Branwen daughter of Llŷr

At a Glance

• Central figures: Branwen daughter of Llŷr, sister of Brân the Blessed (Bendigeidfran), king of the Island of the Mighty; Matholwch, king of Ireland; and Efnysien, Branwen’s half-brother, whose spite begins and ends the destruction.
• Setting: Wales and Ireland, moving between the court at Harlech, the shores of Aber Alaw in Anglesey, and the feasting halls of the Irish king; from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi.
• The turn: Efnysien, uninvited to the match, mutilates the Irish king’s horses, and the insult sets in motion a chain of humiliation, war, and ruin that no gift can undo.
• The outcome: Ireland is emptied. Only seven men return to Britain with Brân’s severed head. Branwen dies of grief on the shore of Anglesey, and the Island of the Mighty is left leaderless.
• The legacy: Brân’s head, buried facing east beneath the White Hill in London, was said to ward Britain against invasion for as long as it remained there.

Brân the Blessed was so large that no house could hold him and no ship could carry him. He sat on a rock at Harlech, looking out at the sea, when thirteen ships came sailing from Ireland with their prows bright and their shields turned peace-side-out. Matholwch, king of Ireland, had come to ask for Branwen.

She was Brân’s sister, daughter of Llŷr, and men said she was one of the three chief maidens of the island. The match was agreed. They feasted that night on the shore at Aber Menai, for there was no hall that could seat Brân, and the fires burned in the open air between the sea and the mountains.

The Horses

Efnysien, half-brother to Branwen and Brân through their mother, had not been asked. No one had consulted him about the marriage. He arrived at the camp and saw the Irish horses stabled in the field, and he asked whose they were.

They told him: Matholwch’s horses, the Irish king who had come for Branwen.

Efnysien went among the horses and cut their lips to the teeth, their ears to the skull, their tails to the bone. He did it methodically, stall by stall, until every horse was ruined.

Matholwch found his animals at dawn. He said nothing to Brân directly but made to leave, his men loading the ships in cold silence. Brân sent messengers after him: the insult was not his doing, and he would make it right. He offered a sound horse for every one maimed, a rod of silver as tall as Matholwch himself, a plate of gold as wide as his face. And then, because nothing seemed enough, he offered the cauldron.

The Cauldron of Rebirth

It was a thing Brân had, a great iron cauldron. A dead man placed inside it would rise the next morning, whole and walking, though he would never speak again. The Irish took it. Matholwch accepted the gifts. The marriage held.

Branwen crossed the sea to Ireland. For a time things were well. She bore a son, Gwern, and the boy was fostered among the best households of the Irish. But the men of Ireland had not forgotten the horses. They brooded. They talked. In the third year they came to Matholwch and told him the insult had never been answered properly, and he was shamed for tolerating it.

The Kitchen

They drove Branwen from the queen’s chamber and put her to work in the kitchen. Every day the butcher, after cutting the meat, came and struck her across the face with his bloody hands. They forbade all ships and all travelers from crossing to Wales, so that Brân would never hear of it.

Three years she spent in that kitchen. She caught a starling and taught it to speak, tied a letter beneath its wing, and sent it across the water. The bird found Brân at Caer Seiont. He read the letter.

He assembled every fighting man in the Island of the Mighty. He waded across the Irish Sea - the water came only to his waist - and his fleet sailed beside him. The Irish saw something on the horizon they could not understand: a forest moving across the water, and beside the forest a mountain with two lakes on its ridge. Branwen, asked what it was, told them: the forest was the masts of the British fleet, the mountain was her brother, and the two lakes were his eyes.

The House That Could Hold Brân

The Irish retreated behind the Shannon and broke the bridge. Brân lay down across the river and his men walked over his body to the other side. Then the Irish offered peace. They would build a house large enough to hold Brân - no such house had ever been built - and inside it they would give the kingship of Ireland to Gwern, Branwen’s son.

Brân agreed. The house was built. But the Irish hung a hundred leather bags from the pillars, and inside each bag was an armed man.

Efnysien came in before the feast. He walked along the walls, feeling the bags.

What is in this bag? he asked.

Flour, they told him.

He reached inside and found a man’s head and crushed it between his fingers. He went to the next bag. Flour, they said again. He crushed that head too. He went down every pillar, a hundred bags, a hundred skulls, and did not stop until all of them were dead.

The Fire and the Cauldron

The feast began. Young Gwern walked among the guests. Efnysien called the boy to him, and before anyone could move, he threw the child into the fire.

Branwen tried to leap after her son. Brân held her back with one hand and held his shield over her with the other, and then the killing started.

The Irish had the cauldron. Their dead rose from it and fought again, silent, relentless, filling the hall with men who could not be killed twice. The British were falling. Efnysien saw what was happening. He lay down among the Irish dead, and when they threw him into the cauldron he stretched himself inside it until the iron cracked into four pieces. His heart broke with the effort.

Without the cauldron the Irish died and stayed dead. But the slaughter had already gone too far. Of all the men Brân brought to Ireland, seven survived. Brân himself took a poisoned spear through the foot, and the wound would not close.

Aber Alaw

He told the seven to cut off his head and carry it home. He told them it would remain alive and speak to them, and they could feast with it for eighty years at Harlech and at Gwales before they buried it under the White Hill in London, facing France, to guard against invasion.

The seven took the head and crossed back to Wales. Branwen came with them. They landed on the shore at Aber Alaw in Anglesey, and Branwen sat down on a stone and looked back across the water toward Ireland.

She thought of the two islands. Both ruined. Because of her, she said. She drew a sharp breath, and her heart broke, and she died there on the bank of the Alaw. They buried her in a four-sided grave on the riverbank.

The seven carried Brân’s head south. It talked and laughed and was good company, and they feasted with it at Harlech for seven years and at Gwales in Pembroke for eighty more, and the head never decayed and the years passed like a single evening. Then someone opened a door that faced Cornwall, and all the grief they had forgotten came flooding back at once, and they could not rest until they had buried the head beneath the White Hill.

Two islands emptied. A grave on the Alaw. A head under a hill, facing east. That was what remained.