Ramidreju

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Cantabrian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: An animal born once every hundred springs out of the weasel and the beech marten, whose gall, once taken out of it, cures any illness and finds hidden treasure.
Role in Mythos: It appears in a single tale, as the source of what the anjanas drink on the night they climb to the pass above the Cabuérniga valley.
Relation to Humans: Anyone who finds one and takes its gall is promised a cure for every sickness there is and the whereabouts of buried treasure. No telling records anybody managing it.

On the second-to-last night of September, lights move slowly along a mountain above the Cabuérniga valley, spaced out like the candles of a procession, and there is singing. The whole record of the ramidreju sits inside that scene. One paragraph, in one story, in one book: Manuel Llano’s collection Las Anjanas, printed in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo in 1931, in a tale called Claveles de plata that Llano took down from Ricardo Balbás, a very old and very quick-witted man of Viaña whose house had been his lodging on the road. Everything anyone knows about the animal comes off that page.

Balbás was describing the anjanas, the good women of the mountain who came up from April until the autumn began. On that one night they walked together, singing, to a pass on the road to Cieza, and knelt there, and said their praises. Then they drank. First water, out of a jar of bone cased in silver. Then the gall of an animal born once every hundred springs from the weasel and the marten. That animal is the ramidreju.

Balbás gave it four things and stopped. It is very thin and very long. Its hide is very black, and the green stripes running down it are sunk into the skin rather than lying on top of it. Its eyes are yellowish. Its face is a wild boar’s, and it is a working face: the animal roots with it, turning the earth the way a boar turns it, and opens holes like a mole’s in the leaf litter. Then it goes down. Fifty metres and more, into ground that no marten has any business being in, and there it hides.

The gift is in the gall, and the gall does not do anything for the animal that grows it. A person who finds a ramidreju and takes the gall out of it can cure every illness there is and find the treasures that are hidden. Those two things arrive together in one clause and are never separated afterwards. The ramidreju is not said to hunt gold, or to want it, or to smell it through stone. It digs, and the digging is its own business. The gold belongs to whoever is holding what was cut out of it.

The limits are the ones the arithmetic sets. One is born in a century, and it spends whatever life it has fifty metres under the beech roots in a burrow no wider than itself. Nobody in the story finds one. The tale records no hunt, no trap, no bargain and no lucky man, and it does not say what becomes of a ramidreju that is never caught.

Both its parents are ordinary and both are real. The rámila is the beech marten, a word Cantabrian enough that the Spanish Academy’s dictionary still marks it as such and glosses it simply as garduña. The weasel in those same valleys was a monuca, which one of Llano’s other informants pauses to explain in the middle of a different story, while describing the sandals the anjanas wore, which were made of its skin. So the parentage is not exotic at all. It is the two small hunters anyone in Cabuérniga could have named, and once a hundred springs they produce something that travels down instead of along.

What the record does not do is grow. The standard academic survey of Cantabrian mythology works steadily through the ojáncanu, the anjana, the cuegle, the trasgu, the trenti and the guajona, and never arrives at the ramidreju at all. There is no second telling, no variant, no origin beyond the hundred springs and no end. The details most often hung on it now, a hide that heals, tusks set in the boar’s mouth, a nose for buried metal, are not in what Balbás said. What is there is stranger and much smaller: an animal nobody has ever seen, whose only recorded appearance is as something the anjanas drink on the night they go up to the pass.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a ramidreju?

The ramidreju is a creature of Cantabrian folklore in northern Spain, described as very thin and very long, with a very black hide striped in green, yellowish eyes and the face of a wild boar. It roots in the earth like a boar, opens holes like a mole’s, and hides more than fifty metres down.

How is a ramidreju born?

A ramidreju is born once every hundred springs from the weasel and the beech marten. That is the whole of what the record says about its origin. It gives no parent’s name, no place of birth and no account of what happens to the animal afterwards.

What is the ramidreju’s gall used for?

Whoever finds a ramidreju and takes out its gall can cure any illness and find hidden treasure. The two powers are named together in a single sentence. The anjanas were said to drink that gall at their gathering on the second-to-last night of September, after drinking water from a jar of bone cased in silver.

Does the ramidreju hunt for gold?

No. The story never says the ramidreju seeks gold, wants it or can smell it underground. It digs, and the treasure-finding belongs to the person who takes its gall. The idea that the animal itself hunts for gold is a later addition rather than part of the original account.

Where does the ramidreju come from?

The ramidreju is known from a single paragraph in Manuel Llano’s Las Anjanas, published in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo in 1931. Llano heard it from Ricardo Balbás of Viaña, in the Cabuérniga valley, inside a tale called Claveles de plata. No independent telling of the creature has been recorded.