Ys
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Ys (also spelled Is or Ker-Ys in Breton) is a mythical city built in the Douarnenez bay in Brittany by Gradlon, King of Cornouaille, for his daughter Dahut.
[edit] The story
According to the legend, Ys was built below sea level, protected from inundation by a dam. The only keys of the gate in the dam were held by Gradlon, but Satan made Dahut steal them and give them to him. He then opened the gate and Ys was flooded. In some versions of the story, Satan was sent by God to punish the city, whose inhabitants were becoming decadent. Other versions of the story tell that Dahut stole the keys either at her lover's request or in order to open the gates of the city to let her lover in. The only survivor was the King Gradlon, who was advised to abandon his daughter and Saint Winwaloe by Saint Winwaloe himself. Everyone who lived in the city died. And the souls of the dead children were then swallowed by the ocean as a punishment. And according to the legend, one can still hear the bells of Ys, warning of a storm. Gradlon then founded Quimper and on his death, a statue representing him on horseback looking in the direction of Ys was erected on the Saint Corentin Cathedral and still stands there. Bretons said that Ys was the most wonderful city in the world, and that Lutèce was renamed Paris after Ys was destroyed, because "Par-Is" in Breton means "Similar to Ys"[citation needed].
This deluge legend differs from others because the location of Ys is well defined: the statue of Gradlon looks at it, most of the localities mentioned exist, several Roman roads actually lead into the sea (and are meant to lead to Ys), and this myth could in fact depict the engulfment of a real city during the 5th century[citation needed]. This history is also sometimes viewed as the victory of Christianity (Gradlon was converted by Saint Winwaloe) over druidism (Dahut and most inhabitants of Ys were worshippers of Celtic gods). However, a Breton folktale asserts that Gradlon met, spoke with and consoled the last Druid in Brittany, and oversaw his pagan burial, before building a chapel in his sacred grove[citation needed].
It should be noted that there are many comparable instances of sea-level rise between the Roman and Mediaeval periods around the English Channel.
- Caesar's writings tell of his men being able to wade across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, carrying their weapons above their head. Today it is significant shipping lane serving the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth.
- The Scilly Isles were in the Roman period a single island, "Scillonia insula" (singular) in writings, and farms have been found on rocky islets too small for agriculture(at very low tides walking between some islands is possible), ancient field walls are clearly visable offshore of some islands.
- The first settlement and port of Selsey, seat of the Bishop of Sussex, is believed to now lie off the Sussex coast.
[edit] Later use of the legend
The legend of Ys was confined to the folk of Brittany until 1839, when T. Hersart de la Villemarqué published a collection of popular songs collected from oral tradition, the Barzaz Breizh. The collection achieved a wide distribution and brought Breton folk culture into European awareness. One of the oldest of the collected songs was this tale. The medieval poet Marie de France also wrote poetry and stories based around the Ys legend. Four years after Luminais' painting scored a success at the Salon of 1884, on May 7, 1888, Édouard Lalo's opera Le roi d'Ys, based on this legend, premiered in Paris. In Claude Debussy's first book of Preludes (published 1910), the evocative La Cathédrale engloutie recalls the drowned cathedral in the city of Ys, with the muffled and watery sonority of its spectral bells.
Poul Anderson and his wife Karen wrote a tetralogy of novels about Ys in the 1980s. Prior to that series, fantasy writer A. Merritt in his novel Creep, Shadow! drew from the Ys legend. Author Robert W. Chambers set the short story "The Demoiselle D'Ys" (from his fantasy collection The King in Yellow, 1895) in medieval/contemporary Brittany.
Jack Vance sited Ys as one of the cities in the kingdom of South Ulfland in his Lyonesse Trilogy.
Dutch-born writer Iman Wilkens claims, in his book Where Troy Once Stood, that the Trojan War and other events in Homer's epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey took place in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea; he claims the city of Ismarus, sacked by Odysseus' men after leaving Troy, was in fact Ys. Wilkens' suggestions have not attracted the attention of mainstream scholars.
Harpist/folk-singer Joanna Newsom released an album in 2006 called Ys. Progressive rock band Il Balletto di Bronzo also has a concept album called Ys. The heavy metal band Bal-Sagoth has included Ys in many of its stories/songs.
