Work is in full swing at the moment, life is hectic, and my father died in January, so I’ve not had much time for writing, blogging or posting on boards.
What news I’ve had isn’t exactly great, either. The Cripple and the Brollachan was rejected by ASIM with no reason given, Ideomancer rejected my story about the Gruagach and the Milkstone with the comment that “it felt a bit too much like many other regional horror pieces we were receiving at that time” and Abyss and Apex rejected Fresh Blood and Feathers, saying that although it was well received it still wasn’t good enough and I needed to cut the intro. So, other than two in Bewlidering Stories, and a couple of pending submissions at Aurealis, I got nothin.’
This is somewhat depressing, seeing as I had elected to write this type of tale as a safe introduction to publishing, to build up my profile, rather than going for some of the more avant-garde stuff in my arsenal. It would see, from the last year that the stories l’m doing are not very marketable. Now, I might be stubborn, but I;m not a purist, so it seems top me that change of plan is in order. I’m going to work up some rewrites of existing tales in a shorter simpler style, with child characters. This will probably take me the better part of the year to do.
I’ll keep going with the blog in the meantime, although I’m still short the post for April, having only just done March.
Down but not out,
S.
Dermot Egan's illustration of the Blue Man wearing a magic sea hat, (c) 2007.
The post for March – a full month late – concerns the cohuleen druith (a kind of magic sea hat), and all its variants in Irish and Scots folklore.
Firstly, on the name. Sometimes I’ve seen the first word spelled ‘cohuleen’ and sometimes ‘cohullen’, but in either case its meaning is clear, being derived from Irish cochall, or ‘hood’. ‘Druith’ is desrived from draoi. I will qoute MacBain’s definition here:
draoi, druidh, a magician, druid, Irish draoi, gen. pl. druadh, Early Irish drai, drui, g. druad, Gaulish druides (English druid). Its etymology is obscure. Stokes suggests relationship with English true, Gaelic dearbh, q.v. Thurneysen analyses the word as dru, high, strong, See truaill. Brugmann and Windisch have also suggested the root dru, oak, as Pliny did too, because of the Druids’ reverence for the oak tree. Anglo-Saxon dry/, magus, is borrowed from the Celtic. draoineach, druineach, artisan, “eident” person (Carm.); draoneach, “any person that practices an art” (Grant), agriculturist; druinneach, artist (Lh.). Irish druine, art needlework.
Therefore the “druid’s hood”, or enchanted hood, is used by the Irish Merrow (sea people) to make journeys from the undersea realms to the surface and back again (Yeats, as ever, provides a good basic source for this). If a merrow loses its hat, or if it is stolen by a human, that merrow cannot return to the undersea realm. In many accounts, this particular fact is a useful means by which men may kidnap female merrow and force them to live in marriage on the surface, as in the story of the Lady of Gollerus. And I think that is its main function. My supposition here is that the cohuleen druith was invented by Irish story-tellers to make the “kidnapped mermaid” motif seem more plausible and more interesting, and also to allow human visitors to see and report on the remarkable undersea realm.
My reason for this is pretty simple: there doesn’t seem to have been a conceptual problem in Gaelic folklore with the idea of undersea humanoid creatures that could breathe water – in fact, the Blue Men of the Minch are a case in point (although in my version of the Blue Men story, they do use magic hats), as are various trows, nuggles and other sea sprites that do not seem to need a cohuleen druith to survive underwater. So, if the only reason for the cohuleen druith was to explain how creatures could breathe, it would have no function at all in the narrative, as pre-modern audiences would happily listen to a tale about a free-swimming aqautic humanoid creature with no apparent air supply.
However, there did need to be some explanation as to why a kidnapped mermaid did not simply run away. Here, the cohuleen druith is perfect, a ready made reason why she must stay until, like the Lady of Gollerus, she discovers it’s hiding place and departs at once to her true element, leaving a lingering doubt as to the fishy maternal origins of everyone in the family thereafter.
