BRETON LITERATURE. Breton forms with Cornish and Welsh the Cymric or south ern division of the Celtic group of languages. For the purpose of freeing themselves from the Saxon domination, an emigration from Britain to Armorica (Brittany) took place in the 5th and 6th centuries of our era, and the tongue of the immigrants thus became the lan guage of this part of France. The Breton language is still spoken by upward of a mil lion people, chiefly in the departments of Fin isterre and in. the western portions of Cotes du Nord and Morbihan. It has numerous dialects —those of Vannes, Quimper, Triguier and Leon being the chief. The last-named, as the literary medium, is the most important.
Old Breton literature from the 6th to the 14th centuries is. closely identified with the work of the British bards. The material that has survived is lacking in diversity, being made up of miracle plays, a prayer-book and monas tic cartularies. The language of the aristoc racy of the province in the Middle Ages was French, and the Breton dialect accordingly sank to the level of a patois. Modern Breton —in which there is a great adhesion of French words — may be said to date from the publi cation, in 1659, of a manual with reformed spelling by Fabien Maunoir, a Jesuit priest. The beginning of the 19th century witnessed a marked revival in interest in the Breton lan guage, due largely to the work of Legonidec, who, as an exile in Great Britain at the time of the French Revolution, fell under the in fluence of the Welsh literary movement. He
published his 'Grammaire in 1807 and his 'Dictionnaire breton-francais) in 1821. He had a successor in La Villemarque, whose 'Barzaz Breiz,) while by no means a faithful rendering of the oral and floating folk poetry of the province, and raising a storm of controversy almost as celebrated as that raised by the publication of Macpherson's 'Ossian,' acted as a stimulus to new investigators. F. M. Luzel (1821-95), the foremost of the Bre ton collectors of folk-lore, left for his contri bution a series of books of great value. Marc' Larit Fulup, the last of the old-time wandering folk-singers of Brittany, died in 1910. Consult Loth, 'Chrestomathe bretonne' (1890); (Vo cabulaire vieux-breton) (1884); Ernault, 'Dic tionnaire etymologique du moyen-breton) (1898); 'Glossaire moyen-breton' (2 vols., 1895-96); Luzel,llees bretonnes' (1879); (Legendes chritiennes de la basse-Bretagne' (1881); 'Conies populaires de la basse-Bre (1887); Henry, 'Lexique etymologique du breton moderne' (1900); Le Goffic, (L'ame bretonne) (Vols. I, II, 1908-12). See CEuric