So, the very next day, Teirnyon set out for Narberth, taking the boy with him. They found Rhiannon sitting, as usual, by the gate, but they would not allow her to carry them into the palace on her back. Pwyll welcomed them; and that evening, as they sat at supper, Teirnyon told his hosts the story from beginning to end. And he presented her son to Rhiannon. As soon as everyone in the palace saw the boy, they admitted that he must be Pwyll’s son. So they adopted him with delight; and Pendaran Dyfed, the head druid of the kingdom, gave him a new name. He called him “Pryderi[335]”, meaning “trouble”, from the first word that his mother had uttered when he was restored to her. For she had said: “_Trouble_ is, indeed, at an end for me, if this be true”. ----- Footnote 330: Rhys: _Studies in the Arthurian Legend_, p. 282. Footnote 331: It is constantly so-called by the fourteenth-century Welsh poet, Dafydd ab Gwilym, so much admired by George Borrow. Footnote 332: This chapter is retold from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogi of _Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed_. Footnote 333: Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 678. Footnote 334: Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 123 and note. Clûd was probably the goddess of the River Clyde. See Rhys: _Arthurian Legend_, p. 294. Footnote 335: Pronounced _Pridaíry_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVIII THE WOOING OF BRANWEN AND THE BEHEADING OF BRÂN[336] In the second of the “Four Branches”, Pryderi, come to man’s estate, and married to a wife called Kicva, appears as a guest or vassal at the court of a greater god of Hades than himself—Brân, the son of the sea-god Llyr. The children of Llyr—Brân, with his sister Branwen of the “Fair Bosom” and his half-brother Manawyddan, as well as two sons of Manawyddan’s mother, Penardun, by an earlier marriage, were holding court at _Twr Branwen_, “Branwen’s Tower”, now called Harlech. As they sat on a cliff, looking over the sea, they saw thirteen ships coming from Ireland. The fleet sailed close under the land, and Brân sent messengers to ask who they were, and why they had come. It was replied that they were the vessels of Matholwch, King of Ireland, and that he had come to ask Brân for his sister Branwen in marriage. Brân consented, and they fixed upon Aberffraw, in Anglesey, as the place at which to hold the wedding feast. Matholwch and his fleet went there by sea, and Brân and his host by land. When they arrived, and met, they set up pavilions; for “no house could ever hold the blessed Brân”. And there Branwen became the King of Ireland’s bride.[337]