FIG. 21 The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney.
IF YOU FLY INTO KIRKWALL on the little eighteen-seater planes that ply between Orkney and the Scottish mainland, you’ll see the low green islands, like the curving backs of dolphins, showing above the splashing waves, and to the west the towering island of Hoy, the High Island with its cliffs and stacks, home to a myriad seabirds. And as you journey through the islands, by bus, car or ferry, you come to realise how the sea does not separate the communities of Orkney, but rather unites them; a brisk row or putter across the sound soon brings people from different islands together. Orkney is an ancient archipelago, with its prehistoric settlements of Skara Brae, the huge Maes Howe burial mound with its Viking graffiti and splendid dragon, and its mysterious standing stones. I stood in the Ring of Brodgar early one grey, still April morning when nothing could be heard but the calling of the birds: the whistling of the curlew and the twitter of the peewit. A band of lemon-coloured light lay along the horizon and only a whisper of traffic – the school bus on its way along the main road – reminded me that humans still lived in this mythic landscape. Just off the shore in the Harray Loch, curious faces reared up; some of the seal-folk had perhaps come to see what was happening up at the stones.
Seals, with their expressive faces, huge eyes and twitching whiskers, so graceful in the sea and clumsy on land, are social creatures, living in sizeable groups. They communicate with each other quite noisily, with barks, yaps and grunts. I’ve heard the sound of their conversations carrying over the still water from Kitterland near the Calf of Man to the smooth, green headland at the Isle’s southern tip. On Britain’s western and northern islands, seals live alongside the fishing communities. Although they are sometimes blamed when the fish are hard to find, the seals (or selkies as they are called in dialect) have earned the respect of the islanders, and many tales are told of selkie–human interaction. One such from Orkney is a variant of a widespread international tale-type: the Grateful Lion (Tale Type 156). Mansie Meur (Magnus Muir) the fisherman is gathering limpets on the rocks at Hacksness on the island of Sanday, when he spots a female seal. She is giving birth with great difficulty, while the father seal is waiting at a decent distance. Finally the pups are born and make for their mother’s dugs. The fisherman thinks that the two babies will make him a fine waistcoat and seizes hold of them, while the mother makes her escape, sliding off the skerry away into the sea. The mother seal gazes at him with such despair and pleading, utters a groan ‘sae dismal an’ how, an’ sae human like, that hid geed stra’cht tae his hert an’ fairly owercam’ him’ (so dismal and so hollow, and so human-like that it went straight to his heart and fair overcame him). At last the mother begins to weep, tears streaming from both eyes. Now Mansie can’t steel himself to snatch her pups; he puts them back on the skerry, and the mother gathers them to her.
FIG. 21 The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney.
Some forty years later, Mansie went fishing for coal-fish on a tidal rock off the west side of Eday, one to which it was easy to walk at low tide. It took a long time for the fish to start biting, but with the flood tide he began to have some luck and was soon filling his creel. His success was such that he quite forgot to keep an eye on the pathway back, until, to his horror, he realised that he had been cut off by the tide. Though he screamed and shouted, the west of Eday is a lonely place and he realised that he was going to drown. The water crept up by degrees, but just as it was lapping at his chin and beginning to wash into his mouth, he felt something seize hold of his collar, swing him off his feet and drag him through the water towards the shore. Once his feet could safely touch bottom, Mansie looked back to the rock where he’d been stranded and there he saw the seal, fetching his creel of fish, which she brought to him in her mouth. Mansie recognised her as the seal whose pups he’d spared all those years ago, now grown elderly, but yet a wise and kindly figure. And he said with all his heart, ‘Geud bliss the selkie that deus no’ forget’ (God bless the selkie that does not forget).
The story gives a vivid picture of life on the Islands, the hard work of limpet-gathering and fishing on desolate rocky shores where no one will hear cries for help. And that long moment of pity and sympathy that Mansie feels, his realisation of shared emotion between human and animal, is foregrounded in this version of the tale. Walter Traill Dennison, an Orkney folklorist, published it in 1880. Dennison himself lived on Sanday and he recorded a good number of local tales in his Orcadian Sketchbook, many written down in the local dialect. There’s a Victorian sentimentality to the idea that the mother seal wept when she feared that she would lose the pups she had just given birth to with such agony. But it’s also clear that the informant from whom Dennison collected this tale regarded the selkie-folk as much like humans, except that they happen to live in the sea, wearing their selkie skins. How much animals are like humans, and how much humans are like animals, is the theme of this chapter. The borderline between man and beast is a permeable one, as we’ll see; under certain circumstances we can communicate with our fellow creatures, and we certainly owe them respect. For we are also animals, though we can speak, and we think ourselves better than the beasts. Quite often the human can revert to the bestial and give expression to feelings and behaviours which civilised people have managed to repress. In the tales of selkies, werewolves, deer-women and witch-hares that follow, we’ll see how the different kinds of human–animal interaction that they relate can also figure human–human relations, particularly those of men and women.
The touching tale of the selkie of Hacksness keeps the selkie mother firmly in seal form. Though she seems to have and express human feelings of sadness and gratitude, and to have a long memory and good recognition, she does not shed her selkie skin to show the human form within, and nor can she speak. Another of Dennison’s tales explains how the descendants of a certain family come to have a hard, horn-like growth over their hands and feet – a phenomenon that Dennison had seen for himself. This genetic trait came about through the wilful behaviour of the family’s ancestress, to whom Dennison gives the name ‘Ursilla’ (Ursula). Ursilla was the daughter of a great Orkney family of a rather forbidding demeanour. She decided to choose her own husband and, after her father’s death, elected to marry a humble young man who had worked with the animals in the barn – perhaps deciding that she did not want a husband who would try to boss her around. Once she had the husband she had long desired, Ursilla was not happy. Dennison skates over the problem, but, perhaps because of the social gulf between husband and wife, and Ursilla’s efficient running of household and farm, the husband felt emasculated. Neither sexual satisfaction nor children seemed likely to come to Ursilla. With the pragmatic approach that characterises her earlier behaviour, Ursilla solved the problem by going down to the shore, sitting at the high-tide mark, and, at high tide, she let seven tears fall into the sea. This summoned a big male selkie who put his head out of the water and asked what the lady’s will might be. Ursilla told him of her plight, and he agreed to come to her at the seventh spring tide, for then he could assume human form. Ursilla and the selkie thus became lovers, and they lay together very frequently. And so every bairn that Ursilla bore had seal-like webbing between fingers and toes. The midwife clipped away the telltale webbing, but it would grow back in the form of a horn-like crust over the hands and feet. Some of Ursilla’s descendants were entirely free of the problem, but one or two in each family and each generation would suffer from the disfigurement.
There’s no explicit moralising in this tale, though it’s clear that if Ursilla had married one of her equals instead of following her desire for the lowly barn-man, she could have had a normal marriage and children. Ursilla’s solution to her marital difficulties harnesses a widely held belief that selkie-men find human women desirable. Genetic abnormalities in families are, of course, often explained by untoward behaviour by mothers, or by unusual encounters during pregnancy. Ursilla’s name means ‘Little Bear’, which suggests that she already has an affinity with the animal world. And the belief that animals can somehow transmit their traits to the foetus in the womb is an ancient and widespread one. Ursilla deliberately chose her selkie lover; his selkie form ensured discretion about their relationship, and the couple seem to have come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement. The unfortunate heroine of the ballad ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’ took a lover and had a child by him without knowing the truth about his identity. In the version collected by Francis Child (Child 113) she laments that she does not know who the baby’s father is or where he can be found. At this a figure appears at the foot of the bed where she is nursing her child, ‘and a grumly guest I’m sure was he’ – a terrifying apparition.
