viii Foraging Through Folklore Ella Leith

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 Woman). Translated by Bria Mason.

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.

A man called Daniel Danielson received a ghostly warning: And as he slept he dreamt a dream, he saw a sort of a skeleton looking man with drappered rags with seaweed attached that came to him, said “Dan’l, don’t set the third hail [haul], don’t set the lengths the third hail, for if you do you’ll join me at the bottom o the sea.” Daniel and his captain took the warning seriously and turned shoreward after the second haul, narrowly missing being trapped at sea by the Great Storm of 1832, which killed over 100 people.

A legend from New England makes an even more overt connection between seaweed and the drowned. Two sisters are trapped near Cape Cod after their car breaks down; they seek refuge in an abandoned house. They wake in the middle of the night to the sight of a dripping wet man in a sailor’s costume reaching towards the empty fireplace as though to warm his hands. He vanishes when the sisters challenge him, and in the morning there is a puddle of water and a length of seaweed lying on the hearth. One of the sisters takes it with her. Later, a mechanic tells them that the house belonged to a sailor lost at sea. When they subsequently relate the experience at a dinner party, one of the guests— a marine biologist —asks to see the seaweed; the sister presents it to him. The marine biologist turns pale: the seaweed is a rare type that only grows on drowned corpses.

Seaweed’s negative connotation in these stories does not do justice to the wider role it played in the life of coastal communities. Different types of seaweed have been used for food— whether in the domestic kitchen or as fodder for livestock —as fertiliser, medicine, building and roofing material, and many other things. Pérez-Lloréns and colleagues outline the range of uses across different cultures in their article ‘Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life’, tracing the appearance of seaweed in related folklore and literature. Despite its ubiquity and value, however, they observe fewer celebratory references to seaweed in European folklore than in many East Asian cultures; instead, there is a slight ambivalence towards it, just as there is ambivalence towards the sea itself. The sea is the primary source of sustenance for coastal communities, but it is also unpredictable and dangerous and its depths unknowable. Strange lifeforms, both natural and supernatural, live below the waves; from merpeople to selkies, who are human on land, seals in the sea. There may also be submarine realms, such as Tír na nÓg— the land of youth —where the Irish warrior Oisín spends hundreds of years, only to wither away when he steps again on dry land.

Seaweed belongs to the liminal space between sea and land, wet and dry, death and life. It is both an everyday resource lying in stinking heaps on the shore and, when reanimated by water, an eerily weightless foliage with the power to conceal or ensnare.

References Botkin, B. A. (1965) A Treasury of New England Folklore, Bonanza Books, New York Pérez-Lloréns, J. L.; Mouritsen, O. G.; Rhatigan, P.; Cornish, M. L. & Critchley, A. T. (2020) ‘Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life’, in Journal of Applied Phycology, 32, pp. 3157-3182 Shaw, M. F. (1955 [2014]) Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist, Birlinn, Edinburgh Versions of the songs and legends mentioned above can be found on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches website, the online portal for selected items held in the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive at the University of Edinburgh. Songs and stories quoted from directly are:

Donald John MacIntyre: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecor d/39271

James Laurenson: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecor d/68204

Nan McKinnon: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecor d/72077

Stanley Robertson: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecor d/65439

With thanks to the irrepressible Bria

Mason for sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm about songs and seaweed.

54 Marianne Hazwleood

Arisaema griffithii

Ink Shoots series

Wrack and Tang Amanda Edmiston

Soft sea-fronds of Bladderwrack (Fucus vesiculosus, or Black Tang as it is known in parts of Scotland) are an accessory in so many stories, anointing mysterious transitional creatures, and lost lovers brought back from Davy Jones' locker. Iodine-rich Wracks and Kelps have been a part of our diet for centuries— both directly and through the nourishment they added to our soil and animal fodder. The history of these practices is drenched in poignant dates and community traditions. Their inland sister, the River Wrack, has for centuries been used in ritual— like the New Year gathering from the River Dochart, as it runs through Killin in rural Stirlingshire, to nestle St Fillan's healing stones, which still sit in the mill adjacent to the Falls.

Maybe it's the underwater, half-hidden nature of seaweed that makes it fit so well into legends and magic; into images of fantastical, otherworldly, saline forests, so removed from our everyday life. But, to embark on this month's voyage, I'm going to take you somewhere more prosaic, more recognizable. Glasgow's River Clyde doesn’t immediately conjure up images of seaweed and mermaids. It's thick, grey ribbon of intense, memory-laden water seems more likely to release ghasts of welders walking from the Gorbals to Govan, whisky-woven banter of gallus, fair days spent sailing ‘doon the watter’ on one of Tam Seath’s Ru'glen built Clutha ferries. The Clyde rings with recent journeys into culture and regeneration, with modern architectural wonder, and empty spaces consumed by flats. Memories of many things, but… mermaids? No. As you make your way along the riverside path, from the Titan crane I M A G E

through Partick— past expressways and luxury flats towards Clydeside— folkloric beings don’t immediately rise from its depths. These strands of River Wrack do not appear to hold shapeshifting Each Uisge— disguised as handsome people, distinguishable only by their Black Tang hair —waiting to seduce unwary victims and drag them out to their seaweed clad lairs. We imagine the water-plant flanks of the Kelpie emerging not from this river, that once hummed with industry, but from hilltop loch sides. This is not, at first glance, the home of magical or enchanted beings.

