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Brocéliande: how a Breton forest became Arthurian
Thérèse Gaigé · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Brocéliande: how a Breton forest became Arthurian

14 min read

Forest of Brécilien attested in 1145; Wace and Chrétien de Troyes c. 1160-1181; Usemens charter in 1467; identification with Brocéliande from 1820 to 1896

A forest the charters call Brécilien, a fountain that makes it rain for the lord of Montfort, and two 12th-century romance writers, Wace and Chrétien de Troyes, who made it famous under another name. How, from Poignand in 1820 to Bellamy in 1896, scholars set Merlin, Viviane and the Val sans Retour on the heaths of Paimpont — and what historians say about it.

A forest in the archives

Before it was Merlin's forest, the forest of Paimpont had a name, and that name was not Brocéliande. The earliest mention dates from 1145: the Chronicon Britannicum, a Breton chronicle known from late copies, relates that a heretic, Éon de l'Étoile, a cleric from the Loudéac area who believed himself the son of God because he heard his name in the per eum of the prayers, burns the hermits' huts with his band “in the forest of Brecilien”. Éon is captured around 1148, condemned at the Council of Reims before Eugene III, and dies in prison. Here is the first documented Brocéliande: a forest of hermits and plunderers, with no King Arthur.

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