#breton folklore

[fern-the-seeker]

the hubris i had at 11pm last night dude..... was laying in bed lamenting how i know nothing about breton folklore but it's such a neglected scholarly field, and then i had what seemed like the brilliant idea of simply writing my OWN guidebook? HUH? with what knowledge... with what resources.... with what time babe

[gawrkin]

La Fosse Arthour, Saint-Georges-de-Roulley, France

(Source: LINK) (Additional Link HERE)

(Source: LINK)

[maypoleman1]

3rd March

St Winnol’s Day

Source: Dreamstime.com

First comes David, then comes Chad,

Then comes Winnol, roaring like mad.

This folklore rhyme is just about all we know know about St Winnol, whose day it is today. He was a Breton saint in origin, named Winnaloe, and was a fierce ascete, insisting that his brothers join him in wearing hair shirts and prostrating themselves in front of the Lord. Winnol also had strange miracles attributed to him, including possession of a mysterious bell which, once sounded, would result in all the fish in a stream coming to him, and an ability to carry churches. Apparently the churches at East Portlemouth in Devon, and Lizard in Cornwall, owe their locations to Winnol.

Unsurprisingly, it is highly unlikely that Winnol ever existed.

[maypoleman1]

1st October

St Mylor’s Day

Saint Melaire in Chapelle Saint Brieuc. Source: Wikipedia

Today is St Mylore’s Day. Mylore (or Melar or Melaire) was a little known early sixth century Breton saint, who was also venerated in Amesbury Abbey, of which he was the patron saint, in Wiltshire. His lack of biography gave the Breton monks license to in effect invent a predictably gory back story for Mylore. Under the most common account, Mylore is a Breton prince whose father was murdered in time-honoured fashion by his uncle Rivoldus, who then sought to dispense with his nephew too. A council of bishops then intervened and placated the usurper king by decreeing although Mylore should not die, he should have his right hand and left foot cut off and be sent to live a life of contemplation in a monastery. This the long-suffering lad did and found, miraculously, that his prosthetic silver hand and bronze foot worked just as well as flesh and blood. Rivoldus was not satisfied with this turn of events and so had the young saint decapitated. Rivoldus died three days later. Mylore’s head was taken over the Channel to the abbey at Amesbury where it remained, protected by the belief that if anyone attempted to remove the relic, they would meet the same fate as Rivoldus.

The legend is almost entirely made up, but does correlate with the treatment of deposed Eastern Roman Emperors in medieval times who would frequently be mutilated and forced into holy orders to disbar them from the imperial throne.

It is claimed that Amesbury church was founded by Queen Guinevere, who retired there in disgrace after her affair with Lancelot. She is allegedly buried under the building.

[kroashent]

Agrippa

World Anvil is a worldbuilding tools platform and community for writers, RPG storytellers and worldbuilding lovers

Demat!

For the month of April, I am undertaking a special project to "solidify" Kroashent while I continue to work on the novel and the art. For the month, I will be making a special focus on developing and sharing the "Bestiary" of Alvez, showcasing the flora and fauna of the world of Kroashent. I hope to shift the focus each month with looking into characters, magic systems and geography, among others.

A lot of people have asked about the creatures of Alvez, and I always feel like my explanations are rather long-winded, daunting infodumps. It seemed like a great place to start to make my work a little more engaging.

Those familiar with my other work may be familiar with "Marie's Bestiary", a similar themed project sharing this information with in-universe commentary by the wandering troubadour. For this project, I'll be following a similar pattern, sharing the WorldAnvil Wiki pages. While I eventually hope to illustrate each of these entries, but for now, I'll be posting the entries themselves.

As always, feedback and inquiries are very helpful! I am always looking for ways to improve and flesh out my setting and stories and love enthusiastic engagement! I put a ton of work into these and hope you enjoy them!

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Our first entry is the Agrippa, a fearsome tome of living magic. These grimoires are highly sought after by similherez (Spellcasters), elevating even mediocre casters to the level of masters. Agrippa are living entities, often malevolent as they seek to guard their secrets.

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BTS: Agrippa are a real phenomena in Breton folklore, named after 16th Century Occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. The Agrippa are intriguing, portrayed less as books, but as living entities. Their folklore weaves a complex patter of anti-clerical political sentiment in Ancien Regime France, a fascination and distrust with the growing exploration of physical sciences, and connections to older traditions of the power of words.

[kroashent]

Laundry Day of the Damned

Sometimes one stumbles across something magical in folklore research. The "Kannerez-Noz", the phantom washerwomen of Brittany, haunt rivers and streams, washing out bloody linens and demanding passerby helping them wring out the clothes. Refusal results in drowning, while complying results in broken bones and mangling.