The creature reveals that he is a man on land and a selkie in the sea, and Sule Skerrie, far out in the northern ocean, is where he dwells in seal form. He hands her a purse of gold as her ‘nourris-fee’ (nurse’s fee) and demands his son. He will teach him, he tells the mother, to swim in the sea in selkie form, on ‘a simmer’s day / When the sin shines het on evera stane’ (on a summer day / when the sun shines hot on every stone). The mother, he prophesies, will marry a ‘proud gunner’, and that man will one day – unwittingly – shoot dead both selkie father and son. In other versions of the ballad, the son is given a golden chain to wear about his neck; this identifies him in seal form, but it does not prevent his death in the gunsights of his stepfather. Sometimes the father offers marriage, which the young woman rejects, but when the selkie comes to claim his son, she changes her mind about the match, only to be rejected in her turn.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie, like the Elf-Knight ballads of Chapter 2, warns girls against unregulated sex with men whose background they don’t know and who don’t come to woo them formally and win their family’s consent. And, since it’s still generally expected in the west that a woman will move to live with her husband, rather than absorb him into her own community, she needs to think carefully about whether she can be integrated among his people with their different customs and habitat. In this story, then, the mother is caught in a double predicament – who can she name as father to her child, and how, once he has identified himself, could she ever find a way of living with a selkie? The Great Silkie acknowledges his responsibilities by revealing himself and by handing over gold for the baby’s upkeep, though his claim that this is a ‘nourris-fee’ suggests that he underestimates the bond between mother and child, and has no real intention of forming a family. The gold chain is a concession to the mother’s love for her child; as a recognition token it allows her to identify her son when she visits him in his seal habitat, and, poignantly, to discover that her new husband’s prey is her child. The Silkie is an entirely patriarchal figure, interested primarily in claiming his son and allowing him to develop his dual human/selkie nature; the mother has no right to keep her child with her. The son’s departure with his father enables her to marry, however, and to marry well; the new husband is characterised as both rich and proud. His shooting of the seal father and son is construed as accidental, but the story expresses a deep-rooted unconscious male hostility towards these two rivals for his wife’s affection: her former lover and their child. The uncanny tale of animal seduction is strongly shaped by human sexual, social and family dynamics: the seduced woman gets limited reparation for her social shame, but the father’s claiming of his son brings her nothing but sorrow and portends disaster for the child. The destruction of father and son, entirely licit since they are only seals, results in one version in the mother’s death from a broken heart.
A final selkie tale from Orkney is a version of the international Tale Type 402: the Animal Bride. The Goodman of Wastness was, according to Dennison, a proud man who would have nothing to do with the many girls who admired him. One day as he is down at the shoreline, he sees the selkie-folk who have shed their skins, and who are splashing and playing in the sea, or sunning themselves on the rocks. He creeps round behind the rocks to get a closer look. When they notice him, the selkies snatch up their skins and dive back into the sea – all except one lovely girl, who forgets her skin. The Goodman takes up the skin and makes off with it; the girl comes out of the sea and follows him, weeping and pleading for its return. But the Goodman likes the look of her too much, and, refusing to give the skin back, asks her to come and live with him. The selkie-woman cannot survive in the sea without her skin, and so unwillingly she accedes. As the years pass she bears the Goodman seven children, but she is often to be seen gazing longingly out to sea, and she teaches her children many strange songs, never heard before. One day, the older children are out fishing with their father, the younger children are out gathering limpets, and the youngest child has stayed at home with a sore foot, which she has propped up on a stool. The mother determines now to find her lost skin and searches everywhere for it, but to no avail. The child asks what she seeks, and the mother explains that she is looking for a skin with which she could make a little hide sandal to protect the child’s foot. The girl reveals that she has seen her father with just such a skin, which, when he thought no one was looking, he lifted down and looked at, and then hid back up in the rafters over the bed. The mother loses no time in finding the skin, and with a cry of ‘Farewell, peerie buddo!’ (little child), runs down to the sea, sliding back into her skin as she goes. As she plunges into the water, a male selkie swims up to greet her with clear signs of joy and delight. The Goodman is rowing home from the day’s fishing when she pops up in the water beside him and uncovers her face, reciting this verse:
Goodman o’ Wastness, fareweel tae thee!
I liked dee weel, doo war geud tae me;
bit I lo’e better me man o’ the sea!
(Goodman of Wastness, farewell to you!
I liked you well, you were good to me;
but I love better my man of the sea!)
And the selkie-wife was never seen again, though the Goodman would often walk along the beach in search of her. In some versions of this tale, which is found in the Hebrides as well as the Northern Isles, the mother takes her half-selkie children with her, leaving the husband who had forced her into marriage truly bereft. The same Animal Bride tale is told of swan-maidens in northern Eurasia, and also of mermaids, particularly in Cornwall. The sea-girt British Isles give rise to tales which imagine the realm of the Other as the ocean, rather than the distant lands to which the swan-maiden flies away when she gets her swan-skin back.
This selkie story is one of identity before and after marriage and it still resonates with us today. Although it is not so common for women to be married off without their consent, many women leave their communities and their former lives behind when they wed. Often the wife puts her husband’s career first and she finds herself trapped in the home, looking after the children and doing the best that she can. The selkie tale warns that when the opportunity arises for the wife to reassert her identity and find her freedom once again, she may well seize it. Despite the strong social expectation that she should put others’ needs first, despite the demands of the children and the feelings of the husband, who had assumed that his uncomplaining wife was happy, she goes away, sacrificing all the benefits which marriage is assumed to bring, but finding herself again in the process.
Amy Sackville’s novel Orkney, published in 2013, tells the story of Richard, an elderly English don, and his ex-student (never named) whom he has married. Richard and his wife have come to Orkney, where his wife was born, on honeymoon. There Richard tries to work, while his wife spends more and more time on the shore, gazing out to sea. Her father, who disappeared when she was young, has some part in the psychic drama in which both she and Richard are players; so also her dreams about drowning begin to infect her husband’s imagination. The novel is somewhat unreliably narrated by Richard, and charts his growing anxiety about his wife. Feeding his fears are the age gap between them, which fuels his jealousy of all other men, her refusal to talk about her past, and her strange silver hair and Otherworldly air. Sackville evokes the Orkney landscape with a clarity which contrasts with the ungraspable events that occur in the human sphere. The islands are ‘a herd of cragged beasts, their scurfy backs just breaking the surface of the water’, and the light of the sun is strangely muted as if always seen through the fog which clouds the reader’s apprehension of what’s really going on. Whether Orkney is a tale of the supernatural or a folie à deux isn’t perhaps clear, but the book plays on the selkie and mermaid stories which the wife relates to her increasingly anxious husband. Though much of the book is overwritten and the impossibly fey girl-wife becomes increasingly annoying, as a modern reframing of a selkie tale Orkney understands the essential unknowability of the seal-woman and the uncomprehending, overpossessive and insecure husband.