But in other situations, it will serve as an explanation for why a human is capable of visiting the undersea kingdom, like in Crofton Coker’s The Soul Cages, in which the hat is described as being like a cocked hat. Here, the human protagonist is capable of visiting the undersea world of the mysterious merrow through the aid of a borrowed hat.
Scottish material has interesting parallels to the Irish; George Douglas (1901) provides us with The Fisherman and the Merman, The Mermaid Wife and The Seal-Catcher’s Adventure, all of which abandon the cohulen druith in favor of seal skins, and two of which are from the Shetlands. In all of these tales the merrow appear as being very similar to the Selkie, taking the form of seals while travelling and then disrobing of their seal skin apparel when on the shore. In each one, a skin gets stolen, with tragic consequences for the owner, who can no longer return below.
The Scots / Norse influenced use of the sealskin for exactly the same narrative purpose as the cohulen druith has further convinced me that it is a narrative device with little background in earlier Celtic lore. I’d be interested in read any accounts of enchanted hats being worn by merrow in the Irish cycles, which is would we would expect to find them if they were a part of ancient tradition. But to my knowledge, there are none; as far as I can see, the ‘enchanted hat’ is like an 18th century equivalent of the teleporter on Star Trek: it’s a very handy scenic device when it’s working, and a very handy plot device when for some reason – like in nearly every episode – it doesn’t.
As I mentioned, in my Blue Men of the Minch story (see the sidebar) the titular creatures wear magic hats, although they do not in MacKenzie’s original. I merged the merrow and the Blue Men in this way precisely because I wanted to have the ’stolen wife’ element in the story, and for my protagonist to see the under sea kingdom beneath the Shiant Isles. And without the cohulen druith, that’s simply not possible. In fact the story didn’t really come alive until I added the hat. Handy, that.
As I noted in my post on Elliot O’Donnell, I’ve had an interest in the story about a family of werewolves at Loch Langavat in Lewis for some time now. They appear mentioned on Wikipedia under Hebridean Mythology and Folklore, and in other places on Wikipedia too, and from there have found their way to any number of sites on the Hebrides or on lists of mythological creatures. It’s a classic case of internet-itis. The entry is always much the same:
“A family of werewolves were said to occupy an island on Loch Langavat. Although long deceased, they promised to rise if their graves were disturbed.[1] “
The source given on Wikipedia is Darren Mann’s paranormal database. I contacted Darren to ask about the source he’d used to construct the entry, and he very kindly sent me a scan of the document in question, which turns out to be a two-page anecdote in Terence Whitaker’s book, Scottish Ghosts and Apparitions. I’ve attached the page scan Darren sent me. It tells the story of how Andrew Warren went to visit his grandfather on Lewis and the old man had dug up a werewolf’s body, claiming that the “island used to be overrun with them”. Andrew then sees the ghost of the werewolf through the window that night before fleeing in terror. The bones are reburied the following day and the creature is laid to rest.
In the meantime, however, I’d come across another source mentioning werewolf bones in the Hebrides – the story in Elliot O’Donnel’s Werewolves that I posted a few months ago. As soon as I got hold of the scan from Whitaker I realised it was the same story. O’Donnell does not mention Langavat – that was probably an insertion by Whitaker – and some other details have been addded but nonethless it is clear that the two are the same tale.
Whitaker was not the only person to borrow the tale from O’Donnell. Much earlier, in 1926, Christopher Marlowe (not the poet) wrote a book called The Fen Lands, including exactly the same tale, but placing it in Linciolnshire. That version appears here and also on BBC Lincolnshire. I can’t find much about Marlowe’s book online and it looks fairly obscure, so really I’m just guessing when I say that the tale – which is too specific to be a ‘travelling tale’ or a widespread archetype – has simply been borrowed by Marlowe from O’Donnell’s book of fifteen years earlier, and relocated closer to home.
So anyway, that’s how we got a widespread internet meme about there being a clan of werewolves in Lewis that would rise if their bodies were disturbed.
