Welsh Texts: Mabinogi Celtic Font for Medieval Manuscripts

Mabinogi Celtic Font
Font for accurately depicting Medieval Welsh Manuscripts.

All Medieval manuscripts were hand-wirtten as a result, there is considerable difference in the way the letters are represented in these works. However, as most scribes of the time were trained in the monasteries the letter forms tend to be similar. The Welsh language is also different in that there are additional letters as compared with English and these forms are represented. There are also accents and diacritical marks that are not found in English (and some are unique to the Middle Ages). All these letter forms and accents have been brought together into a single font that accurately represents Medieval Welsh manuscripts. That font is presented here, free and you need to download this font to be able to properly see the original versions of the texts presented on this site.



Synonyms:
Cym: Mabinogi Cetic, Medieval Welsh Font

Mabinogi Celtic font for Medieval Welsh Manuscripts



The five handwriting types found in the Llyfr Gwyn Rhyddech range from blackletter through half-uncial to almost Roman in style. I have taken the most roman of these scripts in style and generated a font that is somewhere half-way between the original and the font face used in J Gwenogvryn Evans' Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch. Wherever possible standards have been adhered to (essentially Unicode 4.1.0 and the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) standard that specifies the location of characters used in Medieval scripts not currently in Unicode. These standards have been slightly broken by the inclusion of the cursive capitals A-Z at poositions 2B90-2BB1 (Misc Symbols and Arrows) and by the inclusion of symbols that are defined in the MUFI standard but which are not currently assigned a unicode location. The font will threfore be updated when these character locations are fixed. However, as this may be some years away I have attempted to do the best I can in this latest version 2.1 of the font, released in June 2006. I've also fixed a problem found with Firefox where characters in the range E2A0 to E2C9 were not correctly displayed by moving these characters to new locations.

The font was originally generated some five years ago, but has now been extended to cover all Western European languages as well as all the symbols needed for Middle and Old Cymric. Ogham has also been added to the font to cover all insular Celtic writing forms. I've now added Greek letters to cover early Gaulish and I've added the Furthak Runic letters as well. In additon, the font has been extended with almost 250 special and unusual glyph characters to cover the altering handwriting forms between 1100 CE to 1600 CE which covers the texts of the Llyfr Gwyn, Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, Llyfr Taliesin and the Ystoria Taliesin. As a result this font will encode for all the original manuscripts writings forms presented on this website.

This font really is designed to display Medieval text in a close approximation of the handwriting styles of the original transcriber but slightly simplified to display better on a computer screen. As a result the font is very closely kerned with nany of the characters almost running into one another, as they do on the original manuscripts. Just about every character in the font has now been improved in terms of outline and kerned by hand. There may be a little tinkering in the future, but the font has now essentially reached its final form. However, because of the firefox display problems, if you previously downloaded the font you will now have to update to this new 2.1 versions. This is partly because of the 20-odd characters moved to new locations in the latest font and because of all the new characters in the font.

To show you an example of what the font looks like, the image below shows a poem from the Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch Mabinogi:

Rendering this into modern orthography gives:

Dar a dyf yn ardd vaes,
Nis gwlych glaw mwy tawdd. nawes
ugein angerdd a borthes
yn y blaen lleu llaw gyffes

Translated into English this gives:

An oak grows on a high plain,
Rain wets it not, though doth corruption seep
A score of crafts does it uphold
And at its crown Lleu of the Skilful Hand

The fragment above gives only a taste of the original, but even from this you can see that the early Medieval orthography was quite different from the modern. It does, however, contain all the glyphs needed to render modern Western European languages. It is not just intended for scholars, so why not use it to give some of your own documents a 'Mediaeval' feel?

Please note that this font represents several months' work. I'm not asking any money for it, however if you do use this font and find it useful I would be grateful if you would make a donation both to support further font development (I would like true bold and italic versions of the font) and to keep this website running.

 Download Macintosh TrueType here
  Download Windows TrueType here

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