There are many mermaid tales from the south-west which belong to the same tale type as the selkie-wife story. Many a bold young Cornishman has stolen a wife from the waves, and lived to regret it, either because she deserts him and the children or, worse still, she takes him down into the sea where he has no hope of survival. Unlike selkie-women, mermaids go quite out of their way to attract humans. The long Cornish tale ‘Droll of the Mermaid’ tells of Lutey, who lived near Lizard Point and one day chanced upon a very unhappy mermaid who had become stranded in a rockpool. Though she could wait for the tide to wash her back out to sea, she fears that her bad-tempered husband (who is, alas, not unusual among mermen) will start eating their children if she doesn’t come back with his dinner. Lutey offers to carry her to the sea; she gives him her comb, which he can use to summon her, and grants him three wishes. Lutey asks for the knowledge to break other people’s spells, for power over familiar spirits, and that these capacities should continue to run in his family. These the mermaid promises him as he bears her in his arms towards the sea. She winds her arms around his neck as he wades through the shallows, inviting him in seductive tones to come to visit her world beneath the waves. Lutey is almost bewitched and up to his waist in the water when his dog, left behind on shore, begins to bark. He looks back and realises that he cannot leave all that is precious to him on land, but the mermaid tightens her grip around his neck, and no longer whispers seductively to him, but looks determined to drag him under. Lutey just has the presence of mind to draw his knife from his belt and threaten her with it; the sight of cold steel makes her loosen her grasp, but as she swims away, she sings out that she will come for him in nine years’ time.
The mermaid nevertheless made good on her promise, and Lutey became a well-known healer and white witch, his powers bringing him prosperity and renown. But nine years to the day after Lutey met the mermaid, he was out on the sea on a calm and moonlit evening, fishing with a companion, when the mermaid suddenly appeared beside the boat with her golden hair floating behind her on the water, and she called his name. ‘My hour is come!’, said Lutey, and he promptly leapt overboard and was never seen again.
A more friendly mermaid lived in the waters of Gob Ny Ooyl on the east coast of the Isle of Man. The local Sayle family were on good terms with her, and regularly brought her apples: she was very fond of them, and they are hard for sea-dwellers to get hold of. As old man Sayle got more decrepit, he could no longer go out fishing and the family’s luck began to diminish; their creels were empty and the older sons went out with the herring fleet instead. Evan, the youngest son, was out in the boat one day, shaking his head over the empty creels, when he saw a fine young woman sitting on the edge of a rock. She asked after his father, then, saying that she hoped to see him again, dived into the sea. When young Evan told his father about the encounter, he brightened up and told his son to take some apples with him next time. The mermaid was delighted, singing:
The luck o’ the sea be with you, but don’t forgetful be,
Of bringing some sweet lan’ eggs for the children of the sea.
And, of course, Evan’s luck in fishing changed from that day forth. He spent a lot of time out on the water, restoring the family fortunes and chatting with the mermaid, but after a while he decided he’d like to travel, to go for a sailor in foreign parts. This made the mermaid miserable, but he promised her that he would plant an apple tree on the brow of the hill above her haunt. And so he did, and the family’s luck held while the tree was growing. But although he had promised that the apples would drop down to her in the water by themselves, the tree was quite slow in maturing and the mermaid’s patience wore thin. She would sit beneath the tree on the rocks of an evening, singing sad songs and gazing up at the tree, but finally she gave up and decided to go off across the ocean in search of her young friend. Neither he nor the mermaid ever came back to Gob Ny Ooyl, but the apple tree bore its ripe red fruit down by the water for many years after that.
Mermaids long for what the land has, whether it’s handsome men, human prey, or the ‘land eggs’ which the sea can’t provide. They pop their heads above the water to warn that storms are coming, but they also hope to pull men down to drown and to make them their lovers. Lutey’s mermaid tried her wiles on him, but when he resisted the temptations she offered she kept her promise; as we know, the creatures of the Otherworld are bound by the words they speak. Freshwater mermaids are just as ambivalent as their maritime equivalents. The Mermaid of Black Mere (now Blake Mere) near Leek in Staffordshire would cheerfully drown men if she could draw them close enough with her singing, and the Laird of Lorntie on Tayside had a narrow escape. Riding past a lonely lake one evening, he caught sight of a lovely woman sinking in its depths and shrieking for help. He was about to plunge in to rescue her when his servant held him back, warning him that ‘the wauling madam’ was none other than the mermaid. And so it was, for she rose out of the water and uttered the blood-curdling verse:
Lorntie, Lorntie,
Weren’t na your man,
I had gart your heart’s blude
Skirl in my pan.
FIG. 22 Clerk Colvill by H.M. Brock (1934).
(Lorntie, Lorntie, were it not for your man,
I’d have made your heart’s blood swirl in my pan.)
The ballad of Clerk Colvill, recorded by Child, warns what can happen when you fall into the mermaid’s clutches. Though the clerk is warned not to go to the well of Stream, he fails to heed the warning, and falls in love with the mermaid there. There’s a gap in the middle of the ballad, but when it resumes, the clerk’s head is aching horribly. The mermaid tells him that he can only be cured if he cuts a bandage from her shirt to bind his throbbing temples – but the remedy makes his agony worse. He draws his knife to slay her, but she springs away into the stream, ‘And merrily laughed the mermaiden / It will ay be war [worse] till ye be dead’. And so the clerk dies a miserable and painful death.
Other Scots mermaids, especially the freshwater sort, are kindly until crossed; the mermaid of Port Glasgow, witnessing a funeral procession for a girl who had died of consumption, recommended a concoction of mugwort and nettles against the disease, and this was found to be effective. The mermaid of Galloway would sit of an evening on a block of granite, giving sound medical advice to the locals until a religiously minded woman, holding tightly to her Bible for protection, pushed the mermaid’s chair into the pool where the mermaid lived. The next day the woman’s child was dead in its cradle, and the mermaid was heard singing of the empty cradle and her lost stone. Finally the mermaid was driven out of the pool because so much dirt and polluting matter was thrown into it.
Mermaids, then, like other forms of the supernatural, must be treated with respect; promises made to them must be kept, whether you like it or not, and they will keep their pledges. They can be well disposed to humans and have surprising healing knowledge, which they are willing to share. So the mermaid brings both life and death; the freshwater springs over which she presides are often auspicious places of healing. But she demands sacrifices too; men must die for her, whether dragged down below the lake’s placid surface or struggling in the towering seas when the ocean is stirred up by tempests. In Julia Blackburn’s wonderfully meditative novel The Leper’s Companions (1999), the washing up of a mermaid on the shore of a little medieval community signals the beginning of strange happenings and ill luck. By the time the village is roused to come and look at the spectacle she has vanished back into the ocean, leaving behind only a hank of dark, lank hair, like seaweed. But the mermaid and her avatar, carved above the door arch of the village church, with ‘her fat fish legs spread wide … and a look of lechery on her face as she smiles to reveal a row of pointed teeth’ are recurrent figures, for women with lascivious smiles showing those strange, pointed teeth, and drowned females haunt the rest of the novel.
As the door-arch sculpture in this English village indicates, the mermaid is an ancient and ambivalent symbol. She is often found carved in churches, as in the Norman chapel in Durham Cathedral, where she appears on a capital, or depicted on the wonderful sixteenth-century chair in the church of St Senara at Zennor; she signifies love and death in equal parts.
FIG. 23 The Mermaid Chair in Zennor church, Cornwall.