I find it interesting the way that as such tales are deconstructed into their basic elements in order to be put on the internet, new ideas are created. For example, the notion that “the island used to be overrun with werewolves” has become a ‘clan of werewolves.’ The ‘island’ itself was proably intended to be Lewis, but has been scaled down to be “an island on Loch Langavat,” which is a totally new concept. And the fact that one apparation was seen has been viewed as evidence that the whole clan would rise again if their bodies were disturbed.
So we go from a single episode to the archetypal Wikipedian / Hebridean wolf-clan, who are all over the internet now and will probably refuse to die quietly. There’s no possible way my little corner of the net would ever change that, even if I wanted it to.
And I don’t even think I do. I’ve decided to run with the ‘wolf-clan’ idea in my story, and I’m playing with the notion that many more of them could have risen up from the dead if it had not been for the quick thinking of Mr Warren’s grandfather. There’s archaeology, excorcisms, and the whole works added in. Apart from the beginning, it’s a whole new story.
Here’s an extract:
‘Charlie! Charlie! Come look what I found, boy. Here, in the kitchen!’
I ran through the back door, in from where I had been helping Kenneth cut the peat, and saw the old man, white haired, red-faced and muddy from the trail, just finished laying down a leather bag of bones upon the big table, with poor Elsie looking on in horror, for they were as mucky as he, and crumbs of drying peat and bone were already scattering across her newly-swept floor.
‘What is it, seanair?’ I asked, for I knew he liked it when I used that word, ‘grandfather’, although I knew no other words of the old language.
‘A werewolf!’ said he with a note of triumph, and out of the bag came the head, rolling onto the table and falling upright to look at me, so theatrical it seemed the old man must have practiced the move for a while before he came in. The eyes were empty and the teeth fallen away, but it was a wolf’s skull clear enough, although it seemed to me that the rest of the pile was nothing but the skeleton of a normal man.
‘Oh, Lord preserve us, and get the dirty beast from here!’ said Elsie, frowning at him as best she could, but I do not recall him ever having flinched at her scolding before, and this was not to be the first time. She spluttered and fussed for a moment before walking out the way I had come in, taking her morning tea beside the outhouses, instead of in her chair by the kitchen fire.
Now my grandfather got to sorting the bones, with me watching on in silence, and within half an hour the creature’s form lay stretched out complete on the table; he was a rangy fellow who would have stood almost as tall as the Reverend himself, with the angular canine head now in position on top of the spine and looking very natural there, made of the same sort of bone, and about the same age.
But of course, I thought that it must be impossible, and I still recalled that on my first summer my grandfather had fooled me with a wild story about magic eggs. Ever since, I had been on the receiving end of many long lectures about the dangers of superstition – and the butt of many jokes about bad eggs for my troubles.
‘Grandfather, this joke is a very good one,’ I said, smiling. ‘But what are we going to do, now it is done?’
‘This is no joke, Charlie Warren. It’s a werewolf’s body. This part of Lewis used to be overrun with them, and satyrs and other animal-men, although no-one now cares to admit it.’
‘Grandfather, I’m not twelve any more. I’m nearly a man now. You’ve found a wolf’s skull and buried together with a body in the cemetery, then dug it up again. That’s all.’
‘Well, you can tell that to the two girls up at Dibadale, who saw a live one just yesterday. I’m sure they’ll be pleased to know that the young boy – the man, I beg your pardon – from Glasgow is calling them a pair of liars.’
‘Grandfather…what are you saying? They saw a wolf-man?’
‘Quite so. From their window, and it was running in the fields behind the house, just as the sun was setting. But of course, obviously they were mistaken, and you would know better, because of all the schooling you have had, and the books that you have read. Is that it?’
‘I’m sorry, seanair,’ I said, for I knew that he would never have kept up the pretence so long, and that he must be serious. ‘I thought it was a joke, like the time you made those empty eggs move about, with the magnet beneath the table.’
‘There is no joke about it, this time,’ he said. ‘And I would never use the body of a dead man in jest, so do not make that suggestion again. Now, come and take a look…’
‘Seanair?’ I interrupted him, a thing he would not normally allow. ‘Where were you yesterday, when the beast was seen?
