Join me today to meet the blind saint and bard of Brittany.
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Name: Hervé, Harvey, Herveus, Huva, Hoearnveo, many other variations
Life: c. 521-575 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: June 17
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One day when he was a little boy, Hervé came home and found that his mother was not there. Because Hervé had been born blind, it must have dawned on him slowly as he searched that all of his mother’s possessions were gone too.
Hervé was now alone in the world. He was seven years old.
The little boy begged for food along the dangerous highways and in the towns of Brittany in the West of Modern France. Eventually he found someone to help him keep on the paths - one tradition has it that it was another abandoned boy, and a different tradition has it that Hervé befriended a stray dog. With this guide, young Hervé begged for his food, and kept moving.
The roads along which Hervé wandered had been built by the Romans. Of course, by the time Hervé was using the roads in the 520s, the power of Rome was little more than a memory. Brittany itself had only begun to exist as Rome was fading away. As Roman power waned, a Celtic warlord named Conan Meriadoc had sailed East from Britain to carve out a new home for his people in the wolf-infested forests of Brittany. Legend had it that Conan Meriadoc had been so grimly determined that his new lands should be truly Celtic that he had cut the tongues from those locals whom he captured, to ensure that they would not change his language by introducing new words or strange accents.
Roman weakness had allowed Conan Meriadoc to make himself king in Brittany. But that same weakness meant that other powerful groups were on the move as well. The home from which Conan Meriadoc had come was invaded by the pagan Angles and Saxons. The war went on for generations, the defence led by men like Saint Tewdrig and the shadowy figure of King Arthur. But slowly the Christian Britons were pushed back into the area that we know today as Wales. Those who could not get there sometimes thought of fleeing to the lands claimed by Conan Meriadoc. As one chronicler wrote:
Others, heeding the advice of the evangelists, left Great Britain - which is now the land of the Saxons for Brittany - thus to escape the tyranny of pagans. (J. T. Koch translation)
Those Britons who came to Brittany found that there too, they would have to fight for a place in this post-Roman world. A mighty power had emerged in modern Germany and France: the Franks. But Conan Meriadoc had chosen a good, defensible place, and his successors developed a way to fight that baffled the Franks. Franks liked to battle it out in person, fighting hand to hand to see who was the better man. The Bretons went in the opposite direction, developing a way of war based on a nimble cavalry that would burst out of the forest to attack with javelins and then fade away before the Franks could properly respond. For centuries this helped to deter Frankish aggression, giving the Bretons of Brittany more independence than many other peoples in the Frankish kingdoms.
As Conan Meriadoc had hoped, the Bretons remained culturally very similar to the Britons. This meant that, like the Britons, the Bretons kept what was left of the old Celtic cultural hierarchy. Originally it had been a three-part hierarchy, as described by the historian Strabo centuries before.
As a rule, among all the Gallic peoples three sets of men are honoured above all others: the Bards, the Vates, and the Druids. The bards are singers and poets, the Vates overseers of sacred rites and philosophers of nature, and the Druids, besides being natural philosophers, practice moral philosophy as well. (Benjamin Fortson translation)
Several things had happened to destroy the first two parts of the Celtic hierarchy. For one thing, the pagan Romans did not tolerate religions that engaged in human sacrifice. When they found that the druids sacrificed humans in many different ways, the Romans hunted the druids to extinction. Then Rome had brought Christianity to the Celts, and the role of the Vates became irrelevant as priests took over the religious functions of the community. All that was left were the bards. They sang songs of Celtic history, telling of the great men of the past, and if you achieved greatness a bard might immortalize you in song as well. Bards were welcome at the courts of kings, even kings who were not Celts. And so it was that, as the 6th century dawned, an ambitious bard named Hyvarnion made his way out of Britain, through Brittany and to Paris to take a place in the court of the Frankish king, Childebert I.
The bard Hyvarnion served King Childebert I for years, winning the king’s gratitude and respect. Eventually Childebert hoped the bard would become a permanent member of the court. But Hyvarnion missed his home and his own people. He asked the king for permission to return home, and Childebert granted his request, telling his officials to take good care of the bard as he travelled West along the royal road, which was really just the old Roman road, that would take Hyvarnion back through modern France to the coast where he could find a ship to Britain.
