The Devil's Dance

The first English translation.

In 1883, the great French linguist Julien Vinson gathered everything the Basque country still sang, riddled, and whispered - and this book is the whole of it, in English at last. Here are the wonder tales the villages told against the winter: the sea-witch whose last wave is a wave of blood; the fairies who build a bridge in a night, cheated of their wage by a crowing cock; the one-eyed giant blinded by his supper-guest; the devil's godson who steals the moon itself. Here are the songs with their airs - love songs, drinking songs, the anthem of the Guernica oak - printed with the original Basque; the lullabies and begging songs; seventy-eight riddles; two hundred and twenty-eight proverbs; and the strangest survival of all, the pastorales - the open-air folk theater of the high Soule, where blue-coated Christians and red-coated Turks fought seven-hour verse battles on a stage of planks and barrels while Satans danced at the edges. Vinson's own account of that theater, and his complete carnival play of Pançart - the trial and execution of Mardi Gras himself - close the collection.

The companion volume to Basque Legends and Folk-Tales of the Pyrenees.