Wentworth Webster

Basque Legends: Collected, Chiefly In The Labourd, By Rev. Wentworth Webster, M. A., Oxon. With An Essay On The Basque Language, By M. Julien Vinson, Of The Revue De Linguistique, Paris. Together With Appendix: Basque Poetry. This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich typography, graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING

Reproduction of the original: Basque Legends by Wentworth Webster

Reproduction of the original: Basque Legends by Wentworth Webster

Reproduction of the original: Spain by Wentworth Webster

Reproduction of the original: Spain by Wentworth Webster

In A Book of the Basques, Rodney Gallop notes that, "one Englishman, and one alone, has lived long enough among the Basques to write with authority upon their character, customs and language: the Reverend Wentworth Webster." Based on information that Webster collected from servants and other domestics in the closed world of the nineteenth-century Basque etxe (house, but with a meaning much more powerful and comprehensive than we expect from the English word), especially from Stephana Hirigaray, who he employed as a maid in the Basque Country. As a French Basque woman with rural roots, Stephana Hirigaray had more than stories to give to her employer. She had an insider's knowledge of the culture in which those stories were embedded. Hirigaray belonged to a Basque moral community in which Basque master/servant relationships were notably equal. In rural Basque culture, servants ate at the same table as their employers, who considered them as members of the family. Thus, the master/servant relationship between Webster and Hirigaray is likely to have been influenced by that Basque emphasis on equality. First published in 1877, Basque Legends consists of more than forty-six stories (and variations thereof) that feature supernatural figures such as the Tartaro or Cyclops, the Seven-Headed Serpent, and Basque fairies known as lami ak. In addition, Webster collected stories about witches and sorcery, animal tales (such as "Acheria, the Fox"), fairy tales, and religious tales. It also contains an original essay on the Basque language by Julien Vinson, an in-depth collection of Basque poetry, and a modern introduction by Sandra Ott.