On day four of our blog takeover to celebrate the publication day itself for The Mab we are delighted to welcome back author and the inaugural postholder for the Children's Laureate Wales, Eloise Williams to introduce us to the role of magic in The Mab.

The world of The Mab is steeped in magic. The legends tell of shapeshifters and magicians, witches and giants, spells and curses. Dead people come back to life with the use of a magic cauldron, characters are transformed into animals or can speak to them to gain their wisdom, people disappear into the Otherworld or walk from that world into ours. Anything can happen. Everything is possible. In fact, in The Mab, the only thing which can be expected is the unexpected!

The characters in The Mab live in a landscape where magic happens so often, they unquestioningly believe in it and in its power. The boundaries of this world are moveable, and the linear spaces are filled with strange and wonderful things.

In Follow the Dream, the Emperor of Rome, Maxen Wledig, takes a nap after a day of hunting and has dreams of crossing the sea to find an island where a majestic castle lies. There he sees the most beautiful maiden and immediately falls head over heels in love with her. When Maxen wakes, instead of getting on with his day he decides that his dream should be followed. He sends some of his men to seek out the beautiful maiden and find her they do. In Wales, of course, where the original stories were told.

Three Graces is a story of three terrible plagues. The first is a plague of whispering listeners who have the ability to hear everything everyone is saying, so that people are afraid to speak. The second, an ear shattering screaming which comes from a red dragon and a white dragon in combat. The third plague is caused by a magician who steals people’s food while they sleep, so that the poor go hungry. You might well be able to find parallels between this world and ours.

The stories were originally part of an oral tradition of storytelling. The storyteller would need to keep the listener interested in the tale as they told it. For this reason, they drew heavily on the landscape of Wales, so that an audience would be able to relate to the stories and used magic to spellbind them too. Because of this the stories don’t necessarily follow a linear path. Storytellers would throw in as much drama and mystery as possible to keep listeners on their toes. If they could feel the interest ebbing, they might add in an enchantment, or a curse, a giant, or a hideous monstrous claw. This still works today as you turn the pages. You might gasp in wonder at something magnificent or wrinkle your brow at something strange. Either way, the magic will draw you in as it did those listeners of medieval times.

The characters who populate The Mab find ways to live with magic, sometimes harnessing it for their own gain, or battling against it to find a way through their weird and wonderful world. When you step into the pages you become part of that mythical landscape too. Wild and unpredictable, shimmering and enchanting, you are a magician, and you also walk between the Otherworld and this.

A big thank you to Eloise Williams for writing this fantastic blog feature for us.  You can find out more about The Mab every day this week during our blog takeover and might like to think about attending the YLG Wales Zoom training day Empathy in Your Library which includes a conversation with Eloise Williams and Matt Brown who will be discussing The Mab with librarian extraordinaire Alison King.  Special thanks too, to Max Low, illustrator of the The Mab for use of its brilliant cover and the image from Luned and the Magic Ring.

During day two of our blog takeover to celebrate the publication of The Mab we are delighted to welcome author and the inaugural postholder for the Children's Laureate Wales, Eloise Williams to introduce us to some of the women of The Mab.

In stories from the olden days, women are often there to look pretty, be a foil to the stories of men, and not say much. They wave fond farewells as the men ride off on horseback to have great adventures. Sometimes it’s possible to think that these women didn’t have any voices at all.

Not so in The Mab! The women of The Mab have a lot to say. They are fierce and bold, clever and witty, smart and resilient. They make decisions and they make mistakes. They are very important people in their stories, and we are proud to give them voices.

In Rhiannon, Pwyll and the Hideous Claw women are central to the story. Rhiannon, a powerful, enchanting woman from the Otherworld joins this world only to face terrible trickery and punishment for a crime she didn’t commit. She is accused of murdering her own child when it has actually been stolen by a hideous, monstrous claw. Who has tricked her? Her maids, and to protect their own skin because they slept as the baby was taken. As punishment, Rhiannon is forced to carry people on her back as if she is a horse. Yes, you’re right, these stories are weird.

Blodeuwedd, in Meadowsweet and Magic is a woman conjured entirely from flowers because a man called Lleu wants a wife, and his mother has cursed him that he may never be married to a human. Unhappy with the arrangement, Blodeuwedd plots to kill Lleu. Unfortunately, for her he has protection charms placed around him which mean that he can only be killed in very specific circumstances. Luckily, Blodeuwedd is extremely inventive and spends a whole year thinking up ways to murder Lleu. I don’t want to give too much away but her plan involves a goat and a bath!

