Evnissyen

Evnissyen is a volatile member of Bendigeid Fran’s family whose acts of violence repeatedly overturn attempts at peace. First he mutilates Matholwch’s horses after objecting to his sister Branwen’s marriage; later, during a truce, he kills Branwen’s son Gwern, helping ignite the battle in which he sacrifices himself to break the Irish cauldron of rebirth.

Identity and Introduction

At Bendigeid Fran’s court in Harlech, Evnissyen is identified as one of the king’s brothers on their mother’s side, alongside Nissyen. Both are sons of Eurosswydd and Penardun, daughter of Beli son of Manogan. The narrative defines the brothers by their opposing effects on the family: Nissyen makes peace when anger is at its height, while Evnissyen provokes conflict when his kin are most at peace. This contrast establishes Evnissyen not simply as a quarrelsome man but as a force that disrupts reconciliation from within the family itself.

The Marriage and the First Rupture

After Branwen had become Matholwch’s bride at Aberffraw, the court began arranging horses and attendants for the newly allied parties. Evnissyen came upon Matholwch’s horses and asked whose they were. When told that they belonged to the Irish king, who had married Evnissyen’s sister, he objected that Branwen had been given in marriage without his consent. He then attacked the animals: he cut their lips, ears, and tails, and injured their eyelids to the bone, leaving them disfigured and useless. The violence turns a grievance about his exclusion from the marriage decision into a public assault on the visible property of the new ally.

Matholwch was told that the mutilation was intended as an insult and began to leave for his ships. Yet he also wondered at the contradiction: he had been given a bride of exceptional rank, beloved by her family, and then treated with contempt. Messengers sent by Bendigeid Fran caught up with him and asked why he was departing without leave. Matholwch answered that the treatment was an insult, especially striking after Branwen had been bestowed upon him. Evnissyen’s act thus threatens the alliance at the moment of its formation; his family’s diplomatic effort must now contend with damage he has deliberately made impossible to overlook.

The Hidden Warriors and the Killing of Gwern

During the attempted settlement between the two peoples, the Irish concealed armed men in leathern bags hung from the pillars of a great house. Evnissyen inspected the bags and tested the Irish explanation that they contained meal. Feeling a head inside each, he crushed the hidden men one by one; he killed all two hundred, including the last man, whose helmet he detected before finishing him. The deed exposes the danger beneath the proposed peace, but Evnissyen’s intervention is no turn toward restraint: the same capacity for violence that had sabotaged the marriage alliance now destroys the ambush by direct slaughter.

When the hosts later gathered in the house, peace was concluded and sovereignty was conferred upon Gwern, Branwen’s son. The boy passed affectionately from Bendigeid Fran to Manawyddan and then to Nissyen; Evnissyen, too, called him over, presenting himself as a loving uncle who wished to fondle his nephew. Once Gwern was within reach, Evnissyen seized him by the feet and thrust him into the blazing fire. Branwen tried to leap after her son, but Bendigeid Fran held her back with one hand while holding his shield with the other. The apparent reconciliation thus becomes the setting for Evnissyen’s most intimate betrayal: after helping destroy the concealed attackers, he murders the child whose kingship had marked the peace.

Gwern’s death breaks the truce into open battle. As the people in the house rushed to arm themselves, the Irish used the Cauldron of Rebirth to restore their dead as fighting men, though the resurrected could no longer speak. Evnissyen saw that the dead from Bendigeid Fran’s side had not been restored and recognized that his actions had helped bring his own people into dire straits. He answered not by escaping or pleading for mercy but by throwing himself among the Irish corpses. Two barefoot Irishmen mistook him for one of their own and cast him into the cauldron; there he stretched out until he broke it into four pieces, bursting his own heart in the process. His final act disables the instrument that had returned the Irish dead to battle, but it cannot undo the massacre or secure victory: only seven men of Bendigeid Fran’s company survive, and the king himself is wounded by a poisoned dart.

Narrative Role and Ending

Evnissyen’s role is shaped by an escalation in the objects and bodies on which his violence acts. The mutilated horses make his grievance visible in the aftermath of a marriage; the crushed heads uncover the armed ambush beneath a proposed peace; Gwern’s death turns kinship itself into the site of rupture. At the last, Evnissyen directs his force against the Cauldron of Rebirth and his own body, breaking the instrument that sustains the Irish fighters at the cost of his life. The sequence changes the direction of his violence, but not its scale: the act that finally aids his people comes only after his earlier actions have helped make reconciliation impossible.