The City of Ys is the great legendary city of Brittany, a magnificent coastal settlement protected from the sea by a great dike with a single bronze gate, whose key was kept by the king Gradlon. The city was extraordinary — wealthier, more beautiful, and more sophisticated than anything else in the known world of its time — and it was destroyed in a single night when the king’s daughter Dahut opened the bronze gate and let the sea in. The city sank beneath the waves of the Bay of Douarnenez, where it remains, and on calm days fishermen claim to hear its church bells ringing beneath the water.
The legend of Ys is one of the foundational myths of Breton identity, a story that encodes the relationship between the Celtic world and the Christian world that replaced it, between the old sensual pleasures of the pre-Christian tradition and the austere demands of the new faith, between a father’s love and a daughter’s ruin. It has been told and retold in Brittany for over a thousand years and remains the most important single legend in the Breton tradition.
King Gradlon and the City
Gradlon was a historical figure, or at least a figure presented as historical in the early Breton sources: a fifth century king of Cornouaille in southwestern Brittany whose court at Quimper was a real place. The legendary Gradlon who built Ys is a magnificent king whose kingdom represented everything the Celtic aristocratic ideal valued: wealth, hospitality, military prowess, and the capacity to create something extraordinary through the application of power and will.
The city of Ys was built on land reclaimed from the sea, protected by the great dike and its bronze gate. It was a city of luxury and pleasure, governed by Gradlon but presided over spiritually by Dahut, his daughter, whose character in the legend is one of the most complex in the Breton tradition. She is beautiful, she is powerful within the city, and she is deeply attached to the old pleasures and the old religion that Saint Corentin, Gradlon’s Christian advisor, is trying to replace.
Dahut and the Devil
The legend’s explanation for Dahut opening the gate varies by version. In the most common telling, a young man arrives at the city one night, extraordinarily handsome and compelling, and seduces Dahut. At his request she takes the key from her sleeping father’s neck and opens the bronze gate. The sea rushes in. The young man reveals himself as the devil or a demon, having used Dahut’s desire to accomplish what he could not accomplish directly.
Saint Corentin or Saint Gwenolé, depending on the version, wakes Gradlon and tells him to flee. Gradlon escapes on his magical horse, which can ride across the surface of the sea. He pulls Dahut up behind him as he rides. But the voice of the saint or of God tells him that the sinner behind him is causing the horse to sink, and Gradlon, in the most devastating moment of the legend, pushes his daughter off the horse into the sea. She sinks with the city. He survives.
Dahut as the Morgane
After her drowning Dahut does not simply die. She becomes the Morgane, a sea spirit who haunts the Bay of Douarnenez and who appears to fishermen as a beautiful woman who lures them to their deaths, the Breton equivalent of the mermaid as a figure of deadly beauty and supernatural danger. Her transformation from princess to sea spirit connects her to the broader tradition of the untimely female dead becoming supernatural beings — the same tradition that produces the Rusalka in eastern Europe and the Baobhan Sith in Scotland.
The bells of Ys that fishermen claim to hear beneath the water are one of the most persistent elements of the tradition. The promise that Ys will rise again when Paris sinks — the Breton saying that Paris was built on the ruins of Ys, that Par-Is means similar to Ys — is one of the most defiant expressions of Breton cultural identity, a statement that what was lost was greater than what replaced it and that the loss is not permanent.
For more on the folklore of Brittany, the Korrigans article covers the fairy people of Brittany whose tradition sits alongside the City of Ys in Breton legend. The Ankou article covers the Breton personification of death. The France folklore hub page has every article in the cluster.
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