La Moira enchantée au Portugal: mémoires d'un récit mythique. Introduction by Ana Paula Guimarães. Preface by Idelette Muzart-Fonseca dos Santos.Colecção "A IELTsar se vai ao longe", 28.

Lisbon, Colibri / IELT, Instituto de Estudos de Literatura Tradicional, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010.. First published edition. Large 8°, original illustrated wrappers. As new. 317 pp., (2 ll.), maps and tables in text, footnotes, bibliography. *** First published edition of what was originally an exceptional doctoral thesis defended at Université Paris Nanterre in 2007. From the North down to the south of Portugal, in the ruins of ancient monuments and of abandoned villages, as well as in certain rocks, dolmens, grottos, water springs, wells and even rivers we find the shelters to an enchanted Moira, a fantastic creature that was entrusted of a treasure. This creature, a she, waits for someone to disenchant her. Sometimes this creature appears to humans under the shape of a woman and others under that of an animal (a goat or a serpent). She can also show herself as a woman in the torso and as a snake from the waist down, simultaneously. It usually shows by the Saint John’s festivities, combing her golden hair in the sun. It weaves in golden looms and offers figs, gall-nuts or coal, which will later on turn into gold. In order to break the enchantment she is under, she asks for bread and milk from the shepherdesses. As far as the shepherds are concerned she will ask them to allow themselves to be kissed by her while under a serpent’s shape. These mythological narratives are inherited from the collective memoir and constantly recreated by those who reckon them. The former play a significant role in the community’s sense of identity. They are an outcome of the questioning on life and death matters, that is to say about fecundity and fertility. These narratives of the oral tradition resound divinities and myths namely Greeks and Roman ones, and of German and Indian origins. They establish relations of analogy with other supernatural beings and also with divinities from other countries heirs, as well as Portugal, of an Indo-European patrimony. «A independência da Biscaia», «A dama do pé de cabra» and «A dama marinha» as well as other narratives of Melusinian type, show the coupling of a human being with a supernatural one, based on an interdiction. Bridging these narratives to the oral ones of enchanted Moiras allows to uncover the reports that are woven between them.***