Basque Legends
Legends of the native people of the Basque Country, a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-eastern Spain and south-western France. From the introduction: They are told by the Basque peasants, either when neighbours meet--after the fashion made familiar to us by American novelists in the "Husking Bee"--for the purpose of stripping the husks from the ears of maize, an operation generally performed in one or two
...long sessions; or at the prolonged wedding and other feasts, of which we have evidence in the tales themselves, or else in the long nights round the wintry hearth of their lonely dwellings. For it is one of the charms of the Basque land that the houses are scattered all over the face of the country, instead of being collected into crowded villages; and it is, perhaps, to this fact chiefly that we owe the preservation of so much old-world lore, and of primitive ideas, among this people. The reader must not be surprised at the length of some of our specimens. The details of the incidents of the longest are religiously preserved, and, as told at home, they are probably more lengthy (as anyone will understand who has ever taken anything down from recitation) than as here given.
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