Nonetheless, according to fragments of lore, it was once home to merfolk— or at least, there’s a scale or two of evidence to suggest this, though I have to admit more than those random scales seems hard to find. There is no full traditional story, that I can find, of the Mermaid of the Clyde. All there seems to be, laced through herbal reference books, are those famous words she uttered. There is little back story, no explanation of where she went. When I first found mention of her in the pages of a herbal, she seemed to sing to me; words echoing a lost connection, a thread joining to the shipbuilders of recent times, to the current upsurge in community gardening, to the reflourishing of this ‘dear green place’, if you will. A re-flourishing that clambers up stories like a runner bean, that uses old tales as frames to support upward growth and create nourishment for those that seek it. Her words reward gardeners who look back to old ways of tending the soil, gathering storm-shored Bladderwrack to feed the land, enriching the crops as winter sets in. Old stories spiralling into new, bringing elements together like the

proteins of a bean: these are seeds to cultivate new, healthy ways of being.

The Mermaid is reputed to have said: If they wad drink Nettles in March and eat Muggins in May sae many braw maidens wadna gang to clay. Sure enough, as we meander down this path they are still there— the Nettles and Muggins —their vigorous shoots reclaiming the untended concrete of abandoned industrial acres, minding those of us who admire them of forgotten mermaids. Nettles (Urtica dioica) and Muggins, (or Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris, as it’s more commonly known these days) are both hugely rich in minerals. These are terrific herbs, at the right times of year, to enrich the diet. Mugwort is also a great herb for regulating the menstrual cycle and bringing forth babies when they’re due, which may also be a consideration behind the Mermaid’s words. Nettles take waste and re-mineralize, potentially offering support to adrenals worn down by the stress of this neglected land, the strains of being a neglected person. Their piratical tendencies also make them vital plants for clearing up heavily used and polluted land and then starting to replenish the soil, the perfect partners for the Black Tang.

This all seems interconnected to me; a vital spark needed to keep us, and our land, alive. Plants share their stories. Like the plants, the stories nourish. Their spiralling tendrils connect us to our land. If we neglect this ancient relationship, we become malnourished. The rhythms and energy our minds and bodies need, and our environment requires, become muted, victims of subtly persuasive violence and deprivation. We are not museums. We don’t thrive on calcified stories, nor on fossilized land. We need to flourish; to respect, remember, learn, grow, change organically, adjust ably, inviting and maintaining relevance and positive interaction. And, so, I feel I need to keep re-weaving, mending; story-mending. Retelling, recording, sharing and growing plants, people, folklore, folk-medicine and traditional tales. Like plants, stories need to grow organically, transforming to stay alive. The Mermaid of the Clyde was one of the first stories I ‘mended’; an intriguing snippet of herbal wisdom uttered by a mermaid who, it was claimed, lived in the grey ribbon of Glasgow’s mighty river, before it was dredged for shipbuilding. So, I weave together broken snippets of story, creating new words to encase shards lost, set adrift from their old tales. But she’s not finished yet. She has further to swim. Those Nettles, Mugwort and wonderful Wracks still need to grow...

In the meantime, here she is now— words woven back in— The Mermaid of the Clyde: There was a time, so the Daoine Sìth on the mountains claimed, when the Merrow and their cousins the salmon-tailed Ceasg, lived free of worries in the sea lochs and wintered on the silt-strewn banks of the Clyde. But although their kind could take on the human form and wander amongst the legged ones— and legend had it they felt empathy and kindred fondness for the women and girls —they all too often found the earthbound folk to be aggressive and loud. As the focus of man’s attentions became money and manufacture, the merfolk began to drift to deeper water, ‘til only one Merrow woman remained in the Clyde’s tidal flow. She watched as the dear green place she treasured turned to dirt and greed, ‘til the young women she sought to help heard her sing no more. As industry gained momentum and tenements— back-to-back, dark and damp —covered the meadows; as the shipyards called for the river to be dredged— removing the river Wracks, threatening to hook anchors and restrain hulls; as the banks were clawed and the forests burnt; as the young women of Glasgow began to live foreshortened lives; nowhere could they find the iron-rich greens they needed to bring riches to their bodies. Now only iron-filled yards brought riches to the few.

The Mermaid despaired. Times had changed. This was no longer a world in which she was welcome. Before one last tail-flick took her away from this dark, heat-arced world, she uttered: If they ate Nettles in March and Mugworts in May, not so many good maidens would have gone to the clay. The words floated on the river as the tide washed in and drifted out, as the moon pulled the water away. As soft as the foam itself, and with a flick of her tail, she vanished into the beckoning ocean forests. As we look back, as winter approaches, at the Nettles we gathered in our Dock-covered hands, as we inhale the Mugwort's bitter aroma to remind us of summer ’s end, we may hope she swims well-nourished now— in beds of Bladderwrack midst the briny depths —waiting for a time to return to her river, carrying new stories, just as the Nettles and Mugwort move back to the abandoned shipyards. Maybe next time she sings to us, it will be of the nutritious riches to be found in the Fucus beds she has swum through, of the iodine-rich winter harvest we once turned to in stormy weather. Maybe next time, we will listen.

References Pérez-Lloréns, J.L.; Mouritsen, O.G.; Rhatigan, P. et al. (2020) ‘Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life’, in Journal of Applied Phycology, 32: 3157–3182

Image Rhodius, T. (1760) Illustration from ’Opuscula subseciva: observationes miscellaneas de animalculis et plantis, quibusdam marinis, eorumque ovariis et semnibus continentia’, Jobi Basyeri med doct, Academiae Caesareae. No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.