Realms of Myth: Asturias

[Jubal]

Realms of Myth: Asturias

By Jubal

Some of the northernmost regions of Spain, Asturias and Cantabria, nestle along the northern coastline, with an especially distinct mythology that offers a lot of possibilities for an interested game designer or writer. In this second entry in our Realms of Myth series, I'm taking a look at this region as a potential basis for a setting, and giving an initial showcase of some of its myths and legends.

These are the regions of Spain that were the furthest from Umayyad power centres when the Muslim caliphate captured most of the peninsula in the 710s, and Muslim rule was never fully established in the north. As the last Visigothic kings lost their territory, a Visigothic nobleman called Pelagius or Pelayo established a principality in the rugged Asturian mountains which ultimately became the progenitor polity of Castile, Leon, and eventually Spain as we know it.

Landscape

Covadonga, site of Pelayo's most famous victory.

Asturias and Cantabria are mountain regions: the steep valleys here proved notably inhospitable for Muslim invaders in the early medieval period, who were ultimately unable to control them. It's no accident that it was here that Pelayo was able to start his rebellion successfully, beating a force sent to put down the rebellion while heavily outnumbered at Covadonga by hurling rocks down on the enemies then having his forces emerge from hidden caves.

Using northern Spanish mythos in a fictional work I think does demand that you have a similar sort of mountainous terrain, and there's a few important things to remember about that and its effects. Mountains in fiction are often played as having primarily isolating effects, and this has a lot of utility: they can be areas where localities have very specific local traditions, where it's easy to be introducing characters or players to a new situation even if their general knowledge of the world as a whole is pretty good. However good someone's common knowledge is, the likelihood they'll know about a particular mountain village's festival giving flowers to the Xanas is pretty much nil, and the likelihood those villagers will practice their religion and ideals in the exact way characters have come to expect is also lowered.

Mountains can also intensify connections by funnelling trade and travel down mountain passes, and they do so in many parts of the world with thriving trade cities at the intersections of important routes. But there's a reason they don't do this much in Asturias – there's nothing on the other side. The open and famously choppy Bay of Biscay is as important as the mountains, a wild sea with relatively few major ports historically. This creates a situation where often all that's over the mountains is even more isolated fishing communities. As such, one should be really emphasising that remoteness.

A rugged mountain region can also be a great place of natural beauty: crags, hidden waterfalls and forest glades are good sorts of spaces that can bring nature and humanity closer. These sorts of prominent natural landmark features are good as ways to tie particular stories and creatures directly into a landscape, and tell your audience about a landscape in ways that are evocative but also immediately plot-relevant.

Culture and plot points

A bison from the cave at Altamira.

An Asturian-style region in a fictional setting would be a good place for characters to resist or hide from figures of authority, full of caves and tight-lipped villages that are unlikely to trust the lowlander forces searching for your protagonist (or more problematically unlikely to trust a lowlander hero searching for a fugitive foe). Whole areas can get very hidden: the village of Cuevas del Agua for example to this day has its only access through a cave system.

The sense of remoteness and beauty can also be important in some religious contexts: monastic institutions often get founded in places far from the earthly world and temptations of larger cities, and treasures or relics from more vulnerable lowland places often end up in mountainous regions when the lowlands get invaded, finding security in the relative isolation. The converse part of this, as mentioned earlier, is the often very localised way that some religious practices can turn in isolation: they're a good place for forming and hiding mysterious local cults just as much as isolated bastions of true religion – and indeed those things might be exactly the same thing when viewed from different perspectives.

There's also a sense of ancientness about the cultural landscape in somewhere like Asturias: because herding is so core to the economy, more than arable, and because of the low population density, this means that the hilltops don't get ploughed over and old caves don't always get visited and repurposed. As such, it's a great area for presenting bits of past cultures, stone age paintings and old barrow-mounds for burials and so on. The most notable real example in Asturias is Altamira, the first cave to have seriously had a prehistoric theory advanced for its origin (which was contested at the time in the late 19th century: modern ideas of cave-men and cave art would have been alien to audiences as recently as the 1870s). It's an oddity of fantasy that it's actually surprisingly rare to come across a world's equivalent of a stone age, in part because Great Ancient Civilisations are such a core trope in many fantasy worlds that there's little room for the more real-world cave paintings and worked flints that show the most ancient parts of our past. This could be a good sort of setting to make use of that, and in a world with magic but a sense of low remoteness, cave art in a flickering fire and mysterious don't necessarily need to come with some far greater lost society to be meaningful.

Monsters

The Musgoso, protector of shepherds, and the fey Xanas are some of the more helpful Asturian creatures.

It's fair to say that Geralt of Rivia would never be short of work in Asturias: the region has a very colourful array of creatures to draw upon. Many of them are quite small scale, as appropriate for a region of relatively isolated environments: folk horror and the sorts of creatures that frighten children are common. Examples include the wonderfully named Zamparrampa, an ogre-like creature which haunts poorly kept houses and brings them further misfortune, and the Guaxa, a vampiric creature which represents an old woman with owls' eyes and a single tooth that drains their blood. There's also the Loberu, who are really magical humans: they live among wolves and ultimately become their masters, gaining wolf-like qualities and the ability to command their pack. These all would be good foes in a somewhat mystery-focused narrative: they are not necessarily enormous physical threats to an armed adventurer, but are very dangerous to most other people, a good set-up for a monster-slaying plot.

