Two Celtic bloodlines: Mabinogi's myth, and Dark Souls

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

If you have played Dark Souls, you already know how to read Mabinogi. That is the strange part, because the two games have nothing in common on the surface.

One of them is a Korean online game from 2004 where you can spend an entire evening playing a lute in a town square, weaving cloth, and never drawing a weapon. The other kills you in a corridor. And yet people who have played both keep saying the same thing, and have been saying it for years: Mabinogi feels like Dark Souls. Not the combat — nobody means the combat. They mean the other thing. The story is never told to you directly, and you can feel it buried under the floor. A quest book, a place name, half a sentence an NPC drops and never explains. You put the pieces together and realise you have been standing on the graveyard of a war that ended ten thousand years ago.

This article answers the question in two halves. The first half is checkable: whose mythology Mabinogi actually borrowed, how, and the one place it deliberately wrote the story backwards. The second half is not checkable but is worth taking seriously: which parts of the Dark Souls resemblance are real shared ancestry, and which parts are us. Guessing out loud is allowed. Guessing without grounds is not.

First, separate the two bloodlines: Wales gave the name, Ireland gave the war

This site has already read the four branches of the Welsh Mabinogion end to end. Pwyll and Rhiannon; Branwen married away to Ireland; the mouse that was nearly hanged; two brothers turned into deer, boar and wolves. The verdict was clear: the game took the title and not one line of the stories. No need to repeat it here.

What is worth adding is something that piece had no room for: borrowing a name without the story is the norm in Celtic adaptation, not a shortcut Mabinogi invented. Wales and Ireland are two languages, two manuscript traditions, two temperaments. The Welsh Mabinogion is court prose about inheritance, marriage, curses and restoration; war is scenery and the protagonist is a family. The Irish Mythological Cycle — the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions) and Cath Maige Tuired (The Battle of Mag Tuired) — is about wave after wave of people crossing the sea and putting down whoever lived there before. Six invasions, and the protagonist is a race.

Put both books on the desk in front of someone building an online game about a divine people fighting otherworldly monsters. Which one do they pick?

devCAT picked Ireland, and picked it thoroughly.

The Irish side: six invasions, two battles, one name moved out of order

The Book of Invasions, in a paragraph: Ireland is occupied by six peoples in turn — Cessair’s folk before the flood, then Partholón’s, then Nemed’s, then the Fir Bolg, then the Tuatha Dé Danann, and finally the Milesians. Every wave has to fight the wave before it, and every wave also has to fight the thing that never really left: the Fomorians. The Fomorians are not one of the six. They are the sea-side, mist-side, under-the-island natives, and each new generation of arrivals gets its turn with them.

The two battles of Mag Tuired are the Tuatha Dé Danann’s share of that bill. In the first, against the Fir Bolg, they win — but their king Nuada loses an arm, and by the law of that people a maimed man cannot rule. The crown passes to Bres, who is half Fomorian, and Bres works the gods like slaves. The second battle is fought to throw Bres out. The Fomorians come with Balor of the great eye, who kills whatever that eye looks at; his own grandson Lugh, the god skilled in every craft, drives a sling-stone through the eye and out the back of the skull, and the poisoned gaze turns and burns the Fomorian army instead.

That is where the words “Battle of Mag Tuired” in the game come from. As this site’s place-name research established, Sen Mag Plains is the ancient battlefield the official material names outright.

Cichol Gricenchos is in that book too, and his position is the interesting part. He is not Balor’s successor — he comes long before Balor, a Fomorian leader whom Partholón’s people fought in what the text records as the first battle ever fought on Irish soil. PC Mabinogi writes him as “the Fomorian king after Balor”. The chronology is inverted end to end.

That is not an error, it is adaptation. devCAT needed a Fomorian leader who was still alive after Balor and could stand opposite Morrighan for twenty years of story, so they took the oldest name on the list and moved it to the end. That is the hand of someone using a mythology, not merely quoting one.

On the goddesses, this site’s Morrighan piece goes into detail: the Morrígan, Macha and Badb as a triad, with Nemain sometimes counted in and sometimes not — the sources themselves never settled it. One line to add. In the real myth, Morrighan fights at the second Mag Tuired on the side of the Tuatha Dé Danann, with prophecy and terror, a battlefield goddess who is genuinely frightening. The game keeps her direction and sands her down: the guardian who spends the last of her strength sealing the Fomorians away and turns to stone doing it. A bloody war-goddess became a gentle one who speaks to you in dreams. Long-time players know that gentleness gets turned over again later. Another article’s job.

The cut devCAT made: the invaders become the heroes

This is the part worth stopping on, and the question here is not what but why.

