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viii: Foraging through Folklore
Of Sorrows and Seaweed Ella Leith Girl over there, hùg ò Beside the shore, hùg ò Don’t you pity, hù ri o rò A drowning woman? hùg ò I don’t pity, I don’t pity, hùg ò Little do I care about her, hùg ò A young woman, hù ri o rò Tonight will be in her place, hùg ò A’Bhean Eudach (The Jealous Translated by Bria Mason.
Woman).
This Gaelic song, collected in 1956 from Nan MacKinnon (1903-1982) of Vatersay, is a version of the ballad known as The Cruel Sister. Other well-known versions tell the story of a jealous woman drowning her sister and the sister’s bones subsequently being made into a fiddle or harp that will only play one tune: the tune of the ballad. Conversely, A’Bhean Eudach or Thig am Bàta (The Boat Will Come) as it is also called, is the song sung by the trapped woman herself as she waits to drown. Few narrative details are contained in the song; instead, they belong to the seanchas or traditional knowledge associated with it, which the singer might share before performing. The seanchas tells of the doomed woman being lured onto tidal rocks and abandoned, whether engrossed in collecting seaweed or having fallen asleep. Sometimes it is said that her dying song is so haunting that the murderer cannot help but sing it afterwards, and so incriminates herself. Nan MacKinnon’s seanchas gives an additional evocative detail: the jealous woman braids her sleeping sister’s hair into the seaweed she lies on, leaving her ensnared while the tide draws inexorably in. Linked images of seaweed and hair appear elsewhere, too. In another Gaelic song, Hi ù ò ra hù bhò, a woman mourns her drowned lover and describes his hair being tossed among the
seaweed; in A'Mhaighdeann Bharrach (The Maiden of Barra), a woman laments that her man was entrapped in a mermaid’s seaweed hair. Storyteller Stanley Robertson also tells of the alluring green hair of a mermaid, and the amorous fisherman who pursues her into a tidal cave: So he sees the ain he loves coming closer with the bonnie dark green hair floating in the water, but as she comes closer… she wasnie bonnie. Her hair just looked like seaweed strands and […] her skin was growing thick scales, ken. It mighta looked bonnie in the distance but they were big and thick […] and her teeth were […] three or four inches thick, and she was like a shark and she opened her moo… He barely escapes with his life. This, too, is a recurring theme. If you meet a handsome man or beautiful horse near water, be sure to check for seaweed and sand in his hair or mane— these are indications that he is a water horse (a kelpie, or each uisge) who will drag you under. The Norse draugr is a huge seaweed-covered creature, whose sole purpose is to drown sailors; interestingly, the word draugr literally translates as ghost. It’s unsurprising that death by drowning is a preoccupation of coastal communities, or that seaweed— discarded daily on the shore in tangles resembling slimy ropes or hair, later reclaimed by the incoming tide —is the motif used to illustrate it. Seaweed appears in instances of second sight relating to drowning: Donald John MacIntyre from Argyllshire relates the distress of a man who saw a vision of seaweed on the face of a dancer at a cèilidh; the dancing man drowned three days later. In Shetland, a similar legend is told by James Laurenson of Fetlar.
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