The Oral Transmission of Celtic Tales

The Transmission of Celtic Tales to France in the Middle Ages

The word Celtic refers to a group of people who lived in Europe at least as long ago as 500 bc. Their languages, though similar, were not exactly the same, and there were three main language groups: Gaulish, spoken in the area that we call France today; Gaelic, spoken on the island we now call Ireland; and Brythonic, spoken on the mainland of Britain. When the Romans conquered Gaul (France) in the first century before Christ, the Gauls became bilingual, and eventually Gaulish died out. When the Romans invaded Britain, however, they did not occupy the whole country, and Brythonic remained the language of the British people, even after the Romans had left. In the fifth century, after the Romans had left, and when the Angles and Saxons were in the process of occupying Britain, they drove the British into the western parts of the country—mainly into Wales and Cornwall. Some Britons even fled the country altogether and set up a British colony in the province of Armorica, which became known as Lesser Britain, or Brittany. These communities developed separately from each other, and their languages became known as Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh and Breton are still spoken today. Welsh today is a predominantly Celtic language, with a small influence from Latin (the language of the Roman Empire and the medieval Church) and English (from more modern times, and expressing modern concepts like Dim Parcio, which means No Parking). For a long time, the French tried to suppress Breton; according to Elmar Ternes, as recently as the 1950s in Brittany, “it was not uncommon to find the authorization notice Il est interdit de cracher par terre et de parler breton (‘It is forbidden to spit on the ground and to speak Breton’)” (377). Consequently, Breton has a very large number of loanwords from French.

The Romans never invaded Ireland, so Gaelic was never influenced by Latin. However, one tribe of Irish people, the Scotti, emigrated from Ireland, and settled on the Isle of Man and in Scotland—which now bears that tribe’s name. These groups developed in isolation from each other, and the languages became known as Irish, Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man) and Scots Gaelic. Manx died out in 1973; there are a few speakers left in the Highlands of Scotland, and rather more Irish speakers in Ireland.

Although these communities developed essentially in isolation from each other, there are some indications that they enjoyed a certain amount of communication: after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, for example, the Welsh and Irish were connected by religious ties; and there seems to have been some trade between Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. R. S. Loomis therefore posits that Irish storytellers would have been fairly common in Wales during the early Middle Ages. The Welsh storytellers, hearing these stories, adapted them to their own uses, sometimes combining or conflating them with their own indigenous tales. These stories were in turn passed on to Breton minstrels, who made a living not merely telling stories and singing lais in Brittany, but also wandered into northern France, where they necessarily had to translate their tales into French. In the process of oral transmission, the stories were adapted to the preferences of their listeners and, sometimes, their tellers: Christian storytellers would often gloss over the pagan elements in the original pagan stories, or give names to characters that were easier to pronounce in their original language. Sometimes, they would mistranslate a word, sometimes they failed to understand a whole episode. Frequently, the expanded or contracted an account, combined two characters into one, or split one characters into two. The result can be bewildering. An example of this is a character in the Irish story called the Phantom Frenzy. The character, Eriu, represents the Sovereignty of Ireland. She bears a drinking horn, and appears sometimes as an ugly old hag, and sometimes as a beautiful young woman. In the original tales, she represented the fertility of the land, which is fertile and beautiful in the spring and summer, ugly and barren in the winter. But at some point in the transmission of these tales, she changed until, in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, she appears as two people: the beautiful Grail-bearer, and the ugly messenger who criticizes the hero and sends him off on the quest to find the Grail castle. The horn that Eriu bears has become Chrétien’s grail, a dish containing a mass-wafer—clearly the pagan Horn of Plenty transformed into something a Christian could appreciate.

The Celtic origins of almost all the Arthurian stories, and most particularly those connected with the Holy Grail, can still be detected even in the most overtly Christian stories. This does not mean that the authors of the stories were closet pagans, or that the “true” meanings of these stories subvert the Christian orthodoxy of the time. But it does show the medieval flair for adapting interesting stories to their own purposes, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not so successfully.