Note (return) — Chapter VI
Reading edition
Branwen, "White Bosom," daughter of a sea-god, may be a sea-goddess, "Venus of the northern sea,"359 unless with Mr. Nutt we connect her with the cauldron described in her legend,360 symbol of an orgiastic cult, and regard her as a goddess of fertility. But the connection is not clear in the story, though in some earlier myth the cauldron may have been her property. As Brangwaine, she reappears in romance, giving a love-potion to Tristram—perhaps a reminiscence of her former functions as a goddess of love, or earlier of fertility. In the Mabinogion she is buried in Anglesey at Ynys Bronwen, where a cairn with bones discovered in 1813 was held to be the grave and remains of Branwen.361