The last chapter of the real myth: the Milesians cross from Iberia, negotiate with the Tuatha Dé Danann, fight them, and win. The defeated gods withdraw under the hills, under the lakes, into the mist, and become the fairy people, the Aos Sí. The Milesians take the surface and become the ancestors of the Gaels — the ancestry the Irish claim today. In the sources, then, the Milesians are the conquerors: they are the people who drove the gods underground.

In Mabinogi, the player is a Milletian. You arrive in Erinn from another world; the Tuatha Dé Danann treat you as a saviour, the Fomorians as an enemy, the goddess as hope. devCAT gave you the conqueror’s name and left the conqueror’s script out.

Two readings have circulated for years. One says the name simply sounded right — “Milesian, the people who came from over the sea” fitted “the player, a stranger logging in from the real world”, and nobody thought any harder about it. The other reads deeper: devCAT knew the Milesians were conquerors and deliberately left the shadow in. The evidence offered is what happens later in the PC storyline, where the fact that a Milletian cannot truly die and can always begin again is treated by the characters as something foreign to this world. An immortal outsider, to a mortal world, is either a saviour or a slower kind of invasion. On this reading devCAT simply swapped the myth’s conquest for a gentler, longer version: not arriving with a sword, but moving in — until this world’s gods start depending on you.

Nobody has settled it, and devCAT has never said. This article leans to the second reading, and the reason is taste, not proof: a design that hands the player a conqueror’s name and never explains it fits the next twenty years of this game better than a design that did not think about it. That is a guess, and it is labelled one.

This table's 12 rows were verified 2026-09-02. "✓ Confirmed" means the game's own text or on-screen content directly names this entity; "✕ Confirmed absent" means a specific channel was checked and came up empty (a stronger claim than silence); "－ No data" means this site's research didn't find it, which is not the same as the game not having it. Full sourcing for each row lives in the article prose and the dataset itself.

Dark Souls: rule out the impossible first

Now the second half.

Start with the calendar, because the calendar deletes half the speculation on its own. PC Mabinogi launched in Korea in 2004. Demon’s Souls is 2009; Dark Souls is 2011. Mabinogi cannot have been influenced by Dark Souls. No interview required. Going the other way — has anyone at FromSoftware played Mabinogi? — the public record of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s interviews gives you Berserk, Arthurian legend, and English fantasy novels he could not fully read as a child. Not one mention of a Korean online game. So: there is no traceable design lineage in either direction. Anyone telling you Mabinogi is Dark Souls’ ancestor, or that Dark Souls lifted Mabinogi’s setting, is offering the least grounded guess in circulation.

With that cleared away, what remains is the genuinely interesting part — because the resemblance is real, it is just located somewhere else.

Where they match: the same soil, two different trees

One: both borrowed from Wales, but from different parts of the book. Mabinogi took the title. Dark Souls took the naming. Gwyn, Lord of Cinder — Welsh gwyn means white, holy, blessed, and Welsh myth has an otherworld king called Gwyn ap Nudd who hunts the souls of the dead with his hounds. His daughter Gwynevere is Guinevere in Welsh spelling. His son Gwyndolin carries the same root. Artorias the Abysswalker is one Latinised form of Arthur. Which produces a genuinely odd result: Mabinogi took the Mabinogion’s cover, and Dark Souls took its onomastics. Two games walked off with half of the same Welsh book each — one the title, one the method of naming. This part is checkable, not a guess.

Two: in both games the story lives in fragments rather than cutscenes. This is the resemblance people actually mean, it is real, and it can be shown. The thickest slab of Mabinogi’s setting is the G1 quest books — physical books you pick up at a tavern counter and read yourself — plus place names (Sen Mag is an ancient battlefield; the Dragon Ruins have an actual dragon in them) plus half-sentences NPCs never explain (Kristell referring to “what she used to be”, Tarlach living as a bear in the snow). Dark Souls does the same job through item descriptions: three lines on a ring, the provenance of a set of armour, whose sword this was and why it is lying here. Both write a thin main line and a thick world, and hand the reading to you. The difference is temperament: Mabinogi’s fragments are warm enough to make you sad about one NPC for twenty years (see Kristell and Tarlach); Dark Souls’ fragments are cold, and make you sad about someone you never once saw alive.

Three: both put a goddess at the door, and both goddesses are lying to you. Label this one clearly — it is a player reading, not a documented correspondence. Mabinogi opens with Morrighan speaking to the Milletian in a dream: gentle, sorrowful, asking you to save this world. The later PC storyline turns that gentleness over, and the community argued about it for years. Dark Souls opens with Gwynevere on her throne in Anor Londo speaking to the undead: equally gentle, equally asking you to inherit the fire, and equally revealed later as an illusion — a shell held up by her brother Gwyndolin. Players on both sides went through the same experience: the goddess you believed was a face this world showed you so you would go and do something. No developer on either side has ever said this. It is simply too neat to leave out.

