Three-line indexes to vanished tales

Claim (verbatim)

The Trioedd Ynys Prydein, the Triads of the Island of Britain, are a mnemonic catalogue of medieval Welsh narrative: each triad gathers three heroes, three horses, three unrestrained ravagings, three battles, under a shared heading, as pegs on which a trained storyteller hung tales he knew in full. Rachel Bromwich's edition (Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 3rd edition, University of Wales Press, 2006) prints the roughly ninety triads and annotates, allusion by allusion, which of the stories they invoke can still be read as a surviving narrative. The answer indexes a catastrophe: the triads are a table of contents for a literature that is mostly gone. The loss mechanism is that the triads preserved the organising skeleton of the cyfarwyddyd, the storyteller's lore, precisely because a three-line list is cheap to copy and easy to memorise, while the tales themselves - long, orally maintained, tied to performers - were not; the index outlived the volumes. So the great majority of the personal and narrative allusions in the triads should have no counterpart in any surviving tale, and the minority that do should cluster around the handful of prose narratives that happen to survive - the Four Branches, Culhwch ac Olwen, the romances. Restated: fewer than three in ten of the distinct narrative allusions catalogued in the Triads survive as an extant tale, and the survivors skew heavily to the Mabinogion orbit. The triads are the index of a library that burned.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: across the distinct narrative and personal allusions catalogued in Bromwich's Trioedd Ynys Prydein (3rd ed., 2006), fewer than 30 percent will correspond to a story surviving as an extant medieval Welsh narrative, and among those that do survive a clear majority will belong to the small Mabinogion-adjacent prose corpus (the Four Branches, Culhwch ac Olwen, the three romances, Breuddwyd Rhonabwy) (primary clause: the sub-0.30 allusion-survival rate; the verdict follows it, with the Mabinogion skew as a secondary confirmation). An allusion counts as surviving only on an extant narrative telling its story, not on a bare recurrence of the name in genealogy or poetry. The test voids for coverage if fewer than sixty triads can be assessed.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Bromwich's Trioedd Ynys Prydein (3rd ed., University of Wales Press 2006), using her apparatus's identifications of which triadic allusions survive as narrative, scored against the extant medieval Welsh prose corpus (Rhyddiaith Gymraeg) - count the allusions with a surviving tale and their distribution across the corpus.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Bromwich's edition already contains the determination: her triad-by-triad notes identify which allusions answer to surviving narratives, her indexes catalogue the personal names, and her introduction states the conclusion - the triads index a native storytelling literature the greater part of which is lost, with the readable survivors clustering in the small extant prose corpus. Under the prediction's own scoring (an extant narrative telling the story, bare name-recurrence excluded) the sub-0.30 rate is guaranteed by that printed apparatus, and the Mabinogion-orbit skew of the survivors is equally her stated result. Only transcription of her identifications remains, so the primary clause is already in print.

• R. Bromwich (ed.), Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain, 3rd ed. (Cardiff, 2006), introduction, notes and indexes
• R. Bromwich, 'The Welsh Triads', in R.S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.