I subscribe to 404 Media because they’re one of the few outlets doing tech journalism that isn’t just uncritically parroting the ridiculous claims of big tech CEOs, but this story about recent discovery of human-created underwater structures near an island off the coast of Brittany has got me thinking about the game of telephone that is Celtic mythology, particularly regarding the Breton legend of the sunken city of Ys. The neolithic and bronze age Celtic cultures of the European Atlantic coast, stretching from Ireland to Spain, were oral cultures. As such, they never preserved their own history in their own words, so we’re left only with their archaeological remains on the one hand, and on the other, the stories written down by the Romans, who produced propaganda about uncivilized barbarians in need of Roman rule, and the Medieval Catholic Church, who appropriated Celtic myth and folklore to teach Christian morality and exalt the victory of Christianity over paganism.
Reading Celtic mythology and folklore as recounted by Medieval Christians offers a tantalizing glimpse into a lost world. For me, the pleasures of these stories, whether Irish, Welsh, or Breton mythology, whether Arthuriana or the Mabinogion, lies in attempting to reconstruct the Celtic values overwritten by Christian ones.
One of my favorite Celtic legends is the legend of the city of Ys. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi summarizes the legend thus:
YS, the ruins of a city in the Bay of Douarnenez, Finistère, France, near the town of Plomarch. Towards the end of the fourth century AD, Ys was protected from the sea by a strong dam, the gates of which were hidden; only the king possessed the key to these gates. The king’s daughter was tempted by a mysterious stranger. To please him, she stole the key from her father’s chamber; the gates were opened and the city was drowned. To this very day, travellers can hear the bells of the churches of Ys sounding the hours, deep in the shadowed bay.
It may turn out that the place isn’t so imaginary, after all. The aforementioned discovery points to a historical origin of the legend. That’s not to say that these stones are the ruins of Ys itself, or that the city sank for the reasons outlined in the legend, but that the motif of the sunken city in Celtic mythology has historical origins.
I’ve been trying to write a story set in Ys for years, on and off. We can’t really know what the “original” version of the story is, before Chrsitian interpolation, and I can’t purport to write a version that is faithful to the original Celtic story, if an “original” even exists, but I can try to “re-paganize” or “de-Christianize” it by cutting away the dualistic morality and the demonization of women. My story in Flame Tree’s Morgana anthology (that’s marketing, folks) follows a similar trajectory with respect to the figure of Morgan Le Fay, whose role in Arthurian legend Medieval Christian writers often couldn’t quite work out.
Dahud, the king’s daughter in the Ys myth, is a similar figure to Morgan. Françoise Le Roux and Christian-Joseph Guyonvarc’h connect the two in La Légende de la ville d’Is, arguing that the legend of Ys “is also the legend of Dahud or Morgane, the daughter of the sea.”
While the legend’s motifs, such as the woman of the Otheworld, originate in Celtic mythology, it makes sense to me that this story, and other Celtic tales of sunken cities, such as the Cornish legend of Lyonesse and the Welsh legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod as told in The Black Book of Carmarthen, would have their origin in historical fact.
It wouldn’t be the first time science vindicates myth. One need look no further than Humboldt Bay near Eureka, California. The indigenous Wiyot people have a legend about its creation: one day, the earth opened up and swallowed the land, flooding the area and destroying a tribe in the process.
For a long time it seemed absurd that a body of water the size of Humboldt Bay could appear overnight. But it turns out that the story encodes a historical event: the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake, a magnitude 8.7 earthquake that rocked the Pacific Northwest and created a tsunami that reached all the way to Japan.
It’s not unreasonable to think that Celtic stories of sunken cities are no different, recording historical events dating as far back as the end of the ice age, when sea levels were far lower and the southern part of the North Sea was a stretch of lush tundra now known as Doggerland. The European coastline as we know it today didn’t take shape until about 7000 years ago. How many settlements were lost to rising sea levels?
While these settlements, and the structures discovered off the coast of Brittany, were likely nothing more than villages of hunter-gatherers who crafted stone tools and erected megaliths, the paucity of factual knowledge leaves the door open to romantic notions of lost civilizations. These gaps in the historical record are what get my imagination going for some reason, whether it’s the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin in western China, or the Atlantic Bronze Age, or the Native American abandoned city of Cahokia, or the Garamantes of the Sahara.
Anyway I need to finish one of my Ys stories before someone else realizes what an excellent platform it would be to tell the story of the current civilizational collapse that we’re currently living through…
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