Legends and oral traditions of Valle d'Aosta

In the side valleys branching off from the Dora Baltea river, where villages of stone and wood withstand winter with the same stubbornness they have shown for centuries, a body of narrative survives that has never found a definitive written form. The legends of Valle d'Aosta are still passed down today through the spoken word — once in the stables, now in people's homes — carrying with them a layering of eras that no archival document could restore with the same fidelity. They are the product of the different peoples who have crossed these mountains: the Salassi, the Romans, Franco-Provençal-speaking populations, Walser communities who settled in the higher valleys from the Middle Ages onward. Each passage left its own deposit in the collective story.

The recurring themes reflect with precision the living conditions of those who inhabited these places. The creatures of Valdostan folklore — the *dzinn*, an ambiguous figure tied to wild spaces, or the witches said to gather near crossroads — are not decorative inventions but narrative responses to phenomena the community had no other way of explaining: the sudden death of livestock, drought, an avalanche wiping out a mountain pasture. In this symbolic system, the mountain is never a neutral backdrop. It is an interlocutor with whom the village maintains an ongoing negotiation, marked by rites, offerings and prohibitions handed down together with the stories themselves.

The physical landscape and the legendary one overlap until they become indistinguishable. Certain glacial lakes bear names that recall supernatural presences; some isolated rocks preserve mythical explanations for their shape; crossroads between valleys are still linked, in the oral memory of the elderly, to dangerous encounters with entities dwelling at the margins of the human world. This parallel geography is not folkloric in the reductive sense of the word: it is the cognitive map with which generations of shepherds and farmers organised the space around them, defining where it was permissible to go and when, which places demanded respect and which were simply to be avoided.

The transmission of this heritage went through critical phases over the course of the twentieth century, when the depopulation of mountain hamlets and mass schooling broke many chains of oral transmission. Institutions such as the Bureau Régional pour l'Ethnologie et la Linguistique (the regional office for ethnology and linguistics, part of the Autonomous Region of Valle d'Aosta) launched systematic collection campaigns, documenting local variants of the same legends across different municipalities and recording the voices of elderly storytellers. This work made it possible to compare versions of the same story told just a few kilometres apart, revealing significant differences and showing how each community had adapted the tale to its own topography and history.

What remains, even after collection and cataloguing, is something writing cannot fully capture: the rhythm of the voice, the pause before the decisive moment, the tone that shifts when the storyteller enters the oldest part of the tale. Valdostan legends exist fully only in the act of telling, in the moment someone decides to pass them on to someone else. In this sense they remain a living heritage not because they are celebrated in public re-enactments — though these do exist too, tied to fairs such as that of Sant'Orso in Aosta — but because they continue to circulate, changing shape, in the private conversations of those who still live in these places.