Phantom washerwomen are pretty common in Celtic mythology and folklore from Ireland to Spain. But, according to one source in the Southern town of Vaucluse, France, a pair of enterprising thieves exploited the fear of these vengeful spirits. Dressing in white gowns, they were spotted washing clothing in a stream by a guard, who they then demanded help them wring out the clothing. The guard noted the high-quality of the garb, but continued working throughout the night for fear of being drowned by the spectres. Only in the morning when they had vanished did he learn the nearby castle had been robbed and he had spent the night assisting the thieves in washing their ill-gotten gains of fine clothing and linens!

[mask131]

Deadly fall: Even more about the Ankou

Category: French culture / Breton folklore

Freely translated from Edouard Brasey’s “Encyclopedia of Fantasy Heroes” (the translation is really incorrect but the French notion of “merveilleux” is hard to translate so I’ll stick with “fantasy”)

Chapter 4: Travelers of the Otherworld

The Ankou

In Bretagne, the wraith that announces death is called the Ankou. He was first written about in the 18th century. He appears as a grinning skeleton, dressed in a large black cloak that only reveals his head and hands. He is armed with a scythe whose blade is turned upside-down, so that he can reap in a much wider way – and he uses a human bone to sharpen the blade. He usually stands upright on a cart with iron-wheels and creaking axles, the “karrik ann Ankou”, with two white horses, one skinny and lanky, the other fat and shiny. Sometimes the cart is invisible: you can only hear its sinister creaking. The Ankou is sometimes helped by two assistants who walk by the cart. The first holds the bridle of the first horse, while the other opens the field gates and house doors, plus throws in the cart the dead that the Ankou reaped.

If he points his bony finger at someone, it means they will die very soon. If he touches someone, the person will feel a cold chill and they will know it is time for them to die. The Ankou then takes his victims into the otherworld, located in the direction of the sunset, by forcing them to climb on his “bag noz”, his “night boat”. The Ankou is at the same time the “oberour ar maro”, the laborer/workman of death ; a ferryman of the dead similar to Charon in Greek mythology ; and the kind of the dead, of which he leads the macabre hordes. But sometimes, it is said that the Ankou is actually Death itself.

Every year, on All Saints Day (corresponding to the ancient holiday of Samhain), the Ankou and the dead come together, in an invisible shape, to the feasts the living prepare for them : tradition says that on Toussaint (All Saints Day), you must cook crêpes and curdled milk mixed with cider, and place it all on a white tablecloth while playing music. While the living can’t see the dead when they consume these offerings, many testimonies talk of plates, cutlery or chairs moving on their own. When the rooster sings, the gathering of ghosts disappears, leaving behind them a lot of leftovers the living can eat freely. Sometimes the Ankou is said to be the last dead of the year, working for twelve whole months before he is “dethroned” and replaced by a new deceased.

Other tales claim that in the depths of the Huëlgoat forest, in the Arrée mountains, there is a gaping opening to hell. The Ankou sits there, in a palace filled with thousands of candles, each of them corresponding to the life of a human being. Sometimes the Ankou blows on a candle, which causes the death of the corresponding person. Legend also describe how the Ankou can sit on the threshold of newly-built houses, waiting patiently for the first living being to cross it, so that he may take them away. This is why people, after building a new house, pushed an animal first inside, or placed an egg on the stone of the threshold. The Ankou takes away his “prey”, and the livings can enter the new house without fear.

Even if the character of the Ankou is only known in Bretagne, the “cart of death” is also found in Ireland, where it is called “dead coach” or “deaf coach”. Black and silet, it is dragged by four headless horses and its coachman is also headless. It always follows the same road: leaving the church and making a big circle around the area before returning to the church. Similar beliefs are also found in Cornwall.

[mask131]

Deadly fall: More about the Ankou

More about the Ankou

Category: Breton folklore / French folklore

Freely translated from “The Legend of Death” by Anatole Le Braz

  Chapter 3: The Ankou

The Ankou is the “oberour ar maro”, “the worker/employee of death”.

The last dead person of the year in every parish becomes the Ankou of this specific parish for the next year. When there is more death than usual during the year, it is said “War ma fé, heman zo eun Anko drouk” (On my faith, this is a nasty Ankou).

The Ankou is usually described as a very tall and very skinny man, with long white hair, and the face hidden by a wide hat – however he can also appear as a skeleton wrapped in a shroud, whose skull keeps turning around like a weather vane, in order to see everyone around him and not have anything escape his gaze. In both gazes, the Ankou holds a scythe. But it is not a normal scythe, because the cutting edge of its blade is outward instead of inward – as such the Ankou doesn’t reap by closing the scythe towards him, but rather by throwing it in front of him.

