Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

> The Prydain Chronicles do not even extratextually draw any connections to the Mabinogion except in as much as they use similar names. I think it's very different to draw elements from a mythology than it is to set a fiction in a historical time.
Agreed. Also, FWIW, extratextually, Lloyd Alexander did more to cut the connections than to draw them: always said very clearly in the forewords of his books that Prydain was not Wales, although inspired by his love for that country, and that he was not retelling Welsh mythology, and that, among other things, Arawn was considerably less villainous and Gwydion rather less heroic in Welsh mythology than they were in his books. It's hard to imagine how he could be any more explicit about the fact that, while he loves the mythology and was inspired by it, he is not attempting to co-opt another culture's stories, or much clearer about what kind of liberties he was taking. And that information was in the forewords, not an afterword, so I, at least, went into the stories when I was a kid already knowing they weren't retellings.

Disclosure: Alexander's my favorite author (tied with DWJ); the Prydain Chronicles are about as close to my favorite books in the world as you can get, and I adore the man and have trouble hearing a word against him. I try to be objective, but everybody's got an author or book they feel that way about, I'm sure. (I'm sad to hear that Peter Dickinson didn't think they should be published. Well, the man's not right about everything. When I met him, I told him how much I'd been impressed by a story he'd written, and described it, and he denied having written it. I had to go home and look it up to make sure I wasn't going crazy, but there it was, in a little-read anthology of short stories by his wife. He'd just forgotten about it. :)