Basajaun

What modern popular culture — above all Dolores Redondo's Baztán trilogy — knows as a guardian spirit was, for Basque shepherds, the owner of the mountain: someone to keep on good terms with by sharing bread and fire, not someone to fear. The oldest written traces are a Latin-Basque glossary from London; the oldest stories come from the Goierri region around Ataun, collected by José Miguel de Barandiarán, whose museum now preserves the tradition.

The basajaun that Basque shepherds knew was not a forest monster. He was a landowner. The name says so: baso (forest, upland) plus jaun, which in Basque means lord, the same respectful form of address given to a person. Basajaun is lord of the woods in the sense that a farmhouse has an owner. The oldest written trace of the word is not mythological either. In the Dictionarium Latino-Cantabricum that Pierre d'Urte compiled in London around 1715, the Latin agrestis is glossed as “basa jauna, basagizona”, and mulier agrestis as “basandréa, larreandréa, basemaztéa”. Before it was an entry in a bestiary, in other words, basajaun was a way of saying “rustic, half-wild man”. The three senses recorded by Resurrección María de Azkue in his Diccionario vasco-español-francés (Bilbao, 1905-1906) confirm that double life: “a fantastic being, Lord of the forests”; “a rustic, half-savage, unsociable man”; and, noted specifically in the Gipuzkoan Goierri — Ataun's own district — “master of the hunters”. All of it is documented, with sigla and citations, in Euskaltzaindia's Orotariko Euskal Hiztegia. Who collected the tradition, where, and from whom Without two men, none of this would survive. The first was Jean-François Cerquand, who between 1875 and 1887 serialised his Légendes et récits populaires du Pays Basque in the Bulletin de la Société des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Pau. In one of those texts, taken down at Esterenzubi, a wild man called Antxo shares fire and food with some cowherds; the boy who gives up his own portion is rewarded with a hazel wand that multiplies his cattle. The tale opens with a formula worth a whole treatise: “in those days the wild lords conversed with Christians”. The second, and decisive, was José Miguel de Barandiarán, born in Ataun on 31 December 1889, ordained in 1914 and doing fieldwork from 1916. In April 1921 he founded the Sociedad de Eusko-Folklore at the seminary of Vitoria and, that same year, the Anuario de Eusko Folklore, the oldest humanities journal still published in the Basque Country. In volume I he printed “Brief practical instructions for the folklore investigator” (pp. 11-29): a manual so that village priests and seminarians could collect material systematically. His stated criterion, quoted in the indexes later compiled by Gurutzi Arregi and Ander Manterola, was to publish “raw material, just as it came out of the quarry of the people”, because “for now we are doing neither history, nor psychology, nor art properly speaking; we only want to lay solid foundations for the science of the future”. Mythological material reached print mostly through the monthly sheets Eusko-Folklore. Materiales y cuestionarios. In parallel, Azkue was publishing Euskalerriaren Yakintza (Espasa-Calpe, 1935-1947). Its second volume gathers 241 folk tales — the fruit, as Wilhelm Giese noted when he reviewed it in 1950, of fifty years of work — printed in their original dialect with a Spanish translation alongside. Among the native figures of the wonder tales, Giese lists the Basajaun next to the laminak and the Lady of Amboto. Barandiarán spent 1936 to 1953 in exile (from 1941 at Sara, in Labourd), returned to Ataun in October 1953 and died there on 21 December 1991, aged 101. In between he published Mitología vasca (Minotauro, Madrid, 1960, with a preface by Julio Caro Baroja) and the Diccionario ilustrado de mitología vasca (Bilbao, 1972) — the two books from which nearly everything now repeated about the basajaun descends. The two documented functions Guardian of the flocks. The pastoral basajaun does not attack livestock; he defends it. He keeps the wolf away, calls out from the mountainside when a storm is coming so the shepherd can bring the sheep in, and, in the recorded tradition, secures the fertility of the herd. In return he receives offerings: bread, milk, the warmth of the hearth. The tales describe an exchange that runs both ways. And he teaches trades — cheese, butter and curd-making, and the domestication of animals. Keeper of the secrets. The second function is more ambitious. The basajaun owns wheat, the saw, iron soldering and the mill, and men take them from him by trickery. The protagonist is San Martin Txiki (Sanmartintxiki, San Martinico), a swindling saint. Barandiarán located the story with the precision of a land registry: “the basajaunak grew wheat on the mountain of Muskia, in Ataun. A bold man — San Martinico — a friend of theirs, went to visit them in their cave”. There he bet that he could leap across the heaps of grain without touching a single one, lost on purpose, and walked out with his wide shoes full. An axe was thrown after him; it missed and lodged in the trunk of a chestnut at Mekolalde, in the San Gregorio quarter of Ataun, a kilometre from the cave. Later he eavesdropped on the song by which the basajaunak fixed the sowing calendar — when the leaf sprouts, when the leaf falls, by Saint Lawrence — and so became the first to sow wheat. By the same method he obtained the saw (copying the serrated edge of a chestnut leaf), the soldering of iron (using clay) and the alder axle of the mill. Basandere, and the place in the pantheon The Basandere is usually presented as his female counterpart, and that is how she appears in Barandiarán (“the wife of the basajaun”, “a genie who appears at the mouth of certain caves”) and in Caro Baroja: “beside the Basajaunak come the basanderiak, their female partners”. But the academic dictionary forces a qualification. In Lower Navarre, around Garazi, basandere is simply one of the names for the lamia; in d'Urte it meant no more than “a rustic woman”; elsewhere it names a carnival character. There is no single, stable Basandere — there is a semantic field. Something similar applies to Mari, the lady of the summits and caves. Barandiarán organised the Basque pantheon by putting her at the centre, as chief of the genies and the axis of very diverse mythic themes. Barandiarán's own definition of the basajaun, quoted in Euskaltzaindia's dictionary, gives him a domain of his own: “Baxajaun, lord of the forest, is the genie who dwells in the deepest woods or in caves in prominent places.” In the Ataun tales he keeps to the forest and the sheepfold. The geography is not scenery, either. Ataun lies at the foot of the Aralar range, a massif dense with dolmens and caves occupied since the Palaeolithic. Barandiarán, ethnographer and archaeologist at once, would spend a morning excavating caves with 27,000 years of human occupation and the afternoon writing down what his neighbours said about those same caves. The basajaun lives where real people lived.

