Scottish Folklore
This Sunday, 21st of February, is International Tourist Guides Day, and since the theme this year is rural tourism and storytelling it seems like the perfect time to write about Scottish folklore! Although folkloric tales exist all over the country, to me they feel particularly bound up with the landscapes and atmosphere of the Scottish Highlands.
As a child, I adored these tales. I was very into children’s historical fiction about Scotland, especially Kathleen Fidler’s books, and I loved being transported back to the lives children led here in different periods. My mum’s side of the family is from Sutherland in the far north of Scotland and we would often spend time up there in the holidays. I remember running around at Carn Liath broch near Golspie – an ancient stone dwelling that’s roughly 2000 years old – and imagining the lives of the people who grew up there when it was new. How did they see the world? What stories did they tell to help them understand their place in it?
Carn Liath broch, near Golspie
I think it’s important to remember that, for as long as people have existed, we have always been human. We might have lacked the scientific knowledge and technology to investigate things the way we can now, but we were always just as curious and inventive. We always wondered where the mountains came from, what brought the mist and rain, how the rivers came to run through the landscape. People have always told stories about their lives and their environment, because we always wanted to think about how we came to exist.
The people of Scotland were no different. Like cultures all over the world, we have our ancient myths and legends – stories that disappear so far back in time that no one knows who told them first. For most of our history, Scotland had a primarily oral culture: our histories and our creation myths were passed down around the fireside by mothers, by bards, by visitors from far away.
Imagine a village in the Highlands hundreds of years ago. In the wintertime, the sun disappears below the horizon just after three in the afternoon and emerges again after nine in the morning. The people come from a culture without writing and books, and in the darkness they gather by the light of the fire to entertain each other with songs and stories passed down from those who came before them. They sing ballads and tell stories of ghoulies and ghosties and the ancient beings who made the land. For generations and generations, the stories change and grow in the telling. They weave in bits of truth and bits of invention, winding the stories of people’s lives around the traditional beliefs.
One Gaelic creation myth tells of the Cailleach (“old woman”), an ancient crone and deity who rules over the dark months. Stories speak of her crossing the landscape, creating mountains from rocks as she goes. Her hammer shapes the valleys and her great staff freezes the land to usher in winter. She is the mother of all the gods and goddesses, the ancient force who still exerts influence over her creation.
Her stories change across the country, shaped by their different tellers. Some say the mountains were an accident, created by stones falling from her creel, while others say she laid them out as steppingstones. On the west coast, she brings in the winter by washing her great plaid in the sea and spreading the clean white cloth over the land. She is the mother of everything and the dark and frightening power of nature.
You can even still visit one ancient shrine thought to belong to her in Glen Lyon in Perthshire, where small time-worn stone figures are said to represent her family sheltering there. Perhaps these little stone and turf houses once existed all across the land, but mostly only stories survive.
As well as creation myths, stories sought to explain the world people saw around them every day. Remote, mountainous places like the Scottish Highlands are filled with weather phenomena that we can now explain with modern science, but which seemed supernatural to our ancestors.
Will-o’-the-wisps, also known as spunkies, are ghostly lights that lead travellers astray at night. They mesmerise and lure people off the path to drown in watery bogs, seeming to shift and always move further away. Nowadays we know that these lights are caused by gases from the bogs igniting as they touch oxygen in the air, creating tiny ephemeral fires (but that’s a much less fun story to tell – and I think most of us would still be creeped out to see them fluttering in the darkness as we walked through the pitch-black countryside).
A Brocken spectre. Image: Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Up in the Cairngorm mountains, people have seen Am Fear Liath Mòr (The Big Grey Man), a towering figure accompanied by a sense of deep unease and the sound of strange footsteps. He is probably an optical illusion called a Brocken spectre, while shifting winds and the shapes of the landscape distort sound and cause strange feelings. Despite the rational explanations, just like the spunkies leading travellers off the path, I think any of us might believe Am Fear Liath Mòr was coming for us if we were alone in the billowing mountain mist.
Other stories serve as cautionary tales, warning people of the dangers of straying into the landscape or away from social norms. Treacherous waters hide beasties, and their power is not to be disrespected.
One such beast is the kelpie, or water horse. It lives in rivers and emerges from the depths to tempt humans into its lair. Sometimes it takes the form of a magnificent horse, strong with shining hair. Its beauty ensnares children to climb up on its back, but as soon as they lay a hand on the kelpie it returns to its monstrous form and sweeps them beneath the water. In some stories, children cut off their fingers to escape with their lives. In others they’re never seen again, but piles of bones and entrails turn up on the riverbank, the only remnants of the victims of the kelpie.
The Kelpies sculptures in Falkirk
In other versions, the kelpie comes ashore as a handsome young man, a stranger to the area. He seduces a young woman with his charms, but when she touches him, he transforms again and spirits her away to make her his wife or devour her flesh. At night, you can see the smoke from the fire she tends in his home rising from the water’s surface, forming wisps of mist and reminding folk of the danger that lies beneath.
Stories like this tell children to be wary of the rushing river waters, and young women to treat handsome strangers with caution (not bad advice in either case!), but they also entertain. They speak to deep human fears and send a chill down the spine of the listener – much like a modern horror film, they scare for fun. And that’s part of why folklore endures through the generations: it explains the world and connects with people’s experience of it, while turning the everyday into something magical, poignant and funny. Because what is being human if not telling stories?
