Ankou

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

Contents

He does not represent Death itself, but its servant: his role is to collect in his creaking cart (karr an Ankù, karrigell an Ankù, karrik an Ankù) the souls of the recently deceased. When a living person hears the sound of the cart (wig ha wag!), it is because he (or according to another version, someone close to him) will soon pass from life to death. It is also said that anyone who sees the Ankou dies within a 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 have been more deaths in the year than usual, we say, speaking of the Ankou in office:

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

Ankou is depicted, sometimes as a very tall and very thin man, with long, white hair, his face shaded with a large felt hat; sometimes in the form of a skeleton draped in a shroud, and whose head constantly turns at the top of the spine, like a weathervane around its iron rod, so that it can embrace with a single take a look at the entire region he is tasked with covering.

In both cases, he holds a scythe in his hand. This differs from ordinary scythes in that it has the edge turned outwards. So the Ankou does not bring it back to him when he mows; unlike what hay mowers and wheat harvesters do, he throws it forward. »

Thus the Ankou is a moving being, a relay that the last deceased of December pass each year. Graphically he is represented as an ageless being, with a non-distinct appearance since he is covered by a cape, often black (or a shroud). Unlike the skeletal representations of Death, Ankou is most of the time represented as a being of flesh, since he was once a man. However, the sculpted representations of the Ankou in certain churches (The Martyrdom) present him as a skeleton with hollow eye sockets, armed with an arrow or a scythe.