Four: both worlds rest on the bones of a dragon from the previous age. The Dragon Ruins on Gairech Hill hold a full skeleton, and PC Mabinogi’s G1 builds an entire sequence around it (that story belongs to Bangor and its dragon). Dark Souls begins in the Age of Ancient Dragons — no fire, only grey and stone and everlasting dragons, until Gwyn and the gods overturned it. Neither game’s dragons are today’s enemy. They are the thing the current world was built on top of. This is another guess by this article, marked as such. But if you have just walked past that skeleton on the hill, carrying this reading back to it makes it colder.

Where they do not match: this part matters more

It is easy to write a comparison that only lists the matches. That is the worst kind of guessing — collecting the evidence that fits. So here is the honest other column.

Dark Souls’ Celtic content is thin. Its real lineage is Arthurian legend plus Norse myth plus Berserk. The Welsh names in Gwyn’s family are borrowing at the level of onomastics; the story’s skeleton — the succession of fire, the curse of undeath, a twilight of the gods — does not line up with any Irish or Welsh source. Mabinogi is the reverse. Its names are the surface and its skeleton is genuinely Irish: the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Fomorians, Mag Tuired, three sister goddesses. Not decoration — load-bearing walls holding up the main storyline. One game borrowed a skin, the other borrowed bones.

Second: Mabinogi’s world recovers. Tarlach can turn back from a bear into a man; Kristell can go from succubus to nun; Morrighan can walk back out of the stone. Dark Souls’ world only goes down. The fire only gets smaller, and every bonfire you light extends an age that should already have ended. That single difference outweighs all four resemblances combined. Mabinogi’s sadness is the thing that never got said. Dark Souls’ sadness is saying it would not have helped.

Third, and simplest: Mabinogi has people playing instruments in the town square, and Dark Souls does not. You can spend an afternoon in Mabinogi killing nothing at all — farming, fishing, playing a lute — while the mythology lies quietly behind you. Dark Souls does not let you ignore it.

What devCAT actually said

The early interviews with Kim Dong-gun about Mabinogi have been collected many times, and only two phrases keep coming back. One is “fantasy life” — not a game about killing things, a game about living in a fantasy world. The other is that Celtic myth was chosen because it had not been worn out in games yet. That is all. No Dark Souls (chronologically impossible anyway), and no manifesto about burying story in fragments. devCAT never sold fragment storytelling as a feature. They simply built it — possibly because in 2004 the cutscene budget of an online game stretched about as far as letting you read the quest book yourself.

So the final placement of the whole Dark Souls section is: a player reading. What you see when you have played both and look at one through the other’s eyes. It is not false — the Welsh names, the story in fragments, the goddess at the door, the dragon of the previous age, all four check out if you go and look — but players assembled it; developers did not plant it. This article will not blur that line, because once it is blurred all that is left is “Mabinogi is kind of like Dark Souls”, which says nothing.

If Dark Souls is your door in

One practical note, since this is probably why you are here. If you come to Mabinogi from Dark Souls expecting the same reading experience, the honest guidance is: the fragments are there, but they are gentler and further apart, and most of them are optional. Nobody stops you at the door of Bangor and tells you a dragon is buried on the hill you just crossed. Nobody explains that the plain north of that town is the field where a goddess turned to stone. You walk past both, several times, and the game lets you. The digging is real, but it is voluntary in a way Dark Souls’ never is — and the payoff is warmer than you will be expecting. In Dark Souls the buried thing is usually a horror. Here it is usually a person.

What we conclude

Mabinogi has two Celtic bloodlines. The Welsh one gave it a title; the Irish one gave it the skeleton of an entire world. Then devCAT made a single deep cut in that skeleton: the myth’s conquerors, the Milesians, became the player, and the oldest name on the Fomorian list, Cichol, was moved to the end to stand opposite Morrighan. All of that is checkable.

The Dark Souls line has no verifiable ancestry and a very verifiable shared soil: two games took half of the same Welsh book each, one the cover and one the naming; both bury their story in fragments; both put a goddess at the door who turns out to have another face; both worlds lie on the bones of a dragon. Those four line up. They are also a player’s reading, and neither devCAT nor FromSoftware has ever claimed them. It is written down here because a careful guess is worth a great deal more than “they just feel similar”.

Next time you stand in front of the Dragon Ruins, pick which pair of eyes to use. Either is fine.