Tartalo

Rain came down over the hills of Gipuzkoa and two brothers, lost and soaked through, found a cave and went in out of the weather. It was warm inside. It smelled of wet wool and old fire. At dusk a flock came shouldering past them through the entrance, and behind the flock came the owner of the cave, who rolled a stone across the mouth of it, looked the brothers over with the single eye set in the middle of his forehead, and settled the evening’s business aloud. One of you for today. The other for tomorrow.

Ask a Basque farmer in the 1870s who the Tartaro was and the answer came back immediately, and it came back the same every time: the man with one eye in the middle of his forehead. Wentworth Webster, an English clergyman who spent years taking down tales in Labourd, could not get an unlettered speaker to describe him any other way. Not an ogre. Not a giant of the vague, mountain-shaped sort. A huge man built along the lines of a shepherd, with one eye.

His name shifts depending on which valley you are standing in. Tartaro, or Tartaroa, in the northern provinces where the stories were first written down in French. Torto. Alarabi around Markina in Bizkaia. Anxo, or Ancho, though several sources give that name instead to the hairy lord of the woods and the two have never been fully untangled. Tartalo itself, José Miguel de Barandiarán noted, belongs particularly to Zegama, where the mountain above the village carries a dolmen called Tartaloetxe, the house of Tartalo, standing in a place called Tartaloetxeeta. He turns up through the Goierri of Gipuzkoa, in the Burunda valley, in the cave of Muskia at Ataun, on the slopes of Erreniega above Zizur. The land is more specific about him than the stories are.

Where the name came from is unsettled. Jean-François Cerquand, publishing Basque legends in Pau in 1875, proposed that Tartaro came from the Tartars, on the model by which French *ogre* is supposed to come from *Hongrois*. Webster liked the shape of that argument and distrusted its conclusion, pointing out the awkward fact that the Tartars did not appear in Europe until the thirteenth century, which is very late indeed for a creature who otherwise looks extremely old. Others have reached for Latin *Tartarus*, the pit beneath the world. Webster also spotted a homelier candidate in a Low Navarrese wordlist: the root *tar*, which surfaces in *tarrotu*, to grow somewhat large, and in *tarrapataka*, moving fast and making a racket. That last one at least sounds like him.

Whether Tartalo is one being or a kind of being is equally unresolved. Barandiarán raised the possibility that it functioned as a personal name; Webster’s own collection contains a tale in which three Tartaros appear at once, which rather settles the matter in the other direction. Only one story bothers to explain how such a creature comes about, and it is a strange one, told at Ahetze by Estefanella Hirigarray: he was a king’s son, punished for some fault by being turned into a monster, and the only cure was marriage. That is why he pursues the girl in her version. Nobody would guess it from his behaviour.

The rest of the time he is simply a working monster with a working monster’s routine. He is a shepherd and a hunter, and what he hunts is people. He sets snares. He eats a whole sheep in a day, takes a nap, and then starts on whoever has fallen into his hands. In the version the Abbé Heguiagaray heard from his mother in Soule, the Tartaro lives not in a cave but in a huge barn with thick walls, a high roof and a door so strong that he alone knows the trick of opening it; his mother, an old witch, keeps a turf hut in the corner of the garden. It is a farm. It is run by an appetite.

He never wins.

The escape always turns on the same two objects, iron and wool. A young man, caught in the snares and waiting his turn, watches the giant eat a sheep and lie down, then puts the roasting spit into the fire and holds it there until it glows. The scream brings the Tartaro up off the floor and blundering about the room, and the young man is already gone from where he was. Blinded, the giant opens the door only a hand’s width and lets his flock out between his legs, feeling each animal as it passes. So the man takes the bell from the ram’s neck, hangs it round his own, pulls the fresh sheepskin over his back and goes out on all fours. The Tartaro’s hands close on the fleece. The man slips out of it, dives between the giant’s legs and runs.

