This is a translation by Lady Charlotte Guest of the Mabinogion, a cycle of Welsh legends collected in the Red Book of Hergest, a manuscript in the collection of the library of Oxford University.

Mabinogion means “tales of youth”.

The British Victorians had a deep fascination with folklore,legend, myth and the world of Faerie.

This is one of many great works which have long since entered the public domain when the original copyright expired. Many have been transcribed for the Web as part of Project Gutenberg. This particular version was transcribed from the 1849 edition text by David Price of Coventry, England.

We owe Project Gutenberg a huge debt for its Herculean labors in providing us with these texts.

The trouble with the Gutenberg texts is that they are hard to read in your browser. The formatting is very much “Early Web”. So I’ve taken this one and tried to make it as readable as a paper book, to see just how much can be done with better layout and fonts, using Web-standards HTML and CSS3.

What I’ve done is still far from perfect. It works if you are reading on a display of 1440 x 900 pixels or better. I had to paginate it by hand. It is designed to be read with your browser in FullScreen mode. (Hit the F11 key) The layout needs to eventually be made adaptive, so it can be read comfortably on any screen

Even so, I think this attempt is a big improvement, and I would be interested in feedback and ideas on how it could be made even better.

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