The Celtic Mythology Collection 2016

by Brian O'Sullivan

  Everyone has a different story about what went wrong in Hawthorne Close. They say McGroarty skimped on the foundations. They say he was in cahoots with cross-border smugglers and used substandard materials. There were rumours that he was too fond of high living, that he had a drink problem. Some people say the families didn’t pay in full, that they left McGroarty short, that it wasn’t his fault. And one or two muttered about a thorn tree but those people were elderly, rural and always muttering something daft.

  Mythological Context: Fairies

  Ever since I was a kid in West Cork, I’ve been wary of ‘fairies’. Down in Beara, we had an old neighbour called Thady who claimed to see strange lights up on the hill at night. On those nights, he told us, the fairies would come to torment him, causing strange noises up on his roof or knocking on his door after midnight. Thady lived quite far up the road from us, an isolated botharín (little road) that led down to the sea. It was a lonely spot and although there were at least four other houses on that road, all of them were empty and in various states of disrepair. Two were in ruins, two others had been deserted by families who’d died out or moved overseas. It truly was an isolated spot and that isolation did nothing to help him overcome his fear of ‘fairies’.

  Over toward Ballydehobb, I also knew an old woman who claimed her house had been built on an old Sidhe path – a kind of unmapped path where the ‘fairies’ are said to travel. Not far from where she lived, there was an old blackthorn tree that she insisted was their favourite place to gather. There were also several old ráth up and down the coast – what people now often call ‘fairy forts’ – where mothers warned their children not to tread. In fact a ráth is just the ruin of an ancient farming settlement and has nothing to do with ‘fairies’ but removed from their cultural history over the centuries, people had to find some rationale to explain the existence of these substantial old structures. In that regard, the ‘fairies’ fit the bill perfectly.

  As I grew older and became more informed, I learned some odd things about Irish ‘fairies’. I was surprised to find, for example, that the word ‘fairy’ was actually an Anglicization of an old continental European word. Despite what I’d been told at school it wasn’t a direct translation for ‘Na Sidhe’ or the ‘Tuatha Dé Danann’. In fact, ‘the fairies’ bore no meaningful resemblance to those Otherworld figures referred to throughout the ancient Irish manuscripts.

  The first thing you should know is that when you’re referring to creatures of Celtic mythology, it’s probably more correct to avoid the word ‘fairy’ completely. The namby-pamby, flower-hoppers with wings that adorn the Enid-Blyton books of old were never truly part of Celtic mythology. In particular, when talking about Irish/Scottish mythological creatures – essentially the same things – it’s always better to use the Gaelic term ‘sí’ or ‘sith’ (pronounced ‘shee’) or ‘síog’ or – in plural form – ‘Na Sidhe’ or ‘Na síoga’. [The Welsh too had specific terms that corresponded to the English word but as I have no expertise on this topic, I’ve not discussed them here.]

  The word ‘sí’ is derived from an ancient Celtic word ‘síd’ which was the name for the giant mounds that held tumuli or passage graves where some of our far-distant ancestors were buried. This is why Na Sidhe – until the last century or two – were often portrayed as, or confused with, representations of the dead.

  In pre-historic and pre-medieval Ireland, it seems certain that Na Sidhe were usually understood to be a kind of mirror image of humanity. In the oldest manuscripts, they are described as looking like us, speaking like us and, in general, acting like us, displaying all the character traits, both positive and negative, we’d associate with typical human behaviour. The two key aspects that differentiated Na Sidhe from their human counterparts however, were that they (a) lived in the Otherworld and (b) had access to exclusive knowledge and powers.

  In much of the surviving pre-medieval literature, when Na Sidhe interacted with humans they were generally portrayed doing so as equals, if not superiors. They were never, ever, ‘little people’.

  As the Celtic nations were invaded and conquered, their cultural belief systems were also eroded, which disrupted the transfer of traditional knowledge about Na Sidhe/Tuath Dé Danann. This transfer process was further disrupted by events such as the Great Famine in Ireland, the Clearances in Scotland and the exacerbated weakening of Celtic languages as native speakers died or immigrated in great numbers. Oppressed on all sides, over time Na Sidhe also took on an increasingly derivative form, shrinking (metaphorically and descriptively) in the stories they inhabited. Much of the stories with negative connotations associated with them also developed over this period as the Church asserted its position that belief in such entities was unacceptable competition at best, outright evil at worst.

  Ironically, while knowledge of Celtic mythological figures was diminishing in the Celtic nations, reduced expressions of what they’d represented began to flourish in England under a new name: fairies. Distorted versions of the old Celtic mythological figures had been appearing in medieval romances, initially as Otherworldy enemies to the (mostly Christian) protagonists but, in later centuries, taking on a more alluring and less menacing role. In this new, sanitised form, the ‘fairies’ started turning up in literature such as Edmund Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen’, Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and many others. Much later, during the Romantic Period (at its peak from around 1800 to 1850) when older cultural tropes were mined for inspiration purposes, the use of ‘fairies’ became even more popular.

