#laura babbles
A supernatural wife never stays…
I’m always extra fascinated by folklore tropes that show up in a wide variety of cultures, so let’s look at another one: the supernatural/inhuman wife. These are usually stories about a man winning himself a wife that is decidedly not human, either through trickery or courtship. But it never lasts, because these stories all seem to have the same ending, the wife leaves:
Almost all selkie stories, both from Celtic and Nordic tradition, are an example of this. A man steals a selkie’s pelt and thereby binds him to her or leaves her stranded on land and in her desperation persuades her to come back with him and become his wife. After many years and many children she always finds her pelt, however, and as soon as she does she runs off to the sea. In most cases it turns out she has a husband and children in the sea too. In most she keeps leaving presents for her children and in some she still feels affection for her human husband, but she never goes back ashore. There are similar tales about swan-maidens.
An Aboriginal story from the Guugu Yimithirr-speaking people called “The forest spirit and his ten beautiful daughters” tells how the great hunter and warrior Gabul, the Carpet Snake, goes to the mountaintop where the powerful Forest Spirit, lives. He bests him in an unarmed fight, demanding to marry one of his daughters as reward before he will let him go. He takes the most beautiful of the ten daughters home to be his wife but starts worrying when she does not eat or drink. Eventually he takes her to the river and there she promptly turns into a fish and swims upstream back to her father’s mountain, leaving Gabul ashamed and broken-hearted.
There are also stories about fairy wives, most notably two from Wales. One, collected as “The Shepherd of Myddvai”, has a shepherd courts a beautiful maiden that dwells in a lake by bringing her bread. She agrees to go with him if he promises not to strike her three times without cause. Of course he promises this, but he taps her once for dallying to spur her into action, once in confusion when she weeps at a happy wedding, and once in disapproval when she laughs at a sober funeral. She declares their marriage ended and flees back to her lake, only returning once her sons are grown to give them gifts of healing.
In the similar tale “Touched by Iron” a farmer’s son falls in love with a fairy maiden and the promise he must make her father is to never touch her with iron. One day as he helps his wife off her horse, she is touched on the knee by the stirrup of the saddle and vanishes. But with her mother’s help she does get to visit him sometimes afterwards, by standing on a large floating turf on a lake, so it could not be said she had set foot on human earth.In a Chinese story called “The Painter”, from the 9th century bundle Wenqi lu, a learned man buys a screen with a painting of an inhumanly beautiful woman on it. The painter tells him of a ritual that might bring the woman to life and the man manages to call her to him. She steps out of the painting and consents to stay with him, they even have a son together. When the child is two years old, however, the man speaks with a friend of his, who immediately suspects the woman of being a dangerous creature and gives him a celestial weapon to kill her. As soon as he arrives home, his companion sobs that she is a mountain spirit who never asked to be painted by the painter and never asked to be called by him. She steps back into the painting, taking her child with her, leaving the man alone with a beautifully painted screen that now shows both her and the little boy.
In January I followed an online lecture by celticist Dr. Nike Stam, who is working on a 16th century Irish manuscript that is anticlimactically called VLQ7, but that contains two veryexciting pieces of Irish Mythology:
- The only prose version of a Finn MacCool tale that was later called “Finn and the Phantoms”.
This is cool because we only have two manuscript versions of this story: the poetic version from the Book of Leister and this prose version. The beginning seems to be missing (the first page of the text is damaged), but it features Finn and his Fianna get their asses kicked by a household of strange figures who all disappear at sunrise. (There is a note at the end of the story by the scribe, saying: what a wondrous story this is.)
- A version of Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu ’s Feast), which is present in 5 other manuscripts.
Thisis cool because Fled Bricrenn is the first mention of “the beheading game” that the Green Knight plays with Gawain and because this particular version of the text might have an ending that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
This lost ending is primarily what they’re studying this manuscript for at the moment and it’s very tragic:
This manuscript used to have no cover, so the first and last pages got very worn and dirty. Fled Bricrenn is told at the end of the manuscript. It’s a whacky story about how Bricriu Poison Tongue makes fools out of the Lords and Ladies of Ulster by playing pranks and pitting them against each other.
All other known versions of the tale end rather abruptly, but in the 19th century a German scholar looked at this manuscript and made a note that even though the last page was too dirty to read properly, he suspected this version of Fled Bricrenn might actually continue there. (The celticist lamented that 19th century German in cursive is much harder to read than any medieval script.)
No one managed to decipher it however, and when an American scholar came to look at it in the 1990’s someone at the library of Leiden where it is held made the mistake of giving it to “a nun in the country who does these sorts of things”. She tried to washthe last page and thereby also washed away most of the ink, leaving the page clean, but completely illegible.
The researchers hope that they will be able to find remnants of the text using multi-spectral imaging. If all goes well they’ll be trying that this summer and I really really really hope it will turn up something interesting!
A curious anon asked whether there were also stories about mermen among the many stories about mermaids. There are many water creatures in folklore, including male ones. But many of them do not look half-fish, half-human, like we expect from mermaids. A “watery” or “fishy” looking human is actually more common. And it’s actually not uncommon to have fishtailed women and scaly-legged men spoken of as being direct counterparts in folklore. But there are some more mermaid-like mermen to be found.
As far as stories go, what we now think of as classic merfolk, seem to show up most in folklore from the British Isles and Western and Northern European coast. (But if you include deities the Babylonians, Syrians and Greeks definitely join the club.) While female merfolk are by far the most prevalent, here are the mermen I know of:
Icelandic stories speak of a “marbendil”, which is a merman that is only seen when accidentally fished up from the deep. One story describes him as having a big head and long arms, but resembling a seal from the waist down. The other as “a great fish with a mans’ head and body”. They were thought to have some sort of clairvoyance and could tell a person’s fortune, just like their female counterparts. They have homes and family at the bottom of the sea and keep sea-cattle.
On the Shetland Islands there are stories about a whole society of mar-folk that lived in the ocean, who looked fully human while in their homes or when they go ashore, but who traveled through the water by changing their bottom half to a fish tale. They were fond of music, a bit smaller than the average human, and the men in particular of a darker complexion, with dark or reddish hair. They too could tell fortunes. Some of the stories overlap with those about selkies.
In Norway they have a similar divide as the Shetland Islands, with both mermen and mermaids having fishtails, but the men a little darker than the women, with a long black beard and hair. They could foretell the future, but also bring misfortune. A friendly merman might warn fishermen about coming storms.
While the rarely mentioned “merrow-man” from Irish folklore seems to be ugly, but more man than fish, brief mentions of Welsh mermen give them both a fish tail and beautiful long hair. In tales from Cornwall the mention of “merrymen” are equally brief, though sometimes described as dangerous. They seem to exist mostly in reference to the mermaids, as their fathers or husbands.
In both the Netherlands and Germany there are several similar stories about a mermaid that was caught by fishermen, whose ship is immediately followed by a merman. He turns out to be her husband, and begs for her release. When they refuse, he curses their village and foretells that it will be completely destroyed by the sea. Another Dutch story tells of some sailors who accidentally wound a merman with long red hair and beard. They are so shocked to see him that they do not catch him, much to their helmsman’s dismay.
Lastly, there seems to be a pretty complex fishtailed merfolk society in one of the stories from Arabian Nights. And, while beyond Europe creatures that are half-water snake seem much more common than half-fish, one tale attributed to the Teton tribe from what is now Midwestern USA has a woman that flees into a river and becomes a fish from the waist downward.
