Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Devil's Dance: Basque Legends, Mythology, and Songs of the Pyrenees

The Devil's Dance: Basque Legends, Mythology, and Songs of the Pyrenees

Lyell, J. Alderman
Vinson, Julien
Bidart, Jean

Paperback

Mythology & Folklore

ISBN13: 9798189328527
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 27 2026
Pages: 290
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.72 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
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.

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