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The Mabinogion's stories are amongst the most compelling and beautiful in European literature. Composed in a golden age of Celtic story-telling in the eleventh century or earlier, they bring together the grotesque and the warmly human, the entertaining and the richly significant. Culhwch is here, perilously wooing the Giant's Daughter; Owain i shere, winning the Lady of the Fountain by knightly feats of arms; and -- a potent and miracle both -- King Arthur is here for the first time as a prime mover in a significant prose narrative ('Culhwch and Olwen'), and thereafter as King and Emperor of what is still the world's most famous royal court.
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