‘Coming through Dibadale from the Loch at Langavat, as it happens,’ said he. ‘Some peat-cutters found the body, when they were digging in the mouth of the Tairbh. I was called out there to dig him out and bury him properly. Now, enough of your interruptions, and look carefully at his right arm. Don’t be squeamish, he is as dead as can be, and will not harm you.’
I wrinkled up my nose as I approached, although there was no smell but that of the peat. It had preserved the body well, and in some places some of the skin on his arms remained, and lines were visible in the flesh on his right hand, a tattoo or marking of a dirty dark blue, some design of the ancient people. I peered closer – it was a beast, four-footed, looking not very much like a wolf, and very much more like a very dirty hound with an elongated body, whose head had been badly smudged.
‘Is it a wolf?’ said I.
‘Obviously,’ said the venerable bone-digger. ‘Hah! This will fox old Professor Bugge! This could be Leodwulf, himself!’
He often spoke this way, making allusions that were far beyond my ability to comprehend, for I knew he considered me a sponge that would soak up his knowledge like water, without effort or discernment. But on that day I was preoccupied with the frightening appearance of the creature, and also by the notion that one of its living relatives had been seen only a few miles to the north.
‘Seanair?’ I asked. ‘Who is Leodwulf?’
‘Leodwulf, the ugly wolf, young Charlie. The founder of the MacLeod clan, seven hundred years ago! And here’s proof. Well, at least it could be proof. I wonder if there are more bodies in that bog, eh? It would be quite marvellous to see if they all had the same mark.’
‘You mean…we are descended from…him?’
‘Oh…perhaps not him directly, Charlie.’ He must have seen the worried look of a frightened boy creep back upon my face, and he became placatory, after his own fashion. ‘As I said, the history of this island is not what people would have you believe nowadays. The Vikings claimed to accept the true God, but in truth they had Him confused with all sorts of demons from their old country, and they continued to worship the wolf, and the raven too. But to a Christian, the wolf is a symbol of lust and deceit! A man wearing such as symbol on his arm should never have been allowed in a house of God!’
‘So…does this mean you are right?’ I asked. ‘And that Professor Buggy is wrong?’ I found myself often in this situation with my grandfather; he would come at things from so many directions at once that I ended the conversation with no memory of how it had begun, and no idea what he wanted me to say. Then all of a sudden he would realise how his ranting must appear to my boyish eye, and he would relent of his strange questions and theories. He turned very quickly away from the creature’s body, and said:
‘Well, never mind that ignorant old Dane! There was a wolf-clan here, and I can prove it. I’ll keep his arm, and get the rest of him back in the ground tomorrow morning. We’ll bury him outside the old graveyard, and then go fishing. And let’s let that be the end of it, and there will be no breathing a word to your mother, either. Now, it is time for your lunch.’
That’s the post for February…
SJM.
Incidentally there are two Loch Langavats on Lewis (it does just mean Long Lake, after all). I’ve picked the northern one, as it is more remote, and set the action at Tolstadh, the cloest town with a Free Church. The other one is partly in Harris, further south, and is a famous salmon-fishing spot.
Hi. Here’s the main post for January.
The Fachan has always intrigued me, ever since I read about it in James Mackilllop’s Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, which says the following:
“Fachan, fachin. Grotesquely ugly supernatural figure in Scottish gaelic folklore, counterparts of which are known in Irish tradition. The fachan is a variety of the better known athach, while the d’reach is a more particular fachan. The fearsome creature has but one leg from its haunch, one hand protruding from its chest, one eye and rough spiky hair; cf. the Irish Fer Caille; Fomorians. There were no creatures haunting lonely groges and locks that credulous peasants dreaded mor to meet. Sometimes classed as a Giant. See also Bòcan; luideag.”
