Helped by his brother, Amaethon, god of agriculture, and his son, Lleu, he fought the Battle of Godeu, or “the Trees”, an exploit which is not the least curious of Celtic myths. It is known also as the Battle of Achren, or Ochren, a name for Hades of unknown meaning, but appearing again in the remarkable Welsh poem which describes the “Spoiling of Annwn” by Arthur. The King of Achren was Arawn; and he was helped by Brân, who apparently had not then made his fatal journey to Ireland. The war was made to secure three boons for man—the dog, the deer, and the lapwing, all of them creatures for some reason sacred to the gods of the nether world. Gwydion was this time not alone, as he apparently was when he made his first unfortunate reconnaissance of Hades. Besides his brother and his son, he had an army which he raised for the purpose. For a leader of Gwydion’s magical attainments there was no need of standing troops. He could call battalions into being with a charm, and dismiss them when they were no longer needed. The name of the battle shows what he did on this occasion; and the bard Taliesin adds his testimony: “I have been in the battle of Godeu, with Lleu and Gwydion, They changed the forms of the elementary trees and sedges”. In a poem devoted to it[350] he describes in detail what happened. The trees and grasses, he tells us, hurried to the fight: the alders led the van, but the willows and the quickens came late, and the birch, though courageous, took long in arraying himself; the elm stood firm in the centre of the battle, and would not yield a foot; heaven and earth trembled before the advance of the oak-tree, that stout door-keeper against an enemy; the heroic holly and the hawthorn defended themselves with their spikes; the heather kept off the enemy on every side, and the broom was well to the front, but the fern was plundered, and the furze did not do well; the stout, lofty pine, the intruding pear-tree, the gloomy ash, the bashful chestnut-tree, the prosperous beech, the long-enduring poplar, the scarce plum-tree, the shelter-seeking privet and woodbine, the wild, foreign laburnum; “the bean, bearing in its shade an army of phantoms”; rose-bush, raspberry, ivy, cherry-tree, and medlar—all took their parts. In the ranks of Hades there were equally strange fighters. We are told of a hundred-headed beast, carrying a formidable battalion under the root of its tongue and another in the back of its head; there was a gaping black toad with a hundred claws; and a crested snake of many colours, within whose flesh a hundred souls were tormented for their sins—in fact, it would need a Doré or a Dante to do justice to this weird battle between the arrayed magics of heaven and hell.