Let’s cross over the Irish Sea now to Ireland, to hear another animal bride tale, one with a different motivation. In Chapter 3 we met the hero Oisín, son of Finn, the famous leader of the Fianna, and the time-shifting outcome of his stay in the land of the Sidhe, the Irish fairies. The story of Oisín’s mother explains some of his affinity with the Otherworld and its women, for she was Sadb the deer-woman. Finn, his men of the Fianna, and his faithful and sagacious hounds Bran and Sceolan were out hunting one day when they started up a beautiful fawn. Instead of attacking it, the dogs licked the little creature and began to play with it. Finn was surprised, and the more so when, as he set off for his home in Almhuin, the fawn followed. That evening, a beautiful woman stepped into the house and explained that she was that very fawn, who had been enchanted into animal form by Fear Doriche, the Dark Druid of the Sidhe, whose love she had refused. It was decreed that if she could come within the fortress or dun of the Fianna, she would be safe from the Dark Druid and would regain her human form. Finn of course fell in love with Sadb, and she became pregnant by him. But then invaders came and Finn was called away to fight the enemies of Ireland. When he returned, there was no sign of Sadb. He learned that, while he was gone, a semblance of himself and the two hounds had appeared at the dun gates and Sadb had run down joyfully to meet him. The shadowy figure stretched out its arms; as Sadb flung herself into them, it lifted up a hazel rod and struck her with it, and turned her back into a fawn. As the little deer tried to run back to the safety of the dun, the shadow-dogs dragged her back by the throat and they all disappeared.
The distraught Finn kept searching for his lost wife, until, seven years later, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, the hounds found a long-haired, naked boy – whom Bran and Sceolan greeted with keen licking, whining and tail-wagging. They took the boy home with them. As he learned to speak human language, he told them his story. He had been raised by a deer in an enclosed valley where they lived on roots and herbs in the summer, and where food was left for them in the winter. A man with a dark aspect would come to visit the deer, sometimes speaking softly, sometimes shouting angrily, until finally he struck her with a hazel rod and forced her to follow him away. The deer looked back many times and wept, but had no power to resist. The boy had tried to follow the deer, but had finally collapsed on the grass, where the hounds had found him. Finn thought the boy had more than a look of his lost Sadb, and he was named Oisín, which means ‘Little Deer’.
The story of a woman enchanted into animal or monstrous form by a spurned suitor or a jealous stepmother is well known; some ballad examples are discussed below. Usually the disenchantment is successful and the hero and the rescued girl can live happily ever after. In this tale, however, the dark powers of the Druid turn Sadb’s love for her husband Finn back against her, and trick her into leaving the magically protected space of the dun. Yet Sadb had continued to resist, and to remain in her deer form, taking care of her child. Once the boy is seven, however, he is old enough to take care of himself and the Druid can reclaim the mother without jeopardising the life of the innocent child. It’s a tale of family violence and dysfunction, of a woman’s subjection to a brutal man and the consequences for the child. The mother’s new partner resents her son, fathered by another man, but he can’t bring himself to kill the boy. Sadb and Oisín’s history has a great deal of resonance. The mother is never rescued from the man who oppresses her, but her son grows up sympathetic and kindly towards women, especially those from the Otherworld who, perhaps, recall his lost mother to him.
Oisín stays with his father, growing up to be a poet and a hero, but his fate remains entangled with the Otherworld. In one tale, ‘Niamh of the Golden Hair’, the queen of Tir na n’Og, the Country of the Young, falls in love with him from afar, and she comes to Almhuin and fetches Oisín away with her, despite the forebodings on the part of father and son that they will not see one another again. Another story tells how the king of Tir na n’Og was chosen every seven years through a running competition: the competitors must race up a mountain and the first to sit upon a chair at the top is king thereafter. One king who had held the throne for a long time was anxious to continue his rule and he asked his Druid how long he would reign. ‘You will keep the chair and crown for ever’, said the Druid, ‘unless your son-in-law takes them from you.’ The king had only one daughter, a girl of extraordinary beauty, so he took precautionary steps. He struck her with the Druid’s rod and replaced her lovely head with that of a pig, confident that he had ruined her chances of marriage for ever. The distraught princess went to see the Druid, who revealed that she could be disenchanted, if only she could marry one of the sons of Finn mac Cumhail.
The pig-headed princess left Tir na n’Og for County Leinster, the haunt of the Fianna, and there she saw Oisín out hunting, a sight that pleased her very much. Oisín was so successful in the hunt that he could not carry home all his game and the princess offered to carry some for him. After a while they stopped to rest, for the day was hot, and the princess opened her dress to cool down. Oisín looked at her white bosom and shapely form and said, perhaps rather ungallantly, ‘It’s a pity you have the pig’s head on you, for I have never seen such an appearance on a woman in all my life before.’ The princess revealed that marriage would lift the enchantment, and Oisín immediately agreed. As soon as the marriage was consummated, there and then the girl regained her beauty, but she stipulated to Oisín that she had now to go back to Tir na n’Og; unless he went with her, they would be parted. Oisín set out for Tir na n’Og that very day, without troubling to bid his father and the Fianna farewell. And, of course, next time the race for kingship was run, Oisín was an easy winner, and he ruled over the Land of Youth for many a year.
Oisín is able to use his imagination to see beyond appearances, to realise perhaps that the woman who is ready to help carry his heavy burden of game would make a good wife and helpmeet, despite her porcine features. It’s not the princess’s helpfulness that prompts him to ask about her condition, however, but her figure and white breasts; if he’s willing to take a risk on her truthfulness the transformed hybrid woman can be rescued. There is a moral here that suggests that surface appearances – a pig’s snout and hairy ears – may mask an inner loveliness, but Oisín seems to know that the girl is telling him the truth. This tale is a variant of a motif called the fier baiser (proud kiss) when it appears in romance. Closely related to the Loathly Lady that we learned about in Chapter 4, the heroine of fier baiser stories has usually been enchanted by a wicked stepmother. Let’s cross back over the Irish Sea now and make our way to the mighty Bamburgh Castle, which towers over the long yellow beaches and grey rocks of the Northumbrian seashore. Bamburgh was the home of a kindly king who had two children: a daughter, Margaret, and a son known as Childe Wynd. The king was widowed and he married again, while the Childe set off adventuring over the sea. Margaret’s stepmother took a jealous dislike to her stepdaughter and cast a spell over her:
I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
And borrowed shall ye never be,
Until Childe Wynd, the King’s own son,
Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
Until the world comes to an end,
Borrowed shall ye never be.
(I curse you to be a Loathly Worm, and disenchanted you shall never be, until Childe Wynd, the King’s own son, comes to the Heugh and kisses you three times; until the world comes to an end, disenchanted shall you never be.)
Margaret became a monstrous dragon, a loathly (laidly) worm who coiled her gleaming body many times round the Heugh, or mound, at nearby Spindleston. Hunger drove her to devastate the country all about, devouring flocks of beasts, until a wise man realised who she was and how her hunger could be appeased – by setting aside seven cows whose milk was enough to sustain her. And there poor Margaret remained. Over the sea, Childe Wynd heard what had befallen his sister and vowed to rescue her. He built a ship with a keel of rowan wood – proof against witchcraft – and sailed for Bamburgh. Though the stepmother raised a mighty storm against him, the rowan keel kept him safe and he was able to land at Buddle Creek, just out of sight of the castle. There he found the Laidly Worm; he had raised his sword to slay it when it spoke to him with his sister’s voice, warning him that he must kiss her to break the spell. Though Childe Wynd wasn’t sure whether more devilment might not be involved, he took the risk and kissed the foul-smelling, hideous dragon on the mouth. Nothing happened, so he kissed it again. He was on the point of giving up when the Worm pleaded with him to try once more – if she was not disenchanted by sunset she was doomed to remain in this form for ever. One final kiss – and the grim coils of the dragon dropped away, as Margaret stepped out from among them.
