Lloyd Alexander

Princess Eilonwy is the deuteragonist in Disney's 1985 feature film The Black Cauldron. Although she is, in fact, a princess by birth, she is not considered an official Disney Princess due to the film's lack of success and popularity at the box office.

The Horned King is a fictional character in Disney's animated feature The Black Cauldron.

Gurgi is a fictional character in The Chronicles of Prydain, the series of fantasy novels by Lloyd Alexander. Gurgi is the hero Taran's faithful companion, appearing in all five books. He is described as being some sort of cross between man and beast, having long arms, covered with fur and leaves,... and ever hungry but really "just a sort of a, kind of a thing". His manner of speech is filled with rhymed pairs of words , and redundant phrases ; he refers to himself in the third person. Gurgi is humble and loyal toward his human companions, at first submitting even to Taran as a "noble lord". Gurgi is one of the few characters to appear in all five books of the series, the others being Taran, Fflewddur, Dallben and Coll. In The Book of Three Taran first meets Gurgi in his quest to locate Hen-Wen, the Oracular Pig. At first Taran is disdainful of Gurgi, believing him to be more of a nuisance than anything else. By the end of the book he learns the value of true companionship.
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Fflewddur Fflam, son of Godo, is a cantrev lord in the fictional country of Prydain in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. He is referred to as a King, but it is made clear that he is a very minor king of a tiny kingdom at best, much less important than the High King who rules Prydain. His... kingdom is described as being dreary and dull. As a result, he often leaves it to go wandering as an unofficial bard. Though he returns from time to time to rule, he once mentions that he gets the feeling that the people of his country get along just fine even if he's not there. Fflewddur is described as a tall, thin man with spiky blonde hair, although in the Disney film The Black Cauldron he is depicted as a white-haired older man, semi-lanky, with a bit of a pot belly. The movie's Fflewddur has apparently been stripped of his royalty, or at least it never gets mentioned, and is the object of intense, disturbing attraction from the overweight enchantress Orwen. He is voiced by Nigel Hawthorne.
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The Mabinogion is the title given to a collection of eleven prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts. The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions. While some details may hark back to older Iron Age... traditions, each of these tales is the product of a highly developed medieval Welsh narrative tradition, both oral and written. Lady Charlotte Guest in the mid 19th century was the first to publish English translations of the collection, popularising the name "Mabinogion" at the same time. The name first appears in 1795 in William Owen Pughe's Cambrian Register: "The Mabinogion, or Juvenile Amusements, being Ancient Welsh Romances." It was then adopted as the title by the first English translator of the complete tales, Lady Charlotte Guest. The form mabynnogyon does indeed occur at the end of the first of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, but it is now generally agreed that this is a scribal error that was assumed to be the plural of the Welsh word mabinogi, which occurs correctly at the end of the remaining three branches.
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Welsh mythology is the mythology of the Welsh people. It consists partly of folk traditions developed in Wales, and partly of traditions developed by Britons elsewhere before the end of the first millennium. Some of this contains remnants of the mythology of pre-Christian Britain, surviving in much... altered form in medieval Welsh manuscripts such as the Red Book of Hergest, the White Book of Rhydderch, the Book of Aneirin, and the Book of Taliesin. The prose stories from the White and Red Books are known as the Mabinogion, a title given to them by their first translator, Lady Charlotte Guest, and also used by subsequent translators. Poems such as Cad Goddeu and mnemonic list-texts like the Welsh Triads and the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain, also contain mythological material. These texts also include the earliest forms of the Arthurian legend and the traditional history of post-Roman Britain.
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