This beast was one of the things that got me started on the project. I just…like it. There’s all sorts of kooky illustrations up on the net – I might put up a Fachan Gallery at some point, including a link to the charming and silly Catch the Fachan video game from Aberlour distillery. But apart from the bizarre and almost comic appearance of the creature, the really intriguing – and annoying – thing about the Fachan is that there doesn’t seem to be a single representative tale behind it. I’ve already pointed this out in my overview. Such a creature needs to live in a narrative, not in a list.
Anyway, the original source for the creature is the very brief account in J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands vol 3. Campbell is discussing the possible relation of Gaelic lore to Egyptian lore and discusses the Fachan in his description of the god Nesnas. He writes:
THE NESNAS is described as having half a head, half a body, one arm, and one leg, with which it hops with much agility. No such creatures appear in German or Norse tales, but the smith, in the Lay of the Smithy, had one leg and one eye. In a very wild version of No. XXXVIII., got from old MacPhie, the DIREACH GHLINN EITIDH MHICCALAIN, the desert creature of Glen Eiti, of the son of Colin, is thus described:–”With one hand out of his chest, one leg out of his haunch, and one eye out of the front of his face.” He was a giant, and a wood-cutter, and went at a great pace before the Irish king Murdoch MacBrian, who had lost sight of his red-eared hound, and his deer, and Ireland.
In the same story a “FACHAN” is thus described:–”Ugly was the make of the Fachin; there was one hand out of the ridge of his chest, and one tuft out of the top of his head, it were easier to take a mountain from the root than to bend that tuft.”
The Fachan appears listed in every internet list of mythical Celtic creatures that you care to name, owing to its inclusion in Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies and Dictionary of Fairies. From Briggs, all sorts of details about the creature are derived – that it can destroy orchards in a single night, that it can induce heart attacks, and so on – but in terms of a memorate account of anyone actually having seen one, the best on offer is an account of the footrace between Nesnas Mhiccallain and Murachadh Mac Brian.
To me, that account shares more with stories of the hero that proves his worth but defeating and/or taming the ‘Hard Ghillie’ or troublesome servant, and it sheds little light on what a peasant’s encounter with the Fachan on a lonely moor in Scotland might have looked like. Basically, I don’t think the Murachadh Mac Brian tale is a representative account, even though it is the only one around.
Other issues arise from the passage – firstly, that this particular Fachan seems to have human parentage and be quite integrated into human (Irish) society whereas Brigg’s account is of a solitary fairy living in Scotland, leading me to question whether the named “Glen Eiti” and Glen Etive in Argyll are necessarily the same, as everyone seems to have assumed. But that is also for another post. The point here is, I wanted to write a good “memorate style” story about the creature, so it seemed like I was going to have to make one up.
My main inspiration came from this thread over at the CELT-L discussion list, which I participated in for a while in 2006 when I was writing the story. Stiof MacAmhalghaidh, who is something of a guru on that list, pointed out several things to me which were invaluable in completing the story.
Firstly, that the appearance of the Fachan is very similar to that of a druid in the Corriugneacht, which essentially means ‘ crane pose’. Druids would hop about on one leg with one eye closed and one arm extended, wearing a cloak of bird feathers. Stiof suggested that a kind of reverse euhemerization had taken place – that the druids had undergone a transformation into bird-like animal spirits in the minds of the people of Scotland and Ireland.
Here’s Dermot Egan’s sketch picture of the druid Callan from my story Fresh Blood and Feathers, showing something like the Corriugneacht. The reader is asked to imagine his eventual degenertion into the Fachan encountered centuries later on a lonely roadside in Glen Etive…
(c) Dermot Egan 2007
Even better than the Corriugneacht idea was Stiof’s pointer to the story of Suibe Geilt (Wild Sweeney, Sweeney the Mad), a classic Irish poem set down in the 12th century but probably of a much earlier origin, which records the decline into insanity of the priest-king Suibne of Dalriada (in Ulster, rather than Argyll), who goes mad after a defeat and takes to the forests, becoming a strange bird-like creature. He’s in the same tradition as Lailoken / Myrddyn Wyllt (Mad Merlin) who was supposed to have done much the same thing after defeat of his master at the battle of Arfderydd in 573. Certainly, there is a well-known meme in Gaelic literature of the mad druid who transforms into a bird-man, and this is what Stiof suggested that the Fachan may have derived from.
