CASE

How Brittany has remained a land of legends

The eyes of Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, Breton Departmental Museum of Quimper, 2022. © Olivier Favier

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

10 mins

Fairies and goblins, the mysterious city of Ys washed away by the waters, Ankou and Arthurian legends… Armorican folklore inspires dreams well beyond the borders of historic Brittany.

How can its persistence and vigor be explained?

Above all, how can its meaning be revealed beyond the different versions that have been given of it?

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If Brittany is perceived today as a land of legends, it partly owes it to a paradox.

Indeed, the oral traditions were preserved there beyond the nineteenth century thanks to the persistence of Gallo and Breton, both recognized since 2004 as languages ​​of Brittany by the Regional Council.

Until the 1950s, the first was still widely spoken in the countryside in Upper Brittany, Loire-Atlantique or Ille-et-Vilaine, for example, when the second dominated in Lower Brittany, from the west of Morbihan to west of the Côtes-d'Armor via Finistère.

In the past, Gallo – from the Breton

, which means “foreigner” – had gained ground over Breton, due to its proximity to French.

But what has long favored it will prove fatal or almost.

Gallo is indeed one of the languages ​​of oïl – Romance dialects of northern France and Belgium.

Like the "patois" of other regions of France, it has not aroused during the last two centuries the same interest as Breton, the only Celtic language of French territory, related to Cornish and Welsh still spoken across the Channel. and perceived very early on as one of the foundations of regional identity.

Gallo is also now on the verge of extinction, when Breton now has more than 200,000 speakers and can rely on a wide network of media and learning structures, both in public establishments and in the associative network of Diwan schools, where students learn it by immersion.

“The Barzaz Breiz Quarrel”

At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, following the example of what happened outside mainland France during the colonial conquest, the desire to impose French as the sole language of instruction and administration went hand in hand with redoubled attention to oral accounts, which we hastened to collect when their oral transmission seemed doomed to imminent death.

The first major attempt to collect stories, in the form of songs and poems, linked both to Breton legends and mythology and to historical facts whose story was transmitted by oral tradition, dates back to 1839. It is the work by Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, a 24-year-old Finisterian, son of an ultra-royalist deputy, who publishes a collection by the name of

He never ceased to increase the content over numerous reissues, and his work immediately earned him the interest of his peers, such as Gérard de Nerval and especially George Sand, busy during these years collecting stories oral exams in Valois and Berry.

But as its notoriety grew, the criticisms became more lively, initiated by the philosopher and historian Ernest Renan, then taken up again at the end of the 1860s by the folklorist François-Marie Luzel.

What is quickly called "the quarrel of Barzaz Breiz" will continue until today.

Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, like the poet James Macpherson, translator of the Scottish Gaelic bard Ossian, is accused of having considerably rewritten or even invented most of the texts collected in his work.

To make matters worse, he refuses to give details of his sources.

In 1964, the discovery of his collection notebooks made it possible to complete research begun at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify the performers cited by the author.

If the share of pure invention is very limited, rewrites are present.

The real stake is probably elsewhere, in the influence that he never ceased to exert on generations of Breton singers and in what the researcher Nelly Blanchard has defined as his "charge of revolt", fundamental in the constitution of a regional identity.

A child explores "the house of the korrigans" on the Allée de Lesconil in Cap Sizun, Finistère, 2020. © Olivier Favier

From the romanticism of Émile Souvestre to the

golden age of folklorists

In the arguments put forward, the opponents of

testify to the rather general passage in Europe of the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the following century of a romantic vision of tales and legends, which is also very present in another contemporary collector of La Villemarqué, Émile Souvestre, has a rigorous approach that is faithful to the sources.

François-Marie Luzel, Paul Sébillot or Anatole Le Braz, to name only the most important, claim to be both writers and historians, ethnologists, anthropologists or linguists.

The first two, following the rest of Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, are passionate about archaeology.

All three are also staunch Republicans.

Paul Sébillot was born in the east of Côtes-d'Armor, in Gallo country.

was therefore only natural that he set about collecting the

, after a brief career as a painter.

His taste for folklore led him to take an interest in other regions of France, notably finding similarities between Brittany and Auvergne, to explain the maintenance of their oral traditions.

Anatole Le Braz, originally from the west of Côtes-d'Armor, in Brittany, writes all his work in French and thus reveals to the general public the richness of

.

Brilliant orator, venerated pedagogue, he tries to reconcile his unconditional love for his native land – he will do most of his teaching career in Brittany – and his loyalty to France which distances him from what he calls separatist chimeras”.

