The City of Is
From Travels Through Brittany
by Terri Windling
A.S. Byatt is another modern writer who works with ancient Breton tales in her extraordinary novel Possession, winner of the Booker Prize. The novel makes use of the legend of Melusine, and of the Drowned City of Is, but it also touches on the Merlin story and its place in Breton tradition…
The Ile de Sein in the Baie des Trepasses is another island with legendary associations. It is believed to have been the high seat of the Celtic religion, and a place of oracular magic. Nine druid priestesses, known as the Gallicenae, inhabited the island, with the power to raise the wind and sea, to turn themselves into animals, to cure wounds and diseases, and to see into the future. In Celtic times, the dead were sent to the women of the Ile de Sein; from there they travelled on to the summer lands of an Earthly Paradise.
The Baie des Trepasses is one of the many locations given for the famous Drowned City of Is (also called Ys, or Ker-Ys in Breton tales). According to legend, Is was the capital of Cornouaille — a city so beautiful it inspired the name of Paris (Par-Is, “like Is”). Built by the sea, the city was protected by a dike, locked with a golden key. The king of Is had a daughter, Dahut — headstrong, proud, and wild. Dahut was seduced by a daemon or a fairy, who took the form of a beautiful young man. As proof of her love, he asked her to open the seagate at night to let him in. She stole the key while her father slept, opened the gates, and the sea flooded in.
They say on certain moonlit nights you can still hear the bells of Is ringing from far under the waves.
(This article appeared in Realms of Fantasy magazine in 1996.)
From Sacred Texts Legends and Sagas Celtic
VII. IN BRITTANY
Origin of the ‘Morgan’
The following legendary origin is attributed to the Morgan by M. Goulven Le Scour, our Carnac witness:
‘Following the old people and the Breton legends, the Morgan (Mari Morgan in Breton) was Dahut, the daughter of King Gradlon, who was ruler of the city of Is. Legend records that when Dahut had entered at night the bedchamber of her father and had cut from around his neck the cord which held the key of the sea-dike flood-gates, and had given this key to the Black Prince, under whose evil love she had fallen, and who, according to belief, was no other than the Devil, St. Guenolé soon afterwards began to cry aloud, “Great King, arise! The flood-gates are open, and the sea is no longer restrained!”
Suddenly the old King Gradlon arose, and, leaping on his horse, was fleeing from the city with St. Guenolé, when he encountered his own daughter amid the waves. She piteously begged aid of her father, and he took her up behind him on the horse; but St. Guenolé, seeing that the waters were gaining on them, said to the king, “Throw into the sea the demon you have behind you, and we shall be saved!” Thereupon Gradlon flung his daughter into the abyss, and he and St. Guenolé were saved.
Since that time, the fishermen declare that they have seen, in times of rough sea and clear moonlight, Dahut, daughter of King Gradlon, sitting on the rocks combing her fair hair and singing, in the place where her father flung her. And today there is recognized under the Breton name Marie Morgan, the daughter who sings amid the sea.’
Breton Fairyland Legends
In a legend concerning Mona and the king of the Morgans, much like the Christabel story of English poets, we have a picture of a fairyland not under ground, but under sea; and this legend of Mona and her Morgan lover is one of the most beautiful of all the fairy-tales of Brittany.
Another one of Luzel’s legends, concerning a maiden who married a dead man, shows us Fairyland as a world of the dead. It is a very strange legend, and one directly bearing on the Psychological Theory; for this dead man, who is a dead priest, has a palace in a realm of enchantment, and to enter his country one must have a white fairy-wand with which to strike ‘in the form of a cross’ two blows upon the rock concealing the entrance.
M. Paul Sébillot records from Upper Brittany a tradition that beneath the sea-waves there one can see a subterranean world containing fields and villages and beautiful castles; and it is so pleasant a world that mortals going there find years no longer than days.
(Introduction by ANATOLE LE BRAZ, Professor of French Literature, University of Rennes, Brittany; author of La Légende de la Mort, Au Pays des Pardons, etc.)
From The Mysteries of Carnac and Atlantis
By Paul Johnson
One intriguing possible connection which Markale does not address is the Archaic Maritime civilization of North America, which flourished 7000 to 3000 B.C. from Maine to Labrador. This seafaring culture built dwellings up to 270 feet long and erected primitive alignments of standing stones on the Atlantic coast, which predate the European megaliths by millennia. As some of these alignments are also oriented to solstitial sunrise, they may indicate a missing link between Atlantis and the European megaliths.
What became of the cyclopean builders of Western Europe? What traces of their civilization are left to us? Markale recounts various Breton tales of drowned cities, particularly the Ville d’Is (City of Is). According to some versions, a non-Christian and libidinous island nation is submerged after it refuses to listen to a Christian missionary ’s warnings. In another, a maiden charged with the key to the dike protecting the city yields it to the wrong person, who opens the dike. Other versions give different reasons for the submersion. Markale’s interest in these tales is that they provide possible culture traits from Atlantis or the megalith builders. About the mixed population of Roman Gaul, Markale quotes (p. 254) Ammianus Marcellinus (XV:9), citing a lost work of the Greek Timagenus:
According to Druidic lore, the population of Gaul is not indigenous except in part, and was increased at various times by absorbing foreign islanders from across the seas and by peoples chased from their lands across the Rhine either by the vicissitudes of war (a permanent state in these countries) or by the invasion of the violent element which thunders on their coasts.
This leads Markale to the hypothesis that the Celtic myth of a deluge is based on history — the emigration of the Celts being due to catastrophic flooding of their land. He speculates further that this area is the Baltic and Jutland coasts which experienced severe climatic changes around 1200 B.C., and that the migrants eventually blended with the “foreign islanders” of Atlantean stock who built the megaliths.
(From Sunrise magazine, October/November 1988; copyright © 1987 Theosophical University Press)
