Manawyddan and His Companions Find Dyved Empty

At a feast in Narberth, a thunderclap and a sudden mist mark the disappearance of Dyved’s people and settled life. Manawyddan and his companions are left alone in an emptied country, and their first response is to search the familiar buildings and lands for anyone who might explain what has happened. The unexplained vanishing turns a life of feasting, hunting, and companionship into a test of endurance.

Background at Narberth

After Pryderi returned from tendering homage to Caswallawn at Oxford, he and Manawyddan resumed their feasting and pleasure. They began a feast at Narberth, the chief palace, and later went with their retinue to Gorsedd Arberth. The four companions had been closely bound together while travelling through Dyved: they had enjoyed its good hunting and abundant honey and fish, and had not wished to part from one another by night or day. That settled fellowship makes the sudden loss around them all the more stark.

The Vanishing

After the first meal of the feast, while the servants ate, the four companions and their retinue went out to Gorsedd Arberth. A peal of thunder came, followed by a mist so thick that they could not see one another. When the mist lifted and the surroundings became bright, the country they had known was gone from view: where they expected to find cattle, herds, houses, and smoke, there was no sign of people or domestic animals. The court buildings stood empty and deserted. All their companions had disappeared without the four knowing what had befallen them.

Manawyddan called attention to the absence and led the others to look for the missing people. They searched the hall, castle, sleeping quarters, mead-cellar, and kitchen, finding no one and nothing but desolation. The disturbance was not confined to the palace. As they travelled through the country and visited their houses and possessions, they found only wild beasts. The sudden change had removed not simply their retinue but the human community and ordinary life of the land.

Life in the Empty Land

With no one to ask and no explanation for the disappearance, the four continued to feast, hunt, and take their pleasure. Once their stored provisions were consumed, they sustained themselves on the animals they hunted and honey taken from wild swarms. The account measures their isolation in years: the first and second passed pleasantly, but in time the same solitary routine became wearisome.

That growing weariness brings the episode to a practical turning point. Manawyddan proposes that they leave for Lloegyr and seek a craft by which they can support themselves. The disappearance thus begins a longer sequence of adaptation: stripped of the court and its people, the companions must rely on their own labour and resourcefulness. The cause of Dyved’s desolation remains unexplained at this point, preserving the disappearance as both the episode’s central rupture and an unresolved mystery.