ABSTRACT
One of the difficulties in discussing myth and tradition in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi is that of determining what we mean by myth and tradition. However, there is a broader sense of myth which is relevant to our study of the Mabinogi and that is the view of myth as those tales and poems through which a society is able to examine the fundamental elements of its own structure. Branwen can be seen, then, as a tale which probes a very crucial aspect of the structure of the social machinery available in that culture to prevent war and as such it is a mythic paradigm of that all-important facet of society. The fact that the story ends in disaster heightens the mythic function of the tale, for it provides the audience with an archetypal example of a kind of cultural failure which must have seemed endemic.
