Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan

by Gordon Jarvie

  Some people regard the Loch Ness Monster as a giant form of kelpie. However that may be, the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford University Press, 1998) defines a kelpie as

  … a fairy water-creature of Scottish folklore, initially thought to inhabit lonely, fast-moving streams and later any body of water. Usually thought to be a horse, sometimes human, the kelpie is most often described as at least mischievous and more likely malevolent. The creature entices travellers on to its back and then rushes into deep pools to drown them. His tail strikes the water in thunder and he disappears in a flash of lightning. In human form, the kelpie is a rough, shaggy man who leaps behind a solitary rider, gripping and crushing him.

  Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916)

  Jacobs was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, travelling to Britain in 1873 to study at St John’s College, Cambridge. He later spent a postgraduate year in Germany and then made a home with his wife Georgina Horne in north London, where he became prominent as a prolific writer, intellectual and polymath. He had three children, and it may have been their advent in his life that directed his scrupulous scholarly attention into the field of folklore and fairy tales. He became editor of Folklore Magazine and compiled and wrote popular editions of Aesop, as well as English and Indian fairy tales; while his illustrated and user-friendly annotated Celtic Fairy Tales (1892) and More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894) have been almost continuously in print since their first appearance. His skills as an editor of folklore, judiciously topping and tailing stories, and simplifying without altering their sense, were considerable.

  The two stories included in this book are from Celtic Fairy Tales. Jacobs tells us that the Macdonald of Saddell Castle (who features in ‘The Sprightly Tailor’) was a very great man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant of Argyll, an apology was made to him for placing him so far away from the head of the table. ‘Where the Macdonald sits,’ was the proud response, ‘there is the head of the table.’

  In 1900 Jacobs emigrated with his family to New York after making a successful lecture tour in the USA four years earlier. In New York he wrote a scholarly history of the Jewish people, became an editor of the Jewish Encyclopaedia, and later was a professor at the city’s Jewish theological seminary.

  Andrew Lang (1844–1912)

  Son of the town’s sheriff-clerk, Andrew Lang was born in Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders, where he attended Selkirk Grammar School. He went on to St Andrews University and Balliol College, Oxford. But after his studies he decided he wasn’t cut out for the academic life, becoming instead a working journalist, historian, critic and poet in London. He was happy there to be described as ‘an elegant hack’ and is probably best remembered today for his interest in folklore, and for his rainbow of twelve classic fairy-tale collections, colour-coded from The Blue Fairy Book (1889) through red, crimson, green, grey, olive, pink, violet, yellow, rose and orange to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), which all became bestsellers in their day. That some of Lang’s sources seemed a little unscholarly in no way detracted from their popularity. He was a founding member of the Folklore Society in 1878.

  Lang is said to have been the first British author to give serious consideration to the fairy tale as an art form. But his interest in folklore is clearly traceable to his own Border origins and to the earlier – but, in his day, still recent – fieldwork of Sir Walter Scott (who had been sheriff of Selkirk), James Hogg and others in this part of the world. He is thought to have imbibed much of the lore of the Border ballads and stories from his childhood nurse, Nancy. ‘It was worth while to be a boy then in the south of Scotland…’ he wrote. ‘Memory brings vividly back the golden summer evenings by Tweedside, when trout began to plash in the stillness – days so lovely that they sometimes in the end begat a superstitious eerieness. One seemed forsaken in an enchanted world; one might see the two white fairy deer flit by, bringing to us, as to Thomas the Rhymer, the tidings that we must go back to Fairyland.’

