PENGUIN CLASSICS
SCOTTISH FOLK AND FAIRY TALES FROM BURNS TO BUCHAN
GORDON JARVIE began his career as an English teacher, later working as a textbook publisher and writer. His recent books include the Bloomsbury Grammar Guide (2nd edn, 2007) and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Out Loud (2007); and with his wife he has written several Scottie Books for children. His recent poetry appears in Poems Mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (2007) and Another Working Monday (2005). He lives near St Andrews, in the East Neuk of Fife.
Scottish Folk
and Fairy Tales
From Burns to Buchan
Selected and edited by
GORDON JARVIE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published as Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales in Puffin Classics 1992
This revised and expanded edition published in Penguin Classics 2008
1
Selection and editorial material copyright © Gordon Jarvie, 1992, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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978-0-14-190020-9
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Further Reading
Note on the Texts
Part One: Magic Lore
The Milk-white Doo
Elizabeth Grierson
The Well o’ the World’s End
Elizabeth Grierson
The Seal Catcher and the Merman
Elizabeth Grierson
The Mermaid
James Hogg
The Laird of Morphie and the Water Kelpie
Elizabeth Grierson
The Laird o’ Co
Elizabeth Grierson
The Brownie o’ Ferne-Den
Elizabeth Grierson
Katherine Crackernuts
Elizabeth Grierson
Tam Lin
Anon.
Thomas the Rhymer
Anon.
Thomas the Rhymer, Son of the Dead Woman
Margaret Fay Shaw
Gold-tree and Silver-tree
Joseph Jacobs
The Magic Walking-stick
John Buchan
Part Two: Tall Tales, Giants, Monsters
The Two Shepherds
John Francis Campbell
The Sprightly Tailor
Joseph Jacobs
The Lonely Giant
Alasdair MacLean
The Man in the Boat
Betsy Whyte
Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm
Elizabeth Grierson
Part Three: Wanchancy Apparitions, Second Sight, Witches
Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale
Robert Burns
Adam Bell
James Hogg
The Grey Wolf
George MacDonald
Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik
Robert Louis Stevenson
Through the Veil
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Part Four: A Classic Victorian Fairy Tale
The Gold of Fairnilee
Andrew Lang
Part Five: Letting Go?
The Kelpie
Violet Jacob
The Rowan
Violet Jacob
The Man in the Lochan
Eona MacNicol
Part Six: Envoy
Why Everyone Should Be Able To Tell a Story
John Lorne Campbell
The Tail
John Francis Campbell
Notes on the Authors
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce copyright material: A. P. Watt Ltd for the story ‘The Magic Walking-Stick’, by John Buchan; the late John Lorne Campbell of Canna for ‘Why Everyone Should Be Able To Tell a Story’, from his Stories from South Uist (1961); two poems, ‘The Kelpie’ and ‘The Rowan’, by Violet Jacob, from Voices from Their Ain Countrie: The Poems of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob (2006, ed. K. Gordon), reprinted by permission of Malcolm Hutton; David Higham Associates for the story ‘The Lonely Giant’, by Alasdair MacLean, from The Noel Streatfeild Summer Holiday Book (1973); Birlinn Ltd for the story ‘Thomas the Rhymer, Son of the Dead Woman’, by Margaret Fay Shaw, from her Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955); the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh for the story ‘The Man in the Boat’, by Betsy Whyte, reprinted by permission. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of works published in this book. If any material has been included without appropriate acknowledgement, the publishers will be glad to make amendment in future editions.
I should like to thank Judy Moir for practical help in kick-starting the revision of this project; Jane Robertson for a meticulous editorial eye; and staff at the National Library of Scotland for providing all the professional support with sources that one could possibly expect, help that was as resolute and apposite for the 2008 edition as for the 1992 original.
Introduction
Do you believe in fairies?… If you believe, clap your hands.
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
In Scotland as elsewhere, fairy tales are part of a rich and wide-ranging folk tapestry. And as the countryman Barnaby said long ago (in James Hogg’s story ‘The Wool-Gatherer’), ‘Ye had need to tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions! Ye may as well dispute the Gospel of St Matthew.’ The Scottish folk tapestry covers a multitude: fairy lore sits alongside stories of the ‘Otherworld’ and the Celtic sidhe, of seers and second sight, of witchcraft, black and white, of cures, omens and taboos, of clan lore, myths and legends from Scottish history. Even geography provides Scots with a wide scatter of fairy names such as the Fairy Bridge in Skye (by Dunvegan, with its Fairy Flag), Schiehallion (‘the fairy hill of the Caledonians’), Ben Hee and Ben Tee (‘fairy hill’, from Beinn Shìth and Beinn an t-Sithein), Mullach Sithidh
(‘fairy summit’) and Stob an Fhir-bhogha (peak of the Fir-Bolgs, one of the mythical races of Irish fairies).
