Matholwch

The Thirteen Ships at Harlech

Bendigeidfran — Brân the Blessed, crowned king of Britain — was seated on the rock of Harlech above the sea, with his brother Manawydan and his half-brothers Nisien and Efnisien, when they saw thirteen ships coming from the south of Ireland, fair and swift, their shields above their gunwales. It was Matholwch, king of Ireland, come to ask for Branwen, Brân's sister, fairest maiden in the world, so that Ireland and the Island of the Mighty might be joined by marriage and grow stronger together. Brân consented, and the wedding was held at Aberffraw — and because no house had ever been built that could contain Brân, they slept in tents.

The Maiming of the Horses

Efnisien, the half-brother whose gift was quarreling, had not been consulted, and he took the omission as an insult to his honor. Coming on Matholwch's horses stabled apart, he asked whose they were, and hearing, he fell on them in a rage: he cut their lips back to the teeth, their ears back to their heads, their tails to the skin, and their eyelids back to the bone. Matholwch's men could make no sense of it — a king given a bride and mutilated horses in the same week. They armed for home in silence, which Brân read rightly as the beginning of a war.

Brân sent an embassy led by Manawydan to ask what recompense would content him. Matholwch was offered the full replacement of the horses, a silver staff as tall as himself, a golden platter as broad as his face — and, beyond all price, the Cauldron of Rebirth. The tale is exact about the transaction: the honor-price was paid, the peace was sworn, and neither was ever real again.

The Cauldron of Rebirth

Matholwch asked where such a cauldron had come from, and Brân told him: it had come to him out of Ireland itself. A man named Llassar Llaes Gyfnewid and his wife Cymidei Cymeinfoll — a woman who gave birth to a fully armed warrior every six weeks — had fled the Irish king's plot to burn them alive in a white-hot iron house, and had brought the cauldron with them to Wales. Its property was this: cast a slain warrior into it at evening, and by morning he rises as fighting-fit as before, except that he never again has the power of speech.

So the cauldron returned to Ireland as a wedding-gift of reconciliation — a thing that cancels death but keeps its silence, given to heal an insult that would not stay healed. The irony is the tale's own: the Irish fought their last battle with it, feeding their slain back into the war, until it was destroyed from within.

The Starling and the Crossing of the Sea

Matholwch sailed home with his bride, and Ireland welcomed her; gifts were given, and in due time she bore a son, Gwern. But the insult of the horses would not lie down. Matholwch's nobles nursed the grudge until they drove their king to atone for it: Branwen was put out of the chamber and into the kitchen, and the butcher came every day and struck her a blow on the ear. All passage to Wales was stopped, so that no word could reach her brother.

Branwen reared a starling at the edge of the kneading-trough, taught it speech, tied her letter beneath its wing, and sent it across the sea. The bird found Brân at Caer Seint in Arfon and settled on his shoulder. What followed is the great set-piece of the branch: the crowned king of Britain crossed the sea at the head of his host — wading, for no ship could hold him — and when the Irish destroyed the bridges and his men asked his counsel, he answered with the sentence Welsh has never let go: 'A fo ben, bid bont' — he who would be a leader, let him be a bridge — and lay down across the river so the host could pass over him.

The Hundred Pillars and the End of the Cauldron

The Irish sued for peace on their knees: they would give the kingship of Ireland to Gwern, Matholwch's son by Branwen, and build Brân a house — the first ever made that could hold him. The house was raised with a hundred pillars, and on every pillar a bag, and in every bag an armed man. Efnisien came in first to inspect the peace, asked what was in the bags — 'Flour,' they said — and crushed each head between his fingers, one by one, until he felt the bone give.

At the feast the boy Gwern was passed lovingly from lap to lap until he came to Efnisien's, and Efnisien rose and cast him into the fire. Branwen would have leapt after her son; Brân held her with one hand and took up his shield with the other. Then came the battle the whole tale had been marching toward. The Irish threw their slain into the Cauldron of Rebirth and sent them back each morning, mute and fighting — until Efnisien, in the act that pays for all the rest, lay down among the Irish dead as if slain, was cast into the cauldron with the corpses, and stretched himself out inside it until the cauldron burst in pieces and his own heart burst with it. Of the Irish there escaped only five pregnant women, from whom the five provinces of Ireland were repeopled; of the Welsh host, seven men — Pryderi, Manawydan, Glifieu, Taliesin, Ynawg, Grudyeu, and Heilyn — and Brân, dying of a poisoned spear in the foot, who bade them cut off his head and carry it home. Branwen died of a broken heart on the bank of the Alaw, crying that two good islands had been laid waste because of her. Of Matholwch himself the tale says nothing more: he is not given a death-scene, only swallowed in the general ruin of his kingdom.