FIG. 24 The Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh, by John D. Batten (1890).
Brother and sister made their way home to Bamburgh, where Childe Wynd touched the witch-queen with a rowan twig and turned her into a toad. To this day, a hideous Laidly Toad lives in the cellars of Bamburgh Castle, and she too can only be disenchanted with three kisses. But so far no one has volunteered.
Jealous stepmothers are of course common figures in fairy and folk tale, and the woman transformed into a dragon often appears in chivalric romances in which the knight’s courage is challenged in a different way from the usual feats of combat. Crossing a field of bones of those who have failed the test, closing your eyes and kissing the ugly fang-filled mouth with its corpse breath and horrible whiskers, is a trial at which many knights baulk. In some versions of the story the dragon-woman remains enchanted to this very day, and her disappointment in those who shrink from the ordeal makes her the more savage, lashing out at the men who can’t bring themselves to try.
One interesting feature of the ‘Laidly Worm’ is that it’s a brother who comes to rescue his sister, not a potential lover. Folk tales frequently tell of sisters sacrificing themselves for their brothers, often by having to remain silent while completing a painful and difficult task, in order to lift a spell (the wonderful Scottish fairy tale ‘The Shirts of Bog-Cotton’ is a case in point), but brothers are less inclined to show such exemplary loyalty to their sisters. Margaret and Childe Wynd perhaps are bonded by a distrust of their new stepmother; yet, while the young man can sail away and does not have to deal with his father’s new relationship, his sister has no refuge from her stepmother’s cruelty. In other reflexes of this story, such as the ballad ‘Kemp Owyne’ (Child 34), Dove Isabel, transformed into a monstrous creature, has to wait for her true love to come for her. This savage beast has three treasures – a belt, a ring and a sword – each of which she gives to Kemp Owyne in exchange for a kiss. ‘Her breath was strang, her hair was lang, and twisted thrice about the tree’, but with each kiss, provided he can dart in and plant the kisses without touching any other part of her, the beast’s hair untwists a little, until finally ‘her breath was sweet, her hair grew short’ and she comes smiling towards her beloved. In these tales, the hero really does have to summon up his courage and imagination to see beyond the monster before him, the one threatening to devour him if he does not do exactly what he is asked, and to have faith that the beloved really is waiting under the horror she presents to him.
These tales of animal brides are the converse of the much more familiar ‘Beauty and the Beast’ story. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ speaks to the woman’s fear of marriage and sexual intimacy, teaching that a woman can learn to love what lies beneath the husband’s external appearance: the bristling beard, rough skin, work-worn hands and physical size. The animal-wives remind men that women are indeed different from them, that the ways in which they think and feel may be hard to fathom, and that they may not express directly what it is that they want. To me the plight of the animal-bride, the selkie or mermaid longing for the sea, seems to anticipate what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, would call ‘the problem without a name’, the sense that marriage does not necessarily offer a woman total fulfilment. Where the woman is in fact transformed into a beast and pins her hopes on a man seeing through her beastly exterior to the true identity beneath, a more conventionally romantic assumption seems to be at work: the woman must be saved by the man, be he husband or brother, for she has no agency to transform herself back again. ‘Some day my prince will come’, she must hope; like the classic Disney princess, she is condemned to wait for Mr Right. Unlike the Loathly Lady we met in Chapter 4, Sadb, the pig-headed princess and Margaret are subject to powerful magic from which they can’t free themselves. It’s not surprising then that when the rescuer’s nerve fails and he recoils from the hideous monster, her disappointment and frustration should vent themselves in fury, and that the dragon’s cave should be littered with the bones of those who failed her.
Deep in the tall forests of Ireland, on the border of Ulster and Meath, a priest and his companions were overtaken by nightfall. They made a fire, and huddled round it, praying that no harm would come to them in the hours of darkness. Imagine their terror when a wolf calmly strolled up to the group – and imagine their astonishment when he began to speak to them! ‘Stay calm, don’t be afraid, for there’s no reason to fear, when nothing frightening is happening’, the wolf said, encouragingly. Although the travellers were understandably terrified, the wolf reassured them further by talking about God, and he answered the priest’s questions about Christian belief in an entirely orthodox way. Eventually he explained that his family came from Ossory to the south of Meath, and they’d been cursed by St Natalis. Every seven years, a male and female of the family would be turned into wolves and had to lope away into the forest. If they survived for seven years in wolf form, they regained their human shapes and could return home; another man and woman were then fated to take their place as wolves.
The wolf further explained that his female companion was lying dangerously ill nearby; on the point of death, she needed the last rites from the priest. And he led the priest a little distance to where a female wolf was indeed lying, sighing and groaning like a human being. She greeted the priest courteously and thanked God that she had been sent spiritual help. The priest gave her the rites, but demurred at offering this strange creature the Eucharist and pretended to have no consecrated wafers with him. But the he-wolf pointed out that he did in fact have the Host within the prayer book he was carrying. In order to remove the priest’s last doubts, with his claws he slashed open the she-wolf’s skin from the head to the navel, revealing that there was indeed an old woman within. The priest’s doubts were dissipated and he administered the sacrament; then the wolf zipped the woman back into her skin. The he-wolf spent the night chatting with his new friends and in the morning guided them safely out of the wood. What happened to his female companion is not, alas, recorded, but it doesn’t seem likely that she recovered.
This story is recounted by Gerald of Wales, in his description of Ireland, composed around 1188 (see frontispiece). Gerald went to Ireland with the son of Henry II, Earl John. He concludes his wolf anecdote by observing that when he visited Meath, about two years after the occurrence, there was still a great deal of discussion in religious circles as to whether the priest had acted correctly in giving communion to the she-wolf. Gerald himself thinks that the action was appropriate and cites various other examples known to him of humans changing shape into animals – including the witch-hares we will meet later in this chapter. There’s a real philosophical question at stake here: when a human is changed into an animal, does he or she lose human identity? The Irish werewolves retain their human rationality, even speech; Gerald does not mention whether they behaved wolvishly when out of human sight. Other werewolves alternate between wolf and human form, perfectly sociable men in their normal lives but behaving as wolves when in a transformed state, killing animals (and perhaps people) and eating raw meat. Being a wolf is certainly uncivilised, for one of the most important distinctions between the natural and the cultural is the capacity to transform the raw flesh eaten by animals into the cooked meat enjoyed by humans. We might wonder why St Natalis was so incensed against the Ossory family. Usually saints are put out by the obduracy of those they seek to convert, and perhaps the original wolves were simply being made to manifest their wolvish and unbelieving spirits in an external form. But this poor wolf and his companion were obviously good Christians, so it seems rather unfair of the saint not to lift the curse, six hundred years later, now that the Ossory clan were better disposed to the new faith.
