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Basque Legends

Once upon a time there were two brothers, the one an idiot, and the other a fool. They had an old mother, old, old, very old. One morning early the elder arranges to go with his sheep to the mountain, and he leaves the fool at home with his old, old, mother, and said to him:

"I will give my mother some chocolate now, and you will give her a hot bath (afterwards), quite, quite, hot."

He goes to the mountain with his sheep. The second son put the water on to boil, and said to his mother:

"My mother, the water is hot, what bath would you like?"[1]

She says to him:

"A bath with wood-ashes."

And he carries it to the bed while it is boiling; and as she did not get up, he said to her:

"Would you like a little broth?" And she said "Yes."

"My mother, get up quickly!" and she did not get up.

He takes her, and puts her himself into this boiling water, so that he boiled his poor mother. And he said to her,

"My mother, get up again; the water is not cold."

She did not answer. The night comes, and the other brother returns from the mountains, and says to him

"How is our mother?"

"All right."

"Have you given her the bath?"

"Yes; but she is still there, and she is asleep in her bath."

"Go and see if she is still asleep."

He goes, and says, "No, no; she is laughing – she keeps on laughing."

The other brother goes there, and perceives that their mother is quite dead. He did not know what to do. They both go into the garden, and there they make a great hole and bury her.

They then burn the house, go into the woods, see the witches, cure the king's daughter, whom one of them marries, and they live happily.

Comments:

[1] That is, one with bran, or herbs, wood-ashes, &c., or plain water.

It is possible that this first part may be a narrative of fact. We knew at Asté, near Bagnères de Bigorre, a brother, an idiot "crétin," who deliberately began to chop up his sister (also an idiot and "crétin"), who offered no resistance. He had chopped off several of her fingers, when they were accidentally interrupted. In spite of the blood and pain, she was only laughing at it.

We have another tale of this kind, which may be also founded on fact, so sad is often the condition of the cretins in the mountains. It is of a mother and her imbecile son; he nearly kills himself by chopping off the branch of the tree on which he was sitting. Then he believes himself dead, and commits various other follies. His mother thinks a wife might be able to take care of him, and tells him to cast sheeps' eyes at the young girls coming out of church after mass. He takes this literally, cuts out the eyes of all their flock, and so kills their sheep, the only thing they had, and throws these at the girls, who are disgusted, and quarrel with him. He goes home, and mother and son end their lives together in wretchedness.

M. Cerquand gives this tale at length, Part II., pp. 10, 11. The incidents are very slightly changed.

WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY.

Our legends of witchcraft and sorcery are very poor, and in some of these, as said above, the witch is evidently a fairy. The reason of this is not that the belief in witchcraft is extinct among the Basques, but because it is so rife. Of stories of witchcraft (as matters of fact), and some of them very sad ones, we have heard plenty; but of legends, very few. In fact, witchcraft among the Basques has not yet arrived at the legendary stage. The difference is felt at once in taking down their recitations. In the legends they are reciting a text learnt by heart. It is "the story says so." "It is so," whether they understand it or not. But they tell their stories of witchcraft in their own words, just as they would narrate any other facts which they supposed had happened to themselves or to their neighbours. One woman told us, as a fact within her own knowledge, and persisted in it, a tale which appears both in M. Cerquand's pages and in Fr. Michel's "Pays Basque."[1] It was only after cross-examination that we could discover that it had not really happened to her own daughter, but that she had only seen the cottage and the chapel which are the scene of the alleged occurrence. We have, too, been informed on undoubted authority that, only a year or two back, a country priest was sorely puzzled by one of his parishioners, in his full senses, seriously and with contrition confessing to him that he frequented the "Sabbat."

But what is strange and unexpected is, that with this prevalence of belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and which can be traced back to our earliest notices of the Basques, there is nothing to differentiate their belief on this subject from the current European belief of three centuries back. All the Basque words for witchcraft and sorcery are evidently borrowed. The only purely Basque term is Asti, which seems to be rather a diviner than a sorcerer. The term for the "Sabbat" is "Akhelarre" – "goat pasture" – and seems to be taken from the apparition of the devil there in form of a goat, which is not uncommon elsewhere. Pierre de Lancre, by the terrors of his hideous inquisition in 1609, produced a moral epidemic, and burnt numerous victims at St. Jean de Luz; but there is not a single Basque term in all his pages. Contrary to general opinion, both the Spanish Inquisition and the French ecclesiastical tribunals were more merciful and rational, and showed far less bigotry and barbarity than the two doctrinaire lawyers and judges of Bordeaux. The last person burnt for witchcraft at St. Jean de Luz was a Portuguese lady, who was accused of having secreted the Host for purposes of magic, in 1619. While her case was being investigated before the Bishop of Bayonne, in the crypt of the church, a mob of terrified fishermen, on the eve of starting for Newfoundland, burst in, tore her out of the church, and burnt her off-hand, in the midst of the "Place." "They dared not," they said, "sail while such a crime was unpunished." The Bishop's procés-verbal of the occurrence is still extant in the archives of the Mairie.

The magic wand in all our tales is now said to be made from the hazel. In De Lancre's time it was from the "Souhandourra" – "the cornus sanguinea" – or dog-wood. This was then the witches' tree.

[1] Cerquand, Part I., p. 29, notes to Conte 8; Fr. Michel, "Le Pays Basque," p. 152 (Didot, Paris, 1857).

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