Cerridwen is a figure of medieval Welsh legend, the keeper of a cauldron of poetic inspiration and transformation, who came in later tradition to be regarded as a goddess of rebirth, wisdom and the awen, the flowing inspiration of the bards. It is worth being clear about the nature of the source. Cerridwen appears in the Tale of Taliesin, a story preserved in comparatively late Welsh manuscripts, and her standing as a goddess is largely a development of later, and especially modern, interpretation; the medieval text presents her as an enchantress rather than as an object of worship, and readers should keep that distinction in mind.
In the tale, Cerridwen brews a potion in her great cauldron for a year and a day to give wisdom and poetic gift to her own ugly son, since only the first three drops carry the virtue and the rest is deadly poison. She sets a boy, Gwion Bach, to stir it; but three scalding drops splash onto his thumb, he sucks it, and the whole gift of inspiration passes to him instead. Enraged, Cerridwen pursues him, and the two run through a series of shape-changes, he a hare and she a greyhound, he a fish and she an otter, he a bird and she a hawk, until he becomes a grain of wheat and she a hen and swallows him. She then bears him again, and the reborn child becomes Taliesin, the greatest of the legendary Welsh poets. The cauldron, the transformation-chase and the rebirth have made Cerridwen a powerful emblem of poetic initiation and of death and renewal, and she is much invoked in modern traditions, though the medieval basis for these later meanings is a single remarkable tale.