The Blue Men of the Minch
Welcome to the Monthly Blog for the Celtic Folklore and Fantasy Fiction site. Each month I’ll be giving some information on the creatures that populated the Celtic imagination in previous centuries. The short stories in the fiction series are designed bring these creatures to life. Examples are over in the sidebar. Here, I’ll just be giving basic information about them and some internet links.
This month’s entry is on the Blue Men of the Minch, which happens to be the title story for the first book in the Blue Men, Green Women series.
The Blue Men of the Mich – also called Storm Kelpies – are a race of blue sea-devils thought to live in the waters of the Minch, which runs between the Inner and the Outer Hebrides. In particular they were thought to dwell in the little strait between Lewis and the Shiant (Enchanted) Isles which are an uninhabited group, off shore from Lewis. They were believed to cause shipwrecks in that dangerous stretch of water which is in fact the location of a strong current. There’s links to an old map of the area up here, or check the ever-reliable Multimap for the Ordinance Survey map.
The Blue Men were thought to be interested in poetry and if you could best their leader – Ian Mor – in a poetry competition, or at least answer him in a rhyming couplet, you’d be safe from their aggressions. In my version of the tale I did away with that aspect of the Blue Men, but other accounts focus on it exclusively.
The main source for the Blue Men is Donald Alexander MacKenzie’s classic account in Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend, which, like a great many good things, is up over at sacred-texts.com. The actual account is at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tsm/tsm08.htm. But visit the main site too, and give the guy some money OK?
Most other stuff on the internet is repetitive of that source, with some variations. For instance, the Mysterious Britain page for the Hebrides (www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/scotland/outerhebrides/ouh6.html) suggests that they are a folk memory of marooned Moorish slaves. I rather wish they gave a source to that.
Literature
There is a very unusual entry on the Biblioteca Arcana (itself an unusual site) which links the Blue Men to a Greek myth about the Glaukidai and claims that his ancestors were actually Mermen, after Kerling of Kintail was seduced by a Blue Man in the fourteenth century. Well, can you prove him wrong? He provides several illustrations showing the Fear Gorm (blue men) with fishes tails. This is neither confirmed or contradicted by MacKenzie’s account.
Like my story about the Blue Men, the Biblioteca Arcana plays around with the honorific ‘Gorm’ (The Blue), which was common in the Hebrides in the Middle Ages. In fact the honorific refers to blueness of blood as an attribute of royalty and has nothing to do with the Blue Men myth.
To my knowledge I am the only recent writer have given them a proper literary treatment other than their mention in Danielle Wood’s Alphabet of Light and Dark, published by Allen and Unwin.
Music:
The connections of the Blue Men with music and poetry have inpspired several Celtic musicians. There is an album by Celtic Folk Group Meantime called Blue Men of the Minch. There is also a song called Blue Men Of the Minch by Chris Watson.
Next month: The Water Horse of Raasay
