La traversée prodigieuse dans le folklore et l'hagiographie celtiques : de la merveille au miracle

摘要

Prodigious crossings of seas and rivers by saints are quite commonplace in Celtic folklore and hagiography. Typological analysis reveals three variants of this motif: the saint walks the waves ; the saint leaps over a waterway ; the saint uses a fragile vessel or even a miraculous one (a leaf or even a stone), The present study aims at showing the diversity of the corpus and at throwing light on these variants through the use of explanatory hypotheses, themselves quite diverse (ordeals, foundation legends, a posteriori justifications of pre-christian rites, epic receptions of saints, as well as Christian références of universal significance).