The Breton Research, Thus Far

A view of the port town of Saint-Malo from Wikimedia Commons. The original photo doesn't look blurry or watery, but after accidentally achieving this look by attempting to make it bigger, I think that this has artistic value (provided that it doesn't pixelate too much once the blog post is published).

Since the last time I discussed the research for "The Lion and the Mouse" I can't pretend to have read a brace of historical works, but the desultory reading has been coming along nicely. I discovered a website with a set of modest lessons to teach one Breton, Keravon. I haven't gone past the first lesson (*cough*) but am letting the language/dialect slowly sink in. One thing that especially puzzles me is how to pronounce everything; while the website does helpfully explain e.g. that "ñ" is pronounced nasally (as if, I presume, it were the "n" in French diphthongs like "an," "en" or "on") whereas a plain "n" is not, questions such as whether the "t"s are enunciated or not continue to puzzle me. Besides, the dialect is not in the Romance family of languages, but instead bears a close affinity to the Celtic-derived languages of the British Isles, which makes sense because it is a relict of the people who fled from southwestern England to the Armoric Peninsula in the Middle Ages. So it takes getting used to, though on the other hand I've wanted to learn Welsh for a while and this comes close. Never mind that there are four dialects of Breton and at least as many different orthographies. As for Gallo, I haven't bothered to learn it, because though I vaguely want the hero of the story to come from Haut-Bretagne, where that dialect is spoken, I'm certain that the sailors who would crop up in the at first predominantly seabound tale would be far more likely to speak Breton. But I am putting together an English/French/Breton/Gallo vocabulary list.

The Château des Rochers-Sévigné (as in Madame de Sévigné) likewise from Wikimedia Commons. I like the witchy peak of the lefthand tower. The proportionate size of the chapel is admittedly rather grandiose.

Then I've been reading my way through the fairy tales which were collected and translated from Breton into French by François-Marie Luzel in the 19th century, at Légendes Bretonnes. On the one hand his French is delightfully fluent and readable, the tales also fluent and charmingly benevolent and interestingly bizarre. On the other hand, tales tend to resemble each other, and even more at times to resemble Grimm fairy tales, and after disgruntledly checking the latters' date of publication confirmed the unwelcome suspicion that M. Luzel's collection is sometimes merely secondhand Grimm. "Les Trois Poils de la Barbe d'Or du Diable" is scarcely different from "Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren," and both are quite amusing, but I like the latter better.

Anyway, the first tale in the website's collection, "La Fille Qui Se Maria À Un Mort," is as the title suggests about a girl (a princess, even) who marries a corpse. After the ceremony and a period of uninterrupted wedded bliss the bride is visited in a luxurious subterranean palace by her eldest brother, who is henceforward the hero of the tale. The woman (who, given that she is content never to venture out, is apparently an anticipation of the modern couch potato) has no complaints except that the husband is abroad all day. So the brother decides to accompany the husband, with the latter's acquiescence. First they come across a field barren of all but heather and gorse and meagre ferns [N.B.: very Breton flora], with two fat and gleaming cows in the middle. The prince remarks upon the oddity of the scene, and instead of his brother-in-law the cows respond and say, "God bless you." Then they come across a field that is bursting with luxuriant green, in the middle of which there stand two skeletal-looking cows. The brother once again audibly finds this all very odd, and once again only the cows respond, "God bless you." [And by this point the reader is unhappily and fully aware that a heavy moral allegory is underway.] Then they encounter two goats violently and bloodily fighting each other. The brother takes pity on them, and the animals bless him in turn and separate to let the men pass. Then the travellers reach an old ruined church full of ghosts. The dead man dons his priestly vestments and goes up to the altar to hold a sermon, which is somewhat unorthodox as he begins spewing forth toads "and other hideous reptiles" [N.B.: toads are, of course, not reptiles but amphibians], as do the others present. After the spewing has ceased and the ceremony with it, the congregation choruses, "Vous nous avez délivrés! Merci! Merci! " and leaves.

Archway at the ruined 11th or 12-century Abbaye de Saint-Mathieu de Fine-Terre (a Benedictine monastery). It stands on a green plain above the seashore and a bright, trim 19th-century lighthouse stands besides it. The pink flowers visible through the arches are almost certainly hydrangeas, which appear based on my photographic explorations to be hugely popular in the region, but I am pretty certain that they wouldn't have been around, or not much, in 18th-century Brittany. (Wikimedia Commons)

When the men have returned home, the prince wants to know the meaning of this scene. His brother-in-law clarifies that the first pair of cows represented poor people who lived devoutly and contentedly despite their poverty; the second pair of cows represented rich people who lived only for their own worldly gain and therefore lived unhappily; and the fighting goats represented thieves who are intent only on fighting and destruction. As for the scene at the church, the brother-in-law was a priest in his pre-corpse career, but not a sincere one, and the amphibians/reptiles he was vomiting were devils that once possessed him. And, because a living man took pity on the cows and the goats, and because the corpse-man married a princess and said his mass in front of a prince [I don't understand what precisely "répondre une messe," which is what the prince did, is], all these sinners were saved and permitted to go to heaven.

As Luzel remarks in his footnote, there is a strong mixture of old pagan and undoubtedly recent Christian elements in this story, which he recorded in 1872 from a servant in the Côtes du Nord region. On reconsidering the story the theology is not precisely to my liking, but then I doubt that its ideas of redemption are to be taken either literally or seriously.

The parish enclosure of Pleyben: a calvary completed in 1650 and the Eglise Saint-Germain, completed in 1583. (Wikimedia Commons)

Besides this sort of reading I've looked at many more photos; I've included a couple in the blog post to show, perhaps, why the region has fascinated me so much since I began to research it. The seashore by itself would already be attractive; one scene that particularly caught my imagination was a rough grey stone church isolated at the brink of a towering cliffside, at the shores of the Baie des Trepassés, so called either because of a prosaic linguistic flub or because of a poetically mournful history of corpses that were washed ashore when ships wrecked off the coast. Little scenes of rigging and rope-pulleys and ships with full sails, or fishing boats resting on the dented sand during low tide and attached by then perfunctory ropes to rings in the ground, are also hugely interesting to me for some reason. But it's the perfectly intact (/reconstructed) though often weathered churches and other ancient edifices — corbelled houses, i.e. ones in which the upper stories overhang the street, with exposed timberwork are one old Breton tradition — out of uncovered natural materials, and executed at times with much solid whimsy, as well as the benign leafy trees that flock the less rugged shores, that have attracted me most. Looking closely at castles has often been disillusioning after the ideas I formed of them across the Atlantic and centuries after they were constructed, but the Château de Vitré and others are doing much to restore those illusions.