Ataun, in the Goierri district of Gipuzkoa at the foot of the Aralar range, is the village where José Miguel de Barandiarán was born and where he took down the Muskia stories of the basajaunak. His foundation's biography gives his birth on the last day of 1889 at the Perune-Zarre farmhouse; the Ataun tourist office's route page says that he went into exile in 1936, lived for almost twenty years at Sara in Lapurdi and came back to Ataun in 1953. According to Gipuzkoa Natura, he died in 1991 in the Sara house he had built on his return. The Barandiaran Museum occupies the Larruntza mill in the San Gregorio quarter, about 3 km from the San Martín quarter where the town hall stands: Larruntza Errota z/g, San Gregorio, 20211 Ataun, telephone 943 18 03 35 or 688 895 069, email [email protected]. The provincial page, consulted on 24 September 2026, says that the mill is first mentioned in the fifteenth century and that the Basque Government declared the group a monumental ensemble in 2003. The upper floor covers Barandiarán's life with an audiovisual and a biographical room; the ground floor deals with his archaeological and ethnographic work through replicas and videos. A second mill called Errotatxo and a hydraulic sawmill stand beside it. The guided visit to the museum and the old mill, during which the mill and sawmill are run. It lasts an hour and a half and costs €4 for adults and €3 for children aged 5 to 12. The page publishes ETRS89 coordinates of X 566693, Y 4758717 for the museum, which fall about 90 metres from the pin on this file. Road access is from the N-1 at Beasain along the GI-120 towards Lazkao, or from Navarre by the NA-120. The tourist office's Barandiaran route, consulted the same day, runs 7.69 km between 166 and 331 metres of altitude, with 211 metres of ascent. It takes about two and a half hours and is graded easy. It starts at the Plaza de San Martín, where the legend of the Lady of Zaindegi is told, and passes the Aldakotxo farmhouse, the Sara house and the Larruntza museum. At the Lauztierreka bridge the route faces Mount Muski with its antenna, which the page calls the home of the basajaun and of Tartalo; at the church of San Gregorio it tells the stories of Sanmartintxiki and the basajaun, and it ends by the dam at Gaztiñerre. The same office lists three further mythological routes, Sarastarri, Jentilbaratza and Berrenoa. Gipuzkoa Natura also runs a guided walk of about 4.4 km from San Martín to San Gregorio along the Sara route, lasting three hours, at €6 for adults and €4 for children aged 3 to 12. Muskia is the mountain of the story. In the text by Barandiarán that Antxon Aguirre Sorondo reproduced in Euskonews in 2009, the basajaunak grew wheat "en la montaña de Muskia, sita en Atáun", and Sanmartintxiki visited them "en su caverna".