Celtic Folk-Tales from Armorica

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 large number of stories in the 1860's and 1870's, 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 o stories, many of which were repetitions of one and the same theme. We have tries to make a representative selection from his stories, keeping only sufficient repetition of similar themes to permit the reader to see how one and the same story may come to vary in 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.