This anthology tries to reflect some of this background, and includes stories – and poems – based on the work of those indefatigable collectors of folk tales: Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Chambers in Edinburgh and the Borders, Robert Burns in the west, and J. F. Campbell in the Gaelic-speaking part of the West Highlands and the Hebrides. Also included are stories by some great Victorian and twentieth-century writers, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Andrew Lang and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
We have to remember that as late as the seventeenth century in Scotland the Brahan Seer (Kenneth MacKenzie) was prophesying the building of the Caledonian Canal and the coming of the railways, and foretelling how the hill of Tomnahurich (also called Tom-na-Sitheichean, or the Fairies’ Hill) would end up under lock and key with the spirits of the fairies chained within: in 1859 it was duly laid out as the town cemetery of Inverness. And right up to that period, long after the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment, instances of ghosts, ‘visions’ and second sight were widespread in Scotland, often involving deaths, marriages, boats and journeys, battles, drownings and other calamities.
It is also useful to remember that the burning of the last ‘witch’ in Scotland took place at Dornoch as late as 1722, less than seventy years before Robert Burns wrote his poem about Tam o’ Shanter. Epilepsy, miscarriages, suicides and all sorts of misfortunes were widely attributed to witchcraft. The notion that a witch couldn’t pass across a running stream was widespread; Tam o’ Shanter was familiar with this folklore, which was why he rode pell-mell for the comparative safety of the Brig o’ Doon. Once over the river, he knew he’d be safe from the witches…
We need to recall, too, examples of cures, omens, auguries and taboos. Violet Jacob’s twentieth-century poem ‘The Rowan’ highlights the still-common view that a rowan tree had certain protective powers in warding off misfortune and evil spirits, while other plants possessed different properties. There was also a widely held belief in the healing powers of certain wells, whether in the matter of overcoming infertility in women, or curing consumption, or overcoming deafness. A spring near Ayr was said to have cured Robert Bruce of his leprosy. There were firm views about the auspiciousness (or otherwise) of undertaking important projects on certain days of the week. Quarter Days were particularly lucky, for example.
All these notions remain a part of the dualchas (culture), especially in rural areas, even if less pervasively than in the past. The following anecdote illustrates this. A friend, who had moved to Skye in the 1980s and was in the process of making his cottage habitable, proposed to cut down a rowan tree that threatened to block the light beside the front door. He happened to mention the matter in conversation with the late Sorley Maclean (1911–96), a distinguished poet and one-time headmaster of Plockton High School, a man who had seen active war service in North Africa and Europe. Sorley strongly advised against the removal of the rowan. When my friend professed scepticism on the matter, Sorley (who hadn’t visited the house) asked on which side of the house the door was located. My friend thought for a minute, and then replied, ‘The north side.’ Sorley then shook his head and said, ‘Especially do not remove a rowan tree on the north side of the house.’ The tree still stands, a sain (or form of protection) against ill: a symbol of the culture and wisdom of the North-West Highlands that has not been eroded by modern life.
Part Five of this collection is called ‘Letting Go?’ and comprises three more recent texts that are not fairy tales in the traditional sense, but which successfully continue to feed off the spirit and atmosphere of such tales. Violet Jacob has already been referred to. Many of her poems, including the two printed in this collection (‘The Kelpie’ and ‘The Rowan’), famously achieve a spooky atmosphere of part-Christian, part-supernatural fear of the unseen that once kept youngsters running scared of the dark shadowlands and the world ‘beyond’. Assisted by references to kelpies and rowan trees, the story called ‘The Man in the Lochan’ achieves a similar frisson. These texts remind us that, living as we all now do – theoretically – in an age of reason and rationality, we remain susceptible to the world ‘beyond’, and are still engrossed enough to write and read recent stories and poems about it. Many other good writers have continued to mine this seam: Helen Cruickshank, Marion Angus, Betsy Whyte, Robert Rendall, Peter Ratter and Stanley Robertson among them.
Joseph Jacobs once estimated that there were more than 2,000 Scottish folk tales – a substantial corpus. And of course they also had countless local variants, so this anthology barely reveals the tip of a large iceberg. But it tries to convey within a single collection a hint of the literature’s variety and vitality.
