Water Beasts
As I said in the introduction, a simple (although far from conclusive or exact) division of faery beasts is to separate them into those that dwell on land and those that dwell in water. The latter never confine themselves to the rivers, lakes, or sea where they have their main abode, but they will still spend a large part of their lives feeding, sleeping, and mating beneath the waves. Over and above any ferocity in their temperaments, the fact that they belong in a different element is part of the reason they can be so dangerous to us.
Water beasts take many forms: they can resemble humans, they can look like familiar farm animals, such as horses and cattle, or they can be out and out monsters. The humanlike forms are found in several species or types: there are some that dwell in saltwater and some that dwell in fresh. Some of the latter live in lakes (what I’ve called meremaids), whereas others are found in rivers and springs (what I’ve referred to as water sprites). What unites all the water beasts is the fact that for many of their significant interactions with humankind they will come out of the water to find us.
The main occupation of many of these creatures is seducing mortals and luring them to their doom. (Mermaids, it’s true, might sometimes accidentally drown their lovers, but it is not generally their intention, unlike most of the water beasts discussed in Chapter 2 to Chapter 6.) Poet Joseph Rodman Drake in his verse “To a Friend” described travellers being terrorised by “the kelpie’s fang.” 9 In Charles Mackay’s 1851 ballad “The Kelpie of Corryvreckan” a handsome stranger on a horse rides off with lovestruck Jessie but then plunges beneath the waves with her so that she is found drowned the next day.10 Many of the stories of water beasts, like that of Jessie, have a moral element, which may be more or less explicit. Jessie’s want of caution with a handsome stranger might be read as a warning to virgins everywhere. In other accounts, the message concerns violation of a Sunday or a festival like Easter: children who ought to be at church are instead playing by a lakeside and Satan seems to come in the guise of a pretty pony to seize their souls.11
9 . Joseph Rodman Drake, “To a Friend,” in The Culprit Fay and Other Poems (New York: George Dearborn, 1836), 43.
10. Charles Mackay, “The Kelpie of Corryvreckan,” in Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (London: Charles Gilpin, 1851), 56.
11. For example, at Loch Venachar—John Leyden, Journal of a Tour in the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland in 1800, ed. James Sinton (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1903), 13–14.