Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (40 page)
The name ‘Brittany’ (cf. Fr.
Bretagne
) enjoys a strange euphony in our ears. This is true despite – perhaps because – the region is so little known in the English-speaking world. The ancient name for the peninsula jutting out from northern France was Armorica, a term still occasionally seen in print. The current name, which means literally ‘Little Britain’, commemorates a migration of Brythonic-speaking peoples from the island of Great Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Modern Bretons see themselves as descended from the ancient Britons, although their gene pool gains from many other peoples, including the
ancient Gauls pushed westward by the advancing Franks. Why the Britons should have left Britain has been subject to much interpretation. An earlier view that they were driven out by predatory Saxon invaders now seems less likely. More prosaic reasons like famine and economic hardship are more probable. In Welsh tradition the emigrants from Britain were led by St Cynan Meiriadog (or Meriodoc), who was rewarded with tracts of land for his service to the Roman emperor known to the Britons as Macsen Wledig. First composed of a series of culturally related petty kingdoms, Brittany was an independent duchy through the Middle Ages until 1532. It remained a mostly Breton-speaking province of France until Napoleonic times, when it was divided into five (later four)
départements
. Despite the efforts of sometimes violent nationalist groups, the four
départements
remain integrated into the rest of the nation, but important cultural distinctions remain. New houses, for example, must by law be constructed in Breton style, with black slate roofs and cream stucco walls. Urban industrial workers retain deep enthusiasm for traditional Breton dress and folk dances. And though records are inconclusive, several hundred thousand people still speak the Breton language. The name for Brittany in the Breton language is
Breizh
.
The Welsh ecclesiastical traveller Giraldus Cambrensis (
c
.1146-1223) tells us that spoken Breton was more closely related to the Cornish of his day than to the Welsh. Modern linguistic analysis confirms his observation. In recent centuries Breton has made many borrowings from Welsh, but contemporary spoken Breton and Welsh are not mutually comprehensible. Neither early Welsh literary development nor written Cornish, like the miracle plays, seems to have had much influence on Breton writers. The Anglo-Norman Marie de France (fl.
c
.1160–90) introduced a purported Breton narrative form, the
lai
or
lay
, to mainstream European literature. Many of her
lais
, in addition, employ Breton themes. Several Arthurian stories have Breton settings, such as the forest of Brocéliande, where Merlin was imprisoned, and Arthurian figures are reshaped in Breton form, for example Perceval as Peronnik. Giraldus also speaks of many ‘tale-telling Bretons and their singers’, but no Breton literature of any kind is known before 1450.
Written Breton literature did not commence for almost another 400 years when Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (1815–96) produced
Barzaz Breiz
[Breton Bards] in 1839. As an admirer of James Macpherson’s spurious
Poems of Ossian
, as well as of the Welsh charlatan Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826), La Villemarqué looks like a pseudo-medievalist to the modern sceptical eye. Although his poems and stories lacked the antiquity of the originals of his contemporary Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations in
The Mabinogion
(1838–49), and he was a bowdlerizer, La Villemarqué was a better linguist than Macpherson and more faithful to sources in oral tradition. His texts are still used today in university courses in Breton literature.
Relatively few Breton narratives have any currency outside Brittany, but the best-known of them has also been widely known within Breton tradition, surviving in three versions. Its usual Breton title is
Kêr Is
[City of Is], known in English as ‘The Legend of the City of Ys’. One of a half-dozen flood legends in Celtic languages, the story explains how a once sinful city came to be submerged beneath the Bay of Douarnenez in southwest Brittany. Turning on the central theme of pagan excess in conflict with Christian restraint, its three permutations always include at least three characters. The first is Gradlon (or Gralon) Meur [the great], a pious and saintly king who protects his city by building a dike. His name is still much associated with the city of Quimper (Bret. Kemper), where his statue sits between the two towers of the cathedral. Second is his beautiful, wilful and lascivious daughter Dahut (also Dahud, Ahé, Ahés), who brings grief to the kingdom. And third is the abbé Guénolé, an historical figure credited with founding the first monastery in Brittany at Landévennec in the fifth century.
In his youth, King Gradlon had practised the old faith. When he took a wife, it was thought in his kingdom that she was not of this world. After the birth of her daughter, Dahut, the wife returns to the sea whence she came. While hunting one day with his men, Gradlon happens upon a pious hermit in the woods, Corentin (or Korentin), who appears to have no food to feed his guests. The hermit then performs a miracle that deeply impresses the king. He takes a minnow from a well and cuts it in half with his knife. The half he keeps becomes the basis of a bounteous feast, with fish, meat and fruit in abundance. The half of the fish returned to the water grows whole again so that Corentin can repeat the miracle on another occasion. Thunderstruck at what he has seen, Gradlon declares himself for the new faith,
Christianity, and sees to it that Corentin is installed as bishop in Quimper. Churches, chapels and cloisters begin to appear, and under Corentin’s urging Gradlon passes new laws curbing fleshly excesses and promoting temperance, virtue and restraint instead.
