Meantime, the “wicked stepmother,” falling ill and being at the point of death, became frightened when she thought of her sin against Azénor, and confessed the lies by which she had wrought the ruin of the Countess. The Count, overcome by remorse and grief, set out in quest of his wife. Good luck led him to Ireland, where he disembarked at Youghal and found his lost ones. With great rejoicing he had a stately ship made ready, and prepared to set out for Brittany with Azénor and Budoc, but died before he could embark. Azénor remained in Ireland and devoted herself to good works and to the training of her son, who from an early 356 age resolved to embrace the religious life, and was in due course made a monk by the Abbot of Youghal. His mother died, and on the death of the Abbot of Youghal he was elected to rule the monastery. Later, upon the death of the King of Ireland, the natives raised Budoc to the temporal and spiritual thrones, making him King of Ireland and Bishop of Armagh.
After two years he wished to retire from these honours, but the people were “wild with despair” at the tidings, and surrounded the palace lest he should escape. One night, while praying in his metropolitan church, an angel appeared to him, bidding him betake himself to Brittany. Going down to the seashore, it was indicated to him that he must make the voyage in a stone trough. On entering this it began to move, and he was borne across to Brittany, landing at Porspoder, in the diocese of Léon. The people of that district drew the stone coffer out of the water, and built a hermitage and a chapel for the Saint’s convenience. Budoc dwelt for one year at Porspoder, but, “disliking the roar of the waves,” he had his stone trough mounted on a cart, and yoking two oxen to it he set forth, resolved to follow them wherever they might go and establish himself at whatever place they might halt. The cart broke down at Plourin, and there Budoc settled for a short time; but trouble with disorderly nobles forced him to depart, and this time he went to Dol, where he was well received by St Malglorious, then its bishop, who soon after resigned his see to Budoc. The Saint ruled at Dol for twenty years, and died early in the seventh century.
Another Celtic myth of the same type is to be found on the shores of the Firth of Forth. The story in question deals with the birth of St Mungo, or St Kentigern, the 357 patron saint of Glasgow. His mother was Thenaw, the Christian daughter of the pagan King Lot of Lothian, brother-in-law of King Arthur, from his marriage with Arthur’s sister Margawse. Thus the famous Gawaine would be Thenaw’s brother. Thenaw met Ewen, the son of Eufuerien, King of Cumbria, and fell deeply in love with him, but her father discovered her disgrace and ordered her to be cast headlong from the summit of Traprain Law, once known as Dunpender, a mountain in East Lothian. A kindly fate watched over the princess, however, and she fell so softly from the eminence that she was uninjured. Such Christian subjects as Lot possessed begged her life. But if her father might have relented his Druids were inexorable. They branded her as a sorceress, and she was doomed to death by drowning. She was accordingly rowed out from Aberlady Bay to the vicinity of the Isle of May, where, seated in a skin boat, she was left to the mercy of the waves. In this terrible situation she cast herself upon the grace of Heaven, and her frail craft was wafted up the Forth, where it drifted ashore near Culross. At this spot Kentigern was born, and the mother and child were shortly afterward discovered by some shepherds, who placed them under the care of St Serf, Abbot of Culross. To these events the date A.D. 516 is assigned.
‘Fatal Children’ Legends
This legend is, of course, closely allied with those which recount the fate and adventures of the ‘fatal children.’ Like Œdipus, Romulus, Perseus, and others, Budoc and Kentigern are obviously ‘fatal children,’ as is evidenced by the circumstances of their birth. We 358 are not told that King Lot or Azénor’s father had been warned that if their daughters had a son they would be slain by that child, but it is probably only the saintly nature of the subject of the stories which caused this circumstance to be omitted. Danaë, the mother of Perseus, we remember, was, when disgraced, shut up in a chest with her child, and committed to the waves, which carried her to the island of Seriphos, where she was duly rescued. Romulus and his brother Remus were thrown into the Tiber, and escaped a similar fate. The Princess Desonelle and her twin sons, in the old English metrical romance of Sir Torrent of Portugal, are also cast into the sea, but succeed in making the shore of a far country. All these children grow up endowed with marvellous beauty and strength, but their doom is upon them, and after numerous adventures they slay their fathers or some other unfortunate relative. But the most characteristic part of what seems an almost universal legend is that these children are born in the most obscure circumstances, afterward rising to a height of splendour which makes up for all they previously suffered. It is not necessary to explain nowadays that this is characteristic of nearly all sun-myths. The sun is born in obscurity, and rises to a height of splendour at midday.
Thus in the majority of these legends we find the sun personified. It is not sufficient to object that such an elucidation smacks too much of the tactics of Max Müller to be accepted by modern students of folk-lore. The student of comparative myth who does not make use of the best in all systems of mythological elucidation is undone, for no one system will serve for all examples.
To those who may object, “Oh, but Kentigern was a 359 real person,” I reply that I know many myths concerning ‘real’ people. For the matter of that, we assist in the manufacture of these every day of our lives, and it is quite a fallacy that legends cannot spring up concerning veritable historical personages, and even around living, breathing folk. And for the rest of it mythology and hagiology are hopelessly intermingled in their motifs.
Miraculous Crossings
Another Celtic saint besides Budoc possessed a stone boat. He is St Baldred, who, like Kentigern, hails from the Firth of Forth, and dwelt on the Bass Rock. He is said to have chosen this drear abode as a refuge from the eternal wars between the Picts and the Scots toward the close of the seventh century. From this point of vantage, and probably during seasons of truce, he rowed to the mainland to minister to the spiritual wants of the rude natives of Lothian. Inveresk seems to have been the eastern border of his ‘parish.’ Tradition says that he was the second Bishop of Glasgow, and thus the successor of Kentigern, but the lack of all reliable data concerning the western see subsequent to the death of Glasgow’s patron saint makes it impossible to say whether this statement is authentic or otherwise. Many miracles are attributed to Baldred, not the least striking of which is that concerning a rock to the east of Tantallon Castle, known as ‘St Baldred’s Boat.’ At one time this rock was situated between the Bass and the adjacent mainland, and was a fruitful source of shipwreck. Baldred, pitying the mariners who had to navigate the Firth, and risk this danger, rowed out to the rock and mounted upon it; whereupon, at his simple nod, it was lifted up, and, like a ship 360 driven by the wind, was wafted to the nearest shore, where it thenceforth remained. This rock is sometimes called ‘St Baldred’s Coble,’ or ‘Cock-boat.’ This species of miracle is more commonly discovered in the annals of hagiology than in those of pure myth, although in legend we occasionally find the landscape altered by order of supernatural or semi-supernatural beings.
One rather striking instance of miraculous crossing is that of St Noyala, who is said to have crossed to Brittany on the leaf of a tree, accompanied by her nurse. She was beheaded at Beignon, but walked to Pontivy carrying her head in her hands. A chapel at Pontivy is dedicated to her, and was remarkable in the eighteenth century for several interesting paintings on a gold ground depicting this legend.