Barzaz Breiz

Barzaz Breiz (in modern spelling Barzhaz Breizh, meaning "Ballads of Brittany": barzh is the equivalent of "bard" and Breizh means "Brittany") is a collection of Breton popular songs collected by Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué and published in 1839. It was compiled from oral tradition and preserves traditional folk tales, legends and music. Hersart de la Villemarqué grew up in the manor of Plessix in Nizon, near Pont-Aven, and was half Breton himself.

The collection was published in the original Breton language with a French translation. It achieved a wide distribution, as the Romantic generation in France that "discovered" the Basque language was beginning to be curious about all the submerged cultures of Europe and the pagan survivals just under the surface of folk Catholicism. The Barzaz Breiz brought Breton folk culture for the first time into European awareness. One of the oldest of the collected songs was the legend of Ys. The book was also notable for the fact that La Villemarqué recorded the music of the ballads as well as the words. This was one of the first attempts to collect and print Breton traditional music, except hymns.

Until this publication the so-called "matter of Brittany" (Breton legends) was known only from references to some legends in French language Romances of the 13th and 14th centuries, in which much of the culture was also transformed to suit Gallic hearers.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part collects ballads about historical legends and heroic deeds of Breton leaders, including Nominoe, Erispoe and the warriors of the Combat of the Thirty. The second part records local culture, concentrating on religious festivals and seasonal events.

The publication of traditional folk literature was controversial at this time because of the dispute about the most famous of such collections, James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian, which purported to be translated from ancient Celtic poetry, but was widely believed to have been largely written by MacPherson himself. After the publication of Barzaz Breiz François-Marie Luzel criticised the work at a scholarly conference in 1868. At the 1872 Congress of the Breton Association at Saint-Brieuc, he argued that the songs had been completely manufactured in the manner of MacPherson, because, he said, he had never himself met with ballads in such elegant Breton and free of borrowed French words. The main problem raised by his opponents was that Villemarqué refused to show his notebooks to other scholars.

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