)

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First assembled on paper in the fourteenth century, the eleven stories in The Mabinogion reach far back into the oral traditions of Welsh poetry. Closely linked to the Arthurian legends - King Arthur himself appears in one of the stories - they summon up a world of mystery and magic which is still evoked by the landscape so vividly described in them. Mingling fantasy with tales of chivalry, they prefigure the great romances of the Middle Ages but stand on their own merits as magnificent evocations of a golden age of Celtic civilization.

Author Bio

John Updike was born in 1932, in hillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.