  The Gold of Fairnilee (1888) is an original fairy tale carefully grounded in a period of documented history (the Scottish defeat at the battle of Flodden in 1513, and the years following this national disaster). It also has a precise geographical location near the town of Galashiels, less than fifty miles from the English border. But fairy markers run throughout this otherwise historical tale. In chapter 1 we learn that Fairnilee – still a real house – means ‘the field of the fairies’. In chapter 2 we read of the ‘bad omen’: little Randal sees the ghost of his father Sir Hugh on the day of his death at Flodden, fifty miles away. The old nurse who looks after Randal fears he may be ‘fey’ – susceptible to fairies. In chapter 4 we learn that the nurse is herself more than a little fey, much given to stories about elves, fairies, bogles, kelpies and brownies; she is even compared to ‘Whuppity Stoorie, the wicked old witch with the spinning wheel’. Throughout the story there is much discussion of the ‘good folk’ and of local legends pertaining to Fairnilee.

  The story is thus steeped in fairy lore and legend, and later – via a wishing well on St John’s Eve (the feast of Beltain) – the boy Randal is stolen away for seven years into Fairyland by the Queen of the Fairies, just as Tam Lin had been. The story is charmingly told and, like all the best fairy tales, has an entirely satisfactory and happy conclusion.

  Lang wrote only four or five original fairy tales, and The Gold of Fairnilee is by far his best. The others (The Princess Nobody (1884), Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893)) are more light-hearted, more fantastic and more suited for children. Only Fairnilee has something of the steely menace that probably derives from the Border fairy ballads.

  Although he spent most of his very successful writing career in London, Lang returned to St Andrews, his Scottish alma mater, for a period inthe 1890s during which he wrote a history of the town (1895).

  But dearer far the little town,

  The drifting surge, the wintry year,

  The college of the scarlet gown.

  St Andrews by the Northern Sea,

  That is a haunted town to me!

  (from ‘Almae Matres’)

  The best biography is Roger Lancelyn Green’s Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography (1946). Among other things, this quotes Robert Louis Stevenson’s genial send-up of Lang, written shortly after the pair first met in the south of France in 1874. Although they had much in common (sadly, even including poor health), Lang struck the forthright Stevenson as being languid and affected and he didn’t initially take to the older man, as his sketch indicates:

  My name is Andrew Lang,

  Andrew Lang

  That’s my name,

  And criticism and cricket is my game.

  With my eyeglass in my eye,

  Am not I,

  Am I not

  A la-dy da-dy Oxford kind of Scot,

  Am I not?

  George MacDonald (1824–1905)

  MacDonald was the son of an Aberdeenshire farmer, born at Huntly. A graduate of Aberdeen University, he was hostile to Calvinism and in 1850 he became a Congregationalist minister at Arundel in Sussex after studies at Highbury Theological College in London. But he had to give up this work after doctrinal differences with his church, going on to make his living by lecturing and journalism.

  MacDonald wrote poetry and much fantasy fiction, including the novels Phantastes: A Faery Romance for Men and Women (1858) and Lilith (1895); he also wrote the children’s stories At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872). Probably his best-known fairy tale is ‘The Golden Key’, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress allegory published in his Dealings with the Fairies (1867). ‘The Grey Wolf’ was published in his collected Works of Fancy and Imagination, vol.10 (1871). MacDonald was friendly with Lewis Carroll, and his writings were to influence J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

  Non-specific as far as the period in which it is set and its precise location, ‘The Grey Wolf’ occurred once upon a time in stormy weather in an outlying fragment of the Shetland Isles �
�� that is to say, on the very edge of the British Isles. There is no detail to suggest the author had ever been there, and the vagueness of the setting contributes to the spookiness of the tale. The protagonist is a young English student who has become lost. He is rescued from a sea cave and given shelter by a young woman ‘with a smile that bewitched him, revealing the whitest of teeth…’ This is an eerie version of the Red Riding Hood story, where the hungry wolf is female and the potential victim is male.

  Alasdair MacLean (1926–94)

  A crofting son of a crofting line in Ardnamurchan, the most westerly peninsula of the British mainland, Alasdair MacLean left school at fourteen. He worked for a period in the Clyde shipyards, did national service, served in the British and Indian armies, and worked as a lab technician in London and Canada. Later, he attended Edinburgh University as a mature student and worked as a librarian in Fife. Both his parents died in 1973, and after their death he returned to Ardnamurchan where for a while he attempted to continue their crofting tradition.