Dahut is displeased with this turn of events, finding the new Quimper joyless. Her father calls her tone blasphemous. Changing the subject, she complains that she lives too far from the ocean. She begs her father to build her a city by the sea and says she will then be content. And so Gradlon spares no expense to meet her wishes, constructing the new city of Ys with spacious public squares and tall white towers. Bishop Corentin notes that Ys lacks churches and, to Dahut’s chagrin, Gradlon adds them. The king’s daughter recommends other additions. Seeing that Ys has been built on low ground, she asks that her father construct a protective dike, with sluices that can be opened to fill the city’s needs. He complies.
In the oldest and simplest version of the story, Dahut secretly entertains her lover, and the two of them, driven to frenzy by wine, steal Gradlon’s key to open the sluice gates, flooding the city.
The more familiar second version has much more to say about Ys as a commercial centre given to luxury and debauchery. To ensure her dominance over the churches Gradlon has built, Dahut consults the pagan sisterhood of the isle of Sein, women who still worship the old gods. They conjure up the korrigans, small but lustful creatures who seek carnal relations with innocent Christians and are also magnificent builders. They fashion a new castle for Dahut, both elegant and imposing, that towers over Gradlon’s church. Before long the church is nearly abandoned, with weeds pushing up between the stones at its door. Learning of this, as well as of Dahut’s fostering of public practice of the seven capital sins, abbé Guénolé is filled with loathing and disgust. Taking the tone of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Guénolé foretells the ruin of the City of Ys.
A small boy named Kristof sets in motion some of the forces working against Ys. After casting stones in the water with a crooked stick, the boy catches a magical fish who offers riches in exchange for his liberty. With her usual haughtiness, Dahut mocks this exchange, and so the fish responds with a magical spell upon her, making her pregnant with a son who can claim no father. About a year later, Dahut’s father
Gradlon puts his daughter, Kristof and the baby boy in a cask and sets them out to sea, where yet another city with palaces appears. Ys remains in danger, however, because Kristof has magically removed a protective oak.
Although Gradlon is nominally king of Ys, his paternal indulgence to Dahut means that she sets the tone for the city, especially the moral tone. With the help of the korrigans, she contrives that Ys may become a lure for unwary sailors, capsizing their ships nearby so that they may be looted by the immoral city’s depraved denizens. Each night she takes a new lover whose face is covered in a black silken mask. When she tires of his attentions, she ties a fatal knot in the mask’s strings, leading to the painful death of the rejected gigolo. This pattern continues until she receives a suitor unlike any of the others. Dressed all in red he refuses to wear her black mask and meets her bare-faced. Charming her with his impudence, he tells her that he will make her his bride in his palace of fire with columns of smoke, if only she gives him what he wants: the key to the sluices in the dike. She responds that this is impossible for the key is tied around her father’s shoulder. Then, with much stealth, she retrieves the key and gives it to the stranger, but when she reaches up to touch his cheek he is no longer there.
As soon as the key enters its slot, the sea begins to rush into the city. Guénolé raises the alarm in Gradlon’s palace and urges the king to flee on his steed Morvarc’h [horse of the sea] before they are all inundated. Still the doting father, Gradlon pulls up his worthless daughter behind him as he sets off at a gallop. The water is seething and foaming at Morvarc’h’s fetlocks, ready to submerge them both, when a voice from behind calls out to him, ‘Throw the demon you carry into the sea if you do not wish to perish.’ At that moment Dahut falls from Morvarc’h, and the water recedes, allowing Gradlon to escape and to reach Quimper safely. Ys is now submerged, but Dahut lingers on as a siren-like mermaid, calling out to sailors about to be shipwrecked.
Roles are substantially changed in a third version, known only in ballad tradition. This time Gradlon leads the people in extravagance and debauchery, and freely gives the key to Dahut, who misuses it. Once again she survives as a mermaid who haunts the waters at Douarnenez.
The popularity of the story in Breton oral tradition invites a wide array of variants. The City of Ys may also be located on the Étang de Laval on the desolate shores of the Bay of Trépassés [the dead]. A later narrative appendix describing an underwater church whose bell was still ringing but which would emerge on a clear morning inspired Claude Debussy’s piano prelude
La Cathédrale engloutie
[the sunken cathedral] (1910). That same popularity has made the corruption of Ys proverbial, as in the Breton slurring pun on the name of the French capital,
par Is
, from the Breton
par
[like], that is, Paris = ‘like Ys’.
Chapter 7
reminds us that the historical links between early Ireland and Spain as depicted in the
Lebor Gabála
, once dismissed as pure fantasy, have been substantiated by recent scientific study. Research into national DNA patterns shows that the two countries are indeed closely connected. Upon a closer look, however, the tie is more than genetic. Barry Cunliffe in
The Ancient Celts
(1997) traces archaeological links between Spain and Ireland going back as far as the fourth millennium
BC
. Language once supplied another bridge, now vanished. Celtic speakers flourished in the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries before their culture was overcome by the Romans. The most significant numbers were in the northwest corner, the former province of Gallaecia, where Latin displaced the native language after the third century
AD
. That region is coextensive with the modern provinces of Galicia in the far northwest and Asturias its neighbour to the east. The pre-eminent twentieth-century specialist in Galician folklore, Vicente Risco (1884–1963), reckoned that Galician culture was basically Latin, but with a Celtic soul.
