Jentilak

Basque oral tradition, collected systematically in the twentieth century. José Miguel de Barandiarán, the ethnographer and archaeologist who spent decades recording Basque folklore, is the principal source for most of what is now known, and his fieldwork underpins nearly all later accounts.

Resurrección María de Azkue's collections are the other major body of material.

Place-names across the Basque Country and Navarre preserve the tradition directly: jentilbaratza, jentiletxe, and similar forms attached to megalithic sites.

The Jentilak are embedded in the wider Basque mythological system alongside Mari, Sugaar and the lamiak, which Barandiarán reconstructed as a coherent body.

The material was collected late, and how much reflects genuinely old tradition versus nineteenth and twentieth-century consolidation is a real question. Barandiarán was a careful fieldworker, but he was also organising scattered accounts into a system, and the system may be tidier than what he found. One case is documented. A detail about the burning of the Lesaka effigy, reported by Caro Baroja in 1946, was later repeated by Barandiarán without attribution.

Whether the Kixmi episode is pre-Christian tradition remembering conversion, or a Christian-era story constructed about it, cannot be determined. It obviously postdates Christianity in its present form.

The association with dolmens is a folk explanation of megalithic remains, of the same kind found across Europe. It tells us how people accounted for the monuments, not who built them: they are Neolithic, and predate the tradition by millennia.

The etymology of Jentil, from Latin gentilis meaning pagan or gentile, indicates the name at least is post-Roman.