In Branwen and the Cauldron of Rebirth we meet the main character Branwen as she listens to the wisdom of birds while men wage war.  Branwen’s mother has taught her to open her heart in times of trouble. The starlings talk to Branwen and she agrees that love will conquer all. Where there is bloodshed and heartache and grief, she chooses an unusual way to continue spreading her message of love, changing herself and her son into birds.

Women often save the day in the stories of The Mab. Cigfa in Happily Ever After has fire in her belly, rides her horse like a warrior, and uses her intuition to expose the truth of an enchantment. Her story tells us of how real life is much more interesting than your typical happy ever after. In Luned and the Magic Ring, the title character uses a bluestone and a ring which render the wearer invisible to help someone escape certain death, but she also employs logical thinking and her powers of intellect to save the day.

We can’t wait for you to meet these women. They aren’t wholly good or bad. They aren’t just there to wave weeping farewells from castle windows. They are strong and wild, magical and powerful, fallible and free. They have thoughts and ideas and solve problems with their quick wit and intelligence. Perhaps they will remind you of the women in your own life?

A big thank you to Eloise Williams for writing this fantastic blog feature for us.  You can find out more about The Mab every day this week during our blog takeover and might like to think about attending the YLG Wales Zoom training day Empathy in Your Librarywhich includes a conversation with Eloise Williams and Matt Brown who will be discussing The Mab with librarian extraordinaire Alison King.  Special thanks too, to Max Low, illustrator of the The Mab for use of its brilliant cover and the image of Blodeuwedd.

Fighting the cause of lost words is a familiar effort in Wales where language itself is endangered. While both Welsh and English by today have equal status in the eyes of the law, over the past 150 years, we have seen the number of Welsh speakers decline from 90% of the population to only 19%. During the past sixty years or so, there have been many campaigns for the survival of Welsh, or Cymraeg as it is known in her own language. As well as official status, these campaigns have led to the restoration of original Welsh place names (and marking them with bilingual road signs), the right to be educated in Welsh and to have Welsh television and radio programmes. And things are certainly looking up, with the Welsh government recently setting itself the ambitious goal to double the number of Welsh speakers from half a million to a million by the year 2050.

This matters. Saving words and languages matters. It matters because they are more than just sounds. They are windows that enable us to see and understand the world about us. A bluebell and a dandelion may both be flowers, but without being called by their own names, they become somehow less visible, less important, more prone to be ignored ...  and eventually, more likely to vanish.

This is one of the reasons why I was so delighted to be asked to try to recast Rob Macfarlane’s spells into Welsh and project them against Jackie Morris’ extraordinarily beautiful artwork. Inspired by the original ideas, I took a deep breath and imagined my pencil into a magic wand. Together we were facing a task of great responsibility - to conjure the words of the world about us back from the brink of unbeing and place them in central sight!

Some of the challenges were obvious. If the way the three letters in the English ‘ivy’ grow to five in the Welsh ‘iorwg’ cause a conundrum, then what about how the four in ‘newt’ expand to ten over three words in ‘madfall y dŵr’?! Beyond their length, the names also sometimes focus on different characteristics. While the Welsh ‘clychau’r gog’ and the English ‘bluebell’ reveal the same ‘bell’/’cloch’ component, ‘blue’ is not reflected in the Welsh, but instead it recalls the ‘cuckoo’ that shares its May landscape. And if the regal status of ‘kingfisher’ is not evident in Welsh, here the colour blue, that’s missing from the bell flowers, is clear for, literally translated, this royal English fisherman is known in Welsh as ‘the blue of the water’s edge’.

As is the case in other languages such as French or German, in Welsh we have two ways of expressing knowing, enabling us to ‘know’ facts on the one hand, and places and people on the other in different ways. In our language we recognise that to know facts is somehow a more superficial undertaking than to know places and people; the former an act of mind and memory, the latter more an act of the heart and soul.

In working on these spell-songs, I have been allowed to meet the twenty words they conjure up and get to know what they represent beyond the mind and memory. They have become more than facts. They have become friends that need to be known by the heart and soul.

With the help of the craftsmanship and artistry of the design team at Graffeg, and the generous encouragement of Jackie and Rob, it has been a great joy to work on Geiriau Diflanedig. I can only hope that the readers will share some of this pleasure and that the Welsh version will play its part, along with its counterparts in the other languages, in calling back onto our tongues some endangered species of wondrous words.

To help ensure a copy of Geiriau Diflanedig reaches every primary school in Wales please visit: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/geiriau-diflanedig-for-primary-schools-in-wales

Geiriau Diflanedig published on 10 October 2019

Grateful thanks to Mererid Hopwood for writing this guest blog.