Versiones melusianas en la tradición oral contemporánea del País Vasco

Abstract

The Basque Country has a fairly rich corpus of versions of the myth of Melusina. In the 14th Century, Pedro Afonso included one of them in the heraldry of the Señores de Vizcaya in his Livro de linhagens. Jose Miguel de Barandiardn, in turn, published a series of narratives of the same legend, gathered from Gipuzkoa and Nafarroa. After examining the main testimonies of the written versions of the legend up to the 20th Century, the narrative pattern the tales follow is described, relating them to other European narrations of the same type.