Busgosu

Wet moss, cut chestnut, and underneath both of them a smell like a goat pen in warm weather. That is supposed to be the warning. The Asturian woods are steep and close and full of noise anyway, water everywhere and beech leaves underfoot, so nobody expects to hear the thing coming. What they expect is to look up from the saw and find that something upright and hairy has been standing between the trunks for a while, and that it has horns, and that the legs bend the wrong way.

He is called the Busgosu, lord of the forest. The stories give him the woods themselves as property: the trees, the deer, the boar, the wolves, the springs. Toward shepherds he can be generous. A cabin roof torn open by a storm is found sound in the morning, the fire banked and burning, nobody about. Toward men who arrive with axes or guns he is not generous at all. The saw sticks. The dogs will not go forward. Somewhere upslope there is a sound like hooves in leaf litter, unhurried, and the sensible response is to leave the timber where it lies.

The other half of his reputation is worse and less often illustrated. He waits for women walking alone between villages and carries them into his cave, and in some accounts his kiss is not a kiss but an infection, a slow wasting sickness that takes months to finish.

It is a good creature. It is also, according to the man who did more than anyone to write down what Asturian country people actually believed, not Asturian.

In 1922 Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia published the results of three years spent walking the region with a notebook, asking villagers what they knew. He opened the section on myths with the Busgoso and then took him apart in half a page. The figure, he wrote, is known in French Navarre as the Bassa-yaon, the wild lord, and among the Basques as the Basajaun, the lord of the woods, and somebody had taken it into their head to bring him to Asturias. He listed the standard description, the human face and arms, the two horns, the goat legs, a sort of Faun. Then he said the myth does not exist there.

He had grounds. He walked the thick forests of Ponga, Caso, Quirós, Somiedo and Muniellos, which is as deep into the Asturian mountains as it is possible to go, and he questioned the old people and the shepherdesses, and not one of them had heard the name. Nor had he heard it himself as a boy in his own village. Later in the same passage, discussing another disputed figure, he allows himself one dry line: this is as true as the existence of the Busgoso in the Asturian hills.

The man who went looking could not find a single person who had heard of him.

His verdict was that the Busgoso and three companion figures were myths brought in a few years earlier by various writers, that they had no Asturian tradition behind them, and that they could not be studied scientifically for that reason. If they were real, he argued, beautiful legends would have grown up around them, and he found no trace of any. How many tales there would be, he wrote, about the shepherdesses and the Busgoso. Then he set out what he considered the actual mythology of Asturias, five names long: the Nuberu, the Xanas, the Cuélebre, the Sirena and the Trasgu. The Busgosu is not on the list.

The prologue makes it sharper still. It was written by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the most formidable philologist in Spain at the time, who backs Llano up and adds a detail from his own family: one of the gentlemen who had supplied this class of material had privately admitted inventing it outright. Some of the other names in the same group turned out to be ordinary dialect words that outsiders had mistaken for beings. Guaxa is a word for an owl. Ayalga means buried treasure, not an enchanted girl guarding it.

So the horned forest lord arrives in the record wearing a Roman costume, and the earliest printed descriptions of him read like a translation of Faunus with Asturian place names attached.

That is not quite the end of it. Ethnographers who have gone back into the same valleys since, collecting from people rather than from books, do keep turning up a wild man of the woods under local names that have nothing classical about them at all. The bulligoso in the northwest. The peludu, the hairy one, around Tineo. The vellosu, the shaggy one, at Libardón. The mofosu, the mossy one, in Piloña. Those names are descriptions, and they describe something covered in hair or moss rather than something with hooves and a lyre-shaped skull. What may well be genuine is a large hairy presence in the trees that the countryside has always half expected. What is borrowed is the goat.

His powers follow from ownership rather than from magic. Within the treeline he decides the weather of a person’s day: whether the path holds, whether the dogs settle, whether the storm-stripped roof is whole in the morning. He commands the animals because they are his. He can make a wood impassable to one man and open to another standing beside him. The wasting sickness attributed to him is the only power in the set that reaches beyond the trees, and it reaches by being carried out.

His limits are the treeline itself, and the paperwork. He does not appear in villages, does not cross open pasture, and has no cult, no shrine, no festival, no charm said against him. He was never given the one thing the Nuberu and the Cuélebre have, which is a large body of ordinary people who could tell a story about him without having read it first. Whatever walks in the Asturian beech woods, it has been walking there under simpler names.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Busgosu?

The Busgosu is a forest spirit of Asturian and Cantabrian folklore, usually described with a man’s face, torso and arms, two horns, and the legs of a goat. He is called the lord of the woods, protector of trees and wild animals, hostile to hunters and woodcutters, and helpful to shepherds who treat the forest with respect.

Is the Busgosu a real part of Asturian folk tradition?

Its pedigree is disputed. The folklorist Aurelio de Llano, who spent three years collecting in rural Asturias, wrote in 1922 that he questioned old people and shepherdesses in the deepest forests of the region and found nobody who had heard the name. He argued the figure had been imported from the Basque Basajaun by writers a few years earlier.

What is the difference between the Busgosu and the Basajaun?

The Basajaun is the Basque lord of the woods, a large hairy wild man attested in Basque tradition. Llano identified the Busgosu as that same figure carried west into Asturias and redescribed with horns and goat legs, which made him look much more like a Roman Faun than like the Basque original.

Does the Busgosu hurt people?

The tellings disagree. He is said to help lost shepherds and to repair mountain cabins in bad weather, but also to drive out loggers and hunters and to carry off women who are alone in the woods. In some accounts his kiss transmits a wasting illness that kills slowly.

What other names does the Busgosu have?

He is also written Busgoso and appears as the Musgosu. Local Asturian names for a comparable hairy forest man include the bulligoso in the northwest, the peludu around Tineo, the vellosu at Libardón and the mofosu in Piloña. Most of those names simply mean the hairy one or the mossy one.

Related Entries

Basajaun, Trasgo, Cuelebre, Xana, Anjana, Ojáncanu, Pan, Faun, Satyr, Silvanus, Cernunnos, Leshy, Green Man