  MacLean wrote several children’s stories as well as ‘The Lonely Giant’, but perhaps first and foremost he was a poet. His poetry has a sure and unsentimental eye for natural detail, giving it an affinity with the work of Norman MacCaig and Ted Hughes. Like MacCaig, he wrote poetry in English not Scots, famously insisting on being dropped from the paperback edition of The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry (1992): he didn’t like to be labelled in this way, or to be seen as part of somebody else’s canon. His poetry collections are From the Wilderness (1973) and Waking the Dead (1976), and they feed into his most famous book, the autobiographical memoir, Night Falls on Ardnamurchan: Twilight of a Crofting Family (1984), where he interweaves extracts from his father’s diary with his own meditative journal. In it he says, ‘If I have done nothing else in my life that will count when the time for counting comes, I have at least sat on a hillside in Ardnamurchan and looked down on a croft that I had harvested unaided and against considerable odds… And if I felt sad at being the last in a long line I also felt for the first time, truly and confidently, that to be last in a line is still to be part of that line.’

  Eona MacNicol (1910–2002)

  Born Eona Fraser in Inverness, she was raised in the village of Abriachan (just like Ellen, the narrator of ‘The Man in the Lochan’), in the hills above Loch Ness – and we all know what is reputed to live there. So her childhood background was rural and had a Gaelic dimension. She attended Inverness Royal Academy and Edinburgh University, graduating with first-class honours in English. She taught in India for some years, returning to Britain with her husband Roy (also a teacher of English, later a minister) and their children in 1955. Her first novel was Colum of Derry (1954), about the early life of St Columba. There was a sequel, called Lamp in the Night Wind (1965). But it was as a short-story writer that she made her reputation, publishing her stories in Blackwood’s Magazine and The Scots Magazine. Many of her best stories highlight the old vanished culture of the Highlands and some of the semi-mystical, supernatural qualities of life there. In retirement, she lived in Edinburgh.

  Her three books of stories are The Halloween Hero and Other Stories (1969), a Highland collection; The Jail Dancing (1978), an Inverness collection; and A Carver of Coal (1979), set in a modern mining community.

  Note that the start of ‘The Man in the Lochan’ is set in a carefully depicted if slightly idyllic landscape. That kind of realistic detail is often an effective ‘trick’ of a supernatural writer.

  Margaret Fay Shaw (1903–2004)

  Born in Pennsylvania, Margaret Fay Shaw was Scottish by blood and by culture, her great-great-grandfather having settled in Philadelphia in 1782. In her autobiography, From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides (1993), she recalls her happy and stable early childhood in the valley of Glenshaw, Pennsylvania, with its mountain laurel and crayfish, its scent of woodsmoke and apples, and the sleeping-cars rolling past on the railroad to Chicago and the great American West.

  Her father ran an iron foundry, but both parents died when she was young and, already a good pianist, Margaret was sent to boarding school in Helensburgh, Scotland. Here she experienced – and accompanied – the ‘art’ songs of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, derived as they were from Hebridean Gaelic song. Margaret wanted to hear the real thing, and soon did just that on a cycling visit to the Outer Hebrides. She was enchanted by this experience, and in due course went to live there, first of all on South Uist (from 1929 to 1935). Here she started her long, lifetime collection of Gaelic culture, soon moving to Barra, and then in 1938 to Canna.

  On Barra she met John Lorne Campbell (1906–96, see p. 216), a kindred collector of Gaelic song and story. They married in 1935, and bought the Isle of Canna in the Inner Hebrides in 1938. Here they came to settle and, during the course of two very long and productive working lives, they built up a formidable library and archive of Gaelic culture – books, film and sound recordings from South Uist, Barra and Nova Scotia in particular. Margaret’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955) was a major field contribution to this archive.

