Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The anonymous medieval Welsh text The Mabinogi is punctuated by moments of startling brutality. These moments can be shocking, as when the “troublesome” Efnisien impulsively disfigures the king’s horses—“cutting their lips to the teeth, their ears down to the head, and…their eyelids to the bone.” But violence in The Mabinogi emerges in comic modes, too, as when (with Samson-like candor) Lleu Llaw Gryffes admits to his unfaithful wife Bloduedd that the only way to murder him is with a specially-made spear while he stands with one foot on the edge of a custom-made roofed bathtub and another on a billy-goat.

These compellingly idiosyncratic representations of brutality are puzzling. Due in part to their disorienting, serpentining narratives, these medieval Welsh prose stories “have been slighted more than most works of medieval literature in the matter of criticism,” observed Patrick Ford in the introduction to his 1977 translation. Here we are, thirty years after Ford’s important translation, and—fueled by a cultural revival in medieval fantasy literature—the Mabinogi is receiving some overdue recognition both from within academia (only now is the text beginning to appear in anthologies of British literature) and from outside the ivory tower.

This paper will discuss the knotty intersections between the two contemporary re-visions of this medieval text. The first is a 2003 live-action/animated film based on The Mabinogi. The other re-vision of The Mabinogi comes via the world of on-line gaming. Now a role-playing game currently available throughout Asia and expected to be released in North America in 2007, the Mabinogi is—judging by google hits—known less as a literary text and more as an MMORPG—a “Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game” (comparable to the more familiar “World of Warcraft”) .

The labyrinthine and strange narrative features of the four “branches” of the medieval Mabinogi are uncannily suited for both animated film and for the interactive role-playing environment. This paper will compare the representations of violence in the relatively passive world of film with the interactive environment of the game of Mabinogi and its “persistent” virtual world. The use of animation in both media differentiates the Otherworld from the “real” world, reminding us, too, about the radical “otherness” of the Middle Ages.



	Audrey Becker (Instructor, English, Bowling Green State University) “Animating the Mabinogi: Depicting Violence in Film and Interactive Gaming” The anonymous medieval Welsh text The Mabinogi is punctuated by moments of startling brutality. These moments can be shocking, as when the “troublesome” Efnisien impulsively disfigures the king’s horses—“cutting their lips to the teeth, their ears down to the head, and…their eyelids to the bone.” But violence in The Mabinogi emerges in comic modes, too, as when (with Samson-like candor) Lleu Llaw Gryffes admits to his unfaithful wife Bloduedd that the only way to murder him is with a specially-made spear while he stands with one foot on the edge of a custom-made roofed bathtub and another on a billy-goat. These compellingly idiosyncratic representations of brutality are puzzling. Due in part to their disorienting, serpentining narratives, these medieval Welsh prose stories “have been slighted more than most works of medieval literature in the matter of criticism,” observed Patrick Ford in the introduction to his 1977 translation. Here we are, thirty years after Ford’s important translation, and—fueled by a cultural revival in medieval fantasy literature—the Mabinogi is receiving some overdue recognition both from within academia (only now is the text beginning to appear in anthologies of British literature) and from outside the ivory tower. This paper will discuss the knotty intersections between the two contemporary re-visions of this medieval text. The first is a 2003 live-action/animated film based on The Mabinogi. The other re-vision of The Mabinogi comes via the world of on-line gaming. Now a role-playing game currently available throughout Asia and expected to be released in North America in 2007, the Mabinogi is—judging by google hits—known less as a literary text and more as an MMORPG—a “Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game” (comparable to the more familiar “World of Warcraft”) . The labyrinthine and strange narrative features of the four “branches” of the medieval Mabinogi are uncannily suited for both animated film and for the interactive role-playing environment. This paper will compare the representations of violence in the relatively passive world of film with the interactive environment of the game of Mabinogi and its “persistent” virtual world. The use of animation in both media differentiates the Otherworld from the “real” world, reminding us, too, about the radical “otherness” of the Middle Ages.