Turned to the Celtic world, he forged links with the playwright John Millington Synge and took a stand for the Irish separatists.

He also stayed in Switzerland and the United States, where he met his second wife and gave lectures on Brittany.

It makes the Ankou, the ghostly personification of the community of the dead, found in Wales as in Cornwall, one of the most popular figures in France of the Breton imagination.

A horse in the forest of Huelgoat, one of the hotspots of Breton imagination, 2021. © Olivier Favier

A legendary fund always studied and accessible to all audiences

University research and cultural dissemination, as evidenced by the current exhibition on Barzaz Breiz at the Departmental Museum of Brittany in Quimper, bear witness to a powerful continuity in the attention paid to these oral traditions.

Regional publishing houses such as Coop Breizh, Locus Solus, Ouest France or Terre de Brume provide wide access to the works mentioned above and their various extensions, which are moreover very present in the catalogs of other French publishers, including in collections for children.

A part of the mythology of Across the Channel – in particular the Arthurian legend – was split in Brittany, associating certain places like the forest of Brocéliande with an imported corpus.

The archaeological traces - dolmens, menhirs, tumuli - crystallize by their strangeness many legends of the Celtic tradition, in particular those related to the korrigans - the term korrigan literally translates as dwarf-little-little.

In 2016, Gaël Bizien devoted a documentary to these elves, entitled

, where, questioning experts and inhabitants, he tries with humor to prove their existence.

Among the legends of Breton oral tradition, the best known is undoubtedly that relating to the city of Ys.

It is often told according to the version of the book by Charles Guyot,

, published in 1926. Despite the title of the work, the author did not deprived of adding a few fabrications of his own or drawing from versions as recent as they are fanciful.

He thus makes Malgven, a queen from the North, the mother of the protagonist of the tale, Princess Dahut.

And to do well, he entrusts this queen with a "sea horse" [Morvac'h] which she will then give to her husband, King Gradlon.

Beyond these poetic licenses, the story told is that of the Christianized rereading which makes Princess Dahut a devourer of men – she seduces and kills a lover every night – and of the engulfment of the city of Ys la just consequence of all his sins.

This is how on

, a famous painting by Évariste-Vital Luminais, exhibited at the Quimper Museum of Fine Arts, we can see the old sovereign riding Morvac'h and throwing his daughter back into the waters of the Bay of Douarnenez at the call of Saint-Guénolé.

The bay of Douarnenez in winter, one of the places reputed to be home to the remains of the city of Ys, 2021. © Olivier Favier

A necessary return to basics

All this makes Lukaz Nedeleg smile, a young storyteller from Brest who aims to make this legend, its origin and its meaning, the subject of a show whose creation is scheduled for the end of 2023, 

1: "The city of Ys is everywhere on the Breton coast, just around Cap-Sizun, there are those who say it is at the bottom of the bay of Douarnenez, and those who place it in the Bay of Audierne and make the Île de Sein its only part still visible.

»

The tales of submersion are moreover a topos among the populations living by the sea. Similar ones can be found in Wales.

As for Dahut, she is reminiscent of the Irish Banshee, messenger from the Other World, especially since in the Celtic tradition, the world often appears divided into two parts separated by the surface of the waters.

The submersion of the city of Ys would thus represent the brutal transition from the pagan world to the Christian world, and Dahut what Gradlon must leave behind to gallop towards modernity.

She also embodies the Celtic relationship to the sea, which often takes on the features of a woman as attractive as it is dangerous, who with a breath can capsize a ship.

“Brittany fascinated the romantics, concludes Lukaz Nedeleg, and the first collections formed a portrait of the legendary Breton sometimes bordering on caricature.

Yet Brittany escapes its own clichés.

We wanted to freeze it in time, but there is a part of the culture that lives on, in a whispering and underwater way.

»

1The city is spelled Ys or Is, as for the final d of Dahud, it corresponds to the Breton pronunciation which brings it closer to the French t.

Évariste-Vital Luminais “The Flight of King Gradlon”, around 1884, Transfer of State property to the city of Quimper in 2013 © Collection of the Quimper Museum of Fine Arts.

Our selection on the subject:

• To read:

→ Joséphine Pencalet, heroine for a day

→ Crêpe and galette, at the heart of Breton culinary heritage

→ Cécile Borne, dancer, visual artist and inveterate gleaner

→ Madelyn Ann or Breton modernity

• To listen to:

→ Michel Le Bris, good luck captain!

→ When the Ile de Sein was a quarter of France

→ The granite giants of the Vallée des Saints, a site between magic and madness in the heart of Brittany

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