Keltské pověsti a pohádky. Bretaň Díl 1.

by Lenka Dostálová (translator), François-Marie Luzel, Zdena Ošťádalová (translator)

The folk-tales of Armorican Brittany form as much a part of the Celtic inheritance of the British Isles as do those of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, for Brittany was largely populated by migrants from Britain in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. Whereas the Welsh and Irish have a written literature coming down from ancient times, the Bretons have kept an oral tradition embodied in songs and stories handed down from one generation to the next.

Luzel collected a number of stories in the 1860s and 1870s, at a time when the traditional art of story-telling was still alive. His voluminous work Contes Populaires de Basse-Bretagne (Folk-Tales of Lower Brittany) contained a large number of stories, many of which were repetitions of one and the same theme. We have tried to male a representative selection of similar stories, keeping only sufficient repetition of similar themes to permit the reader to see how one and the same story came to vary with the passage of time.

Dr Bryce's commentaries are brief; they are intended to help the reader understand something of what the stories are about. Where appropriate, he has included the views of older, and more recent commentators, and he has pointed out the esoteric themes underlying many of these stories.

Cover Photo: Near Carnac by M.J. Coughlan

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985