Ankou

Also Known As: Breton *an Ankou*, “the death”; also *oberour ar maro*, “the worker of death”; Middle Breton *ancou*, cognate with Cornish *ankow* and Welsh *angau*, from a Proto-Celtic root meaning to kill or perish
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: He drives the cart that carries the dead away, and the squeal of its ungreased axle is itself the sentence.
Role in Mythos: He is not Death but Death’s hired labourer, an office filled every year by one of a parish’s own dead.
Relation to Humans: He works a fixed round through a single parish and takes whoever falls due, without malice and without exception. Ordinary people met him on the road at night, and the meeting was almost always fatal, though he was known to give a warning to anyone who had treated him decently.

The axle does the work. On a clear night in the sunken lanes of the Trégor a cart comes up out of the dark going wik, wik, wik, badly greased and in no hurry, and every house within earshot understands the sound before anyone thinks to look out. Nobody needs to see the driver. In Lower Brittany the noise alone was enough to make a family sit up in a box bed and start counting which of them had been coughing.

The man on the cart is called the Ankou, and he is not Death. That distinction mattered to the people who told these stories. Death is God’s business. The Ankou is *oberour ar maro*, the worker of death, the hired hand, and the post is filled from the parish’s own stock. In the version Anatole Le Braz collected across the Côtes-du-Nord in the 1880s and 1890s, the last person to die in a parish in a given year becomes that parish’s Ankou for the year that follows. In other districts the reckoning runs the other way and the office falls to the first death of the new year. Either way, the figure standing in the cart is somebody’s neighbour, working out a year of unpaid labour before being let alone.

Two descriptions of him survive side by side and nobody ever reconciled them. In the first he is simply a very tall, very thin man with long white hair, dressed like any Breton farmhand, his face shadowed under the brim of a wide black felt hat, recognisable on a dark road only by his height and his silence. In the second he is a skeleton in a shroud, and his skull turns ceaselessly at the top of the spine, the way a weathervane turns on its iron rod, so that he can take in the whole territory he has been given to cover without moving his feet. The carvers preferred the second.

In his hand there is a scythe, and it is put together wrong. The edge is set facing outward, so he cannot draw it back toward himself the way a hay mower or a reaper of wheat does. He throws it forward instead. He whets it on a human bone. When the iron needs straightening he takes it to one of the blacksmiths who keep their fire lit past midnight on a Saturday on the excuse of urgent work, and the smith who does that job never works for anyone else again.

The scythe is also the newest thing about him. In the oldest surviving images, the painted panels and granite of the sixteenth and seventeenth century parish closes, he is not a mower at all. On the ossuary at La Roche-Maurice, dated 1639, and again on the ossuary at Ploudiry, he stands baring his teeth with a long fletched dart drawn back to throw, over a scroll announcing in carved French that he kills every one of us. In his other capacity he carries a spade, a pick or a hoe, because half the job is digging. The reaper’s tool only arrives properly with the folklorists of the nineteenth century, who had a ready-made European convention in their pockets and reached for it.

His cart goes by three names, *karr*, *karrik* and *karriguel*, which is to say the cart, the little cart, and the wheelbarrow of the Ankou. It is built like the carts that used to carry the dead, and those were real. Le Braz’s father remembered them from childhood: a tumbrel with willow or osier branches bent over it into hoops, a white sheet stretched across the hoops, more white sheets thrown over the horses, and a pall of coarse cloth over the coffin. Watching that come towards you across open country, he said, you could not help a kind of superstitious terror. Two horses are harnessed in file. The leader is gaunt and barely holding itself up; the shaft horse is fat, glossy and willing in the collar. Two companions walk alongside, one leading the head horse by the bridle, the other opening field gates and yard gates and house doors and stacking the mown dead into the bed.

Gab Lucas, a day labourer from Rune-Riou, was carrying a sack of potatoes home to his wife on a Saturday night with a bellyful of hot cider when the dogs at the Nizilzi farm started howling and a cart came out of the side lane, wik-a-wag, wik-a-wag. He hailed the driver for a lift and got nothing back, so he ran after the cart and heaved the sack over the side. It went straight through the floorboards. He picked it up, pushed it further in, and went through with it, and the two of them rolled in the road while the horses kept walking and the tall man in the hat never turned his head. His wife told him what he had met. The next morning the passing bell went for the master of Nizilzi.

