The Mabinogion

 Some things are only meant to be read by completionists and obsessives.  The book of Numbers, for example, is notoriously tedious and unrewarding.  Nonetheless, there are those for whom either their fanatical religious identity or their neurotic necessity to finish things leads them to mechanically pass their eyes over each word of it.  For the book of Numbers, I am in the latter category.  I only read it because I felt I should at least be able to say that I had.  The Mabinogion is in many ways of a similar flavor: pages upon pages of names and lineages, each of which fails to find any purchase in the reader's cognitive matrix, any other connecting fact to adhere to and make a case for memory.  Unlike the book of Numbers, however, this book has several means of ingress into my own identity, and it is for that reason I persevered.  And also, I am a neurotic completionist.

I have long felt an affinity for Wales.  Each time I've been there, a feeling has washed over me of excitement, comfort, and inexplicable familiarity.  The stories of that ancient land, of a time before even the dreams of Maxen Wledig (Maximus) led him to claim it for the Romans, hold promise of the reason for that feeling.  Perhaps it lies in the stories of my namesake, Bran the Blessed.  I have no affinity for his imposing physical stature, of course, but his role as protector and guardian speaks to me.  Somewhat anticlimactically, the stories themselves are from a time before the invention of narrative consistency.  They are so disjointed and fragmentary--and focus on details of little interest to a modern mind, such as the particulars of heraldry--that I did not come away feeling as though I had discovered a part of myself.  Such was, no doubt, too much to hope.  I did, however, discover a rich canon of characters and stories that begs to be fleshed out in modern form.  An opera perhaps, or an animated epic.  In places though, the only possible adaptation would be a Monty Python sketch of the Johann Gambolputty . . . of Ulm sort: a list of names so long and isolate that it quickly becomes farcical.