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Blue Men and Mirrie Dancers

“The fallen angels were driven out of Paradise in three divisions, one became the Fairies on the land, one the Blue Men in the sea, and one the Nimble Men... i.e. the Northern Streamers, or Merry Dancers, in the sky.” These are the words of the Reverend John Gregorson Campbell, from Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in 1900. Campbell was a Free Kirk minister in the isles of Coll and Tiree from 1861 to his death in 1891 – Superstitions is a posthumous p

Winter and Summer "Goddesses"

A look at the relationship between Bride and an Cailleach Bheur, and the origins of their seasonal roles in Scottish myth. Picture credit: John Duncan, "The Coming of Bride". We've already looked at the role of an Cailleach Bheur as a creatrix in modern myth, shaping the mountains with her hammer of frost and dropping the islands from her creel: but we barely touched on her other major role, that of winter goddess. So let's delve into that. As inventive as Donald Alexander

Creation and the Cailleach

How old exactly is the Scottish creation myth? The monkish chroniclers who first recorded so much of the mythology of the Gaelic peoples back in Early Medieval Ireland had nothing to say about the very beginning. That may not seem like a surprise: obviously they believed in the Christian creation myth, and that shaped their writing: but they were happy enough to write about a world in which the old gods were real, and explicitly called gods. And if you compare their work to

Who are you calling a Celt?

I delve into the question of what exactly "Celtic" means. The term "Celtic" is an extremely contentious one. The idea of Celticity has often been politically charged; the word gets bandied around a lot, and used very loosely, with extreme vagueness about whether it should be taken as referring to language, culture, genetics, or a combination of the above; it provokes a lot of fights, often between people who don't seem to realise that they're using different definitions, and

Legends of Caratacos

In which I look at the legacy of the ancient British resistance leader in later folklore, romance, and drama. Content note: child abduction; marital breakdown. We've looked before at the potential relationship between Shakespeare's Cymbeline (c. 1610/11) and the Snow White story. I'd like to dive again into the play's connections to other romances and legends about the Roman invasion of Britain in CE 43. The majority of the play's quasi-historical material comes by way of