Then comes the detail that belongs to the Basques and to nobody else. The old witch stops him on the path, congratulates him warmly on escaping her son, and presses a ring on him as a keepsake. He puts it on. It begins to shout, *Heben nuk! Heben nuk!*, meaning here you are, here you are, and it does not stop, and the ring will not come off. The blind giant turns and comes on at a run, guided by a voice that will not be quiet. In Barandiarán’s Zegama telling the ring answers a question instead, calling back *here I am* every time the giant asks where he is. The endings vary by the water available. The young man cuts off his own finger with a knife and throws it down a well, or into a pond, or into the Mekolalde, and the ring goes on answering from the bottom, and the Tartaro follows the sound and drowns. In another version it is a girl who cuts, and a cliff he goes over.

Webster noticed the talking ring in Scottish Gaelic tradition and in Grimm, and noticed that it has no classical parallel at all, which is worth holding onto, because everything else about the creature invites comparison with Polyphemus and the argument over whether the Basques got the tale from the Greeks or the other way round has been running since the 1870s. The blinding by fire has a Celtic cousin too, in the spear that goes through Balor’s eye.

His powers are the powers of a big animal with a house: strength, reach, a door nobody else can open, a stone nobody else can shift. His weaknesses follow from the same body. He has one eye, which makes him a single target rather than a pair. He hunts by hand and by ear once that eye is gone, and hands and ears can be fooled by a fleece and a sheep bell. He is, by every account, slower in the head than the smallest and most foolish of the men he catches, and Basque storytellers made a habit of handing the victory to a madman or an idiot: Errua, Ergela, Tontua, the fool who wins. He loses his wagers. He is talked into contests he cannot win and walked into deaths he arranges himself. Webster, who probably knew him better than anyone, allowed that he was not wholly without a rough good humour once he had eaten and drunk, and noted that he occasionally helps, arming a young hero to go and kill the seven-headed serpent.

The ring keeps answering from the bottom of the water. He goes in after it every time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tartalo in Basque mythology?

Tartalo is a one-eyed giant of Basque folklore, an enormously strong cave-dwelling shepherd who keeps a flock of sheep and eats the travellers who take shelter with him. He is also called Tartaro, Tartaroa, Torto and Alarabi depending on the region. Barandiarán recorded Tartalo as the local form used around Zegama in Gipuzkoa.

How do you escape from Tartalo?

In the standard tale the captive heats the roasting spit in the fire and drives it into Tartalo’s single eye, then escapes from the sealed cave by wearing a sheepskin and crawling out among the flock. A talking ring given by Tartalo or his mother then betrays the escaper’s position, so he cuts off his own finger and throws it into water. Tartalo follows the ring’s shouting and drowns.

Is Tartalo the same as the Greek Cyclops?

Tartalo is not the same figure as Polyphemus, but the resemblance is close enough that collectors have argued about it since the 1870s. Both are one-eyed cave giants who pen a flock, are blinded with a burning stake or spit, and are escaped by a captive hiding among sheep. The Basque version adds the talking ring, which has no classical parallel and links the tale instead to Scottish Gaelic and German traditions.

Where does Tartalo live?

Tartalo is placed in caves and mountain shelters across the Basque Country, most famously at the dolmen called Tartaloetxe, the house of Tartalo, on the mountain above Zegama in Gipuzkoa. He is also associated with the cave of Muskia at Ataun, the Burunda valley, the Goierri, and Mount Erreniega near Zizur in Navarre. In one recorded version he lives not in a cave but in a fortified barn with a door only he can open.

Where does the name Tartalo come from?

Nobody has settled it. Jean-François Cerquand suggested in 1875 that Tartaro derived from the Tartars, in the way French *ogre* is said to derive from *Hongrois*, but Wentworth Webster objected that the Tartars only reached Europe in the thirteenth century. Latin *Tartarus* and a native Basque root *tar*, meaning roughly to grow large or to move about noisily, have both been proposed instead.

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Basajaun, Jentil, Mairu, Mari, Aatxe, Lamiak, Sugaar, Gaueko, Ojáncanu, Polyphemus, Cyclops, Odysseus (Ulysses), Tepegoz, Balor, Fachen