Tales, as apart from beliefs, are not often encountered in connexion with the monuments. Indeed, Sébillot, in the course of his researches, found only some dozen of these all told.[17] They are very brief, and appear for the most part to deal with fairies who have been shut up by the power of magic in a dolmen. Tales of spirits enclosed in trees, and even in pillars, are not uncommon, and lately I have heard a peculiarly fearsome ghost story which comes from Belgium, in which it is related how certain spirits had become enclosed in a pillar in an ancient abbey, for the saintly occupants of which they made it particularly uncomfortable. Mr George Henderson, in one of the most masterly and suggestive studies of Celtic survivals ever published, states that stones in the Highlands of Scotland were formerly believed to have souls, and that those too large to be moved “were held to be in intimate connexion with spirits.” Pillared stones are not employed in building dwellings in the Highlands, ill luck, it is believed, being 53 sure to follow their use in this manner, while to ‘meddle’ with stones which tradition connects with Druidism is to court fatality.[18]
Stones that Travel
M. Salomon Reinach tells us of the Breton belief that certain sacred stones go once a year or once a century to ‘wash’ themselves in the sea or in a river, returning to their ancient seats after their ablutions.[19] The stones in the dolmen of Essé are thought to change their places continually, like those of Callernish and Lewis, and, like the Roman Penates, to have the gift of coming and going if removed from their habitual site.
The megalithic monuments of Brittany are undoubtedly the most remarkable relics of that epoch of prehistoric activity which is now regarded as the immediate forerunner of civilization. Can it be that they were miraculously preserved by isolation from the remote beginnings of that epoch, or is it more probable that they were constructed at a relatively late period? These are questions of profound difficulty, and it is likely that both theories contain a certain amount of truth. Whatever may have been the origin of her megaliths, Brittany must ever be regarded as a great prehistoric museum, a unique link with a past of hoary antiquity.
CHAPTER III: THE FAIRIES OF BRITTANY
Whatever the origin of the race which conceived the demonology of Brittany—and there are indications that it was not wholly Celtic—that weird province of Faëry bears unmistakable evidence of having been deeply impressed by the Celtic imagination, if it was not totally peopled by it, for its various inhabitants act in the Celtic spirit, are moved by Celtic springs of thought and fancy, and possess not a little of that irritability which has forced anthropologists to include the Celtic race among those peoples described as ‘sanguine-bilious.’ As a rule they are by no means friendly or even humane, these fays of Brittany, and if we find beneficent elves within the green forests of the duchy we may feel certain that they are French immigrants, and therefore more polished than the choleric native sprites.
Broceliande
Of all the many localities celebrated in the fairy lore of Brittany none is so famous as Broceliande. Broceliande! “The sound is like a bell,” a far, faëry chime in a twilit forest. In the name Broceliande there seems to be gathered all the tender charm, the rich and haunting mystery, the remote magic of Brittany and Breton lore. It is, indeed, the title to the rarest book in the library of poetic and traditional romance.