Week 11 Reading Diary: The Mabinogion, Part 2

(Taliesin monument, via Wikimedia Commons)

The funny thing about this half of the unit was that it took me until about halfway in to get the joke: that Taliesin the bard, who speaks all of these words of wisdom and silences the best bards of the king and manages many other seemingly impossible things, is at most about seven years old. Then I read this entire section with a grin on my face, because honestly the image of a young child putting an entire courts' worth of nobles in their places, and advising a king and queen, and bullying the king into having a horse race just so that he can be even more tricksy win the king the race--that is the best image.

What I was thinking for this half of the unit was definitely including Taliesin in the story, but developing his character so that we see what people, generally, think about him. Elphin and his wife can't like taking orders from a child 24/7--especially a child with more snark in his little finger than most adults have in their entire bodies--so what would their reactions to Taliesin's advice be? What about Elphin's court? There must have been some people who hated him for being such a know-it-all, even despite the fact that he was the reason that the kingdom prospered as much as it did. Maybe a modern-day story, with a child genius? Or would it be funnier as a medieval fantasy-type story? Who knows?

Source: The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1877).