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The Dreams of Max & Ronnie

This is a re-writing, or re-imagining, of two tales from The Mabinogion, as part of Seren’s Mabinogion series. Griffiths studied the two tales on which he focused – The Dream of Maxen Wledig and the satire Rhonabwy’s Dream – in Sioned Davies’s translation (Oxford Classics, 2007). Commentaries on the first are very few, given its obscurity, but of great help in the appreciation of both was an unpublished essay by and conversations with the travel writer Jim Perrin. Griffiths also consulted such sources as Rachel Bromwich’s edition, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (3rd edn, 2006), Angela J. Carson’s essay, ‘The Structure and Meaning of the Dream of Rhonabwy’ (Philological Quarterly 53:2, Apr. 1971), and Will Parker’s website mabinogion.info. The ‘Dreams’ are war stories, of a sort, and Griffiths’s updating of them prompted extensive reading into the Iraq war and the Blair government's manipulation of the media as regards to that, as well as the commensurate notion of celebrity culture, research which fed directly into his next novel, A Great Big Shining Star. Much of this research, in relation to the Dreams, centred on newspaper commentaries and related journalism in the period comprising the run-up to the Iraq war and onwards (from 2003 until the Dreams were written) by such figures as John Pilger, Christopher Hitchens, and David Aaronovitch; both pro- and anti-war stances.