At least Hyvarnion had planned to go back to Britain. But as he was passing through the forests of Brittany, the bard found something, or rather someone, who changed his mind. Her name was Rivanon. Later traditions have emphasized the love story between the bard and Rivanon, an herbalist. In that version of the story, the bard meets the herbalist as she is searching for three herbs: one for happiness, one to cure blindness, and one to heal any sickness. She has only found the first herb, the one for happiness, by the time the handsome bard sweeps her off her feet. And this is why, in that version of the story, the couple enjoys a brief moment of happiness before their son is born blind and Hyrvanion dies young.
The tragic and symbolic story of the three herbs is a late tradition, and it is one that masks a sadder reality that appears only in our earliest sources. Right from the start, something was wrong with the marriage of Hyrvanion and Rivanon. Perhaps it was as simple as both of them rushing into it, he seeing only her beauty and she seeing only his fame. Or, maybe, the fault lay more with Hyrvanion, who may have used his status to pressure Rivanon and her family to agree to the match. Then again, given what came next, Rivanon may have been the one responsible. Today we might say that she became depressed, or perhaps bipolar.
No one denies that Rivanon was willing to marry the bard, but by the time she was pregnant she was deeply unhappy. And so she did something to spite her new husband. Rivanon laid an old curse on her own unborn child, cursing his eyes. When the child was born, he was blind. Rivanon chose a name for him which may come from her state of mind: Bitterness, Hervé.
Soon afterward, Hyrvanion left the picture. He may have died. It is also possible that he abandoned his unhappy family and returned to England. Now blind little Hervé was left with a mother who did not want him. She tried to find a place for the boy with a local hermit. When this arrangement fell through, Rivanon was angry. And so one day while Hervé was out of the house she packed her possessions and simply moved away, leaving her son Hervé to try to survive as a blind seven year old boy.
But Hervé did survive. All alone in the world, Hervé found that his father had left him something that he could use. Hervé remembered all the songs and poems he had heard. He could even improve on them, and above all, he could sing. Hervé sang songs and learned songs, braving bandits and wolves and other dangers to find new audiences and slowly build up a reputation as one of the promising young bards of the land.
Hervé was becoming a bard like his father. But then, when he was 14, an encounter changed the direction of his life again. His mother, Rivanon, had a brother who had become a monk. Hervé may not even have known about this relative, but somehow Hervé found himself at the monastery in Plouvien, just a little North of Brest in Brittany on the West coast of France. By now Hervé’s uncle had become the abbot. Hervé’s uncle the abbot was extremely impressed by his nephew. Yes, being blind would mean that Hervé could never become a reader. But Hervé learned by listening, soaking up information. More impressive still, the events of his childhood had not extinguished Hervé’s faith. Hervé’s uncle offered him a place among the novices, and Hervé took it with enthusiasm. As his uncle had suspected, Hervé had no trouble keeping up. Soon Hervé was the one teaching the classes.
Perhaps the most famous incident of Hervé’s life occurred during this period. Being a member of the monastery meant that Hervé had to work along with everyone else. He was steadying a plow which was being dragged along by a draft animal, helped by a little boy to keep Hervé and the animal aimed in the right direction. Suddenly the boy screamed. A wolf was loping out of the forest, headed for them.
Wolves were present and feared throughout Europe, but the forests of Britanny were especially good places for wolves to roam. Before and after Hervé’s time, Bretons struggled to keep their livestock safe. And at night, the peasants themselves might be in danger, as huge wolf packs came to isolated houses and dug through thatch roofs to get at the frightened peasants within. Indeed, until the 19th century Brittany would have designated wolf-hunters, whose job was to scour the countryside to exterminate the most dangerous wolf packs. So the little boy with Hervé was rightly terrified when a wolf burst out of the forest, but Hervé’s faith had deepened. The wolf attacked and killed the draft animal, and after it was dead Hervé calmly approached the wolf and told it that someone was going to have to pull the plow, and he couldn’t do it. Tradition has it that the wolf was yoked to the plow, and after that humiliating episode it remained with Hervé, his tame guide and companion. Well, almost tame. For centuries afterward, the mothers of Brittany assured their children that if they misbehaved, Saint Hervé’s wolf would come and eat them.
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After the strange taming of the wolf it was clear to Hervé’s uncle the abbot that his nephew was not an ordinary young man. The abbot hoped that Hervé would one day take over the leadership of the monastery. But first, the abbot helped Hervé to answer a question that had been troubling Hervé for years. Where was his mother, Rivanon?
