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Bromwich, Rachel (ed.) : Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain. Third Edition, with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006. cxv, 559 pp.
From its first edition in 1961, Rachel Bromwich's edition of Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain established itself as the standard edition and commentary on the Welsh Triads, and as a key work for anyone studying medieval Celtic and Arthurian narrative traditions.
Bromwich begins her edition with a long introduction in two chapters that look at the "Manuscript Sources and Versions" and the "Origin and Development of Trioedd Ynys Prydein". As Bromwich notes (p. liii), "the triad form was used as a means of cataloguing a mass of technical information: in addition to TYP triads are used extensively in the legal codes, in technical treatises on medicine, and are found in the fourteenth-century Grammar of Einion Offeriad, where the Trioedd Cerdd deal with the details of poetic craftsmanship." The Trioedd Ynys Prydein are also often associated in the manuscripts with "short collections of triads dealing with general moral, gnomic, and proverbial statements" (liii). However, although the triad was used in a number of places in Celtic traditions, the Trioedd Ynys Prydein are of particular importance for the scholar of folk narrative because they are a catalogue of metheval Welsh narrative lore, including Arthurian lore, much of which is otherwise unattested. They are thus a valuable addition to the limited sources for metheval Welsh narrative.
While...