To finish, here’s me telling a version of one of my favourite Scottish folktales: the Selkie (transcript below)
Thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions for topics you’d like to see me write about here. If you enjoy reading these posts, please consider sharing them with other people and following me on instagram. You can also leave something in my tip jar if you’re able. I’ll be back with another post next Friday! Hannah x
Transcript of audio
The Selkie, told by Hannah Mackay Tait
The fisherman emerges from his cottage by the shore. The wide flat sea is calm today, shimmering as the sun slips slowly from beneath the waves. He hears the water lapping at the pebbles and the keening of the seabirds swooping in the sky, and somewhere in the distance there is singing. The sweetest song the fisherman has ever heard is carried along the beach on the breeze.
He follows the song along the shore to a sheltered cove, and there he sees the selkie folk. From time to time, the selkies cast aside their seal skins and come ashore to play in human form. They are splashing in the shallows, singing their joyful song, as the morning sun makes silver of their skin.
The fisherman creeps closer, hidden behind a rock just steps away. He has seen the seals out at sea, of course, but he’s never seen the selkie folk ashore. He watches in amazement as another joins them, casting off her slick wet sealskin and lending her voice to the chorus. She is the most beautiful of all, the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. Her deep brown eyes sparkle with the sea, the salt glistens on her skin like crystal. Her discarded sealskin lies within touching distance.
A selkie cannot return to the sea without her skin. Her skin has all her magic.
He reaches out his fingertips to stroke it. It is wet, and smooth, and slippery-supple to the touch.
A selkie cannot return to the sea without her skin.
Almost before he knows what he’s doing, the fisherman picks up the selkie’s skin and holds it in his hands. It’s lighter than he expected, and it slips weightlessly across his fingers like silk. Perhaps if he keeps the selkie woman’s skin, she will stay to talk to him. Perhaps she’ll have to stay forever. He folds it carefully and slides it into his big pocket.
He doesn’t know how long he watches the selkies playing, but it feels like seconds and days. Eventually they begin to gather up their skins, slipping them back on and one by one returning to the sea. He watches their smooth round backs break the surface as they swim away, ducking beneath the waves and popping their heads up playfully.
In the end, only the selkie woman he has fallen for remains. She searches the shore for her sealskin, lifting the seaweed and looking under stones. She searches everywhere, but of course she doesn’t find it.
The fisherman steps out from behind his rock. The selkie woman jumps and gives a yelp, stumbling backwards into the water.
“Don’t be afraid,” the fisherman says. “I think you’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”
The selkie woman feels no less afraid.
“I’m looking for my skin,” she says. She looks at the fisherman with sadness in her heart, for the selkie woman has heard the stories her people tell of men who steal skins. The stories of selkie women who never came home.
The fisherman shows her the sealskin in his pocket. “I’ve fallen in love with you,” he says. “Please don’t go.”
The selkie woman looks him in his eyes. “Without my skin, I cannot go.”
The fisherman smiles at her, a broad smile. The smile isn’t meant to be sinister, but it is. The smile makes the selkie woman sad, and scared, and resigned. For she sees that he does think he loves her. And now her skin is his.
“Stay then,” he says. “I’ll care for you, I’ll keep you warm, I’ll keep you fed. We’ll be happy.”
And because otherwise she will have to stay here naked and alone, unable to return home anyway, the selkie woman says yes. But she doesn’t think she’ll ever be happy again.
The years turn slowly in the fisherman’s cottage. He is kind to the selkie woman, in his way. He brings her fish when he comes back from the sea. He stokes the fire in the hearth to keep her warm. He will even drag the tin bath from the press and fill it was salty water, hoping it might help her feel at home. But he never gives her back her skin. He has hidden it from her, so she spends her days in sadness.
She cannot be his wife, and she will not share his bed. She sleeps by the fire, in the front room where she can hear the sea. Every day, the fisherman hopes the selkie woman will love him. And every day she hopes that he will set her free.
One day, when the fisherman is out at sea, the selkie woman tears the house apart. She empties every cupboard, every chest. She takes a hammer from the shed and pulls boards from the wall. She rips open his pillow.
She finds nothing.
Empty, she walks back to the shed and flings the hammer in. And then she sees it. A bundle of old sailcloth in the corner, wrapped tight and tied with a cord. A small bundle, really.
The selkie woman rips it open with shaking hands, with human fingers she has come to hate.
It is her skin.
For the first time in these many years, the selkie woman smiles. Her slippery sealskin flows across her hands, rippling, shimmering. She has never seen a more beautiful sight.
She casts off her dress on the ground and runs naked to the shore, her glimmering skin gripped tight in her arms. She pays no heed to the pebbles underfoot or the chill sea air whipping about her. She runs and runs to the water’s edge until she feels it cold and sweet around her ankles, then she flings her sealskin over her shoulders and feels herself become one with it. She dives into the water and it holds her in its salty cold embrace and carries her to freedom, to the selkie folk beyond the waves.
When the fisherman returns from the sea, he finds the ruins of the cottage and runs to the shed. The sailcloth parcel torn open, smelling faintly of salt and seaweed and the wind. And he falls onto his knees and weeps and weeps, because he knows the selkie woman is never coming back.
For the rest of his life, the fisherman will stand on the shore each day and watch the seals play in the water. Sometimes he imagines that he sees one looking at him with a cold glint in its eye. But he never hears the selkie folk sing again.