thumb|right|upright=1.5|Flight of King Gradlon, by [[Évariste Vital Luminais|E. V. Luminais, 1884 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper)]]

Ys (pronounced ), also spelled Is or Kêr-Is in Breton, and Ville d'Ys ("City of Ys") in French, is a mythical city on the coast of Brittany that was swallowed up by the ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Baie de Douarnenez.

Literary versions

In 1839, T. Hersart de la Villemarqué published a collection of popular songs collected from oral tradition, the Barzaz Breizh. Malgven appeared in many subsequent retellings, including Charles Guyot's La Légende de la ville d'Ys d'après les anciens textes (1926). Guyot named Gradlon's horse Morvarc'h and wrote that the horse was a gift from Malgven.

A novel by Norman Douglas, They Went (1920), is based upon the Breton legend.

Oral versions

In 1893, Anatole Le Braz collected a fragmentary version of the legend in his book La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne, and its posterior 1902 augmented edition La Légende de la mort chez les Bretons armoricains Gallicenae, Dahut, and The Dog and the Wolf. Their version portrays Gradlon as a Roman centurion, Gratillonius, sent to be the prefect of Ys.

The Daughters of Ys (2020) by M. T. Anderson and Jo Rioux is based on the folktale. The graphic novel's adaptation follows Dahut's perspective of the events leading to the destruction of Ys.

The devil in Souvestre's version

Émile Souvestre's telling differs from the tale in several points. Ys was still protected by dikes, whose gates were opened for ships at certain moments, but it was Dahut herself who kept the silver keys of the dikes around her neck. Dahut was a sorceress and had embellished the city with the help of the korrigans, which built works men could not make. With her magic, Dahut also tamed the sea dragons, and gave one to each inhabitant of the city, which they used to go find rare goods or to reach their enemies' vessels. The story of Ys also inspired a 1972 album of the same name by the Italian progressive rock band Il Balletto di Bronzo.

Cornish composer William Lewarne Harris wrote his third and largest opera, The Sunken City, about "Ker-ys". The three-act, prologue and epilogue opera, completed in 1992, has not been publicly performed, but there are many private recordings of excerpts.

Historicity

In 2025, marine archaeologists discovered submerged ruins near Sein Island, approximately six miles from the Bay of Douarnenez. They speculate that a real-world city lost to rising sea levels would have been memorable to local peoples, and that the myth of Ys might be based on this sunken settlement.

See also

  • Lyonesse - semi-mythical inundated land off the tip of Cornwall.
  • Cantre'r Gwaelod - Welsh legend of a sunken kingdom
  • List of mythological places

References

Works cited

  • Translation of the French La Femme Celte, Editions Payot, 1972.
  • . Available at Project Gutenberg.

Original French sources

  • Available at Numerlyo, Bibliothèque Numérique de Lyon.
  • . Available at Gallica.
  • . Available at archive.org.
  • . Available at Gallica.
  • . Available at Gallica
  • . Available at Gallica

Further reading

  • MacKillop, James. Myths and Legends of the Celts, London; New York : Penguin Global, 2005, pp. 299–302. .
  • Anderson, M.T. and Jo Rioux. The Daughters of Ys. New York, First Second, 2020.
  • Gralon.net
  • Timeless Myths – City of Ys