Am I being too clever? The lady in the tale was Blodeuwedd, or flower-face, the husband Llew, and the other man Gronw Pebyr. What I really admired about the book was the way that Garner made the story not so centred on Llew, so that the feelings of Blodeuwedd were considered, whereas in the myth, she is made for Llew, has no purpose aside from Llew, and her betrayal is as if a piece of property stole itself.

As to taking liberties, I always feel that the original is still there, and cannot be changed by new work on the theme, which, if it is no good, will wither and be lost. (I'm not so hopeful about Disneyfication of new works.) There's something in Tolkein about the stew of fairy tales, from which each person takes a different mixture. Different readers, and writers, have different visions of the old tales, and when they were told as oral works, different emphases would have arisen in different places with different audiences. So long as it is clear that that is what is being done, and that the writer doesn't intend the work to become the definitive version, so long as the reader can come from that version to the source, what is wrong with it?

On the other hand, I have a gut feeling that there are boundaries defining what ought and ought not to be done. For instance, if someone claims to be retelling "Homer's Odyssey" they should not change the character of Odysseus to fit that of Virgil's Ulysses, or change the end so that Odysseus never gets home. Or is killed by the suitors, or rejected by his wife. If they are telling the story without attribution to Homer, then there is a little more freedom, because there is ancient ground for that, and anyway, the guy is dead. By and large, I feel that the spirit of something should be observed, especially as that is what made the story perpetuate itself in the first place.

Did anyone see the TV film of "Merlin" over Easter? Morgan le Fay should sue!