Basajaun

The bells go first. Every sheep in the fold starts shaking at once, a hundred clappers rattling in the dark for no reason a man could name, and the shepherd wakes, listens, and goes back to sleep. Something has arrived at the edge of the beech wood. The flock will not be touched tonight.

That is the ordinary working evidence of the Basajaun, and it is the part of him that Basque herdsmen seem to have trusted most. His name is a plain compound, *baso* and *jaun*, forest and lord, and it is given to a being who lives in caves and high woods on the slopes of Gorbea in Bizkaia, in the backcountry above Ataun in Gipuzkoa, and through the Irati forest in Navarre. The name travelled south too, into the Aragonese valleys around Ansó and Broto, where he becomes Basajarau or Bonjarau and the old Basque place-names still cling to the map.

He is tall, and he is covered in hair. The strands fall in front as far as the knees, so that his face, chest and belly are hidden behind them, and he walks upright like a man rather than loping. Barandiarán’s informants in Gipuzkoa gave him one further oddity that nobody seems to have invented for effect: his feet do not match. One is an ordinary human foot. The other has a sole rounded off like the cut base of a tree trunk, and where he has crossed wet ground he leaves a line of alternating tracks, one print of a man and one perfect circle. Some tellings hand him a single eye in the middle of the forehead, but that belongs properly to Tartalo, the cannibal giant, and the two of them swap places in the same tales so often that the borrowing is hard to police.

Nothing in the record says how he was born.

What the record does say is that he knew everything first. Before there were farmers there was the Basajaun, who understood when to put seed in the ground and how to bring wheat out of it. Before there were smiths there was the Basajaun, who could take two pieces of iron and make them one. He had the mill before anyone had a mill. And every last piece of it was taken off him by a small saint with an eye for an opening.

On Mount Muskia above Ataun, the basajaunak kept their wheat piled in a cave, and San Martin Txiki came up and bet them that he could clear the heaps in a single jump without disturbing a grain. They cleared them beautifully. He landed square in the middle, which was the point, because he had come wearing enormously oversized shoes and walked home with them full of seed. The saw went the same way. His servant announced to the basajaunak that the master had made one, and they asked, baffled, whether he had studied the leaf of a chestnut tree, which told San Martin Txiki exactly what he needed to know. They crept in at night to ruin the finished blade by bending its teeth back and forth, and only succeeded in inventing the set of a saw. Welding fell to the same trick: sprinkle clay water on the iron, said the Basajaun, to nobody who deserved to be told.

He gives his secrets away every single time, and he is never shown resenting it.

He was not always so easy to be near. Webster’s Basque informants in the 1870s used the French phrase *homme de bouc*, he-goat-man, when they described him, and spoke of him with a familiarity that was never entirely free of dread. At Estérençuby four cowherds left a share of their supper for Antxo, the local Basajaun, who came in while they slept, ate, and warmed himself at their fire. One night three of them skipped the offering. Their clothes were gone by morning, and only the boy who had fed him could get them back, along with a hazel wand and instructions to strike a lame heifer a hundred and one times. He finished the night with a hundred and one cattle.

The darker material is thinner but it exists. In the single tale Webster ever found of the kind, recited to him by Estefanella Hirigaray, the Basa-Jaun takes three brothers and their sister into service and comes to the girl’s door each evening asking her to push her little finger through, and sucks it, and she wastes visibly while her brothers watch. They catch him in a ravine and kill him. His wife the Basa-Andre then drops three great teeth into the water the girl uses to wash her brothers’ feet, and the brothers walk out of the room as oxen. It takes three hazel rods and three blows each to bring them back.

His powers run outward from his position on that boundary line. He can outrun a stag, he does not sicken, and winter and summer are the same to a body under that much hair. He hears weather coming before it arrives and can put a wolf pack off a fold simply by being there. The knowledge is the greater gift, and he has held it longer than anyone because he has been alive longer than anyone.

The limits are just as tightly bound to what he is. He cannot keep a secret against flattery, and the trickster cycle exists because a servant repeating a boast at the right moment will get anything out of him. He detests church bells, and the tales are consistent that he withdrew as Christianity spread, going the way of the Jentilak, the old giants whose dolmens still stand in the Ataun hills. In the Zuberoan tale of the stolen candlestick he loses his claim on a thief the moment the chapel bell at Saint-Sauveur rings, and when he comes back for the man on a day he is fasting, four grains of wheat found in the fellow’s hair and chewed are enough to send him away for good. The wheat he taught the Basques to grow is the thing that finally keeps him off.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Basajaun?

The Basajaun is a tall, hair-covered wild man from Basque mythology whose name means “lord of the forest.” He lives in caves and high woodland in the Basque Country and the Pyrenees, and he acts as a guardian of shepherds and their flocks rather than as a threat to them.

What does the Basajaun do for shepherds?

He keeps wolves away from the fold and shouts a warning from the high ground when a storm is coming, giving herdsmen time to get their animals in. Shepherds knew he had arrived because the sheep would all shake their bells at once. In exchange they left him bread and milk and let him warm himself at their fire while they slept.

Why is the Basajaun called the first farmer and blacksmith?

Basque tradition credits him with knowing agriculture, ironworking and milling before humans did. He was the first to understand when to sow wheat, the first who could weld two pieces of iron together, and the owner of the first mill.

How did humans get the Basajaun’s secrets?

The trickster San Martin Txiki stole them one at a time. He took wheat by jumping into the basajaunak’s grain pile in oversized shoes, learned that a saw should be toothed like a chestnut leaf by having a servant provoke them into saying so, and got the welding secret the same way, by boasting until the Basajaun corrected him.

What is the Basajaun afraid of?

Church bells, and Christianity generally. The stories describe him retreating as the new religion spread, in the same way as the Jentilak. In the tale of the stolen candlestick from Zuberoa, a chapel bell breaks his hold on a thief, and four chewed grains of wheat later drive him off permanently.

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