Bugul Noz

Also Known As: Breton, “night shepherd”; also written Bugul-Noz
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology, French Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A being of the hours after sunset who is an ordinary man by daylight, known across Brittany by his hat, which the tellings make round and as wide as a cart wheel.
Role in Mythos: He is the reason Breton country people were expected to be behind their own doors before full dark, and the figure they were threatened with if they were not.
Relation to Humans: He meets them on the lanes at dusk, carries off the ones he catches in the open, and in the harder tellings drowns anyone still in his hands at cockcrow. One of Anatole Le Braz’s storytellers argued that this made him useful rather than wicked, since his whole effect was to send people home to bed.

A man in Morbihan whistled for his dog one evening after sunset, and something whistled back. He turned, and the bugul-noz was standing in the lane wearing that hat of his, the round one they said was as wide as a wheel off a cart. He ran. The thing ran too, without apparent effort, and called after him that if it had caught him before he reached his own door it would have crushed him between its two hands. He got the door shut. In Brittany that story was not told for entertainment. It was told to people who had to walk home in the dark, and to children who wanted to go out and play in it.

The name is Breton and it means night shepherd. What he shepherds, nobody could ever say. Anatole Le Braz, who spent his life taking down testimony from Breton speakers and who filed the bugul-noz among the hommes-fées, the male fairies, admitted in writing that he had never managed to learn what kind of herd the Night Shepherd fed, nor what a meeting with him was supposed to foretell. That is an unusual thing for a folklorist to put in print, and it is the most honest sentence anyone has written about him. The countryside was certain he existed and vague about nearly everything else.

The tellings do agree on the shape. He is tall. Le Braz described an outline rising in the twilight in front of country people who happened to be coming back late from the fields, and the word he reached for was alarming rather than any word about ugliness. Then there is the hat. In the Morbihan accounts the hat is most of him: perfectly round, broad as a cartwheel, and deep enough that a child put inside it is gone. By daylight, those same accounts say, he is an ordinary man. Nobody explains that either.

He carries a second name in that country, and the second name is loup-garou. Mothers used him to keep children indoors after dark, the logic being that he could do nothing at all while the sun was up. One story had a few girls walking to a neighbour’s evening gathering when he met them on the road. He asked where they were going. He called them dust of my hands. They said they were only out for a walk. He took one of them.

Elsewhere he rides. He goes on horseback through the chemins creux, the deep hedged tracks worn down below the level of the fields, and the one thing that turns him is a crossroads, because a Breton crossroads has a stone cross standing in it and he will not come near one. Anyone he has taken and is still holding when the cock crows, he has to kill, purely to be rid of them.

There are two ways to get someone back off him, and both are exact in the way that real charm-lore is exact and invented lore never is. Two men who mean to free his prisoner must stand by a hawthorn, and the hawthorn has to be a white one. And a prisoner being carried towards the water to be drowned should press to his forehead a stick with two small copper coins fixed on the end of it, at which point he turns around and goes back.

The horse gets a story of its own. Some young men walking home from a dance at Erdeven found a white horse loose in a field and climbed in to it over a stone stile. One of them said that if he were bold he would ride it home. The others told him to get on or one of them would. He got on, and then he could not stop it all night. It carried him a very long way and set him down at last at a village called Salver er bed, striking sparks off the road the whole distance. The horse belonged to the bugul-noz. Everyone in Erdeven knew that.

The strangest account is also the smallest. A woman was making crêpes late at night with her door standing open. He came in and ate the entire stack of them. She did not dare say a word. Then he lifted her up and set her down on the griddle. She screamed for help and nobody came, and once word had gone round the village that the bugul-noz was in that house, nobody was going to.

Against all of that stands a single dissenting voice, and it belongs to one of Le Braz’s storytellers, a woman named Lise Bellec. Preferring to avoid a thing, she pointed out, does not make the thing harmful. To her mind he was doing a job. The entire point of his turning up was to inform people that night is not made for lingering in the fields or on the roads but for shutting yourself in behind a closed door and sleeping, and if that was so then the Night Shepherd was a good shepherd after all, driving thoughtless sheep back to the fold for their own rest and safety. Le Braz thought much the same office had fallen to Yann-an-Od, Jean of the Strand, who works the coastline rather than the lanes and turns up sometimes as a giant and sometimes as a dwarf, in an oilskin or a wide black felt hat.

Where he came from, no telling says. There is no birth, no named sinner and no curse at the end of a rope of causes, no first night. He is out there after sunset and not before it, and the record starts there.

His powers all run off that one fact. Darkness is the whole of his authority. He is a man in daylight and something else the moment the light goes, and what he can do deepens with the hour. He is fast enough to run a frightened man to his own threshold. He is strong enough that crushing a person between two hands is offered as a plain statement of intent rather than a boast. He puts people up on a horse that cannot be stopped and he puts people in water. And he collects anyone caught out in the open who ought not to be, children first.

The limits are just as plain. The sun undoes him completely. He cannot pass a crossroads, because of what is standing in it. A white hawthorn and two determined men are enough to take a prisoner off him, and two coins on the end of a stick will turn him round and send him back the way he came. For all the dread in these stories, the thing he is best attested as actually doing is meeting somebody on a road at dusk, being terrible for a moment, and sending them home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bugul Noz?

The Bugul Noz is a night being of Breton folklore whose name means “night shepherd” in Breton. He is described as a tall figure who appears at twilight on country roads in Brittany, wearing an enormous round hat, and in the Morbihan accounts he is an ordinary man during daylight hours.

Is the Bugul Noz dangerous?

In most Breton accounts he is. He carries off children in his hat, threatens to crush people between his hands, and kills or drowns any prisoner he still holds when the cock crows. One of Anatole Le Braz’s informants, Lise Bellec, argued the opposite case, that his real function was simply to drive people indoors at night for their own safety.

What does the Bugul Noz look like?

Breton tellings describe a tall outline rising out of the twilight and a huge perfectly round hat, said to be as wide as a cart wheel and deep enough to hold a stolen child. The sources do not agree on much beyond that, and Le Braz recorded that he could never learn what herd the Night Shepherd was supposed to be tending.

How do you escape the Bugul Noz?

Daylight stops him entirely, and he will not pass a crossroads because of the stone cross standing there. Breton charm-lore also gives two remedies: two men standing by a white hawthorn can free his prisoner, and a captive being carried to the water can press a stick topped with two small copper coins to his forehead to turn him back.

Is the Bugul Noz the same as a werewolf?

In Morbihan the two names were used for the same figure, and children were threatened with the bugul-noz under the name loup-garou. The link runs through the daylight rule rather than through wolf shape: like the werewolf of the same region, the bugul-noz passes as an ordinary man until the sun goes down.