Evidence from early Iberian tradition supports the vision of Spain found in the
Lebor Gabála
. An early tower did indeed stand in the harbour of La Coruña, which could have served as the model for the one which Breogan builds and Íth climbs to see Ireland on the horizon. Lost now, it was replaced in the second century
AD
by the oldest working Roman lighthouse, known as the Tower of Hercules. Hundreds of abandoned
castros
, small defended Celtic-era towns consisting of round
stone houses dating from as early as 1000
BC
, can be found throughout the area. ‘Céltigo’ turns up frequently as a name for a village or rural district. Monte Pindo, a pink granite mountain on the Atlantic coast near Fisterra in Galicia, is also known as
Olimpo Celta
, ‘the Celtic Olympus’.
Galicia’s claim for a place at the Celtic table seems not yet to have entered a wider consciousness, but the case continues to be made. Traditional music groups from Galicia such as Milladoiro find a warm welcome at Pan-Celtic festivals. The distinguished Galician literary figure Leandro Carré Alvarellos (1888–1976) has argued that the legends of his home province reflect a Celtic culture and psychology, and the Irish academic Elizabeth Frances Keating has devoted a book,
Afinidades Culturais entre Galicia e Irlanda
(1990) to these cultural affinities.
The links are not to be found with lengthy narratives, such as the
Táin Bó Cuailnge
or the
Mabinogi
. Instead, better examples are seen in older oral tradition, especially when malign figures fit well with the Church’s efforts to demonize Celtic inheritance. Such a personage is the
lavandeira nocturna
, a male devil in female disguise who tries to seduce young women. A counterpart in the north is the ‘washer at the ford’, who is found in all six traditions under a variety of names,
bean nighe
in Gaelic Scotland and
tunnerez noz
in Brittany. The washer is also an aspect of the Irish war goddesses Badb and Mórrígan. She is a death omen, sometimes gorgeous and weeping, sometimes hideous and grimacing, who washes bloody garments at the ford of a river and turns to tell the beholder that they are his or hers.
A close parallel with Ireland and other Celtic countries is the phantom funeral. In Irish folk belief, people who have been ‘taken’ by the fairies are not dead but can sometimes be seen in fairy processions, the
sluagh sídhe
or
slua sí
[fairy host] or the
sluagh/slua na marbh
[host of the dead] from which they might be rescued. A fairy funeral can foretell the death of a person known to the viewer. The
Santa Compaña
[Holy Company] in Galicia and the
huestia
[host] and
gente buena
[good people] in Asturias, complete with coffin, priest and mourners bearing candles, are likewise ghostly funeral processions presaging death.
The
xana
is a Galician and Asturian otherworld woman responsible for changelings. Typically, a mother is working outdoors with her
infant nearby, but when she returns home in the evening she notices that the child is different. The
xana
(var.
inxana
), who lives in a cave, has taken the human mother’s toddler and replaced it with her own. One remedy, collected in 1985 near Llanes on the Asturian coast, is for the mother to bring the
xana
’s child to the mouth of the cave and shout, ‘Inxana Mora, take your child and give me mine.’
Irish fairies are associated with mounds or ringforts or earthen circles sometimes called ‘daneforts’ for their supposed connection with Danish Vikings. In Galicia and Asturias the otherworld denizens of ancient monuments, especially the
castros
, are called
mouros
(cf. standard Spanish
moros
). The word is believed to be a corruption of the regional word for ‘dead person’,
morto
(Spanish
muerto
), and not related to the Moorish conquest. The
mouros
are nearly always associated with hidden treasure, usually gold, which makes them close cousins of the Irish leprechaun.
The Irish fairy known as the
púca
often takes the form of a ferocious-looking but ultimately harmless large black dog with fiery red eyes; a Scottish Gaelic variant, the
cú síth
, is dark green rather than black. The
urco
of Galicia is also a fierce-looking large black dog, with the addition of long ears and horns and a piercing howl but without the red eyes. It always presages misfortune.
Other examples bring together verbal formulae more specific than motifs and tale types that might be found in many European countries. In one of the better-known Irish tales, the fairies reward a good hunchback when he adds ‘and Wednesday’ to their monotonous song that goes ‘Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday’. A bad hunchback tries to emulate him by abruptly breaking into the fairies’ revels with ‘and Thursday and Friday’, and is then saddled with the first hunchback’s hump.
The Galician parallel, collected in Verín in the early twentieth century, shows the characteristic demonizing of fairy lore. A woman disguises herself as a witch by painting wrinkles on her face and wearing smoked glasses, mounting a broom and flying to Seville to join a witches’ Sabbath. She finds them dancing in a circle and singing, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, three; / Thursday, Friday, Saturday, six.’ The intruder adds, ‘and Sunday, seven’, and all the witches vanish in a puff of smoke.