Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué

Painting by Évariste Vital Luminais , 1884

Théodore Claude Henri Hersart de La Villemarqué (born July 7, 1815 in Quimperlé , Département Finistère , † December 8, 1895 at Keransker Castle near Quimperlé) was a French scholar of linguistics and antiquity. He was the compiler of a now largely forgotten, but extremely influential Breton- French national epic called Barzaz Breiz at the time . The extent to which La Villemarqué freely invented this epic is unclear. It is probably in the tradition of the fake Scottish national epic Ossian by the author James Macpherson .

Life

Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué was the son of a member of the Finistère département. He went to Paris to study law. In 1837 he presented the Ministry of Education with a collection of 400 texts for publication. The request was rejected, whereupon La Villemarqué published it in 1839 at its own expense. Shortly afterwards, he traveled to Wales for an alleged search for sources . There he was of Celtic bards of initiation have undergone. However, this ritual was only invented 30 years earlier by " Iolo Morganwg ". In England he visited Stonehenge and the ruins of Glastonbury Tor . He is said to have read Gallic manuscripts in Oxford and London, although it is not certain whether he had the necessary knowledge.

His Barzaz Breiz ( Barzas Breiz in the first edition ) was enthusiastically received by a nationally- minded audience, impatiently anticipating such new releases. France had finally received its long-awaited Celtic national epic, as other European countries already had. Partial translations will appear in German, English, Swedish and Polish in the following years. La Villemarqué was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor . His attempt to start a political career as a "moderate Republican" was unsuccessful.

The historical writings allegedly quoted by La Villemarqué were never presented by him; instead, he claimed that they had been lost since 1835. His mother had previously worked on collecting the documents. He blamed the writer Prosper Mérimée for their disappearance . As the last whereabouts of the original document he gave a monastery in Landévennec , there it is said to have fallen into the hands of a recently deceased servant and from his estate to a Jesuit who destroyed the pre-Christian work out of fanaticism. With this presentation of the facts, La Villemarqué anticipated the efforts of the Ministry of Education and the local Préfet and Sous-Préfet , which had already initiated investigations to secure the alleged original document for posterity. In old age, La Villemarqué admitted that as a young man he had interpreted details carelessly, but essentially stuck to his point of view.

From 1851 he was a corresponding member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts where he was proposed by Jacob Grimm and from 1858 member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . He also edited Jean-François Le Gonidec's Dictionnaire français-breton (1847) with a history of the Breton language. The Barzaz Breiz was jointly translated into German by Moritz Hartmann and Ludwig Pfau (Cologne 1858). The two translators had visited the author in Brittany in 1852. Moritz Hartmann documented the creation of the collection in the report on this trip.

Works

• Barzaz-Breiz . Chants populaires de la Bretagne (Paris. 1840, 2 vols .; 6th ed. 1867);
• Contes populaires des anciens Bretons (1842, 2 vols.);
• Poèmes des bardes bretons (1850, 2nd ed. 1860);
• Notices des principaux manuscrits des anciens Bretons (1856);
• Le grand mystère de Jésus, drame breton du moyen-âge (2nd ed. 1866);
• La légende celtique en Irlande, en Cambrie et en Bretagne (1859);
• Myrdhinn, ou l'enchanteur Merlin (1861);
• Les romans de la Table-ronde (4th edition 1861)
• Poèmes bretons du moyen-âge (1879).

Web links

• Literature by and about Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué in the catalog of the German National Library
• Breton folk songs: mostly based on the collection of Mr. La Villemarqué translated by Moritz Hartmann and Ludwig Pfau (Cologne 1858)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anne-Marie Thiesse: La création of national identités - Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle . In: Richard Figuier (Ed.): Points Histoire . 2nd Edition. H296. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-02-041406-6 , pp. 120-127 .