If you are interested in Brittany but lack French or Breton language skills, there is a website you should absolutely check out! It is ICDBL.org. 

The International Committee for the Defense of the Breton Language, US Chapter is perhaps the most idiosyncratic Breton cultural presence in the English language on the internet. A visitor, perhaps inspired by an interest in Celtic culture or via random exposure to an incredible music video, might search for more information on the mysterious land of Brittany and come across the ICDBL.org website.  For more context you may want to first read the Breizh-Amerika article about the mastermind behind this website, Lois Kuter, HERE.

There’s no getting around it - it’s most unfortunate, but ICDBL is an aesthetically challenged website. In 2023 one could be forgiven for thinking that they had discovered a long-abandoned site, frozen in time thirty years ago, somehow still being hosted through an improbable glitch in the interwebs… It does happen. Sadly, I’m sure that many visitors take one look at this dawn-of-the-internet design and just go on their way.  Perhaps an inspired visitor would read the text and decide to donate some funds to the ICBL and on to the Diwan school system in Brittany… oops, the payment portal no longer works.

Substance over Style

In a time when superficial appeal frequently takes precedent over valuable content, the ICDBL website takes the opposite approach - to an extreme degree. Far from being an abandoned website, the Quarterly Bro Nevez journal found there, which can be accessed free of charge, is an incredibly rich and thorough compendium of nearly every imaginable recording, product, event, organization, and occurrence in Brittany, with a particular focus on the music and the language. From the website itself:

The U.S. Branch of the ICDBL was founded in 1981, and has members in 38 states - from Alaska, Hawaii and California, to Maine, Florida and Texas. The U.S. ICDBL is a non-profit organization with the aim to help Americans learn about Brittany and the Breton language and culture, and to support the development of the Breton language education and culture in Brittany.

All U.S. ICDBL members receive the quarterly Newsletter called Bro Nevez ("New Country" in the Breton language). This 40-45 page newsletter (primarily in English with some Breton and French) includes articles about the Breton language and culture, book and music reviews, and short notes to introduce readers to Breton history, art, literature, economy, sports, nature and Brittanys Celtic cousins. Membership (or subscription to the newsletter only) costs US$20 per year for US residents and US$25 for non-US residents.

ICDBL.org and the Bro Nevez journal are an intense labor of love, the work of a person who has devoted their entire life to the pursuit and exposition of knowledge on this topic. I don’t know the author but I suspect that this astonishing website is considered to be a straightforward continuation of the anthropological and ethnomusicological academic work from their earlier life. It has the completeness, quality, and also the dry appearance of a graduate thesis. Here is the work of someone quietly going about their intellectual pursuit, clearly without any thought of compensation or even acknowledgement from a broader community. It is unique and unbelievably impressive, even if in its oddly unattractive presentation it is more or less consigned to only limited exposure to an outside audience. As a modern website on a similar if much less ambitious mission, we can only encourage readers to overlook the rough presentation and dig into this invaluable resource. Those who still have paper checks might possibly even consider donating to the physical address give on the site!

~ Fañch