Ankou

Ankou (an Ankoù) is the personification of Death in Lower Brittany.

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He does not represent Death in itself, but his servant: his role is to collect in his creaking cart (karr an Ankoù, karrigell an Ankoù, karrik an Ankoù) the souls of the recent deceased. When a living person hears the sound of the cart (wig ha wag!), It is because he (or according to another version, someone around him) will soon pass from life to death. It is also said that whoever sees the Ankou dies within the year.

Here is how Anatole Le Braz describes it in his collection of legends The
Legend of death :

“The Ankou is the worker of death (oberour ar maro). The last death of the year, in each parish, becomes the Ankou of that parish for the following year. When there were more deaths during the year than usual, we say, speaking of the Ankou in function:

War ma fé, heman zo eun Anko drouk. (By my faith, this one is a mean Ankou.)

The Ankou is sometimes depicted as a very tall and very thin man, with long white hair, his face shaded by a large felt-tip pen; sometimes in the form of a skeleton draped in a shroud, and whose head constantly turns to the top of the spine, as well as a weather vane around its iron rod, so that it can embrace with a single at a glance the whole region that he has the mission to cover.

In either case, he is holding a scythe in his hand. This differs from ordinary fakes, in that it has the edge turned out. So the Ankou does not bring her back to himself when he is mowing; unlike hay reapers and wheat reapers, he throws it forward. "

Thus the Ankou is a moving being, a relay passed each year by the last deceased in December. Graphically he is represented as an ageless being, not distinct in appearance since covered by a cape, often black (or a shroud). Unlike the skeletal representations of Death, the Ankou is most of the time represented as a being of flesh, since he was once a man. However, the sculpted figures of the Ankou in certain churches (La Martyre) present it as a skeleton with hollow orbits, armed with an arrow or a scythe.