The Mission

What Silenus is trying to do, how it tries to do it, and why it is based in Avranches.

Silenus started in 2019 out of a specific frustration. The folklore of Normandy and Brittany is extraordinarily rich, regionally specific, and — in English — extraordinarily badly served. The available resources fell into two categories: academic papers that were inaccessible to non-specialists, and tourist-facing material that treated every legend as equally real, equally charming, and equally divorced from the landscape that produced it.

Neither of these was what we wanted to read. So we started writing what we wanted to read.

What we are not doing

Silenus is not a debunking project. We are not interested in explaining away folklore as simple ignorance or mass hallucination. We are not interested in affirming it as evidence of the paranormal. Both approaches treat the material as primarily interesting for its claims about what exists, rather than for what it reveals about how people understood and navigated specific landscapes.

We are not trying to produce a comprehensive taxonomy of Norman and Breton supernatural beings. The taxonomy approach tends to flatten regional variation in ways that destroy exactly what is interesting about the material.

What we are doing

We are documenting the folklore of specific places, in specific periods, as accurately as the sources allow. When sources disagree — which they frequently do — we note the disagreement rather than resolving it artificially. When a tradition is clearly the product of nineteenth-century Romanticism rather than older local practice, we say so. When a tradition appears to encode practical information about a landscape, we try to identify what that information is.

We work primarily from fieldwork recordings made by the University of Caen and the University of Rennes ethnology departments between 1960 and 1995, from municipal archives in the Manche, Calvados, and Finistere, and from our own fieldwork in the region since 2019.

Who we are

Claire Fontaine

Research Editor

Claire holds a degree in ethnology from the University of Rennes and spent four years working with the Musee de Bretagne's oral history archive before joining Silenus in 2020. She covers spirits, plant lore, coastal folklore, and the Breton material generally.

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Yann Kergoat

Contributing Researcher

Yann is a historian based in Saint-Malo with a specialism in early modern Norman and Breton mortuary customs. He has contributed to several academic volumes on death and community in the Ancien Regime. He writes for Silenus on the dead, the landscape, and the customs that sit between the two.

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Common questions

Avranches sits on the edge of the Manche, close to Mont-Saint-Michel and at the meeting point of Norman and Breton cultural influence. It is close enough to Brittany that the traditions begin to overlap, which makes it a useful base for work that covers both regions. It also has an unusually well-preserved municipal archive for its size.
Occasionally, for pieces that bring new primary source material to the record or address regional traditions that are underrepresented in existing work. We do not publish general interest pieces on Norman or Breton history, and we are not a venue for creative writing inspired by the folklore. Use the contact form if you have something specific to propose.
No. Silenus is an independent editorial project. We draw on academic sources and our contributors have academic backgrounds, but we are not a peer-reviewed publication and we are not affiliated with any university or research institution.
We try to represent what the sources say, note where sources conflict, and avoid making claims that the sources do not support. Where a tradition has been used in ways that were harmful to local communities — the association of certain folklore with particular social groups, for instance — we try to address that context directly rather than reproducing the tradition uncritically.