Pair Dadeni

Somewhere in Ireland there is a lake with a mound at its head, and the name of the lake is the Lake of the Cauldron. Matholwch, king of that country, was hunting near it when a man came up out of the water with a cauldron on his back. He was yellow-haired, enormous, and ugly enough that the king still remembered his face years afterwards. Behind him walked his wife, who was twice his size.

The man was Llassar Llaes Gyfnewid and the woman was Cymidei Cymeinfoll, and they told the king their business without being asked. In a month and a fortnight she would bear a son, and the child would come out of her fully armed. Matholwch took them in and kept them for a year without complaint. By the fourth month they had begun to make themselves hated, harassing the nobles and the ladies, and the country came to its king and told him to choose between these guests and his kingdom.

What Ireland built for them was a chamber made entirely of iron. Every smith in the land came to raise it, and coals were heaped against the walls to the height of the roof. The family were served all the meat and drink they could hold, and when the word went round that they were drunk the fires were lit and the bellows opened. The iron went red and then white. Llassar waited inside that heat until the plates were pale, and then put his shoulder through the wall and walked out with his wife behind him. Nobody else in that chamber came out at all.

They crossed to Britain, where Bendigeidfran took them in and scattered their children through every part of his kingdom, and the giant gave him the cauldron. That is how a Welsh king came to own an Irish thing that nobody in Ireland wanted.

The cauldron leaves his hands over horses. Efnysien, half-brother to the king and constitutionally unable to leave a peace alone, mutilated Matholwch’s horses at Aberffraw the morning after the wedding, cutting their lips back to the teeth and their ears to the skull. Sound horses were promised in replacement, and a silver staff as tall as the injured king, and a gold plate the width of his face. Matholwch stayed glum through dinner anyway. So Bendigeidfran sweetened it: a cauldron with the property that a man of yours slain today, cast into it, will be as well tomorrow as ever he was at his best, except that he will not get his speech back. Matholwch thanked him warmly and took it home. Nowhere in the story does anyone call this a mistake, which is the closest the teller comes to a joke.

In Ireland the insult festered, and the men around Matholwch made him put Branwen out of his bed and into the kitchens, where the butcher came and struck her on the ear once a day. No ship was allowed to cross between the two islands, and it went on like that for three years. Then a starling she had reared in the cover of the kneading trough carried a letter across the sea, and Britain came to Ireland to fetch her back. Peace was patched together in a house built large enough to hold Bendigeidfran, who had never been indoors. Efnysien called Gwern, his small nephew and the newly made king of Ireland, over to him, and threw the boy head-first into the hearth fire. Everyone in the building went for their weapons at once.

Then the Irish knelt at the hearth and kindled a fire under the cauldron of rebirth. They carried in their dead and lowered them until the vessel would take no more, and in the grey of the next morning those men stood up and picked up their spears and were as good as they had been the day before, and not one of them said a word. That is the sound the second half of the Second Branch is written around: a battle in which one side keeps getting quieter and larger.

Efnysien watched his own dead stay dead. Whatever he was, he was not slow, and the arithmetic in front of him was simple. He lay down among the Irish corpses and let two bare-backed Irishmen find him there and carry him, taking him for one of their own. They dropped him in. Inside the cauldron he stretched himself out, pushing until the metal gave, and it burst into four pieces. His heart burst with it.

Seven men of Britain went home. Bendigeidfran was not one of them; he took a poisoned spear in the foot and had his head cut off at his own order. In Ireland five pregnant women in a cave were all that was left alive.

No source describes the cauldron. There is no rim of gold in the Welsh, no runework, no maker’s name beyond the giant who hauled it out of a lake. What the Welsh ground offers instead are the real ones. The cauldron dredged from Llyn Fawr in the Cynon Valley and now held by Amgueddfa Cymru is built from five tiers of copper-alloy sheet riveted together, its rim beaded over a heavier tubular core, its ring handles hung on straps cast to imitate plaited work. It stands about thirty-five centimetres high and half a metre across the rim, weighs a little over seven and a half kilos, and holds roughly fifty litres, enough stew for a hundred people. It was made to be slung over a fire in front of a crowd, and then it was carried out into a lake and sunk in the peat on purpose. Llassar came up out of the water carrying his; some Welshman carried one down.

The Pair Dadeni is not alone in Welsh writing either. Ceridwen’s cauldron brews inspiration and gives it to the wrong boy. The cauldron of the chief of Annwfn in *Preiddeu Annwn* has a dark rim set with pearls and will not boil a coward’s food, and of the men who sailed after it, except seven, none came back. Arthur takes a cauldron off the Irish giant Diwrnach in *Culhwch and Olwen*. The overlap is close enough that Sarah Higley, editing *Preiddeu Annwn*, reads the poem as the Branwen material given a new setting, with Arthur standing where Brân once stood, and suggests a single older story behind the whole set: a sea raid on a stronghold for a divine cauldron, with iron doors and an escape.

What the Pair Dadeni can do has no obvious ceiling. It does not run out, it does not care whose corpses go in, and it undoes the one thing war is supposed to settle. Its limits are all practical and all fatal. It needs a fire under it and a body in it, so it cannot save a man from drowning or from a fall at sea. It gives back the fighting and keeps the voice, so an army rebuilt from it can never be asked what it saw or told anything new. And because it is only a vessel with a mouth wide enough for a man, a living man can get inside it and open it out until it splits. It took a Welshman who had caused the whole war to work that out, and it cost him his heart to prove it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Pair Dadeni?

The Pair Dadeni is a cauldron from Welsh mythology that brings the dead back to life. It appears in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, the tale of Branwen daughter of Llŷr, where a corpse placed in it rises the next morning able to fight as well as ever but unable to speak.

What does the Cauldron of Rebirth do to the dead?

It restores them physically and completely, with one loss. Bendigeidfran states the terms plainly when he gives it away: a man slain today and cast in will be as well tomorrow as he ever was at his best, except that he will not regain his speech. The warriors the Irish revive with it fight exactly as they did before and never say another word.

Where did the Pair Dadeni come from?

It came out of an Irish lake called the Lake of the Cauldron, carried on the back of the giant Llassar Llaes Gyfnewid, who emerged from the water with his wife Cymidei Cymeinfoll. After the Irish tried to burn the couple alive in a red-hot iron house and failed, they fled to Britain, and Llassar gave the cauldron to Bendigeidfran. He later handed it to Matholwch, king of Ireland, as part of the compensation for an insult.

How was the Pair Dadeni destroyed?

Efnysien destroyed it from the inside. Seeing the Irish revive their dead while the Britons stayed dead, he hid among the Irish corpses until two Irishmen mistook him for one of their own and threw him into the cauldron, then stretched himself out inside until it broke into four pieces. The effort burst his heart, and he died with it.

Which story is the Pair Dadeni from?

It belongs to Branwen ferch Llŷr, the Second Branch of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, preserved in the fourteenth-century White Book of Rhydderch and Red Book of Hergest. The cauldron drives the second half of that tale, in which a war between Britain and Ireland leaves only seven Britons and five Irishwomen alive.

Related Entries

Bendigeidfran, Branwen, Pryderi, Taliesin, Cauldron of Ceridwen, Dyrnwyn, Pwyll, Rhiannon, Arawn, Gwydion, Math Fab Mathonwy, Cauldron of the Dagda (Coire Ansic), Dagda, Nuada