Gerald’s account is one of the earliest werewolf stories recorded in the British Isles. Around the same time as Gerald was writing in Latin, a woman called Marie was composing poems in Anglo-Norman French somewhere in England. Marie tells the story of Bisclavret, who himself lived in Brittany; his name simply means ‘werewolf’ in Breton. Once told in Britain, the story of the werewolf and his unfaithful wife migrated into British belief and became attached to figures associated with King Arthur. Bisclavret himself was a baron who was destined to spend three days a week as a wolf. He would go into the woods, remove his human clothing, hide it in a safe place and assume wolf form. When he needed to turn back into a human he would put on his clothes once more. Bisclavret makes the error of confiding his condition to his wife, who is horrified and disgusted by his confession. She conspires with a knight who loves her to steal Bisclavret’s clothing and leave him trapped in his wolf aspect. And since her husband has vanished without trace, the wife marries the knight and they rule over his barony. Wolf-Bisclavret meets the king, who is out hunting, and runs to him to beg for mercy. Although he cannot speak, the wolf’s behaviour alerts the wise king to the fact that there is more to the matter than meets the eye, and Bisclavret is taken to court to live with the king. Sometime later, Bisclavret’s wife and her new husband come to court. When the wolf sees her he leaps at her and tears off her nose. Though the court is indignant and claims that the wolf should never have been trusted, again the king is wise enough to investigate. The wife and her lover are tortured and admit their crime. The clothing is restored to Bisclavret, who resumes human form and his rule over his barony. His wife and lover are exiled; her descendants are recognisable, for the females of the line are often born without noses.
Bisclavret’s story seems to have become attached in English to a certain Sir Marrok, who was one of Arthur’s knights. Thomas Malory mentions mysteriously in passing that Marrok was betrayed by his wife and spent seven years as a werewolf. In another Arthurian tale, ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’, this time composed in Latin, King Arthur surprises everyone by kissing his wife passionately in full view of the court. The queen rebukes him and accuses him of not understanding women’s minds and their ways. The king then – as he does in a number of other medieval tales (see Chapter 4) – sets out on a quest to find out what women want. Eventually he comes to the court of King Gorlagon, who welcomes him, and Arthur reveals his quest: to discover the minds, the arts and the ways of women. Gorlagon tells him the story of a certain king whose life and identity were bound up with a tree which had grown up from the ground at the hour when he was born. The king knew that if someone cut down the tree and struck him with it, crying ‘Be a wolf!’, he would be transformed. The king’s treacherous wife suspects that he harbours some secret connected with the tree and gets it out of him, though when she transforms him she accidentally commands him to be a wolf ‘with the reason of a man’ instead of adding the rider that he should have a wolf’s mind too. As in the Bisclavret story the wolf is eventually restored to his human form through the wisdom and kindness of another king, and the faithless wife is condemned to sit ever at her former husband’s table with the embalmed head of her lover before her. Every time the husband kisses his new wife, she must kiss the lover’s head. Arthur thanks Gorlagon for his tale, which turns out to be his own autobiography, and returns home. Whether he now knows what women want isn’t very obvious, but he has certainly had clear warning of their capacity for treachery, and that may turn out to be useful.
These werewolf tales belong to courtly rather than popular culture; though they draw on the belief that humans can change form, they are more interested in using the idea either to open up the philosophical question of what it means to be human, or to prove the wickedness of women, figured in their capability of transforming a decent and trusting man into a wild animal. Folk tales have a different view of the werewolf. In Shetland the Wulfver is a gentle and kindly creature. He has a wolf’s head and a man’s body, lives in caves and keeps himself to himself. He likes to fish and will leave his catch on the window sill of someone who is in need of supplies. If you are lost in the wild weather or sudden sea fogs of Shetland he will sometimes appear and lead you safely homewards. Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk also celebrates the wolf, this time an ordinary beast, rather than a shape-changed human. When King Edmund was captured and killed by Vikings in 871, so his Life tells us, his head was cut off and spitefully thrown into the brambles by his enemies. They intended to confound the king’s subjects, who wanted to give him proper burial. When Edmund’s people went out into the dense and dangerous woods in search of the head, it called out to them, crying ‘Here! Here!’ When they came upon it, the head was safely lodged between the forepaws of a huge grey wolf. The wolf was guarding the saint’s head against the depredations of other wild animals, but he willingly surrendered it to the human seekers. Indeed he trotted along beside the party until they were safely back at the town, making sure that neither they nor the head came to any harm. In the cathedral of St Edmundsbury in Bury St Edmunds you can see the wolf with the head still between its paws, carved high up on the canopy over the bishop’s throne, and he also surmounts the shield in the town’s coat of arms. As in the tale of St Carantoc and the dragon, whom we met in the last chapter, this story shows how God’s power extends over the most savage of beasts and that the wolf is more respectful of the royal saint’s numinous power than the wolvish Vikings who martyred and decapitated him.
We tend to associate witches with the black cats that operate as their familiar spirits, but more traditionally the witch transforms herself into a hare in order to steal milk from the neighbours’ cows. The witch-hare has other moneymaking sidelines, however: in one rather jolly tale from Tavistock in Devon, she gives the hare-hunters a run for their money. In a letter written in 1833, a certain Mrs Bray relates how a young boy would earn money by starting hares for the local hare hunters – he was always able to find one when they seemed scarce. Somehow, the hare always managed to get away. This made the huntsmen suspicious, so on one occasion the hounds were teed up to get on their prey’s trail more quickly. The hare zigged and zagged to cries from the boy of ‘Granny! Quick! Run for your life!’ Aha! The hare just made it into the boy’s grandmother’s cottage through a little hole. When the huntsmen broke in, no animal was to be seen. But the old woman was quite out of breath, and she had scratches, as if she had been running through brambles. In a Yorkshire version, it’s Nanny ——, the witch herself (wisely kept anonymous), who volunteers ‘where you will find a hare ligging [lying] and a grand one and all … Only, whativver ye deea [whatever you do], minnd ye dinna slip a black dog at her’. Inevitably, after a great chase across the moorland, a random black dog who isn’t one of the hound pack joins in the chase and, as the hare escapes through a ‘smout-hole’ into Nanny ——’s garden, the black dog seizes hold of the hare’s back leg, tearing off some fur and a little bit of skin. When the coursers go into the house to see how Nanny —— is faring, she is lying in bed, claiming to be a bit lame. When examined, the injury is found, of course, to be exactly where the dog had bitten the hare.
Tales like this, about witches as hares, can be found in almost every part of the country. Typically, suspicions are roused by the low yield of milk from local cows or, in another Yorkshire tale, the nibbling of young saplings in a plantation. Here the culprit is found to be ‘a great, foul old ram-cat ov a heear’, deliberately and systematically taking the tops off each of the little trees. The injured parties procure bullets of silver – quite often a melted-down silver sixpence, or someone’s sacrificed silver buttons – and fire at the fleeing hare. It escapes, but they sometimes succeed in tracking it to a cottage, or sometimes simply burst into the home of the chief suspect. And she will be nursing an injury in the very spot where the hare was shot.
