About the site

The purpose of this site is to collect legends from France, but also from the rest of the world, in order to travel at the rhythm of the words that our ancestors shared.

Little by little, I will try to collect as many legends as possible while trying, as much as possible, to locate them and give the sources I use. The goal is to be able to build a database, complementary to others, useful for those who need to work on it as well as a place to wander for those who would just like to pick a few texts for their pleasure. I would like, eventually, for the site to become as participatory as possible so that everyone can add their texts.

A few words about spelling

Most of the texts come from digitizations found on Gallica or Google Books. Most of these texts date from the 19th century or are sometimes older. You will therefore often find place names written differently from their current spelling. Similarly, the spelling of certain words might surprise you. If I consider the texts readable, I leave them as they are. I only modify them if reading is too difficult. In this case, you will find [brackets] on the modified parts.

Par ailleurs, mon orthographe est loin d’être irréprochable et des coquilles ont pu se glisser dans les textes, notamment du fait de la reconnaissance de caractères sur des textes aux lettres parfois en partie effacées ou aux polices quelque peu exotiques. N’hésitez pas à me faire remonter les erreurs.

A few words about intellectual property

Je fais tout mon possible pour que l’intégralité des textes présentés soit libre de droits. Soit parce que les textes sont dans le domaine public, car anciens, soit parce qu’ils sont sous licence “Creative Commons”. En cas d’erreur de ma part, je supprimerai immédiatement le texte qui ne serait pas libre de droits.

Pour les images, j’essaye d’utiliser autant que possible des images également sous licence “Creative Commons”. Toutefois, dans certains cas, je ne trouve pas d’autre solution que d’utiliser des photos qui ne le sont potentiellement pas. Je cite toujours mes sources et propose un lien vers le site de référence. Si, toutefois, vous trouvez votre photo sur mon site et que vous souhaitez que je la supprime, je le ferai dès réception de la demande.

For texts that I write myself when I can't find old texts or when I can't find a French version, everything is under CC BY-NC license, which means you can do what you want with them, but I ask you to cite the blog and not monetize the texts.

A few words about me

Let me introduce myself, I am Fabien. I am neither a writer, nor a folklorist, nor a storyteller, nor an ethnologist, and even less a computer scientist. I am only an amateur of legends, hiking, geocaching... and yes, a little computer science anyway.

I love discovering a lost fountain in the middle of a forest, a big rock with a magnificent view of the valley, a chapel in an unlikely place or even a ruined castle on top of a mountain. And if a legend comes to surround everything with its aura of mystery, the ordinary walk switches to the magical.

A few words about the technology

This site works thanks to many open source tools, here is the list. Thanks to all the authors of these tools without whom nothing could exist!

The backend:

The backend part is in Python and runs thanks to Django. Why this choice? Simply because Python is the language I 'master' best and Django is a great framework! Let's add to that a little GeoDjango for its capabilities to handle geographical coordinates well.

The database is a PostgreSQL with an extension Postgis for its geographic functions. The search is done with Watson for the 'plaintext' part.

The frontend:

To my great shame I use quite a lot Bootstrap with Crispyforms. I promise one day I'll switch to React or Svelte. But for now, I've kept it as simple as possible. Everything else is done in standard Javascript. Markdown is handled by django-markdownx

The cartography:

My main cartography uses Leaflet, but I also use a little OpenLayers for form maps. Marketcluster is there to handle point clustering on maps.