Well, how to fit all that into my story? The best parts of the Suibne poem to me are the ones in which Suibne visits his wife and lover Eorann who has taken up with another man Guaire son of Congal. She wishes to join him in his life in the woods but he deplores the idea and says it is no road for her… The idea of the demented Fachan replaying this scene over and over with any woman he came across occurred to me and I took the story from there. Here’s a sample.
Later that night, sometime in the dark hour just before dawn, Mary awoke screaming, soon waking the rest in a panic. Hastily they rose, and huddled together to comfort the baby, whose howls echoed around the narrow glen. But when that noise subsided, they made out another sound coming from the hill above them, and it froze them all into a silent fear. A harsh and terrible cry was heard, something like a man screaming, but also like the noise of a wild animal. No words could be made out, but there was a pattern to it, as though the thing were calling out, again and again. It went on for several minutes and left them so frightened that all they could do was to sit huddled, praying it would come to a stop, with poor Peg bleating for warmth and comfort.
Suddenly there were some loud crashes on the hill above, as if branches were breaking, and then the noise died down. As the fear subsided, Jackie readied his gun and got the fire going again so he could see about them, while his mother quieted the baby. Mary began to tell them of the dream that had frightened her so, at first she was still much shaken, and her breathing was ragged. But after only a short time, a calm came over her, and her words came slowly, as though part of her were still dreaming.
‘I am in the wilds, in a camp with Jackie, who has gone out hunting. We are about to be married,’ she said.
‘Aye, well, we did that often enough at the time,’ said Jackie, as his mother scowled.
‘I can hear something land upon the roof; it sounds like a bird, but…now I can hear it speaking to me.’ She shivered at the memory.
‘What did it say to you?’ said Jackie as he moved over to comfort her. At this she began trembling, and then all at once became rigid, and she began to speak in a different voice, low and anxious, as though another person were speaking through her.
‘Do you remember, lady, how easy it was for us as we lay together? Things are hard for me now, living the life of a bird, while you lie there sleeping.’
And then Mary, who seemed to be in a trance, made her reply to the man in her dream, up on the roof:
‘Why can you not come down from there and be with me, and be whole again?’
Now Jackie grabbed her and dragged her closer to the fire where he could see her clearly. She had gone deathly pale, and her eyes had taken on a strange dark colour not her own, and would not fix upon his face. ‘Mary, you are awake now! Wake up!’ he cried, but she seemed unable to hear him, and kept up the strange dialogue, speaking again in the man’s voice:
‘What of your lover, the hunter, who is out now looking to provide for you?’
She replied: ‘I would rather sleep with you, in the hollow of a tree, than lie with him in the finest hall in the land.’
At this, Jackie began to shake her fiercely to wake her, but also in anger that some demon was taking her from him as she slept. ‘Mary, for God’s sake, stop it! Mother, get some water!’ But his mother was yelling at him in return: ‘you’ll break her neck, flinging her about like that, leave her be!’ and baby Peg began to cry again, and throughout it all the strange man kept speaking through the voice of his enchanted wife:
‘My path is not for a lady,’ he cried out. ‘It is better for you to love the man that brought you here, than the crazed and famished half-man I have become’.
At that, the howling noise returned. High up on the dark hillside it was, clear and terrible, the voice of a man crying out in wordless madness, to whoever might hear. At that, Mary came out of her trance, screaming just as loud as before, and there was no calming the baby either. ‘Jack, we’ve got to get away from here,’ said his mother, and they gathered up their belongings as quick as they could and stumbled off down the track to Invercharnan by moonlight, to take their chances with the soldiers. At that moment, it appeared a safer course than remaining near whatever it was on the hill above them…
I’m still trying to get this particular story published. E-mail me if you’d like to read it. Steve.
