Abstract
| - As is well known, the principal purpose of the traditional popular songs of Lower-Brittany, gwerzioù as they are called, is to tell the story of an event, gene-rally tragic or highly dramatic in nature, in order to perpetuate its memory. Over the course of time the process of oral transmission from one generation to another modifies both the shape and content of the gwerzioù. For this reason it is often dif-ficult to discover the factual event at their origins. By comparing them with mate-rial from the archives it is possible in some cases to identify the original event but other questions remain unanswered, such as for instance the conditions in which the song were collected and transmitted. A particular difficulty arises when one attempts to identify their authors. Since these songs have been handed down orally over many generations, the identity of the original authors has long been forgotten in most cases. Identifying the authors poses a real problem in the context of the Ancien Régime society in Brittany where nobility and peasants shared to some extent a common culture and where the clerics (clerks ?) born among the common people helped to bridge the gap between the literate and illiterate population.. This study concerns a gwerz relating a deadly quarrel between two landlords in the Lannion area of Trégor in the early years of the 18 th Century. It adds to the existing body of work that considers popular traditional songs in Breton as histo-rical documents and seeks to answer some questions concerning their life and origin.
- Cette étude au sujet d’une gwerz qui relate une querelle sanglante entre deux seigneurs du Trégor lannionnais au tout début du XVIIIe siècle vient renforcer le dossier tendant à considérer les chants populaires en langue bretonne comme documents pouvant servir l’histoire et répondre à certaines questions concernant leur vie et leur origine.
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