Red Pants

According to the legend, a certain peasant who sought a way to do less work was advised to go to certain shop of Bayonne and buy a box of galtzagorriak. He did that and, when he was back to his farm, he opened the small box. A bunch of little imps with red pants jumped immediately from it asking "what do we do, what do we do?" He immediately put them to work: repair the fence, prepare the land, milk the cows, redo the ceiling... in few minutes the galtzagorriak had done all the jobs and asked again "what do we do now, what do we do now?". The peasant ordered them to do many other things and again the job was done in minutes. But the galtzagorriak kept asking what to do. The more than pleased peasant had to say, "nothing". Frustrated, the imps started to undo all the jobs they had done. Eventually, the peasant managed to get them back into their box and, from then on, he decided to do his job by himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galtzagorriak

For some reason, I can't help but laugh at the mannerisms the Galtzagorriak (a single imp would be called Galtzagorria, which is the combination of words that literally mean red pants) display. This is from Basque legend.

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That is...rather interesting.

It is cute in a way, but, is the Basque Legend about imps alone?

As far as I can tell in my research thus far, the Galtzagorriak only refer to imps. It takes a while to research this kind of lore though, as my sources have to be translated from Euskara.

There are plenty of other creatures in Basque lore though, including giants, dragons/serpents, unicorns, wolf men, and a bunch of other beings.

I love it! I had heard the story before, but I didn't know where it came from.