For having burnt a church, and destroyed the cattle of a school, And caused a book to be submerged, My penance is a heavy affliction.
Its content (though many versions differ in their details) describes a man who had died after living a life of rape and murder, and now comes back from hell to ask for forgiveness.
The main character, Iannic Skolan (also Skolvan, Yscolan (in Welsh), and other spellings; "Skolan" meaning "the phantom"[1]), is guilty of a variety of crimes (depending on the version)—in many versions, he raped his three sisters and killed the offspring, and set fire to a church and killed the priest.
Laurent notes that in contrast to other gwerzioù, there is unity of space, and a consistently elevated tone: the crimes could not be worse, and the possible outcome, damnation, could not be more serious.
These texts start differently, invoking "Skolvan, bishop of Léon", who has come to live in the style of a hermit near the forest of Caniscant, suggesting penitence for a grave error.
Literary scholar Linda Gowans wondered whether this might be the book mentioned in "King Arthur and King Cornwall",[8] an English ballad (preserved in the 17th-c Percy Folio) in which an unarmed Sir Bredbeddle defeats a seven-headed sprite using spells from a book he found "by the side of the sea" (in lines 184-89).
[13] The Breton gwerz was sung for centuries in Lower-Brittany, in many versions, by the "little people" of Brittany, who were frequently illiterate and did not speak French.
It is cited by ethnomusicologist Yves Defrance as one of the songs that suggest an unbroken oral tradition dating back to before the settlement of Armorica by Celtic Britons in the 6th century.
De la Villemarqué, in 1839, thought the song retold the murder in the previous century of a young girl by a certain Yannig Skolan.
By 1845, when he published the second edition of Barzaz Breiz, he had become familiar with the older Welsh poem, and added some couplets he said he found.
Two years later Luzel heard another version, also in Trégor, from the mother of Marc'harid Fulup [fr], the famous beggar and singer of Breton songs.
Folklorist Yves Le Diberder [fr] recorded it in 1910 in Pont-Scorff, and in 1938 a version by a retiree from Pleuven was published.
[19] The Celtic folk music group Skolvan includes a sample of Bertrand's recitation from 1959 on their 1994 CD Swing & Tears.