Review of N. Petrovskaia, This is not a Grail Romance. Understanding Historia Peredur vab Efrawg

The anonymous Middle Welsh tale commonly referred to for convenience as Peredur has been the subject of scholarly attention ever since it first came to the attention of the wider world through the English translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, first published in 1839. 1 It raises a wide range of questions, not least because of the nature of the manuscript tradition.Two long narratives are preserved in Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (the White Book of Rhydderch), now Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 4-5 (c.1350), and in Llyfr Coch Hergest (the Red Book of Hergest), Oxford, Jesus College, MS 111 (1382x1405), and in the past the common assumption that these represented a 'complete' or 'standard' version of the tale tended to distort and oversimplify critical perceptions, consequently neglecting the importance of the two earliest, albeit fragmentary, witnesses, preserved in National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 7 (c.1300) and Peniarth MS 14ii (first half of the fourteenth century).The standard modern edition, by Glenys Witchard Goetinck, reinforced this view, for it was based on the White Book version and although it included in appendix the texts of the two fragments, these were not editions but raw transcripts lifted from J. Gwenogvryn Evans's diplomatic edition of tales from Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch.(Evans 1976) The four manuscript witnesses raise fundamental questions about the text's origins and evolution.They were copied in different parts of Wales -the two fragments from the north, Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch from Ceredigion and Llyfr Coch Hergest from Glamorgan -and none is a copy of another; moreover, the two fragments present significant differences to the two later, longer versions.The problem is complicated by the overlaps in some sections between the Welsh narrative -or perhaps narrative(s) -and the late twelfth-century Old French Roman de Perceval or Conte du Graal by Chrtien de Troyes.The nature of this relationship dominated research on Peredur until the 1970s, when at last critics began to consider Peredur in all its guises as a literary work in its own right, rather than simply as a pawn in the often-heated debate about origins of the Arthurian legend in general and of the grail in particular.The inclusion in Peredur of a procession similar to that found in the French romance, but featuring a severed head rather than some kind of vessel, only heightened arguments about origins