Once upon a time...the stories from childhood begin. Scholars now think fairy tales and many other stories are derived from more serious fables orally transmitted from generation to generation over thousands of years, until a redactor cast them into literary form. With the exception of the last two tales in Patrick K. Ford's translation of THE MABINOGI AND OTHER WELSH TALES, the stories in this book exist in manuscripts religious monks familiar with the 'original' narratives prepared in the early part of the second millennium. For the most part these recorded versions appear to be relatively faithful to an oral tradition, however confused their narratives may at times seem to modern ears. In addition to recording the tales, the monks appear to have used the tales to transmit Christian notions, just as Christian missionaries to Hawaii explained the triune God using the sacred tripartite banana.

The last two tales in the MABINOGI were set down in the sixteenth century by one Elis Gruffydd, an educated man of Welsh extraction (The Tale of Gwion Bach, and The Tale of Taliesin"). Ford says that although no manuscript dating from an earlier era has turned up, it is apparent from the structure of the stories Gruffyd recorded that the two tales are very old and may have been copied in earlier times and the manuscripts lost. Gruffydd apparently was familiar with the oral versions of the tales which were still being retold in sixteenth century Wales which makes them all the more remarkable. events.

The tales of the Mabinogi set down in Ford's translation are somewhat interlinked, much as a set of short stories might be today, or as the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable were in the 12th Century. Characters in one tale show up in another and King Arthur shows up in The Tale of Taliesin ("shining forehead") the remarkable bard whose poems fill the last few pages of Ford's book. Ford suggests literal truth, moral insights and religious/philosophical/magical elements form the basis of these tales. For example, a good deal of evidence exists to support the notion King Arthur lived sometime in the 5th-6th Centuries and Merlin may have been his counselor. On the other hand, the feats of Cerwidan the shape-shifting mother of Morfan and brewer of the cauldron of inspired wisdom are not as well documented, and may be largely mythical/religious. The feats performed by magicians and witches in these tales are quite amazing, but the creation of Blodeuedd (flower face), the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lugh, the fair one with skilled hands), conjured out of flowers by Math and Gwydion, is the best. She was transformed into an owl in punishment for her unfaithfulness to Llew which is why some owls have faces that look like "blowed" flowers.

For those interested in going to some of the sources of the Welsh tradition rather than New Age commentaries, this book is a treasure. Not only do you get Ford's reliable translation of some of the oldest Welsh tales, you also get his highly readable and insightful introduction to the texts of the Mabinogi and the Welsh tradition in general. If you are at all interested in Welsh mythological traditions, start with this book.

There are several translations of the Mabinogion in print, but this is the one I recommend. Not only is the translation a careful balance of scholarly accuracy and readable prose, but it has excellent introductory material as well. As for the text itself... well, as an amateur Celtic scholar and practitioner of neo-Celtic spirituality, I think anyone, of any faith tradition, who wants to cultivate a "Celtic" form of spirituality, owes it to themselves (and to Celtic culture) to become familiar with the primary sources of Celtic myth. The Welsh Mabinogion and the Irish Tain are the two places to start. So... whether your interest in Celtic myth is academic or personal/spiritual, this is an essential text.

I thought this book was awful. It offers very little original thought, and is full of wrongheaded and muddled thinking. I persisted through a fair bit of silliness, but I ultimately gave up after a chapter allegedly written by a mathematicatian got some basic combinatorics all wrong.

It probably deserves 1 star, but I've given it 2 out of respect for the fact that they've attempted to tackle such a difficult subject in the first place.

This edited volume contains articles from the Workshop on Human & Machine Cognition in 1991. I got this book while preparing an upper-division interdisciplinary course on Models of Mind. I liked the overall slant of the collection better than many of the other volumes I considered (e.g., Mind Design II, Haugeland; Philosophy of AI, Boden (one of the contributors to this volume)). Although the workshop happened in 1991, the papers are ostensibly more closely dated to the book's publication (1995). My complaint about the book (which applies to all the other books I've evaluated) is that it lacks the focus of laying out the philosophical issues related to mind and then considering computational models with repsect to those issues. That is not to say the individual papers do not address issues of Philosophy of Mind and proceed appropriately from there -- simply as an edited collection, it lacked the focus that would make it a good text for the seminar course I'm designing. There's much here to stimulate thinking and discussion.