Eventually, the abbot’s investigation turned up an answer. Rivanon had abandoned her son and gone to live deep in the forest in solitude. And so Hervé and his wolf went out to find her. Everything had changed. Hervé was now a learned man, a successful man, and accompanied by a fearsome wolf besides. He found his mother dying, consumed by sickness and guilt. Hervé forgave his mother, reconciled with her, and helped her prepare for the end. Not long after Hervé’s mother died, her brother, the abbot, died as well. Hervé was now the leader of a monastery.
As abbot, Hervé did something strange. He took his community on the move. They walked through Brittany, helping, healing, and casting out demons. Soon Hervé and his travelling monks were well known. When they encountered a bishop, the bishop insisted Hervé should take on some sort of holy orders, but Hervé humbly refused. The bishop did manage to talk him into accepting the minor order of exorcist, which Hervé could not easily avoid since he was known for casting out demons.
After a period of wandering, Hervé settled his community a little to the East of where it had been, in Lanhouarneau. One of my favourite stories about Hervé comes from this moment. A local lord found that two of his peasants had grabbed a few pieces of his wife’s jewelry and made a run for it. The lord gathered his warriors to ride down the thieves. As it happened, the tracks took them over the monastery land, and the nobleman pounded right by Abbot Hervé without even stopping to ask his permission. But as the soldiers rode on, fog rolled in around them. Soon the fog was so thick that they could not find their way forward. There was only one direction in which the way was clear, and the lord found it led back to the monastery. Taking the hint, the lord apologized to Hervé for rudely riding over his land.
Such things, Hervé said, were easy to do in the heat of the moment, and were no great sins. But it was also easy for poor men to see what looked like wealth and impulsively grab for it. This too was the sort of mistake which should not, or not necessarily, destroy a man’s life. As the lord reluctantly agreed, the thieves found their way back out of the fog as well and returned what they had taken. And so the lord and the peasants were reconciled and went back to their lives.
Although we know that Hervé was regarded as a monk and a bard, little of his bardic work remains. We have a few maxims, little fragments of wisdom like these:
The idle youth
Collects trouble for age. (Father Sabine Baring-Gould translation)
or
Better teach a child
Than store wealth for him.
He is also credited with writing the beautiful Breton traditional song, Kantik ar Barados:
But looking back across so many centuries, the story of Hervé can leave us with questions. It’s hard to deny that a man who went from being a blind beggar boy to a successful abbot was manly. But after his death, Hervé would be more than admired. He would be loved. Hervé - Harvey - would become one of the most popular names for boys in that part of France. The Bretons would continue to tell stories about Hervé, adding legend upon legend to his life. I am especially fond of the story that a young girl who looked after him in his final days is supposed to have speculated about how Hervé’s soul would leave Brittany. Bretons knew that souls went to the next world on the night boat, that dark craft that fishermen sometimes saw skimming along the horizon. But Hervé’s soul, she said, would surely leave in grand a ship of its own. At least she hoped it would, since her plan was to look for the calm wake left behind that ship and steer into it. What was it about Hervé that made people think of him in this way?
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I think we can get a hint from the life of Hervé preserved by another saint, Saint Albert the Great. It tells a story of when Hervé helped a bishop - perhaps a man who was struggling with his faith. The bishop said he wished he could see paradise. Hervé prayed, and the two of them suddenly shared a vision of heaven opened and the angels and saints moving about. The bishop was so entranced that he almost forgot to be surprised that Hervé could see the vision as well as he could, pointing out this or that saint whom the bishop might not recognize. It’s a remarkable story, a grand miracle.
But then, in the very next line of the account we find Hervé walking by a convent where some nuns are crying about the loss of a single laying hen. Hervé stops and prays for the chicken, only to have a surprised fox trot back and drop the chicken off unharmed.
It’s a strange juxtaposition. It sticks in the mind. Maybe this is the secret of Hervé’s life. Here was both greatness and humility. Here was a man who could gaze into visions with bishops, but still stop on the way home to say a prayer for a single lost bird.
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Wonderful how manly virtue was celebrated and seen as something to aspire to, and connected to a trove of inspiration, Christianity itself. Some of the legends seem improbable for me, but the story contains deep truths nonetheless. Like great poetry.