Why hares? They were familiar animals before the industrialisation of the countryside, and their habit of rearing up on their hind legs and their distinctive zigzag run made them easy to pick out. They are swift and clever – which explains how they always manage to get back to the witches’ houses before they are caught – and they have long been indigenous to the British landscape. Hares thus appear in a good deal of folklore across the country. The white hare figures the deceived maiden who died of grief in Cornish legend, whose mystery is hinted at in Seth Lakeman’s song ‘The White Hare’. She may, like the Belle Dame sans Merci, try to steal your spirit away. Closer to the game hares of the Yorkshire witch stories is the legendary uncatchable white hare of English folksong, despite the county’s best hounds being set on her tail, like the White Hare of Howden (Yorkshire) or, sometimes, Oldham (Lancs). I’ve seen hares myself near where I live in North Oxfordshire, up by the Roman road that runs along the southern side of Madmarston Hill near Swalcliffe: two big beasts on their hind legs, boxing away at one another like a couple of prizefighters, until they spotted me and the dog. Then they swerved away over the stubbly March fields, only to take up their bout again at a more distant corner. These hares were probably a male/female pair, rather than rival males duking it out: the female was trying to repel the male’s advances, with limited success.
And hares do indeed gather together in what looks like a convocation; eight or ten of them sitting in a circle and gazing at one another as if in silent communication. The writer Justine Picardie mentions seeing just such a phenomenon in June 2012 in the Scottish Highlands:
On the way here last night, a magical scene: glimpsed in a field beside the lane, a circle of hares, all gazing inwards, motionless in the moment that we passed. I’ve heard occasional stories of these rarely witnessed gatherings – known as a parliament of hares – but never seen one for myself. No camera to hand – although if we’d stopped, I’m sure the hares would have vanished – yet a sight impossible to forget.
But we know of course that these were no ordinary hares, but surely a gathering of witches in their hare forms. An Ulster tale, recorded in 1959, tells of a couple who had a strange mirror in their house; when Mary gazed into it she saw her ears getting longer and furrier, and her back legs too. She hopped out of the house and felt drawn to head off in a certain direction. Her husband Pat came into the house to look for his missing wife, but he too gazed in the mirror and the same transformation occurred. Soon the two of them were running along, together with a great many other hares, and they fetched up in a field in Clonmallon. There all the hares began to dance, and so did the transformed humans. Then a big buck called them all to order and began to discuss hare business; the two witnesses understood all that he said. But then he stopped, twitched his whiskers and said that he suspected that there were hares present who should not be there. Mary and Pat felt uneasy at this, and all the other hares began to look at them rather pointedly. They ran for their lives, and just made it home, with the other hares in pursuit; the mirror effected their transformation back again. Just as well, I am sure; an enraged hare could do some serious damage, and an angry witch even worse.
If you are old enough you may remember Masquerade, a children’s book designed by Kit Williams which contained clues to a treasure hunt. Williams crafted a beautiful golden and bejewelled hare, which he buried in a secret location in August 1979. The book told the story of Jack Hare, who set out to carry the treasure from the Moon to her beloved, the Sun. But on the way Jack lost the golden hare, and it was the task of the book’s readers to work out the code and uncover the treasure. The hare treasure was finally located, buried near Catherine of Aragon’s Cross at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire, in 1982; eight years later a scandal was broken by the Sunday Times, which alleged that the finder had had some inside knowledge and had not properly solved the clues. The hare was sold at auction to a private buyer, and was temporarily on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2012. In eastern mythology, in China and Japan, as also in Mexico, a rabbit or hare lives on the moon, which may explain Williams’s cosmic associations for his hare hero. And, although they can scarcely be connected with witchcraft, churches in the West Country have over thirty instances of a three-hare motif, displayed in carvings and roof bosses. This is an intricate puzzle of three hares, carved so that each animal shares an ear with its neighbour; if you look at any individual hare it will have two ears, but the three hares together have only three ears between them. The motif originated in the Far East; its prevalence in the West Country remains unexplained. Perhaps the three beasts represent the Holy Trinity, or, since hares were thought to be hermaphrodites who could reproduce without sex, they might allude to the Virgin Mary.
Witches in their hare form are relatively unthreatening. Their crimes are the kinds of misdemeanours and mischief that are annoying in a rural community, but the hare itself is a wonderful and quite rare sight, leaping across the ploughed furrows of the fields in March or standing alertly on its hind legs, whiskers aquiver. But the British countryside contains more dangerous creatures than the harmless hare, and it’s important to stay on one’s guard against them.
Journeying westwards from the hare parliament that Justine Picardie saw on that peaceful midsummer night, we come to the lochs and lakes of the Highlands and Islands. Lurking in them, very likely, is the highly dangerous water-horse. Once in the Hebrides a young woman was herding cattle and she took them off to a distant hill-slope. As she sat watching them, a handsome young man came along, and he fell asleep with his head resting in her lap. A charmingly pastoral scene, but as the girl gazed down at her sleeping swain she realised, to her horror, that he had horses’ hooves. Quietly, so as not to arouse the sleeper, she cleverly cut away the parts of her clothes on which the man’s head lay, and made good her escape. When the water-horse awoke and realised that she had fled, ‘it made a dreadful outcry’. The girl and the water-horse is a widespread story; sometimes the shape-shifter is detected by the sand and riverweed in his hair, and sometimes the girl is foolish enough to make an assignation with the young man, after which she is never seen again. The cattle-herder missed a trick with her trustful sleeper, for if she had got hold of the silver chain that usually hangs round the imposter’s neck, she would have had power over him. The silver chain represents the water-horse’s bridle; without it, like the selkie, he can’t return to his horse form nor survive in the water.
John Gregorson Campbell, the minister of the Hebridean island of Tiree, and a fluent speaker of Scots Gaelic, collected this and a good many other water-horse stories. His stories about water-horses appeared in 1900, and they give a good conspectus of the creature’s wiles. One such story, widespread in the Highlands, is that of the Nine Children. Instead of going to church these children went out to amuse themselves on a Sunday, in the neighbourhood of Sunart, near Lochaber. They found a horse grazing near the unpromisingly named ‘Loch of Disaster’ (Loch na Dunach) and thought it would be fun to ride it. The beast’s back grew longer and longer until eight of them were all mounted on it. The ninth happened to have a Bible in his pocket and he cautiously touched the horse with one finger. The finger stuck to the horse, and the boy had to cut it off to save himself, for the horse rushed into the loch with the other children on its back, and they were never seen again. Except that the liver of one of them washed ashore the next day. Indeed, in related stories only the livers or other bits of entrails, the parts of the body that float easily, bob up on the surface of the water to indicate the horror beneath. Campbell suspects, I’m sure with good reason, that this tale was invented to make sure that children didn’t roam about on Sundays and make free with other people’s horses, and it certainly caught on. In other variants the survivor is already on the horse’s back when he realises what is afoot and has to cut off several fingers which cannot loosen their grip on the monstrous beast’s mane. Again, had the children looked closely, they’d have seen telltale water weed and sand in the horse’s coat and would have known to keep their distance.
I suggested above that the girl who had to cut her clothes from under the sleeping horse might have done better to force him into her power. This doesn’t always work out for the best, however. The tale of the Laird of Morphie, in Aberdeenshire, warns against exploitation of the water-horse. The Laird captured the water-horse either by slipping a bridle over him or, more likely, by taking possession of the creature’s own bridle, so that the water-horse had to do his bidding. The Laird was building a castle at Morphie, on the banks of the North Esk where the water-horse lived. He struck a bargain with his captive: that if the horse hauled stone for him for a year, he would give him his freedom. The Laird worked the poor horse very hard indeed, so that, when he was finally let loose, the unhappy labourer recited this verse:
Sair back and sair banes
Drivin’ the Laird of Morphie’s stanes!