  The famous 1920 Strand Magazine article with the photos of the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ changed the visual portrayal of the earlier mythological creatures forever. From that point on, the word ‘fairies’ came to mean tiny, winged creatures who hid away in nature’s quiet places but who also retained a tantalising whiff of mystery and magic. Following that Strand article, the associated visual imagery became prettier and the ‘fairy’ figures drifted further and further from the mythological sources from which they’d been derived (aided in no small part by the famous ‘flower fairies’ pictures produced by Cicely Mary Barker and others). Over the latter part of the twentieth century, those became the images of ‘fairies’ that most people became familiar with. By then, of course, they were little more than a fantasy fabrication that had very little to do with Celtic mythology and had incorporated elements not only of ‘Ye Olde English folklore’ but of Germanic elves, classical Romano-Greek nymphs and satyrs, a mish-mash of Tolkien imagery and of course Disney’s plastic, sugar-coated Tinkerbell.

  Back in Ireland and Scotland meanwhile, detached from their original interpretation, the Sidhe/ Tuatha Dé Danann were gradually replaced by a diminutive new interpretation (the síoga) created from a merging of the remnants of the original beliefs, the dominant church teachings and the English-based ‘fairy’. As the Gaelic languages were killed off, even the term síoga was increasingly replaced by the English term.

  Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these fairies came to represent an invisible source of mischief and malevolent purpose. In rural areas, they were held responsible for evil happenings and very much embodied the precarious balance of life in isolated agricultural communities. These particular ‘fairies’ stole babies and replaced them with changelings. They tainted the milk and butter and required offerings to appease them. They wrought disaster on individuals who disturbed their infrastructure; their ráth, their paths and their thorn bushes. It was on the coat-tails of this interpretation of ‘fairies’ that I and many of my contemporaries grew up, although by then it had already been irreversibly diminished by the availability of electricity, education and the influences of television.

  Hawthorne Close almost perfectly epitomises the fairy folklore in Ireland and Scotland that most people above the age of thirty to forty will be familiar with. By focussing her story on the physical consequences of crossing the fairies rather than on the fairies themselves, Sighle Meehan gets straight
to the heart of twentieth century ‘fairy’ lore. These ‘fairies’ represented the ‘dangerous unseen’, the things we don’t fully believe but don’t fully disbelieve either. In her story, they remain silent and unseen, off to the side and out of sight. And they’re all the more dangerous for that. Had they been described in full, as in the Ireland and Scotland of the fifties, sixties and seventies when technology and science dragged ‘fairy’ lore into the light of day, their potency would have been extinguished.

  [Additional Note: In more recent times, the interpretation of ‘fairies’ appears to have morphed once more, homogenised in the great ‘melting pot’ of international travel and communication where elements of different cultures are reduced to nonsensical meaning. Over the last two decades, ‘fairies’ have been increasingly restricted to the female gender and transformed to a kind of sexualised, elf-like form (complete with pointed ears, short skirts and a pout). This particular theory can be verified or disproved by merely entering the internet search term ‘fairy image’.].

  Brian O’Sullivan

  A Mainland Mansie Meur

  Sheelagh Russell-Brown

  There’s Orkney tales of spirit babes that haunt the unholy earth where they are buried. Around their graves, white birds fly up just after sunset, and strange lights in the sky are seen at night.

  Except when we have lightning, though. Storm lightning like we have now. Or when I spot a whitemaa [a seagull] that’s lost its path. There’s no such uncanny doings here along the Saint John River, far from the white and empty shores of Sanday. I know the spot where lie our babes is sacred earth, and our babes no unbaptized children. It’s calm and peaceful there and that is why we’re drawn, though on our own, not we two together.

  At times I swear I have a Selkie bride and I a mainland Mansie Meur. Effie’s long saved me from drowning but now she tends her remaining young, jealous and flegged my attentions will put in peril all that’s left. At times she slips from me like the old tale Selkie slipped from Mansie Meur. She’s like the peedie mother jay, dancing and chattering when I’m at my building, luring me away from the nest of chicks hidden in the pines.

  And some days, when my Effie thinks that I’m not noticing, I see her pick some Black-Eyed Susans, some snowdrops and some campions as our wee Janet loved, to carry to their graves by the furthest apple tree. Effie could not bear to have them taken from her and buried in the churchyard, no matter that it was the English church.

  And all about us are the woods. These woods, they smother me. They say to me that they belong, that they were here before I came, before I and all the others came. And will be here long after.

  The Micmac [‘Mi’kmaq: First Nation tribe], they live among them, taking what they need in sap and in bark for their canoes, in branches for their fires, in meat for their suppers. But the Micmac let the forests live and they return the favour. They have their stories too, stories that grow from this, their land.

  As I have mine.

  The trees push back against us here, us who don’t belong. They’d bury us if they could. With our own stories, then, we’ll have back the clean and grassy land of home, the open shore. No more the lichen-crusted stones, the stony soil, the soiled hands — hands now fighting to repel the crowd of trees that o’errun this savage space.

  But some trees I’ve taken out. I must build here a better home, although my heart’s home is Sanday’s shores. And here therefore, I sing my songs and tell my stories. For folks need songs, they need such stories. Without the tales we build and tell, we’ve naught to put our needs and natures to, naught to hold us back from being lost.

