Iratxoak

Midnight on the eve of Saint John, and on a hillside above a Basque farmstead a needle case lies open on a bed of brambles. Ferns and gorse crowd in around it. The wood is cold, the ground is wet through, and whoever set it down there has already walked back to the valley without looking behind him. By morning the case may be exactly as empty as it looks. Or it may hold something that will get through a week of work while the milk is still warm.

The oldest surviving sighting of the iratxoak is not a story at all but a warning about money. In 1596 a small book of Bizkaian proverbs came off Pedro Porralis’s press, five hundred and thirty-nine sayings printed in Basque with Spanish beside them, the compiler never named. One of them runs *Gassoto yrabacia, yrachoen da yracia*: what is badly earned is strained away by the iratxoak. Only one copy of that book was ever located, in Darmstadt, and the war burned it. What is left is a set of photographs Julio de Urquijo had made beforehand, now kept in a library in San Sebastián. The word outlived its own paper.

Basque has an unnerving number of words for the thing that gets into a house and refuses to behave. When Bernardo Estornés Lasa assembled them for the Auñamendi encyclopedia he ran past twenty without slowing down: mamu, mamarro, zomarro, akilimarro, momolo, babau, txitxoe, izexa, argiak, and iratxo, the last of these marked for Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. Pierre Lhande’s 1926 dictionary of the Labourdin, Low Navarrese and Souletin dialects translates iratxo flatly as spectre. Francisco Ignacio de Lardizábal, writing in 1855, could not quite let the word stand alone and put down *iratxo edo duende*, an iratxo or a goblin, as though even his Basque readers might want the second word for safety. The record has always kept the name more carefully than it kept the creature.

José Miguel de Barandiarán, who spent sixty years writing down what people in the villages actually said rather than what a folklorist would prefer them to say, found the fullest picture in Bizkaia. There the iratxoak come out after dark wearing shapes: a woman, a child, a donkey, a black ram, a pig, a bird with fire spilling out of its mouth. What anyone usually sees first is not a body but a tongue of flame a long way off across the slope, which is how you know where they are and roughly how fast they are moving. They are not held to be evil. They like a fright, they arrive all at once at your elbow, and the genuine danger in them is curiosity, because a person who follows one gets walked across ground nobody sensible crosses at night. Wells and chasms are where they are said to live.

In Ataun, at the mouth of the cave at Armontaitz, shepherds used to find footprints in the morning where the ireluak had come out in the night. Above the drop at Ubedi and outside the cave at Malkorburu, people said the singing came back off the rock at them.

Their origin is a piece of folk botany that flatly declines to be sensible. *Ira* is the Basque for fern and *iratze* a fern brake, so iratxo can be read as a small fern, and the belief holds that the iratxoak are born from the seed the fern sets on Saint John’s Night. Ferns do not set seed. On that one night, the story insists, they do, and anyone who wants one of his own carries a needle case up the hill at midnight and leaves it open among the fronds. Where the belief runs in this shape the creatures often go under another name, mamarro, which may simply be what you call an iratxo you have managed to catch.

Catching one changes the whole character of the thing. Boxed, they become the pamerialak or familiarrak, the ones belonging to the house; the gaizkinak, the little devils, though nobody seriously argues they are devils; the mamorroak, the bugs; the airetikakoak, the ones out of the air. Most often they are galtzagorriak or prakagorriak, the red trousers, from *galtza* or *praka* for trousers and *gorri* for red. The descriptions turn vague at this point and then turn peculiar. Tiny men, barely visible. Neither male nor female. Flies. Lice. A caseful could be had for what a chicken cost, although a good many people insisted that a needle case and its occupants could not be sold at all and had to be given away outright or swapped.

Open the case and they are gone before the sentence finishes. They are fast beyond argument and strong out of all proportion to their size, and they will do whatever they are told however far-fetched it is, and then they come straight back and stand there waiting for the next instruction. That is the whole problem. A farm does not contain an afternoon’s work for them, so the standing advice is to set them something that cannot be completed: carry water in a sieve, wash a black fleece white. Anyone in a district who managed more than looked possible fell under suspicion of keeping a case in his pocket, the healer, the fortune teller, the man whose wall went up overnight. So did some of the witches. So, in the usual telling, did the devil.

The Gipuzkoan ethnographer Juan Garmendia Larrañaga records how far the word eventually travelled. By his day galtzagorri would serve as a plain everyday name for the devil, and also as a piece of village mockery aimed at a man whose trousers had gone orange in the sun.

For all that speed they have almost no defences, and the one crushing limitation in the whole business lands on the owner rather than on them. They cannot be dismissed. They can only be passed on. A man who has kept his iratxoak all his life and intends to go on keeping them is not permitted to die; he lies there not finishing, and the agony continues until the case is destroyed or sold or handed to somebody else, at which point what made him prosperous becomes another household’s difficulty and he is finally allowed to stop. Short of that, the only real protection is competence. Keep them busy and they are the best hands anyone will ever have. Run out of orders and the trouble starts, which is why the careful owner keeps a sieve and a river within reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are iratxoak in Basque mythology?

Iratxoak are the imps or night spirits of Basque folklore, known chiefly in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. They appear after dark as a woman, a child, a donkey, a black ram, a pig or a fire-mouthed bird, and are often first noticed as a tongue of flame seen at a distance. They are regarded as mischievous rather than evil.

Where do iratxoak come from?

Basque belief holds that iratxoak are born from the seed the fern produces on Saint John’s Night. Ferns produce no seed, which is precisely the point of the belief. The name itself is read as a small fern, from *ira*, the Basque word for fern.

What is a galtzagorri and how is it related to an iratxo?

Galtzagorriak, meaning “red trousers”, are iratxoak that have been caught and kept in a needle case, where they serve as household familiars. They are also called prakagorriak, familiarrak, gaizkinak, mamorroak and airetikakoak. Descriptions vary widely, from tiny men in red breeches to flies or lice.

How do you catch iratxoak?

The traditional method is to leave an open needle case at midnight on a bed of brambles among ferns and gorse, or in a cave. Some accounts say a caseful could instead be bought for roughly the price of a chicken, while others insisted that a needle case and its occupants could never be sold and had to be given away or exchanged.

What is the danger of keeping iratxoak?

The owner cannot die while the case is still in his possession, and suffers without release until it is destroyed, sold or given to someone else. The more immediate difficulty is that the imps work far faster than any farm can supply tasks, so they must be given impossible jobs such as carrying water in a sieve or washing a black fleece white.

Related Entries

Galtzagorriak, Mari, Basajaun, Lamia, Tartalo, Jentil, Sugaar, Gaueko, Aatxe, Mairu, Eguzkilore, Familiar, Duende, Brownie, Domovoi