Gwennolaïk looked around, and found herself on an island where a crowd of people were dancing. Lads and lasses, they danced most bravely beneath the green trees heavy with apples, and the music to which they tripped was as that of heaven.
Suddenly the sun rose above the eastern mountains and flooded this strange new world with rich light, and there Gwennolaïk found her mother and her two sisters, and there was nothing in her heart but beauty and joy.
On the following morning, as the sun rose, the young women carried the body of Gwennolaïk and laid it in the tomb of her foster-brother in the White Church.
In this ballad—for the original from which we take the tale is cast in ballad form—we are once more in touch with the Celtic Otherworld. It is a thousand pities that this interesting piece breaks off where it does, thus failing to provide us with a fuller account of that most elusive realm. The short glimpse we do get of it, however, reminds us very much of the descriptions of it we possess in Irish lore. We have also once more the phenomenon of the dead lover who comes to claim the living bride, the midnight gallop, and other circumstances 172 characteristic of ballad literature. There was a tradition in Lower Brittany, however, that no soul might be admitted to the other world which had not first received burial, but here, of course, we must look for Christian influence.
CHAPTER VII: POPULAR LEGENDS OF BRITTANY
“The legend,” says Gomme, in a passage most memorable for students of folk-lore as containing his acute and precise definition of the several classes of tradition, “belongs to an historical personage, locality, or event,”[40] and it is in this general sense that the term is employed in regard to the contents of this chapter, unless where mythic or folk-lore matter is introduced for the sake of analogy or illustration. There is, however, a broad, popular reading of the term as indicating the fanciful-historical. When we read of the King of Ys, or Arthur, for example, we are not aware whether they ever existed or not, but they are alluded to by tradition as ancient rulers of Brittany and Britain, just as Cymbeline and Cole are spoken of as British monarchs of the distant past. They linger as personal figures in the folk-memory, but they scarcely seem as the personages of folk-tale. Let us say, then, for the purposes of our classification of Breton tradition, that we include in the term ‘legend’ all tales of great personal figures who are historical or over whom folk-tale has cast an historical vraisemblance, remembering at the same time that in the case of personages whose existence is doubtful we may be dealing with a folk-tale disguised or even a distorted myth.
The Dark Story of Gilles de Retz
Of the dark and terrible legends to which Brittany has given birth, one of the most gloomy and romantic is the story of Gilles de Retz, alchemist, magician, and arch-criminal. 174 But the story is not altogether legendary, although it has undoubtedly been added to from the great stores of tradition. Gilles is none other than the Bluebeard of the nursery tale, for he appears to have actually worn a beard bluish-black in hue, and it is probable that his personality became mingled with that of the hero of the old Oriental story.