Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture: Essays on Adaptations in Literature, Film, Felevision, and Digital Media edited by Audrey L. Becker and Kristin Noone (review)

The best essay collections are more than just the sum of their parts. Audrey L. Becker and Kristin Noone succeed in crafting such a collection in their Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture. Individually the essays examine contemporary critical questions including representations of the feminine voice, colonial influence, and the role of interactive digital environments in sustaining cultural artifacts. Taken as a whole, however, the collection asks a broader question: can popular culture revitalize the modern imagination in such a way that “Welsh myth [can function] as a powerful force for enabling commonality across boundaries of time and space” (4). At stake for Becker and Noone is the question of adaptation as a form of cultural translation, and whether or not it is capable, as a practice, of linking us to the estranged.

It is particularly fitting that this question should be asked in the specific context of Welsh mythology, for “Wales itself occupies a special place among mythological, and fantastical, realms” as a land with a dual identity— what C.W. Sullivan III describes as “Wales and mythic Wales.”¹ One is a land you can visit, a place populated by real people with a proud cultural heritage. The other is shrouded in mist, and “focuses on Druids, stone circles, medieval romance, Celtic languages and literatures, Celtic music, Celtic sources for Arthurian materials, and the like” (3). As an imaginative space, then, Wales serves as a palimpsest between the world we occupy and the world of myth. In their introduction, Becker and Noone drive this point home superbly, and it is impossible to read the essays that follow without these dual images firmly in mind. This palimpsestic function of place allows the individual essays to function as stays, knitting together a vast diversity of space and time to produce a doubled consciousness that allows the reader to be “enchanted without being deluded.”² This ability to move back and forth between worlds contributes to the development of a cosmopolitan epistemology, a way of knowing that is based on the melding of diverse geographic, temporal, and mythological horizons. Inhabiting diverse imaginative space, Becker and Noone suggest, allows us to more seamlessly inhabit a diversity of non-imaginative spaces. It is a step towards greater cultural empathy.

The essays that follow fall into two categories: those that move modern critical questions into the past for exploration in a new environment (Noone’s essay on the work of Evangeline Walton, Susana Brower’s “Magical Goods, ‘Orphaned’ Exchanges, Punishment and Power in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,” and Jonathan Evans and Stephen Knight’s work on Twm Siôn Cati are standout examples), and those that examine components of the mythic past in the present, where their narrative and critical potential for modern audiences can be explored in a popular context (for example, Carolynn E. Wilcox’s work on Howl’s Moving Castle, Jeff Hicks’ analysis of The Black Cauldron, and Clay Kinchen Smith’s exploration of the world of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games). Though each essay contributes in some way to this larger whole none of the individual essays speak directly to the collection’s overarching project as Becker and Noone describe it. Instead, they comment on the larger goal tangentially as they deal with their own isolated critical questions. Consequently, the reader is called upon to create connections that are not always obvious. That these connections exist is a tribute to Becker and Noone as editors. That they are occasionally difficult to see speaks to the complexity of the material. The result is a collection that rewards the conscientious reader, while potentially frustrating the less attentive.

As a study of myth’s role in creating a cosmopolitan episteme the collection is a success; however, a reader of this journal looking for a significant exploration of...