The cart of the Ankou (called the “karrik ann Ankou” or “karriguel ann Ankou”) looks like the same type of carts in which dead bodies used to be carried. It usually has two horses pulling it, advancing in line : the one in the front is lanky and scrawny, skinny and weak, while the one behind it fat, with a large neck/shoulders and shiny hair. The Ankou doesn’t sit in his cart – he stands up. The Ankou has two companions that walk near the cart: one holds the horses, the other opens the doors in front of the Ankou (the doors of fields, of courtyards, of houses) – the second one is also the one who puts in the cart the dead that the Ankou reaped.

It is said that when the Ankou starts his collect, his cart is filled with stones, so that it goes slowly and makes a lot of noise. When he arrives near the house of someone about to die, he throws away the rocks, to make place for his new “cargo”. And as a result it is believed that if someone is not well and your hear the tumbling of rocks outside, it means the person will soon die.

It is said that the Ankou uses a human bone to sharpen his blade. Sometimes the Ankou needs to straighten out or improve his blade, and he asks the services of the smiths who keep their forge lit and keep working Saturday evenings, especially after midnight (something normally forbidden, as it is the start of Sunday, the holy day of rest). A smith who works for the Ankou will never work for anyone else.

The Ankou is said to have two “purveyors”, female entities that give him his death. The first is “ar Vossenn”, La Peste, aka the Plague. The other is “ar Gernès”, (Costliness) usually translated as “La Disette” (Scarcity/Shortage/Dearth). Once there was a third called “ann Deok holen”, the right on salt, also known as la Gabelle (a high salt-tax that existed in France). But the duchess Anne put an end to this tax in Bretagne and thus killed the third purveyor of the Ankou.

The Plague (ar Vossenn) has a limp, and yet can run as fast as wind – but she cannot jump over rivers. She can only cross by asking a kind man to carry her on his back. In Plogoff, it was said that the Plague was seen once – there was a boat going near the coast, with black sails. When the boat arrived at the level of the Parkou-Bruk valley, white smoke came out of it and took the shape of a woman – she floated in the air above the waters to reach the coast, and it was Plague herself, who quickly spread in one day around the region. As for Dearth, she is said to always “last longer than the bread”.

In olden days, to reach farms isolated in the countryside, there was just small and unkept dirt roads called “garennes” : it was the roads people used to go to mass on Sunday, but also the one used by the dead to go to the cemeteries during funerals. When the rains of winter worsened these already bad roads, people rather passed by the fields bordering them. From this ancient time, there are still numerous trails going around or out of old roads, often bordered by small stepstones to help get out of them or get on them. But as times passes, new, better roads were builded, and the old ones were abandoned by the living… But not by the dead, for they were still used by funeral convoys – because it was a sacrilege to force a dead to take a different road than the one his father, grandfather, grand-grandfather and other ancestors had taken. [Fun fact: in Bretagne the order of ancestors was father, grandfather, oldfather (grand-grandfather), and sweetfather (grand-grand-grandfather). These roads, only used for funerals, became known as the “roads of death” (hen tar Maro), and it is said that anyone who dared to block them would face great misfortune. It was forbidden to run or scream on them, so as to respect and not disturb the dead, and it was on these small, bad roads that you had the most “chance” of meeting the Ankou’s cart.

It is said that when a new house is built, the Ankou comes sitting on its doorstep, to wait for the first person that will cross the threshold, so that he might kill them. The only way to chase him away is to rather offer him the life of an animal – and while before people forced a pet (dog or cat) to cross the threshold before any human, people took the habit of just using an egg about to hatch. But some traditions were much more violent : in Quimperlé the habit was to kill a rooster and spill its blood on the foundations of the house.

- - - - - - - - -

The book also includes a lot of traditional and folkloric tales about the Ankou, that I won’t translate but here is their brief idea:

# A story is about a curious young man who attempts to spy on the Ankou’s cart as he hears it coming one night – only for him to be overtaken by a deadly fever the following morning.

# A story is about a man who, one evening, has to carry a heavy bag of potatoes to an old woman. As he rests near a cross he sees a cart led by a tall and skinny man with a wide dark hat. The cart keeps squeaking and is pulled by extremely lanky and bony horses. The man, tired of the bag, tries to ask the driver to carry it for him, but he doesn’t answer, and when the man tries to put the bag on the cart is just passes right through, as if the wood had no solidity. It is only the following day, upon learning that someone in the village died, that he understand he met the Ankou.

