Enchanted Bag

The Enchanted Bag is Rhiannon’s carefully devised instrument for reversing Gwawl’s claim to her: an apparently small food bag whose limitless capacity draws Gwawl into a trap and allows Pwyll to regain control without killing him. Its magic makes abundance look like lack, and its thongs turn that deception into physical capture.

Gift and Design

Rhiannon gives the bag to Pwyll after Gwawl invokes Pwyll’s promise to grant him a boon and asks for Rhiannon as his bride. Because Pwyll cannot simply withdraw his word, Rhiannon lays out a plan in which the bag will let him satisfy Gwawl’s demand on terms that conceal the trap. She instructs Pwyll to return a year later in ragged clothing, carrying the bag, while his hundred knights wait in the orchard.

The bag is small, but Rhiannon says that even if all the meat and liquor in the seven Cantrevs were put into it, it would be no fuller than before. Its apparent emptiness is therefore essential to the scheme: the more food attendants add, the more convincingly it demonstrates that ordinary measures of fullness do not apply. Rhiannon explains that it will not become full until a man of noble birth and great wealth presses the food down with both feet and declares that enough has been put in.

The Trap at the Feast

At Gwawl’s feast a year later, Pwyll approaches disguised in coarse, ragged garments and asks only for a bagful of food. Gwawl considers the request reasonable and orders his attendants to fill the bag. Their efforts make no visible difference, so he asks whether it will ever be full. Pwyll describes the condition Rhiannon had prepared: a wealthy landholder must tread down the food and pronounce it sufficient.

Rhiannon urges Gwawl to rise, and he willingly puts both feet into the bag. Pwyll turns its sides up over Gwawl’s head, shuts it, and knots the thongs. The object’s two functions meet in that gesture: the bag that seemed able to receive food without limit closes around the man whose demand set the episode in motion. Pwyll then blows the horn, the signal for his hundred knights to come down from the orchard.

Capture, Game, and Settlement

Once Pwyll’s knights arrive, they seize Gwawl’s company and put them in Gwawl’s own prison. Pwyll casts off his disguise, while each knight strikes the bag with a foot or staff and asks what it contains. They answer that it contains a badger, and the repeated blows establish the Game of Badger in the Bag. The bag is thus not merely a hidden container: it becomes the conspicuous center of a collective game that humiliates Gwawl before the assembled company.

The bag’s role ends in negotiation rather than execution. Gwawl pleads from inside it, and Heveydd Hen urges Pwyll to hear him. Rhiannon proposes that Gwawl make amends by serving suitors and minstrels in Pwyll’s place, and that he give sureties that he will not seek revenge. Pwyll accepts this counsel; Gwawl is let out, his men are freed, and sureties are pledged. The Enchanted Bag’s decisive work is therefore to make capture possible while leaving room for a binding settlement: it converts an impossible-seeming demand into leverage, and leverage into an agreed consequence.