Celtic Lore: the tales that might have inspired Star Wars and Harry Potter

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Capricious Cauldrons

There is a Welsh mythic story called The Spoils of Annwn, which narrates a raid on Annwn (the Otherworld) by Arthur, whose target was a magical cauldron, described as made of shimmering bronze and studded with gems. This cauldron knew its own mind: it needed the breath of nine virgins to heat the broth within it, and it would never provide food for a coward.
Arthur’s cauldron-rustling expedition ended in a Pyrrhic victory: he gained the vessel but lost most of his men to the forces of darkness in so doing. Arthur’s cauldron is only one of many that had magical properties. For the Celts, cauldrons were vessels of rebirth. The myth of Brân the Blessed, lord of Harlech, a Welsh hero (so large that he could wade across the Irish Sea and whose severed head remained alive and talking after his death), contains an account of Brân’s most treasured possession, a cauldron that could bring the dead to life.
But, again, this was a vessel that had its own agenda. When Matholwch, king of Ireland, was insulted by one of Brân’s relatives when he came to woo his sister Branwen, he could be appeased only by the gift of the cauldron. Later on, when war broke out between Ireland and Wales, Matholwch used Brân’s gift as a weapon: every night, the Irish war-dead were cooked in the cauldron and emerged good as new to fight another day.
But these resurrected soldiers were, in fact, ‘undead’ zombies, for they had lost the power of speech. Ireland had its own cauldron-myths. Gods, such as the Daghdha (a father-god) had Otherworld ‘hostels’ in which they served food in ever-replenishing cauldrons, and where pigs that had been cooked and eaten – rather chillingly – returned charred and squealing to be re-cooked every day.