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256 form part of an older and more complete account of the culture hero.

To return to the Welsh poem on the harrying of Hades, among the things which the spoilers found there was the cauldron of the Head of Hades; and we are told of it that it had a ridge of pearls round its brim, that voices issued from it, that it was kept boiling by the breath of nine maidens, and that it was a discriminating vessel, which would not cook food for a coward, a peculiarity to be compared with the knack of refusing to cook during the narration of an untrue story, which was supposed to characterize the food in the fairy palace of Manannán mac Lir. The invaders left the cauldron in the hands of one of their number, for it was in all probability the chief object of their incursion into the realm of Hades. All this would have been very puzzling had not Welsh literature preserved other references to the mysterious vessel. The Mabinogi of Branwen speaks of a cauldron which a giant called Llassar had brought up out of a lake in Ireland and given to Brân son of Llyr: one of its properties was, that a dead warrior thrown into it would be alive and well by the next morning, but unable to speak. This was a use it was put to in the war which Brân waged later in Ireland, and on account of this property which it was supposed to have, it is occasionally referred to as Pair Dadeni, or the Cauldron of Regeneration. Now the names both of Brân and Llassar connect the cauldron with Hades, and on Irish ground we meet with