A young man from Trézélan had wanted for years to see the cart with his own eyes, and one June night with a big moon he heard the axle coming and scrambled up the bank into a clump of hazel to watch from cover. Three white horses this time, and two men in black felt hats. As the cart drew level the axle pin cracked, and the driver told his companion to go and cut a new one from that clump of hazel there. The companion cut a branch, whittled it, drove it home, and the horses moved off. The young man walked home unharmed. Towards morning a fever nobody could name took hold of him, and the following day he was buried.

He is not cruel. He is on a round.

Almost nothing can be got out of him, because there is almost nothing in him to appeal to. He cannot be bribed, outrun or hidden from, and the one story in which anyone comes out ahead turns on plain manners: a rich farmer at Pleyber-Christ who invited the whole parish to his blood-pudding feast, was asked in a small cracked voice whether the speaker might come too, and answered that since he had invited everybody there could be nobody too many. The guest in the rotting shirt sat through the meal without eating and lifted his head at the end to show a skull. For the courtesy, he gave eight days’ notice, which the farmer spent dividing his land among his children and making his confession. He died on the eighth evening. That is the best outcome anyone in the collection achieves.

His limits are the limits of a job. He covers one parish and holds the post for one year, and the character of whoever holds it shows in the death rate, a young Ankou going after his own generation and a mean-tempered one taking more than his share. The heavy work is not even his: the Plague and Dearth are named as his two chief suppliers, and it is the Plague, a lame old woman who cannot cross running water without a strong back to carry her, who empties whole districts. His warnings escape him whether he wants them to or not. The axle gives him away three nights ahead. So does the barn owl, *labous an Ankou*, the Ankou’s bird, whose cry carries a long way over wet fields.

Attempts have been made to trace him back to Sucellos, the Gaulish god with the mallet, largely on the strength of a Breton name for the deathwatch beetle, *morzholig an Ankou*, the little hammer of death. No source has ever put a mallet in his hands, and the link remains a suggestion rather than a finding. What he does have is a portrait. In the church of Saint-Milliau at Ploumilliau there stands a wooden statue of him about ninety-nine centimetres high, holding a scythe and a spade, dated to the fifteenth century. There were once two of them, set on either side of the coffin at burials, until a diocesan official on visitation in April 1845 ordered them out of the church, and the custom died for good after a child fainted at the sight. People prayed to the survivor to kill their enemies, a practice known as vowing a man to him. The country nicknamed it Ervoanik Plouillo, little Yves of Ploumilliau. Le Braz, who grew up nearby, called it the terror of his childhood and remembered old women on their knees in front of it. It was classified as a protected historic object in 1972.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Ankou in Breton folklore?

The Ankou is the worker of death in Breton tradition, *oberour ar maro*, a servant of death rather than Death itself. He collects the dead of a single parish and carries them away in a cart. The office is held for one year at a time by one of the parish’s own dead, most commonly the last person to die there in the previous year, though some districts assign it to the first death of the new year instead.

What is the Ankou’s cart, and what does it mean if you hear it?

The Ankou’s cart is called *karr*, *karrik* or *karriguel an Ankou*, and it is modelled on the tumbrels that once carried corpses to Breton graveyards. Its ungreased axle makes a squealing wik-wik sound that carries at night. Hearing it means a death, usually within about three days, either the listener’s own or someone in the household.

Does the Ankou carry a scythe?

He does in most tellings, and it is a strange one: the cutting edge faces outward, so he casts it forward instead of drawing it back like an ordinary mower. He sharpens it on a human bone. The scythe is a late addition, though, since the oldest Breton carvings and paintings of the Ankou give him a dart, a lance or a fletched arrow, or else a spade, pick or hoe for his work as gravedigger.

Can the Ankou be escaped or bargained with?

No. He cannot be outrun, bribed or hidden from, and no Breton tale records anyone evading him. The most anyone achieves is warning: a farmer at Pleyber-Christ who unknowingly invited the Ankou to a feast and treated him as a guest was given eight days to settle his affairs before dying on schedule.

Where can the Ankou actually be seen?

Carved and painted Ankous survive across the parish closes and ossuaries of Lower Brittany, most famously on the 1639 ossuary at La Roche-Maurice and the ossuary at Ploudiry, where he brandishes a dart above a scroll declaring that he kills everyone. A fifteenth-century wooden statue of him, about ninety-nine centimetres tall and holding a scythe and spade, stands in the church of Saint-Milliau at Ploumilliau and has been a protected historic object since 1972.