The Fourth and last Branch of the Mabinogi — the branch of transformation. Math, the old magician-king of Gwynedd, can only live with his feet in a maiden's lap save in time of war; and his nephew Gwydion, the great trickster-enchanter, starts a war on purpose — stealing Pryderi's Otherworld swine with illusory horses, and killing Pryderi himself — so that his brother can wrong the king's foot-holder. From that outrage runs the whole branch: the brothers punished as paired beasts; a child denied a name, arms, and a wife by his own mother's curses; a wife conjured out of flowers; her betrayal and the murder of Lleu; his flight as a wounded eagle; and a reckoning worked, like everything here, by the wand. It ends where the Four Branches end — with the Pryderi thread closed and a new lord over Gwynedd.
A faithful retelling for readers 8 and up — the whole Fourth Branch, page by page. The dark turns (the outrage, the murder, the punishments) handled with folktale tact. Illustrations to follow.
Who does what — grouped by role, linked to the movements where they appear, and to one another.
The cast as a graph — every relationship in the tale, force-laid. Hover a node to light up its ties; click to open its card.
Drag/scroll/pinch to explore. Node size marks principals; colour marks role. Built straight from the relationship edges in the character cards.
The branch laid against Propp's 31 narrative functions — each beat linking to the movement that realises it. A tale driven by villainy and trickery, where the magical agent is the wand and the donor and the deceiver are the same man.
Drag/scroll/pinch to explore; click a node to jump to its detail below.
The tale laid against Greimas's actantial model — the functional structure of wanting beneath the plot. Not the social web of who-knows-whom, but the single engine of desire: who wants what, who sends it, who aids and who blocks.
The branch by call-number — the Thompson Motif-Index and ATU tale-types, the folklorists' Dewey decimal for mythic memes.
One graph, all the layers. The movements run as a spine; characters, motifs, story-functions, type-scenes and the Object of desire hang from the moments they touch — and whatever cross-cuts the tale is pulled toward the centre.
Movements run as the gold spine. Hover a node to light its threads; click any node for detail. Toggle the layers above to isolate one kind of connection.