  But now the storm has passed us by, the lightning to the south dimming. Yet still we sit in our small shelter aneath the stairs till Effie’s satisfied the danger’s gone. And, so, it’s time for stories.

  Effie’s stories are full of horror, of demon lovers and cut-off hands, like them her father must have heard from a mother raised on Russian steppes. She’s mainland raised, Effie. At home here with the haunted woods where I am not. She has a book of Pushkin that she brought with her upon our marriage, and from it she has read me of his tales and songs. These tales I’d never tell to my own children, no matter that she says Pushkin learned them at his nurse’s knee. What sort of nurse this Russian must have had! Effie gives the children horrors enough with her own flegging about the bats, the lightning, and the poison vapours in the woods.

  Instead, I tell the story of Mansie Meur and the Selkie who never forgot. His name is our own family name – the Orkney Meur, the English Muir – and that always tickles them. When Mansie wants to steal the seal pups from their mother and use their pelts to make a weskit [waistcoat], I make the mother’s beerin’ moan, and the children clap their hands. I tell it them in Norn, the tongue of my forefathers, for it’s a part I do not want for them to lose. And I’ve lost enough already. I tell it here in English though, at least in those words that I know.

  ‘Mansie Meur, he was a limpet gatherer and it was a hard, poor life for him. He had no wife nor children for he could not build a home or feed them. Instead he bent on slippery rocks, and as he picked the limpets up and put them in the basket, their weight it bent a crook’d back still further, He dreamed of living in a fine house like that the rulers once had on his small island. He dreamed of silk and furs instead of rough woollen trews and weskit that held the water.

  One day at work as he was dreaming — a grey and drizzly day, much like every other—he heard a keening beyond the rocks where he was standing and saw a Selkie with sleek black fur and handsome eyes, with lashes fine and long like fairy’s webs — much like your mother’s eyes in fact. And there were tears caught in the corners, for she was giving birth—’

  At this, my Effie gives me a kick and such a look! I know that look. It’s warning me that such stories can birth questions parents daren’t answer yet. But they’ve heard this tale so many times before that I just hurry on. Mayhap some day when they are older, such unwanted questions will follow.

  ‘As Mansie sits and watches from a stone above the ocean, he sees twin baby Selkies appear — perhaps a boy and girl like you two here. And then he has a thought, sudden-like. Baby Selkie coats, so fresh and clean, would make for him a fine weskit and with such riches close at hand who knows but that a fine house might follow. And if he had the mother too? Perhaps a hat to crown his head.

  He makes a grab and takes the kittens that wriggle in his arms then settle in to suckle at his buttons while their poor mother – faster – slips away.

  But then he hears her gurn and cry and looks towards the rocks beyond. The Selkie wife now with her Selkie man. She turns her head and gives poor Mansie such a look. There’s water in the corners of her eyes for she is weeping. And Mansie, he cannot be so cruel to take them babies from their Ma. And so he puts them on the skerry and their mother goes to them and keeps them close.

  So Mansie never did get his fine weskit and kingly hat, but he worked on and one day he was married with babes of his own that he too kept close.’

  With this I steal a look at Effie, bent over her mending so I cannot see the tears in her fine eyes. Her hair is black and sleek like Selkie’s hair, with still no touch of grey. I would that I were more like Mansie Meur and give her back her young ones once again. But still there’s two that we’ve been left, who clap their hands for they know the rest from many tellings.

  ‘One day, young Mansie — now not so young — and bent and burdened with care of his small family, must leave to look for fish along the shore. He stands upon a rock and brings in fish after fish, some for that day’s meal and many more to cure and smoke for winter days ahead.

  But he’s been careless, dreaming still of riches that may come, and soon enough the tide is all about his fishing rock and he cannot reach the land. He looks about but the shore is empty — much like these woods if someone strays from the path.’

  — a little warning’s not to go amiss. We’ve lost too much already, my Selkie bride and I, her mainl
and Mansie.

  ‘A Selkie weskit might keep the cold water from his skin if had one, but naught can stop the water creeping up his body. He tastes its saltiness and coughs it out loudly.’

  And here I cough and loll about to make the babies laugh, for they’ve never tasted the salt sea here, so far away from the ocean’s shore.

  ‘And so he says goodbye to wife and babes, and then, just then — what happens?’

  The children gasp though they have heard this many times.

  Just then he feels a wee tug on his collar and looks around to see the Selkie’s eyes, now filled with tears, not with flegging for her little ones but for the little limpet gatherer who’d not taken them. The Selkie’s coat is grey now, her eyes a little dim, but still she tugs and tugs and soon wee Mansie finds his feet can touch the shingle. And then he looks behind and what do you suppose?

  The wee ones clap their hands again.

  ‘The Selkie returns to Mansie’s flooded stone and brings back to him his fishing creel in her now toothless mouth. ‘And Mansie Meur, he said to himself—’

  The children clap their hands again and shout together, ‘Geud bliss the selkie that deus no’ forget’!’

  I see that Effie wishes the story to be in the Queen’s own English, and I’ve done what she wants, but such a tale needs its own words to tell it, not those of a foreign ruler.