What happened
In Lower Brittany death has a name and a face: Ankou, a tall, gaunt man or a skeleton in a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a scythe with its blade turned outward. At night he drives a creaking cart along the roads, pulled by an emaciated horse, while two helpers load the dead onto it. Whoever hears the creak of its wheels – “karrigell an Ankou” – will soon die, or someone close to them will. Tradition says Ankou is the last person to die in the parish each year, who must collect the souls of the others for the following year. His images adorn Breton parish closes. On the ossuary at La Roche-Maurice, built in 1639–1640, a figure of death stands above the holy-water stoup with the inscription “IE VOVS TVE TOVS” – “I kill you all.”
Witnesses
Folk tradition of Lower Brittany; dozens of accounts were collected in the late 19th century by Anatole Le Braz in “La Légende de la mort chez les Bretons armoricains” (1893).
Explanations and hypotheses
Ankou is a personification of death rather than the ghost of a particular person – folklorists see him as a blend of medieval ideas of the dance of death, Catholic memento mori piety and older, pre-Christian beliefs. The images on 16th- and 17th-century ossuaries and churches were meant to remind the faithful of mortality. The tales of the creaking cart are tied to the real experience of the old countryside: carts carrying the dead at night and the sound of wheels on the roads. Ankou remains one of the most important symbols of Breton culture.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Inventaire du patrimoine culturel en Bretagne – Enclos paroissial et église Saint-Yves, La Roche-Maurice
- Diocèse de Quimper et Léon – La Roche-Maurice (notice)
- Anatole Le Braz, La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (H. Champion, 1893)
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