Comte Arnau (Count Arnau)

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Catalan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A damned nobleman condemned to ride a fire-breathing black horse for eternity while his own flesh burns, a pack of hunting dogs at his heels.
Role in Mythos: He is medieval Catalonia’s great cautionary revenant, punished without end for cheating his laborers of their wages and violating a convent.
Relation to Humans: He returns to haunt the living, above all his own widow, whom he tries to seize and drag into the fire with him. To the people of the Ripollès he is both a warning against injustice and a terror glimpsed riding the night sky.

On stormy nights in the Ripollès, when lightning whitens the ridges above Sant Joan de les Abadesses, the old families used to look up and see a horse crossing the sky. It was black, and it was on fire. Flame poured from its mouth and from its eyes and its wide nostrils, and the man on its back burned with it, his flesh eaten and eaten again by a fire that never finished its work. A pack of dogs ran beneath them, howling, and the whole hunt swept over the mountains and was gone before the next flash of light.

The man was a count. He had always said he was lord of the castle of Mataplana, and in the stories he is rich, well born, and rotten through. Two things damned him. Neither was war nor murder. They were smaller and meaner than that, which is part of why the legend has lasted.

The first was a matter of grain. Arnau hired laborers to cut a stair into the living rock so that people could climb to the chapel, and he promised each man a heaped measure of grain for a day’s work. The rock was hard and the work was long. When the time came to pay, he had the measure struck level with a board instead of heaped, and sent the men home with less than he had sworn. He had paid them short. The villagers cursed him for it, and the curse, in the way of these stories, took.

The second was a woman. Arnau wanted Adelaisa, the abbess of the convent at Sant Joan de les Abadesses, and a wall and a vow were not enough to stop him. He forced his way into the cloister and took her, and in doing so he broke her from God as surely as he had broken his word to the laborers. Behind the legend sits a real and ugly event. In 1017 the community of Benedictine nuns at Sant Joan was broken up and the sisters turned out, accused of loose living. The charges seem to have been invented, since the same women were quietly received by other houses without scandal. The history is probably a slander. The legend kept the crime and gave it a face.

What happened to him after death is the heart of the thing. He was not allowed to rest. He was put on the black horse and set riding, burning, through the cold air over his own lands, and there he rides still, paying without end for a debt he had tried to pay short. The dogs are his now, or he is theirs.

The oldest form of the story is not a book but a song, a ballad sung in these valleys long before anyone wrote it down, first collected in the middle of the nineteenth century and printed by Manel Milà i Fontanals soon after. The song is a conversation. For seven years the dead count comes back each night to the house where his widow sits by an iron grate, embroidering by candlelight, and the two of them talk across the bars. She asks him where he comes from and what he wants. He answers from the country of the dead, and then he reaches for her. He means to take her with him, to pull her through the grate and into the fire so that she will ride and burn beside him. Each night she holds. Each night he goes, and the next night he is back. Whether he ever takes her depends on who is singing.

No one agrees on whether there was a real Arnau at all. The name has been hung on more than one historical lord, the castle of Mataplana was real enough, and the bones of the tale may go back to some forgotten quarrel over land or wages or a convent. The figure outgrew whatever started it. In Mallorca the same damned rider appears under another name, the Comte Mal, the Bad Count, fastened onto a seventeenth-century nobleman the islanders despised. Centuries after the first singers, the poet Joan Maragall built a long, unfinished poem around him and turned the burning count into something close to a national symbol, a restless Catalan soul that will not lie down and will not be forgiven.

His power is mostly the power to keep going. He cannot die, because he is already dead. He cannot tire, cannot stop, cannot dismount. He can put terror into a whole district on a bad night, and he can reach for the living and try to carry them off into his fire. That is the limit of him too. The curse that drives him is also the cage. He rides because he must, not because he chooses, and for all the flame and the howling he cannot undo the level measure of grain or the broken cloister, cannot buy back the years, cannot be released. The punishment is cut to fit the man exactly. He cheated on a measure, and now the measure runs against him forever, struck level, never heaped, never full.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Comte Arnau?

Comte Arnau, or Count Arnau, is a legendary nobleman of Catalan folklore from the Ripollès region who is condemned to ride a fire-breathing black horse for eternity. He is punished for two crimes: cheating his laborers of their promised wages and violating the abbess of the convent at Sant Joan de les Abadesses.

Why was Comte Arnau cursed?

Comte Arnau was cursed for fraud and lechery. He promised his workers a heaped measure of grain for cutting a stair into the rock but paid them only a level measure, and he broke into the cloister at Sant Joan de les Abadesses to seize its abbess, Adelaisa.

What is Comte Arnau’s punishment?

Comte Arnau is condemned to ride forever on a black horse that breathes flame from its mouth, eyes, and nostrils while his own flesh is endlessly devoured by fire. A pack of demonic dogs runs with him as he crosses the night sky over the mountains of the Ripollès.

Is the legend of Comte Arnau based on a real person?

It is uncertain. The name has been attached to several historical lords and to the real castle of Mataplana, and the story may stem from the 1017 expulsion of the Benedictine nuns at Sant Joan de les Abadesses, though those accusations appear to have been false. The figure of Comte Arnau grew far beyond any single historical source.

What is the song of Comte Arnau?

The legend’s oldest form is a traditional Catalan ballad, sung for centuries and first collected in the nineteenth century. It takes the shape of a nightly dialogue between the dead count and his widow, who sits embroidering by an iron grate as he returns from the land of the dead and tries to carry her into the fire with him.