# A man who is telling stories to entertain a sick and dying one neighbor stays at his house, in a guestroom. He wakes up in the middle of the night, as the moon is bright in the sky, and notices the window is open. He goes to close it, but sees in the courtyard of the neighbor’s house a tall, skinny man with his face hidden by a large hat, walking back and forth as if waiting, with near him a hastily-built cart pulled by horses with manes so long they drag on the ground – and the cart is filled with human arms, legs and heads. He hides away from the sight of this dreadful creature, only to notice that another entity just entered the house through the backdoor, even taller and skinnier than the first, with an extremely small head with a large smile going from ear to ear, no nose, and instead of eyes two small white lights. This second entity goes to the bedroom of the dying man and the storyteller sees him get up and escort the creepy entity. The following day he is found dead.

# A blacksmith, who has some late works, decided on Christmas Eve to not go to the Midnight Mass and to keep working. His wife doesn’t like this idea, but agrees at the condition that he stops working before the end of the mass. However the man overworks, and a man with a shrieking voice and a face hidden by a large hat appears at his door. The tall, hunched man tells him he needs his services urgently: he needs his scythe to be solidified, because the blade is shaky. The blacksmith decides to help the man, and he notes that the blade is backward but the client insists that he should just correct the shaking of the blade, not turn it around. When the work is done, the man, who is revealed to be the Ankou, pays him not with money, but with a warning: the warning that tomorrow, he should ask his wife to get him a priest to receive the last rites. For this work was the last he would ever do.

# A generous and rich man one day decided to invite a whole village to a feast, because he had just killed his biggest and fattest pig, and organized a “boudin feast” (ar gwadigennou). To announce this, he waited at the end of the mass, and perched on the staircase leading to the cemetery, he loudly announced his feast and how he invited everyone. Absolutely everyone – and he heard a small, high-pitched voice ask him if they were also invited, and he said yes, but could not see who spoke it. When the feast happen it was a grand celebration, with a lot of people, rich or poor, lot of meat and lot of alcohol. But the last guest to arrive at the feast was someone everyone took for a beggard : he had an old and worn-out black robe, almost in tatters, and he smelled like rot. He was yet welcomed like everyone else – but he barely touched the food he was given, he refused to speak to anyone, and he kept his head facing the ground, refusing to look up at other people. The feast went on, and everyone left one by one… except for the beggar man. The generous man thought it was normal : he was the last to arrive, he would be the last to go. But he noticed that his plate and cup were turned-upside down and so he asked him who he was… And there the man raised up his head, revealing a skull, and he cast away his rags, which revealed a body of rotten flesh ; and the guest revealed himself to be the Ankou, that the generous man had carelessly invited near the cemetery. But, as he was kind and generous to the Ankou, the Ankou offers him a gift of knowledge : he reveals to him that he has only eight days left to live, and it is not negotiable. And the Ankou promises that when they will meet again, the generous man will be the guest of the Ankou’s own feast, “not as grand as yours, mind you, but at least there will be much more people!”.

# A man returns to his home to find his wife and servant terrified. They claim that the Ankou’s cart passed by, for they heard a squeaking, creaking cart, as well as big, heavy hooves – and this terrifying cacophony lasted five to six minutes. The man thinks it is ridiculous, because the women refused to look outside and so did not saw actually what was making that noise – he thinks it is just a random cart, but the women claim they heard it passing by the old “road of death” nearby, and given no funerals were organized, they are certain it was the Ankou. The man thinks they are just silly… until later that days he meets a neighbor and discovers that his young daughter suddenly passed away this morning.

# Three young lads, foolish brothers, decide one day to have “fun” by putting a big tree trunk in the middle of an old road, to block it. But the evening, someone loudly knocks at their door : they open it, yet there is nobody outside, and they can’t close the door! All three of them try, to not way. Terrified, they ask who is here, “in the name of God answer”, and a deep voice warns them that they need on the instant to move the huge tree they placed on the road. The brothers, terrified, run to the road through the cold night and find the Ankou with his cart waiting by the tree. They promptly remove the trunk, but the Ankou tells them “Because of your foolishness, you made me lose an hour in my journey. You each own me one hour, and if you hadn’t obeyed to my command and unblocked the road, I would have taken of your life as many years as the minutes I had to wait for the road to be free.”

# A man had recently a new house built for him, but when he enters it he finds a dark and shadowy silhouette waiting for him. He asks who is the man, but the person refuses to answer or look at him, and doesn’t move. He asks three times, and it is only on the third time that the man finally reacts. He raises his head, revealing that he has no nose and empty eye sockets, and he says “I am your master and the master of all.”. The man, recognizing the Ankou, fled and never returned to his new house.