Barzaz Breiz - Authenticity

Authenticity

The publication of traditional folk literature was controversial at this time because of the dispute about the most famous of such collections, James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian, which purported to be translated from ancient Celtic poetry, but was widely believed to have been largely written by MacPherson himself. After the publication of Barzaz Breiz François-Marie Luzel criticised the work at a scholarly conference in 1868. At the 1872 Congress of the Breton Association at Saint-Brieuc, he argued that the songs had been completely manufactured in the manner of MacPherson, because, he said, he had never himself met with ballads in such elegant Breton and free of borrowed French words. The main problem raised by his opponents was that Villemarqué refused to show his notebooks to other scholars.

The dispute continued into the twentieth century. In 1907 La Villemarque's son, Pierre de la Villemarqué, published a defence of his father's work. However, in 1960 Francis Gourvil argued in a PhD that the Barzaz Breiz was a forgery. In 1974 Donatien Laurent partially rejected these accusations by demonstrating the authenticity of the material of the book thanks to the discovery in 1964 of Villemarqué's notebooks. Laurent's research was published in 1989. Laurent concluded that Villemarqué had rearranged the material he had collected in order to enliven and clean up the texts and music, but that this was common practice at the time, comparable to work of the Brothers Grimm.