The Four Branches of the Mabinogi or Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi are the earliest prose stories in the literature of Britain. Originally written in Wales in Middle Welsh, but widely available in translations, the Mabinogi is generally agreed to be a single work in four parts, or “Branches.” The interrelated tales can be read as mythology, political themes, romances, or magical fantasies. They appeal to a wide range of readers, from young children to the most sophisticated adult. The tales are popular today in book format, as storytelling or theatre performances; they appear in recordings and on film, and continue to inspire many reinterpretations in artwork and modern fiction.
(The Mabinogi needs to be disentangled from The Mabinogion which is the modern name for a larger collection of British / Welsh mediaeval tales. Published versions of The Mabinogion[1] typically include the Mabinogi. The name The Mabinogion first appears in print 1795,[2] based on a single medieval mistake, but the name then became firmly established in modern usage for the larger collection.)
“In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena‘s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid’s telling, Perseus describes Medusa’s punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well earned”.
The origin of my own story lies in my having read a description of the island where the Gorgon lived — Sarpedon. The island seems to have been conceived as being part of a chain. Another island in the group, “the Red Island”, was reputed to be the one along whose shores Odysseus sailed a generation later and where he encountered the Sirens (?).
In any case, this mythical chain of islands was, according to various ancient sources, located somewhere to the west of Gibraltar in what today we know as the Atlantic Sea. As indicated, the trope of the young Medusa and her rape by Poseidon can be be found in Metamorphoses. Despite the non-consensual nature of rape, Medusa and her sisters are punished by their transformation into monsters. It is of course ironic that the Sea God is actually the Uncle of the Goddess who metes out their punishment.
I have made a more sympathetic Perseus as it fits better into the piece, and allows for the oblique acknowledgement of the Gorgons’ super-power of turning their victims to stone. The Perseus of the original myth, as opposed to the somewhat young, sensitive one who inhabits my own narrative, would just as likely have dealt with the young Medusa in a fashion not dissimilar to the God. Something of his nature in this respect is reflected in his pursuit of Andromeda later in his mythic progression.
Some more material from Wikipedia on Perseus and Medusa:
Graves, Robert (1955). The Greek Myths. Penguin Books. pp. 17, 244. ISBN0241952743. “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a variant of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus’s mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Seal. Perseus’s name should properly be spelled Perseus, ‘the destroyer’; and he was not, as Professor Kerenyi has suggested, an archetypal Death-figure but, probably, represented the patriarchal Hellenes who invaded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium BC, and challenged the power of the Triple-goddess. Pegasus had been sacred to her because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the instalment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speed.
Jane Harrison has pointed out (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) that Medusa was once the goddess herself, hiding behind a prophylactic Gorgon mask: a hideous face intended to warn the profane against trespassing on her Mysteries. Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses—an early representation of the goddess with a Gorgon’s head and a mare’s body has been found in Boeotia. Bellerophon, Perseus’s double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another.”
The most interesting feature of Graves’ take on the myth is the rendering down of the story to an over-arching metaphor for the conquest and subjugation of the coastal Pelagasians (c.i.f ThucydidesThe Peloponnesian Wars for their actual historical existence) by the migratory tribes of the Achaeans and the Daanaids — literally the Mother worshippers vs. the Sky Horse clans. Given he is right in his analysis, any student of the myths as symbolic social history is left with a very particular problem: how is that Kore or Athena survived in her own city of that name, apparently untouched?
Finally, my young Medusa is really the tragic victim of my story. Perseus will be forced by his circumstance to receive from her a heart of stone, the last thing he probably wants as a life long burden to the end of his days. I would think it is also the last thing Medusa really wants to bequeath to him after his kindnesses on the beach. But such it seems is the legacy left to both of them by a bitter Kore.
The full text of the Wikipedia article on Medusa and her sisters can be found here and my full text of Sarpedon is here …
A “Gorgeion” – usually part of the architrave of buildings and temples – to ward off evil Spirits
“In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet 
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