STORY ATTRIBUTIONS
The stories listed in this book by ‘J. F. Campbell’, by ‘Elizabeth Grierson’ or by ‘Joseph Jacobs’ are not original to those writers. It is in the nature of folk tales and the oral tradition that many versions of a story exist. So, for example, Miss Grierson’s version of ‘The Milk-white Doo’ is based on that recorded by Robert Chambers (in his The Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1826, with numerous reprints). Her ‘Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm’ is probably based on a similar story recorded by W. Traill Dennison in Scottish Antiquary, vol. V (1891). Her source for ‘The Well o’ the World’s End’ is J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–62), with other sources including poems by John Leyden (1771–1811) and James Hogg (1770–1835), as well as Victorian and Edwardian texts from The Folklore Journal. The ancestry of James Hogg’s poem ‘The Mermaid’ may well be related to J. F. Campbell’s ‘The Sea Maiden’, orally collected by the latter in the course of his fieldwork.
Similarly, the text that here appears under the name of Margaret Fay Shaw (‘Thomas the Rhymer, Son of the Dead Woman’) is, as she tells us, her English translation of a Gaelic tale taken down by her husband John Lorne Campbell in November 1935, and published by him in a booklet called Sia Sgialachdan (Six Stories) in 1938. His oral source was the story-teller Seonaidh Campbell, of Glendale in South Uist, who in turn probably had the story from another oral source. And bearing in mind that it was a story about Thomas the Rhymer, it might well have gone back a very long way. Many if not most oral stories have come down to us in this manner.
Part of the aim of writers like Jacobs or Grierson was to popularize the writings of earlier collectors like J. F. Campbell. Sometimes, in the interests of authenticity, the original collectors’ texts tended to be long and turgid and over-repetitive, and in the print medium this was a factor that limited their popularity: the defence of the collectors was that they were writing down stories or poems as told to them or as they heard them. By shortening, simplifying and occasionally ‘anglifying’, later editors like Jacobs and Grierson were able to widen the popularity of the oral folk literature once it had become available in print. And it has to be added that, ever since Scott’s Minstrelsy and probably earlier, efforts were made to anglicize stories in order to render them accessible to readers furth of, or beyond, Scotland.
As well as this tradition of oral folk tales in Gaelic and English, Scotland also had a long-standing anonymous ballad tradition dealing with aspects of the supernatural: ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ are among the oldest of these works, dating back to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. They are included here in versions collected respectively by Robert Burns (1796) and Sir Walter Scott (1802–3).
Literary, written texts represent the other end of the spectrum or tapestry of Scottish fairy tales, some of them in verse and some in prose. Many readers would identify Robert Burns’s memorable poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ as the keystone of that bridge into the corpus. Based on but transforming a local Ayrshire folk tale, this poem is one of many original texts, and Scottish literature is fortunate that so many of its great writers have contributed new material to the genre: as well as Burns, original texts by Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg, Arthur Conan Doy
le, John Buchan, Andrew Lang and others are included here.
In this context it is a real pleasure to reprint Andrew Lang’s story ‘The Gold of Fairnilee’, which has been described – rightly, as it seems to me – as one of the finest of all the Victorian fairy tales. It is interesting to note the entirely realistic historical background to this story – the horrors of a war on your own doorstep – whose action was triggered off by the battle of Flodden in 1513. Watch out in this magic narrative for the ingenious explanation of Tam Hislop’s seven-year disappearance on the eve of the battle, not to Fairyland at all (as Hislop told his neighbours) but a simple deserter hiding out at Perth, well away from the perils of front-line Border warfare. Similarly, note how the action in James Hogg’s story ‘Adam Bell’ commences with the disappearance of the main character ‘on the very day that Prince Charles Edward Stewart defeated General Hawley on Falkirk Muir’ in that other momentous year of 1745. Tales of the supernatural may well flourish best in periods of civil strife, of which Scotland once had its fair share. But I’m sure that if I had lived at the time of Flodden, I too might have been tempted to do a seven-year disappearing trick rather than get dragged into some suicidal war.
Further Reading
BACKGROUND
Bennett, M., Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992).
Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 12 vols (London: Macmillan, 1890–1915).
Kirk, R., The Secret Common-Wealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691, reprinted London: David Nutt, 1893).
Mackenzie, A., The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1899).
Mackillop, J., Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) Page 1