  The Campbells had no children, and in 1981 they gave Canna and their home, Canna House, into the custody of the National Trust for Scotland, though they continued to live there until their deaths. Along with the St Edward Centre, an old church converted to provide accommodation for visitors to the island, Canna House today is a lantern for Gaelic scholarship in the Hebrides.

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94)

  ‘Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik’ is a gripping stand-alone story within a story; it occurs as an episode in chapter 15 of the novel Catriona (1893), a sequel to one of Stevenson’s most successful and best-loved historical novels of adventure, Kidnapped (1886), set at the time of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. One of the heroes of these novels is David Balfour, and in Catriona he finds himself imprisoned on the Bass Rock. Black Andie, a minor character in the novel, tells the story of his grandfather’s time in charge of the fortress on the Rock. The fort had been used as a prison for Covenanters, persecuted by the authorities for their strong religious beliefs. But the Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth just off North Berwick, was then and remains famous as a nesting place for gannets (Sula bassanis being their Latin name, or ‘solans of the Bass’), the solans of the story; and gannet flesh and eggs once provided much of their diet for the soldiers on the Rock. Reading the story, it is hard to decide about Tod Lapraik: is he a supernatural being? The tale tells us a lot about him – what he looked like, where he lived, what he was like as a person, what he did for a living, what people thought of him, what made him different from others, and what happened to him. But readers are left to make up their own minds about what he was – man or sprite.

  The dangers of collecting young gannets on the end of a rope on a sheer rockface, the dangers of the open sea in bad weather and of isolation from one’s fellows, all contribute to creating the ideal atmosphere of excitement, suspense, anticipation and high tension in this well-crafted supernatural tale. The story’s treatment of the supernatural shows the influence of Hogg, Scott and the ballads, and it stands well alongside some of Stevenson’s other atmospheric masterpieces, such as ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Bottle Imp’, ‘The Body-Snatchers’, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston.

  Stevenson was brought up in Edinburgh, attending the city’s Academy and University. He suffered much from ill-health, and as a boy was regularly sent to recuperate at North Berwick; so he knew the shoreline of East Lothian and its offshore islands very well. Indeed, the nearby island of Fidra is said to have been the model for his first novel, Treasure Island (1881), and he almost certainly also visited the Bass. His father or grandfather had built many of the lighthouses around this coast.

  Betsy Whyte (1919–88)

  Betsy Whyte was born at Blairgowrie into a family of travelling folk, and her classic autobiography The Yellow on the Broom (1979) and its sequel, Red Rowans and Wild Honey (1990), tells with clarity and freshness the story of her
childhood and growing up in this culture, moving around the farms of Perthshire. She gave up the travelling life when she married and had her own family to raise, but she continued to narrate her travellers’ stories at readings and ceilidhs until the end of her life. She was also a regular contributor to Tocher magazine.

  ‘The Man in the Boat’ is a recording of an oral folk tale, as told by Betsy to students at the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh University, in 1981. The idea that everybody should be able to tell a story to help pass an idle hour may seem strange in an age of instant canned entertainment, but it is a very old one that crops up in many world literatures. An older and more traditional version of the same topic is ‘Why Everyone Should Be Able to Tell a Story’, by John Lorne Campbell of Canna, on pp. 209–10 of this collection.

  puddock, frog.

  won, dwell

  gin, if

  gloaming, evening light

  maun, may

  ae, one

  laith, loath

  sic, such

  reive, steal

  hie, speed

  brake, hollow

  opes, opens

  sae, thus, so

  sue, beg

  Or, Ere

  beal, fever

  dander, stroll.

  brownies, spirits who were on the whole friendly and domesticated. They were associated with farms and steadings, and in some areas the householder would leave some food or milk – or even clothes – for them in order to gain their protection.