Like the Cornish, the Welsh, and the Scots, the Bretons descend from the Celts who occupied Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The Breton language and culture are strongest in Lower Brittany, which is in the northwest corner of France. François-Marie Luzel (d. 1895), the first Breton folklorist, lived in an area rich in oral tradition. Rather than collecting folklore as an outsider, he was a regular native participant in storytelling sessions. In his most important folktale collection, Contes populaires de basse-bretagne, narrators and dates are identified for most of the tales, and insightful comments are liberally supplied. Luzel enjoyed the multiplicity of alternative versions: he clearly was interested in the ways in which a tale can be molded or tweaked or altered to give different effects. Veillées bretonnes (1879) is explicitly ethnographic: it describes five evenings’ entertainment, including songs and stories and the comments and conversations that took place in between them.
Michael Wilson, who is a storyteller as well as a professor, has much in common with Luzel, in particular an appreciation of folktales as performance. For The Midnight Washerwoman, he has selected twenty-nine of Luzel’s tales (twelve from just two outstanding narrators), chosen to be dramatic, or lively, or surprising, or otherwise remarkable. The tales are arranged in five groups, each a potential veillée, a gathering where various tales of different genres are performed. Generically, the tales are the usual miscellany—magic tales, humorous tales of different lengths, a cumulative tale—plus supernatural stories. These ghost stories, in which someone who has behaved badly is subjected to a frightening ordeal as a punishment, are more like legends than folktales in the narrow sense. The washerwoman character, a malevolent, death-bringing spirit who washes clothes or shrouds in the dark of night, appears twice at a laundry site out-of-doors and once again as a witch who, by offering to help wash newly-spun yarn, insinuates herself into the house of an unsuspecting country woman.
Wilson’s introduction presents background information about Luzel’s life, Breton culture, and the custom of the veillée. It also covers the choice of the tales in this collection, the translation from French into English, and the reference works used for comparative analysis.
In notes at the back Wilson comments on each tale, perhaps to tell something special about the circumstances in which it was collected, or how it relates to some other tale of Luzel’s, or how it reflects popular Breton attitudes or social customs. ATU numbers are assigned. Rheinhold Köhler annotated Luzel’s tales in the 1870s, and Bolte and Polívka cited his work with reference to the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Thus, it is no surprise that many of them correspond to ATU types. (One small correction: the first part of no. 6 is not ATU 313 + 501, but rather the first part of ATU 400 with motif H1235, Succession of helpers on quest, and motif D3611.1, Swan maidens. Tale no. 27, The Enchanted Princess, also belongs to this unwieldy tale type.)
Overall, Wilson has managed to make this book simple enough to be entertaining but also complex enough to be interesting. Storytellers will find useful material here, whole tales, and also embellishments like strategic tricks and twists. Academic readers will also find food for thought. Anyone who is motivated to pursue further library research can access many of Luzel’s works through the French Wikisource website: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Fran%C3%A7ois-Marie_Luzel.
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[Review length: 564 words • Review posted on April 21, 2024]