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[felis_ultharus]

Still reading the Mabinogion. Illness and manga have prevented me from finishing it, but I'm nearly done now.

I'm reading the story of Gereint -- a story I've read in Chrétien de Troyes as "Erec and Enide." Mostly it's the same story, but one thing surprised me -- Morgan the healer, later known as Morgan le Fay -- is male in the Welsh version.

Now the Welsh version was written down later, but in general it's a much more perfect version, accurate in terms of geography and such, and in the original language of these stories.

It's possible that an increasingly sexist story made Morgan male, but a translation error when Chrétien got hold of the story seems much more likely. He was pretty sloppy.

Chrétien's version is the version that first really inspires the Morgan le Fay stories -- a Morgan is mentioned once briefly at the end of Geoffrey of Monmouth's earlier version, but she seems to be a random fairy with no part in Arthur's story. I think Chrétien may have confused the two Morgans, and fused them, and that's where she came from.

In other readings, I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim. Who knew that being vegan gave you telekinetic powers?

Comments

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

I still don't think I want telekinetic powers enough to give up eggs and dairy... But I suppose if anyone needed telekenetic powers it would be vegans; I've always been surprised by the fact that they have the strength to stand upright. ;)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I reamin unconvinced that they're not actually starving to death. I know someone can be quite healthy on a vegetarian diet, but most of the vegans I've spoken to about veganism look dangerously thin, and seem woefully unaware of some the basics of nutrition.

Food, how it works, and what it does has become a battlefield -- I think it's replaced religion, and I suspect we'll have a holy war between the Atkinsites and the Four-Food-Groupers sometime in the next 30 years, which will likely result in genocide.