Before the wedding-feast could be poured there had to be a drink, and before the drink there had to be its making. The Finnish witness, a song of the Kalevala (Finnish oral tradition, compiled 1835–1849), carries the heading "THE BREWING OF BEER." A brewer confesses she has never learned "the origin of brewing"; an old man answers plainly that "Beer arises from the barley, / Comes from barley, hops, and water". Yet barley and water alone stay flat. The drink is coaxed to life by magic: the maker "produced a magic marten," golden-breasted, and sent it to the bears' dens to "Gather foam from lips of anger" for the ferment; from a pod rubbed on her knee "a honey-bee came flying / From the pod within her fingers," and away it flew — "Little bee with honeyed winglets" — for the sweetening. The first ale is not found but conjured, ingredient by summoned ingredient.

The Welsh witness turns the magic drink from gift to snare. In the tale of Lludd and Llevelys, from The Mabinogion (Middle Welsh prose, c. 1100–1400 CE), a kingdom is tormented by two dragons that shriek across the land. The remedy is a cauldron sunk at the island's exact centre, "the best mead that can be made" hidden beneath a sheet of satin. The dragons fight, tire, fall as two pigs onto the cloth, sink to the bottom, and "when they had drunk the mead they slept"; wrapped in the covering, they are buried in the earth. A third plague, "a mighty man of magic," works the same power in reverse — his charms pour sleep over a whole court — and is beaten only by a watcher who plunges into cold water each time the drowsiness takes him.

So the shelf keeps one drink that must be spelled into being and another that unmakes whoever swallows it. Is the magic in the liquid, or in the hand that brews it?