By the jewel-blue waters of Orkney, the mermaid combs her golden hair and casually adjusts her shimmering . . . skirt.

 

North of Scotland lie the windswept islands of Orkney. Low and treeless, they are rich with verdant fields, prehistoric ruins, and unique cultural traditions more closely aligned to Norway than Scotland. Born in 1825 on the island of Sanday, Walter Traill Dennison grew up listening to old stories told around the hearth. He devoted his life to collecting Orkney folktales, which even in the mid-1800s were rapidly passing out of living memory. Many stories concerned the Fin folk, sorcerers who looked human but lived in cities under the sea. And the daughters of the Fin folk were mermaids.

 

Fin folk enjoyed music, singing, dancing, and storytelling. They lived in Finfolkaheem, a glorious underwater city made of crystal with a phosphorescent glow. In Orkney Folklore and Sea Legends, a collection of essays that were originally published in the 1890s, Dennison relates the experience of one Arthur Dearness who was abducted by a mermaid while he was gathering limpets for bait. Auga, as the mermaid was named, took him to her magnificent palace under the sea, where they dressed in fine silks, wore the shimmering dust of ground pearls on their feet, and feasted on all kinds of fish and meats from the sea. The only vegetable was seaweed cooked in oil or seal fat, and red wine ran freely.

 

Auga was unbearably beautiful and Arthur, despite having a fiancée at home, fell in love and agreed to marry her.  The marriage rite consisted of two rituals. First, Arthur and Auga each had to eat half of an emmer goose, and the bones were counted to make certain both had eaten their full share. Then they each drank half of a large horn of wine. Fortunately for Arthur, a black cat ate a few morsels of his part of the goose and spilled some of his wine. When they retired to the marriage bed, the cat turned into an eel and repeatedly bit Arthur when he tried to touch his mermaid bride. Nonetheless, Arthur lived happily with Auga, enjoying days of hunting on seahorses accompanied by seals and otters that swam alongside like dogs, and evenings embracing his lovely wife.

 

Back on land, Arthur’s abandoned human fiancée sought the help of her aunt, who was both wise and skilled. The aunt, it turns out, had sent the cat to retrieve Arthur from the sea. One night as Arthur was caressing Auga, the cat grabbed Arthur’s finger and, with it, drew the sign of a cross on her forehead. She shrieked so loudly that Arthur passed out. The next thing he knew, he was waking up on the beach at the feet of the aunt, who took him home to his fiancée. They married and lived a happy life. From then on, it was said that Auga often sang most mournfully on the rocks near that beach.

 

According to another story, the first mermaid had neither tail, nor skirt. It was said that many ages ago, a great queen—it may even have been Eve herself—saw the most beautiful woman in the world sitting by the water, singing and combing her hair. The queen was astounded by the woman’s beauty, but dismayed by her nudity, so she sent the woman a dress. The woman refused to wear it, singing:

 

“I am queen of the sea, and Mermaid’s my name.

To show my fair body I do not think a shame.

No clothes defile my skin, no dress will I wear,

But the splendid locks of my bonnie, bonnie hair.”

 

This infuriated the queen, who encouraged the island women to create a huge ruckus. The women complained and carried on that men ignored them when the mermaid was present, and it was sin to let such a gorgeous thing sit naked, especially when the mermaid’s beauty and the allure of her songs sprang from sorcery. In the unassailable logic of legend, or perhaps envy, the women insisted that the mermaid forever wear a fish’s tail.

 

So the curse was cast, but the men softened it with the condition that the mermaid would be able to return to human form if a mortal man fell in love with her. Ever since, mermaids have sought human husbands.

 

Other tales explain another reason why human husbands were so prized. As a maiden, the mermaid is the most lovely thing on earth. But if she marries one of her own people, a Fin man, she will gradually lose her looks. After seven years of marriage the Fin wife will look like an average woman; after fourteen, she will be ugly; and after twenty-one years of marriage to a Fin man, she will become a hideous hag. On the other hand, if she marries a human, she will remain beautiful. Pretty strong motivation indeed.

Fin men were notorious for their love of “white money”—that is, silver—and Fin wives were expected to do their part to bring it in. When the Fin wife’s looks had totally faded, she moved to land, where she always pretended to have come from another place—Shetland or mainland Scotland—and earned her living as an itinerant beggar, a skilled spinner and knitter, or healer for both men and cattle. After gaining acceptance from the human community, she began plying her true trade as a sorceress. She often kept a black cat that could assume the form of a fish and deliver messages to the Fin folk in their underwater home. The Fin husband periodically visited his wife on land to collect her earnings, and was known to beat her if she came up short. Some beatings were so severe, the Fin wife would be confined to her bed for several days.

 

So about that shimmering skirt we saw in the beginning. It was said that Fin folk appeared human in Finfolkaheem and on land, but there was disagreement about the mermaid. In an article published in 1892 , Dennison described witnessing a “stiff argument” between some of his old informants. The men held “that her tail was an integral part of her body, while the women declared this tail to be a skirt, fastened at the mermaid's waist, and forming, when its wearer was on land, a beautiful petticoat embroidered with silver and gold; when the mermaid was in the sea her petticoat was gathered together and shut up at its lower end, at once concealing the mermaid's feet and forming what foolish men called a tail.”

 

In nearby Shetland, some said that the Fin folk had a fishlike garment that wrapped around them and enabled them to travel in the water. At home and on land, they simply took it off. Nonetheless, the skirt appeared to have its own power. When Arthur Dearness was abducted by Auga, for example, she took him far over the sea in a small boat. He could see her feet on the bottom of the boat while her long skirt hung into the water and steered.

 

Another tale is of Johnnie Croy, a brave Orkney man who came upon a beautiful mermaid as she sang and combed her golden hair. She was naked above the waist, and wore a glittering silver skirt that wrapped around her feet and looked like a tail. Smitten with love, he sneaked up and kissed her. She unfurled her skirt and ran to the sea, but dropped her comb. Johnnie grabbed the comb and refused to give it back. His boldness won her heart and, after much arguing back and forth, they struck a deal. She would marry him and they would live on land for seven years, then move to her home under the sea. Johnny was so much in love that he agreed. She made a fine wife and they lived happily. At the end of seven years, they packed up their seven children and prepared to move. On the last night, Johnnie’s mother branded the youngest babe on his backside with the sign of the cross. Come morning, his mermaid mother couldn’t lift him no matter how hard she tried, and weeping, she left him there as her family sailed away.

 

Dennison wrote that he had “heard a hundred times more about mermaids from the lips of Orkney peasants than I ever saw in books.” Indeed, Orkney folklore is rich with its own legends from the sea, including the unique mermaid and her skirt.

 

Sources

Benwell, Gwen and Arthur Waugh. Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and her Kin. New York: Citadel Press, 1965.

Dennison, Walter Traill. Orkney Folklore and Sea Legends. Kirkwall: The Orkney Press, 1995.

Marwick, Ernest W. The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000.

Muir, Tom. The Mermaid Bride and other Orkney Folk Tales.  Kirkwall: The Orcadian Limited, 1998.

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