The Devil's Dance: Basque Legends, Mythology, and Songs of the Pyrenees (Parapet Press Basque Series)

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.