Funnily enough, though I do like Debussy’s music and have since I heard it during my third-year Music History class back in… longer ago than I’d care to admit, my main inspiration for this post was, of all things, a video game.

Long story short, in Mario 64, the skybox of Wet-Dry World (as seen here) is a photo of Shibam, Yemen (with the Muhammad Ali Mosque in Cairo added to the photo), with some water and lighting effects added to reflect the level’s theme of “City with Variable Water Level.”

I’ll explain it more detail in the main body of this post, but since I was already aware of The Sunken Cathedral, referring to the cathedral of the legendary sunken city of Ys, it seemed like the easiest premise to use to do something similar, slapping a transparent image of water over an image of a church.

It, uh, it wasn’t great.

I played around with the general concept, adjusting the transparency, adding some colour filters, and trying to figure out the best approach to adding lighting effects. And, well, it took three attempts, but I got one that actually looked pretty good:

And then I, uh, went a little mad with power and did the same thing with my Underwater Egypt picture for my Endless Ocean post…

I’m sure an actual graphic designer could do significantly better, but I least managed to make an image that actually looks like a church underwater, rather than just a church with a transparent image over it…

---

Claude Debussy was a major figure in the classical music of the turn of the 20th century.

One of Debussy’s better-known compositions is the orchestral piece called La Mer (that’s French for “the Sea”). But I want to focus on another one of his ocean-themed pieces, La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral), due to being one of my favourite Debussy pieces.

As stated, the Cathedral in question is the Cathedral of Ys, a mythical city in Brittany, now part of France, but historically an independent Duchy or Kingdom with a distinct Celtic culture. It’s not for nothing that “Brittany” looks like “Britain” — both names refer to the ancient Celtic Britons.

Although Ys isn’t as well known as something like Atlantis, or Númenor, or even a real-life event like Thera, the myth nevertheless has clearly resonated with people over the years. To quote the Scottish scholar Lewis Spence:

The legend of the submerged city of Ys, or Is, is perhaps the most romantic and imaginative effort of Breton popular legend. Who has not heard of the submerged bells of Ys, and who has not heard them ring in the echoes of his own imagination?

from Legends & Romances of Brittany, via Project Gutenberg.

Notably, Ys is also the name of a long-running JPRG series…

In brief, Ys is basically Breton Atlantis, cataclysmically swallowed by the sea, thanks to the either misguided or actively evil princess Dahut literally opening the floodgates. An important Breton saint, whose identity varies depending on the version of the story, warns King Gradlon to flee and he is therefore able to narrowly escape the downfall of his kingdom.

As is often the case with folklore, the exact details vary, but the immediately important part of the legend is that the Cathedral of Ys is said to be visible underwater on clear, calm days and its bells can be heard ringing underwater.

The whole point of the piece, as impressionistic music, is to invoke the idea of the legend through the tone and colour of the music. Basically, telling a story without words.

I can definitely make the connections between the music and tolling bells, and the fact that the music it’s mostly pretty soft does help to make it feel like it’s coming from underwater, though I’m not sure my first thought would be “underwater church” if I didn’t know the story ahead of time.

---

The official Music to Write Realmgard to playlist is here:

And follow me here:

If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:

Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:

Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.

All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.

The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

Realmgard is published by Emona Literary Services^TM