Jentil

Region/Culture: Southern Europe / Basque Country
Mythos: Basque Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A race of colossal, hairy giants strong enough to wade through the sea and hurl boulders from one mountain to the next.
Role in Mythos: The pre-Christian giant ancestors credited with raising the Basque megaliths and handing down the arts of farming and metalworking before their age ended.
Relation to Humans: They lived alongside early humans and gave them the knowledge that made civilization possible, sometimes willingly and sometimes by theft. When Christianity arrived they vanished from the world, leaving only their stones and a single giant, Olentzero, who stayed behind.

A boulder the size of a barn sits alone in a Basque meadow, too heavy for any flood to have rolled it there and too far from any cliff to have fallen. The old explanation was simpler than geology. A giant threw it. Somewhere across the valley, on the next ridge over, one of the jentilak had wound up and let the stone fly, and it had come down here, and that was the end of the matter. The hills of the Basque Country are littered with such rocks, and with dolmens and standing slabs that no ordinary hands could have stacked, and for a long time the people who lived among them knew exactly whose work it was.

The jentilak were giants, hairy and enormous, tall enough to walk through the sea with the water at their waists and to pitch stones from one summit to another for sport. They belonged to the time before, the long age that ran out when the world changed. Their very name admits it. It comes from the Latin gentilis, gentile, the word for the pagan peoples of the era before Christianity, and the Basques gave it to the ancestors who raised the megaliths and lived without the new faith. To stand at a dolmen was to stand at something a jentil had built. The huge capstone balanced on its uprights was not a mystery to be solved but a memory, the fingerprint of a vanished race pressed into the land.

They were builders, but they were also teachers, and this is the part the stories return to. The jentilak knew how to work iron. They knew the saw. They were the first to grow wheat, and they showed human beings how to break the soil and bring in a harvest, so that people no longer had to live on what they could gather. Even pilota, the Basque ball game of stone-hard hands and high walls, was said to have come from these throwers of rocks. Nearly everything that separated the farmer from the wild animal was, in one telling or another, a gift or a leaving of the giants.

But knowledge is rarely handed over cleanly, and the best-loved of the jentil tales is a theft. A small, quick-witted man named San Martin Txiki, Martin the Little, went up among the giants to get the secrets they guarded. In the version most often told he challenged a giant to a jumping contest across a field of wheat, and he lost on purpose, landing short in the crop so that the grains lodged in his abarketak, his rope-soled sandals. He walked back down the mountain with the future of agriculture hidden between his toes. By the same sort of trick, provoking a giant into flinging an axe or boasting of a craft, he came away with the secret of the smith’s fire and the working of metal. The giants had the wisdom. The little man had the cunning to carry it off, and cunning won.

Then the light came, and the age of giants ended in a single night. A luminous cloud rose over the horizon, or a strange bright star, and the jentilak understood at once what it meant. It was the sign of Kixmi, the name they used for Christ, and it heralded the end of their world. In the valley of Arratzaren in Navarra they gathered by a dolmen, and one by one the giants went down into the earth beneath the great stone and were gone, the whole race pouring itself back into the ground it had shaped. Only one did not flee. Olentzero, the last jentil, came down from the mountains instead, and he survives in the Basque Christmas as a soot-stained charcoal-burner and a figure of straw, carried through the streets when the year turns. The giants left the world, but they left the calendar a keeper.

Their power was the power of scale and strength, the ability to move stone that no team of oxen could shift and to remake a landscape by hand. That same size made them slow and blunt, easy for a clever mortal to outwit, and Martin Txiki is the proof of it. Their true weakness was not strength but time. They were creatures of the pagan age, bound to it, and when that age closed they had no place left to stand. They were not defeated in a battle. They simply belonged to a world that was ending, and they ended with it.

As individuals the jentilak wear different faces across the region. Some tales give the role to Basajaun, the shaggy lord of the forest; others to Sanson, a giant grown out of the biblical Samson, or to Errolan, whose name and rock-throwing arm descend from the Frankish captain Roland who died at Roncevaux. The one-eyed, man-eating Tartalo, a cousin of the Greek Cyclops, is counted among them too. What runs through all of them is the same shape of memory: the sense that before the churches and the ploughed fields there were larger things walking these mountains, and that the stones they left behind are still here to be leaned against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Jentil in Basque mythology?

The Jentil, or Jentilak in the plural, are a race of giants in Basque mythology. They were said to be enormous and hairy, strong enough to wade through the sea and throw boulders from one mountain to another, and they belonged to the pagan age before Christianity came to the Basque Country.

What did the Jentilak build?

The Jentilak were believed to have raised the megalithic monuments of the Basque Country, especially the dolmens and standing stones. Isolated boulders scattered across the hills were also explained as rocks the giants had thrown, and their name, from the Latin word for “gentile,” marked them as the pre-Christian builders of these ancient structures.

What did the Jentil give to humans?

The Jentil are credited with inventing metallurgy and the saw, first growing wheat, and teaching people how to farm. In the most famous legend a clever small man, San Martin Txiki, stole the secrets of agriculture and metalworking from the giants by tricking them, carrying grains of wheat away hidden in his sandals.

How did the age of the Jentilak end?

According to legend, a bright luminous cloud or star appeared, which the giants understood as the sign of Kixmi (their name for Christ) and the end of their world. They fled into the earth beneath a dolmen in the Arratzaren valley in Navarra, and the whole race vanished, marking the close of the pagan age.

Who is Olentzero and how is he connected to the Jentil?

Olentzero was the only Jentil who did not disappear when Christianity arrived. Instead of fleeing into the earth with the others, he remained and became a figure of the Basque Christmas, a charcoal-burner who announces the birth of Christ and is represented as a straw doll carried through the streets in December.