RESEARCH ARTICLE The (Pregnant) Mouse Freed from the Gallows: A Ballad Parallel for the Conclusion of Manawydan fab Ll ŷ r Thomas D. Hill & Kristen Mills Abstract In the concluding episode of the Third Branch of the Mabinogi, the Welsh nobleman Manawydan takes the (pregnant) mouse that he has captured to the magically significant site Gorsedd Arberth and prepares to hang her for theft, according to the law. As he prepares the gallows, various figures attempt to intervene until finally a ‘bishop’ redeems his transformed wife by disenchanting the land, freeing Manawydan’s companions, and swearing not to take vengeance. We argue that this scene is strikingly similar to the famous ballad widely attested all over Europe, ‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows’, a parallel which not only illuminates this episode in the Mabinogi, but also suggests how the Welsh storyteller used traditional material in shaping these narratives. Introduction Some years ago in a review of Tom Peete Cross’s Motif Index of Early Irish Literature, Kenneth H. Jackson wrote that folklorists sometimes seem unaware of medieval Celtic instances of motifs and ‘international popular tales’ that antedate many better known folkloric texts—Including both ballads and folktales—by centuries. 1 In his book The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition Jackson illustrates this claim by pointing out a number of folkloric analogues to such medieval Welsh texts as Culhwch and Olwen and the tales that make up ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’ (Jackson 1961). 2 This line of research was later codified by Andrew Welsh who catalogued the traditional motifs in the Four Branches (Welsh 1988), and it is fair to say that in recent decades folkloristic and Celtic scholarship have become more fully integrated. For example, in an article that closely parallels our interests, Sarah Larratt Keefer elucidated some puzzling details in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi by means of comparison with the Scots ballad, ‘The Great Selkie of Skule Skerry’. Her paper was well received and indeed anthologized in a Garland casebook (Keefer 1989, 1996). In this article we would like to follow out this line of