A gentler fairytale is El Musgoso, a shepherd giant – perhaps literally a shepherd of shepherds, who watches over herdsmen in the woods and fields as a quiet protector spirit. The Anjana or Xana is another famous example of a good aligned fey creature from the region, one that may bewitch humans with her beauty but who can heal the sick and act as nature's guardian against some of the fouler monsters. The Ayalgas are another female spirit, loyal guardians of ancient treasure – although, in some tales, they may secretly hope someone does steal the treasure without killing them, thus freeing them by leaving them with nothing to guard.

There are some larger foes such as the draconic Cuélebre, a huge lizard with bat-wings that can in many tales only be fought at certain times of year, and which will eventually take itself away to an isle across the sea but for now guards treasure and maidens that it captures. There's also cyclopes, the Ojáncanu and the more specifically nautical/shipwreck themed Pataricu. One interesting feature of these is that that the Ojáncanu is brutally physically strong, able to defeat a bull or bear with ease, and indeed can only be defeated by the Xanas with their stronger magic – but the Xanas can be captured by the Cuelebre, thus creating a rather different staged requirement for defeating the cyclops. The requirement to fight the foe at specific times of year could be interesting to use, perhaps by creating a necessity to survive until the time at which the creature is vulnerable and avoid it destroying any preparations in the meantime.

The final category is creatures that work with the landscape and represent natural or cultural features. The Guestia, a procession of the dead that can be consulted for auguries, is a good specific localised sort of thing to include, as might more trickery-focused local spirits such as the mischevious faun/devil like Diañu Burlón or the Sumiciu, little folk who are responsible for things getting lost around the house. More nature-focused would be the Nuberu, a dwarf or group of dwarfs with ragged beards and huge hats that are a personification of the region's frequent storms. Their counterparts the Ventolins are meanwhile responsible for gentle breezes and pleasant dreams. These aren't necessarily creatures to be fought, but rather ways in which the landscape can be made to more directly communicate with human and sapient major characters in a tale. Characters might need to petition such forces, or find those who can keep them in balance, or simply gain vital information from them in some way – the Nuberu may have little love for humans, but they could be provoked into revealing information as a taunt for example.

Conclusions

The remoteness and isolation of Asturias, and the ability of the mountains to hide settlements, fugitives, and artefacts alike, is the key force behind most of its myths. The specific way that the mountains back onto the sea, and the wooded, cave-riddled hillsides, give an environment that is especially well suited to connect closely to the mysterious and the sacred. Myths here tend to be tied to time, weather, space and in particularly localised ways.

This localisation also means a type of story that is suited to those sorts of environments. Monsters tend to be the sort that need specific rituals or the attention of other mythic beings rather than those that will be slain simply by a hero's great force of arms. Asturias is a land that resists power and hides what must be hidden, without regard to whether the seeker of refuge means good or ill. Whether the art of ancient worlds, the relics of a church, or the mysteries of the dead's processions and the cuelebre's hoard, there's much to be found in the hills – if the hills will tell you where to seek it.

I sourced the information for this piece largely from some booklets I had from a childhood visit to the region, though there are numerous Spanish-language sites online about the mythology and its background. Some of this folklore may be far more recent than other parts, and the sense of a unified 'regional' mythos may be particularly modern compared to a world where valleys and crags divided local settlements and their cultures so much. If anyone has more information about these creatures and this landscape, please do chime in below in the comments - and let us know if there's somewhere else you think our Realms of Myth series should go next.


This article is part of a series. You can also read Part 1, on the myths of Somalia.

[Spritelady]

The Ayalgas are another female spirit, loyal guardians of ancient treasure – although, in some tales, they may secretly hope someone does steal the treasure without killing them, thus freeing them by leaving them with nothing to guard

This has inspired an idea for the backstory for a pair of PCs in a DnD or other RPG campaign: an adventurer who stole a treasure that someone was cursed to guard. The adventurer specifically stole it so that the cursed person could go on adventures with them, instead of being stuck guarding the treasure in one place forevermore.

Also this was very interesting to read! Do you have any suggestions for particular sources, if someone wanted to look into these creatures and myths more?

[Jubal]

This has inspired an idea for the backstory for a pair of PCs in a DnD or other RPG campaign: an adventurer who stole a treasure that someone was cursed to guard. The adventurer specifically stole it so that the cursed person could go on adventures with them, instead of being stuck guarding the treasure in one place forevermore.

Oh that's very enjoyable (You could even make the cursed guard the PC and they just have this NPC with their magic treasure who they're obliged to haul around - or some part of the treasure itself became mobile and keeps taking the guard on adventures...).

Also this was very interesting to read! Do you have any suggestions for particular sources, if someone wanted to look into these creatures and myths more?

I was working largely from some little Spanish-language illustrated booklets I had from a childhood holiday: most of what's been written is of course in Spanish, so I was reading webpages through translators quite a bit to double check bits. There's a lot out there, though a lot of it is giving variants on more or less the same basic information.

There's an interesting blogpost on the topic in English at https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2014/12/12/asturian/ - which I like, though I think it borders a bit on representing this sort of mythos as "pre Christian stuff that then gets Christianised" which is a style of explanation that is falling out of fashion a bit. Whilst mountain areas can preserve certain things there's also a tendency to read ancientness into every possible bit of culture whereas things do adapt with time: isolation creates and preserves divergent tradition more than it preserves an actual thing unchanged.