The Laird of Morphie shall never thrive
As long as the kelpie is alive.
The water-horse returned to the river, but he liked his verse so much that he was often heard repeating it with relish; and indeed the line of the Grahams of Morphie failed, the castle fell into disrepair and now all that hard-hauled stone has been carted away to repair other buildings. The story warns, then, like some of the brownie tales, against exploiting and mistreating those who work for you. In this verse, and more generally in the east of Scotland, kelpies and water-horses are regarded as interchangeable; Campbell of Tiree, on the other hand, maintains that they are separate creatures, and that the kelpie lurks in fords and falls, where, suddenly and capriciously, he will make the water levels rise to drown the unwary traveller. In Shetland the kelpie will seize hold of the waterwheel at the mill, so that the millstream continues to rush past, while the wheel is unmoving; a supernatural clog on the mill’s production, the kind of trick that is more typical of boggarts. The Nuggle is a Northern Isles water-horse that will pull travellers down from the bridge across the burn, or entice riders onto its back, in much the same way as his mainland and Western Isles counterpart. Such river-demons are both common and not always equine in form. Further south, in Lancashire there’s the Shellycoat, whose clattering coat of shells serves to warn his victims that he means to lure them to the river and drown them. More southerly still are Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth and a legion of female river hags, whose long green hair resembles the water weed that drags their prey down, and who have sharp teeth and long, slender fingers.
The River Conon, in Ross-shire, is a stretch of water about which, all the way along its length, different kelpie or water-spirit stories are told. These include a woman dressed in green who was known to drag people down to their deaths. One of the most dramatic stories concerns the stretch of the river by Conon House. There’s a swampy meadow with cheerful yellow water flags and rushes, and in the midst of it a hillock surrounded by willows; the river whirls past in dark eddies. Deep, thick woods grow on either side of the river; above lies an old cemetery and the ruins of a church. In it can still be seen the remains of a rose window, and a trough that once held holy water – or so it was said in the late nineteenth century. Three hundred years or more ago, before the church was ruined, a party of Highlanders were busy harvesting the corn one summer’s day in the field by the church. Suddenly they heard a voice coming from the river. ‘The hour is come, but not the man’, it proclaimed. When they gazed down, they saw the kelpie standing in ‘the false ford’, a part of the river which looked as if it was shallow and safe to cross, but had a treacherous eddy. The kelpie repeated his words and then, ‘flashing through the water like a drake’, vanished.
Just at that moment, a man on horseback came dashing down the hill. The harvesters tried to warn him not to cross, to take some other route, or at least to wait until the fatal hour had passed. The man was in a great hurry and did not believe their tale, so, in desperation, they bundled him from his horse and locked him inside the church, all for his own good. When the hour had passed, they flung open the church doors – only to find the man face down in the holy-water trough, drowned and dead, having had, so the witnesses speculated, some kind of seizure or fit. The kelpie had got his man, one way or another.
The most dreadful of these northern water fiends is the terrible Nuckelavee, who roams in both Shetland and Orkney. This creature is neither man nor horse, but a horrible hybrid of the two. His head is that of a man, but much bigger, with a huge gaping mouth. And, most horrifying of all, he has no skin. Tammas was making his way home one dark moonless, but starry, night. On one side of the road lay the sea; on the other, a freshwater loch hemmed him in. Suddenly he saw a huge shapeless thing looming up ahead, and advancing towards him. As it approached, he saw that it was indeed the Nuckelavee, both horse and misshapen man; since it lacked any skin, Tammas could see its ‘red raw flesh … [with] blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching and contracting as the monster moved’. Now luckily, although Tammas felt icy spasms of fear running across his scalp and down his spine, he had the instinctive sense to swerve towards the freshwater-loch side of the road – and as he did so, he kicked up some water, which splashed onto the Nuckelavee. It reared and snorted, buying Tammas valuable time, and he sprinted away along the road. In front of him was a little rivulet running across the road, taking the surplus loch water into the sea. Tammas knew that if he could put running water between himself and the monster, he had a chance. The Nuckelavee reached out for him with its abnormally long arms, just as the man sprang over the water, but all it caught was his bonnet; Tammas fell senseless on the safe side of the water.
The Nuckelavee’s fear of fresh water limits his depredations, for he won’t venture on land if he thinks it’s going to rain; moreover in Orkney and Shetland the Sea Mither [Mother], the spirit of the calm and nurturing summer sea, keeps him somewhat under control. These various water-horses and kelpies symbolise the risks associated with rivers, lakes and lochs. Fast-flowing mountain streams and known deep and inaccessible stretches of river can also claim human lives, especially when rain or snowmelt upstream produces a sudden surge lower down. But these tales are also conscious of the deceptive nature of lakes with their unseen currents, clammy and clinging weed, and the sucking mud of the water’s edge. Horses too are dangerous and unpredictable animals, especially so perhaps to the peasants and cotters who have neither the need nor the resources to keep them, but who only see them galloping past with a noble laird on their back, or who encounter them at pasture, taking the grazing that the cotter needs for his own sustenance.
The water-horse has many relatives, among them the Loch Ness monster. When this elusive beast is first encountered, in Adomnan’s Life of St Columba, the saint is informed that the monster has just killed a man. One of Columba’s disciples is sent to swim across the River Ness in order to lure it out; the beast strikes again, but is repelled by the swimmer quickly making the sign of the cross. In Iceland there’s the nykr, who shares the monster’s habits; this creature has Old English counterparts, the nicoras (doubtless related to the pudding-eating monster of Knucker Hole). Nicoras are found lazing in the sun at the edge of Grendel’s Mere when Beowulf tracks the murderous water-hag, Grendel’s Mother, ‘the she-wolf of the depths’, to her lair. And Grendel’s Mother herself is surely the progenitor of such figures as Jenny Greenteeth and her sisters, who lurk in the stagnant weed-choked depths of ponds and standing water, on the lookout for the unwary, especially heedless little children. The tale of the ‘Laird of Morphie’ warns employers against exploitation of their workers; for, as we saw in Chapter 4, even supernatural workers need to be treated fairly, to be rewarded and appreciated. And the eerily prophetic kelpie of Conon shows, like many folk tales, how fate cannot be circumvented; if you go round one way to avoid Death, he will meet you coming in the other direction.
FIG. 25 The Falkirk Kelpies, by Andy Scott.
Two contemporary incarnations of the kelpie – huge, shining in stainless steel, towering 30 metres on either side of the new extension to the Forth and Clyde canal at Falkirk – were completed in October 2013. Sculptor Andy Scott responded to the tradition of the mythic water-horse’s strength, linking its impressive horse-power (as in the tale of the ‘Laird of Morphie’) with the role of the horse in the Scottish Industrial Revolution and, indeed, in towing barges along the canal. These kelpies, though their heads seem to rear and strain as they emerge from the ground, are benign creatures, equine guardians who have moved beyond the sinister implications of their mythological ancestors. These mighty beasts also speak to the horses of the south, the White Horse of Sutton Bank in Yorkshire, the eighteenth-century horses of the chalklands of southern England, and of course the ancient, gloriously graceful White Horse of Uffington where our journey started. And perhaps one day the kelpies will neigh their greetings to Mark Wallinger’s 50-metre high White Horse of Ebbsfleet, if that colossal creature is ever built.
