Basque Legends; With an Essay on the Basque Language. Wentworth Webster

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      “It appears that you have said that you will bring the Tartaro himself here.”

      “No, no, no, I did not say anything at all like that; but if you will give me all I ask for, I will try. You must have a carriage made of iron, half-a-yard thick, and three horses to draw it, and lots of money. When all that is ready, I will set out.”

      He asks, also, for a barrel of honey, another of feathers, and two horns, and starts off.

      When he comes to the ferry, it was no easy thing to get this carriage into the boat. When he has got to the other side, he first puts himself into the barrel of honey, and then into the barrel of feathers, and ties the horns on to his head, and then mounts as postilion. He then comes to the Tartaro’s house, and just then he happened to be at home. Petit Perroquet knocks at the door. The Tartaro himself comes to open, and asks:

      “Who are you? You!”

      “I!!—I am the oldest of all the devils in hell.”

      He opens the carriage door for him, and says:

      “Get in there.”

      The Tartaro gets in, and Petit Perroquet, very glad, starts off, and arrives at the ferry. He crosses, as he best can, with his carriage and horses. He pays the ferryman generously, and comes to the king’s palace. They were all terrified when they saw that he had the Tartaro there. They tried to shoot him with cannon, but he caught the bullets, and sent them back as if they had been balls to play with. They could not kill him in that way, so they finished him with other arms.

      As Petit Perroquet had well gained her, they gave him the princess in marriage. He sent for his mother to the court, and as they lived well, so they died happily.

      II—The Heren-Suge.—The Seven-Headed Serpent

      It would only be spoiling good work by bad to attempt to re-write the exhaustive essay which appears, under the heading of “St. George,” in Baring Gould’s “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.” He there traces the atmospheric myth in which the Dragon is the storm-cloud, the Maiden the earth, and the Hero the sun, through all the forms of the great Aryan legend, in Indian, Egyptian, Phœnician, Italic, Keltic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian mythology. He shows that it was merely by a mistaken metaphor20 that St. George came to assume the place, and wear the glories of the solar hero; and that England only followed in the wake of other countries, in making him her national Saint and Patron.

      We will, therefore, now only glance at some of the Basque and Pyrenean forms of this wide-spread myth. M. Cerquand boldly places one form of the story, which is attached to the house of Belzunce, among historical legends. But the history of Belzunce and the Dragon stands in the same relation to the original myth as does that of Guy, Earl of Warwick, Moor of Moor Hall, and of scores of other heroes. In a Basque version, collected by ourselves, the concluding words show that in this form it is simply an Eponymous legend, to account for the name, “and that is whence comes the name of Belzunce.” The oldest Pyrenean version with which we are acquainted is that of the “Serpent d’Isabit.” We give the outlines of it from memory, as we heard, and read it, at Bagnères de Bigorre.

      The serpent lay with his head resting on the summit of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, his neck stretched down towards Barèges, while his body filled the whole valley of Luz, St. Sauveur, and Gédres, and his tail was coiled in the hollow below the cirque of Gavarnie. He fed but once in three months, or the whole country would have been desolate. With a strong inspiration of his breath, he drew into his capacious maw, across the valleys, whole flocks of sheep and goats, herds of oxen, men, women, children, the population of whole villages at once. He was now asleep, and inert, after such a repast. The whole male population of several valleys assembled to consult on what should be done. After long and fruitless debate an old man arose and spoke:—“We have nearly three months yet before he will wake; let us cut down all the forests on the opposite hills; then let us bring all our forges and all the iron we possess, and with the wood thus cut down let us melt it all into one red-hot fiery mass; then we will hide ourselves behind the rocks, and make all the noise we can to try and awaken the monster.” So said, so done. The serpent awoke in a rage at having his slumbers broken, he saw something bright on the opposite side of the valley, and drew in a long breath, and the fiery mass, with a roar like a thunderbolt, flew across the valley, right down the monster’s throat. Then, what convulsions ensued; rocks were uptorn or split open, the mountains were shattered, the glaciers beaten into dust as the serpent twisted and lashed about in his agony. To quench his agony of thirst he descended to the valley, and drank up all the streams from Gavarnie to Pierrefitte. Then, in his last convulsion, he threw himself back upon the mountain side and expired; his head rested in a deep hollow; as the fire within him slowly cooled, the water he had swallowed poured out of his mouth, and formed the present Lac d’Isabit. In M. Cerquand’s legend of the Dragon d’Alçay, the red-hot iron is replaced by “a cow’s skin full of gunpowder.” In all the Basque legends of this class the hero dies.

      But these legends differ widely from the following tales; there is in them no princess to be rescued, no charcoal-burner, no marriage, or any other wonders. Were it not for their still closer resemblance to the Gaelic tales, we should suspect the following legends to be simply translations of some French legend of St. George. As we remarked before, like the Deccan cobras, the Heren-Suge is always seven-headed. It is strange, too, to notice that the princess always behaves in the same chivalrous way. “One is enough to die.” The union, too, of Tartaro and Heren-Suge in the same tale is curious.

      The Grateful Tartaro and the Heren-Suge

      Like many of us who are, have been, and shall be in the world, there was a king, and his wife, and three sons. The king went out hunting one day, and caught a Tartaro. He brings him home, and shuts him up in prison in a stable, and proclaims, by sound of trumpet, that all his court should meet the next day at his house, that he would give them a grand dinner, and afterwards would show them an animal such as they had never seen before.

      The next day the two sons of the king were playing at ball against (the wall of) the stable where the Tartaro was confined, and the ball went into the stable. One of the boys goes and asks the Tartaro—

      “Throw me back my ball, I beg you.”

      He says to him, “Yes, if you will deliver me.”

      He replies, “Yes, yes,” and he threw him the ball.

      A moment after, the ball goes again to the Tartaro. He asks for it again; and the Tartaro says:

      “If you will deliver me, I will give it you.”

      The boy says, “Yes, yes,” takes his ball, and goes off.

      The ball goes there for the third time, but the Tartaro will not give it before he is let out. The boy says that he has not the key. The Tartaro says to him:

      “Go to your mother, and tell her to look in your right ear, because something hurts you there. Your mother will have the key in her left pocket, and take it out.”

      The boy goes, and does as the Tartaro had told him. He takes the key from his mother, and delivers the Tartaro. When he was letting him go, he said to him:

      “What shall I do with the key now? I am undone.”

      The Tartaro says to him:

      “Go again to your mother, and tell her that your left ear hurts you, and ask her СКАЧАТЬ