Ankou is a personification of death

Death (personification)

The concept of death as a sentient entity has existed in many societies since the beginning of history. In English, Death is often given the name Grim Reaper and, from the 15th century onwards, came to be shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe and clothed in a black cloak with a hood...

 in Breton

Brittany

Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...

 mythology

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 as well as in Cornish

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

 and Norman

Normandy

Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...

 French folklore.

Ankou is also known as "Aräwn".

Background

This character is reported by Anatole Le Braz

Anatole Le Braz

Anatole le Braz, the "Bard of Brittany" was a Breton folklore collector and translator. He was highly regarded amongst both European and American scholars, and known for his warmth and charm....

, writer and legends collector of the 19th century. Here is what he wrote about the Ankou in his best-seller "The Legend of Death":

The Ankou is the henchman of Death (oberour ar maro) and he is also known as the grave yard watcher, they said that he protects the graveyard and the souls around it for some unknown reason and he collects the lost souls on his land. The last dead of the year, in each parish, becomes the Ankou of his parish for all of the following year. When there has been, in a year, more deaths than usual, one says about the Ankou:

- War ma fé, heman zo eun Anko drouk. ("on my faith, this one is a nasty Ankou")

There are many tales involving Ankou, who appears as a man or skeleton wearing a cloak and wielding a scythe and in some stories he is described as a shadow that looks like a man with an old hat and a scythe, often atop a cart for collecting the dead. He is said to wear a black robe with a large hat which conceals his face. According to some, he was the first child of Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...

. Other versions have it that the Ankou is the first dead person of the year (though he is always depicted as adult, and male), charged with collecting the others' soul before he can go to the afterlife. He is said to drive a large, black coach pulled by four black horses; accompanied by two ghostly figures on foot.

One tale says that there were three drunk friends walking home one night, when they came across an old man on a rickety cart. Two of the men started shouting at the Ankou, and then throwing stones; when they broke the axle on his cart they ran off.

The third friend felt bad and, wanting to help the Ankou, found a branch to replace the broken axle, and then gave the Ankou his shoe-laces with which to tie it to the cart. The next morning, the two friends who were throwing stones at the Ankou were dead, while the one who stayed to help only had his hair turned white. He would never speak of how it happened.

Ankou is the king of the dead, and his subjects have their own particular paths along which their sacred processions move.

Another origin story is that the Ankou was once a cruel prince who met death during a hunting trip and challenged him to see who could kill a black stag first. Death won the contest and the prince was cursed to roam the earth as a ghoul for all eternity.

Appearance in subcultures

Every parish in Brittany

Brittany

Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...

 is said to have its own Ankou. In Breton tradition, the squealing of railway wheels outside of one's home is supposed to be Karrigell an Ankou or The Wheelbarrow of Ankou. Similarly, the cry of the owl is referred to as Labous an Ankou or The Death Bird. The Ankou is also found on the baptismal font at La Martyre

La Martyre

La Martyre is a commune in the Finistère department of Brittany in northwestern France.-Sights:The village of La Martyre has one of the oldest parish palisades , whose construction was undertaken between the 11th and 17th centuries.-History:The village owes its name to the assassination on 25 June...

 where he is shown holding a human head.

In Ireland the proverb When the Ankou comes, he will not go away empty relates to the legend.

In popular culture

The Ankou was the subject of a story by Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

 titled The Death of Ankou (1927). A young tourist in Brittany momentarily takes a blind beggar he meets as an embodiment of the Ankou, but in truth it is he who acts as the Ankou for the beggar, who subsequently dies. Lewis relied on Le Braz for some of the background to the story.

Ankous appear in the MMORPG RuneScape

RuneScape

RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in January 2001 by Andrew and Paul Gower, and developed and published by Jagex Games Studio. It is a graphical browser game implemented on the client-side in Java, and incorporates 3D rendering...

as skinless undead monsters.

In the MMORPG Fly For Fun there is a boss entitled as God of Death, named after Ankou.

The Ankou is also used as a character in the novel Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson

Trent Jamieson

-Biography:Jamieson was first published in 1994 with the short story "Threnody " which was published in the winter edition Eidolon. In 2003 Jamieson was nominated for the Ditmar Award for best professional achievement but lost to Jonathan Strahan. In 2005 Jamieson won the Aurealis Award for best...

, as a power second to death himself.

The story of the three wizards who make a deal with death (in order to secure the three deathly hallows) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows can also be viewed as a conceptualisation of Ankou.

Ankou is the title of a short speculative fiction story by Nakia D. Johnson in which a man creates his own Ankou and is later killed by it.