Of all the figures in the Mabinogi, none is as morally tangled — or as strangely modern — as Gwydion fab Dôn. He is a magician, a storyteller, a war-leader, a thief, a liar, and, in the end, a father in everything but blood. The Fourth Branch is, more than anything, his story.
He begins it badly. To allow his brother Gilfaethwy access to Math's foot-holder Goewin, Gwydion conjures an entire war out of nothing — riding south to Dyfed disguised as a poet, magicking gold-bright pigs out of toadstools, swindling Pryderi out of the swine that the Irish gods had given him, and then killing Pryderi in single combat when the deception is discovered. Math sees through everything. The punishment — three years as paired wild animals — falls on Gwydion as squarely as it falls on his brother.
And yet the rest of the Branch redeems him, slowly and stubbornly. When Arianrhod, his sister, rejects her newborn son and curses him to have no name and no arms unless she herself grants them, it is Gwydion who tricks her into both. Disguised as a shoemaker, he draws the name Lleu Llaw Gyffes — 'the bright one with the skilful hand' — out of her own mouth. Disguised again as a poet, he conjures a phantom fleet so terrifying that she grants Lleu weapons to defend her castle. With Math, he then conjures Blodeuwedd from the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet, so that Lleu — cursed to take no wife of any human race — can marry at all.
Blodeuwedd betrays Lleu. Lleu, in the form of an eagle, half-dies on the branch of an oak. And Gwydion goes searching for him — for years, by some accounts — wandering the hills of north Wales, eating what he can find, until he hears the song of a sow at Nantlle and follows it to the tree where his nephew is rotting away in eagle-form. He sings Lleu down out of the tree in three englyns, restores him to human shape, restores him to health, and helps him take his revenge.
That is who Gwydion is, in the end. He starts as a liar and a war-maker. He ends as the one person in the world who will not give up on the boy he raised. The Welsh tradition does not soften him, and does not punish him further. It simply lets him become someone worth loving, by inches, over the course of one long story.
Wear something inspired by Gwydion and you wear the most human magician in Welsh myth — clever, dangerous, devoted, and never quite forgiven, even by himself.