I would like to suggest, finally, that it is--for lack of a better term--the rhetoric of the Welsh tales that made them so popular with fantasy readers of the 1960s and 1970s. On one hand, the Welsh materials are not as sophisticated or refined as the Greek stories; they have not come down to us after generations of literary polish by authors who were using the basic stories to deal with complex and abstract philosophical issues. Rather, the Welsh materials existed in oral tradition (which dynamically preserved that which was both immediately and permanently relevant to the culture in which the tales circulated) and achieved a written status which has not been refined over the generations; they are, and I speak especially of the Four Branches here, much closer to their sources in mythology and legend than are the Greek stories and, therefore, may speak more directly to the hearer-now-reader.

On the other hand, this closeness to the original sources means that the conflicts within the stories are not reducible to a Judeo-Christian good-versus-evil paradigm. Virtually every early mythological creation story (and that includes the Hebrew) tells of a struggle to render order from chaos and also tells of the continuing struggle between the forces of both for domination. The opposition of the humans and the gods to the monsters and the giants in the Norse eddas is perhaps the clearest case in the western corpus of stories involving the struggle between order and chaos, but the Four Branches are also about order--the order of the land (i.e., restoring the wasteland, providing for fertility, and renewing the crop), the order of lordship (i.e., the workings of government, the nature of politics, and the waging of war), and the order of gender (i.e., the struggle for inheritance and the tension between matrilineality and patrilineality)--all topics of particular relevance in the 1960s and 1970s.