A kelpie, or water kelpie (Scottish Gaelic: each-uisge), is a mythical shape-shifting spirit inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. Legends of these shape-shifting water-horses, under various names, spread across the British Isles, appearing in the Northern Isles, Irish folklore, Manx folklore, English folklore, and Welsh folklore folklore. It is usually described as a grey or white horse-like creature, able to adopt human form. Some accounts state that the kelpie retains its hooves when appearing as a human, leading to its association with the Christian idea of Satan as alluded to by Robert Burns in his 1786 poem "Address to the Devil".
Almost every sizeable body of water in Scotland has an associated kelpie story, but the most extensively reported is that of Loch Ness. The kelpie has counterparts across the world, such as the Germanic nixie, the wihwin of Central America and the Australian bunyip. The origins of narratives about the creature are unclear, but the practical purposes of keeping children away from dangerous stretches of water and warning young women to be wary of handsome strangers has been noted in secondary literature.
Kelpies have been portrayed in their various forms in art and literature, including two steel sculptures in Falkirk, The Kelpies, completed in October 2013.
Commentators have disagreed over the kelpie's aquatic habitat. Folklorists who define kelpies as spirits living beside rivers, as distinguished from the Celtic lochside-dwelling water horse ( each-uisge), include 19th-century minister of Tiree John Gregorson Campbell and 20th-century writers Lewis Spence and Katharine Briggs.Briggs, Katharine, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, quoted in This distinction is not universally applied however; Sir Walter Scott for instance claims that the kelpie's range may extend to lochs. Mackillop's dictionary reconciles the discrepancy, stating that the kelpie was "initially thought to inhabit ... streams, and later any body of water." But the distinction should stand, argues one annotator, who suggests that people are led astray when an each uisge in a "common practice of translating" are referred to as kelpies in English accounts, and thus mistakenly attribute loch-dwelling habits to the latter.
Others associate the term kelpie with a wide variety of legendary creatures. Counterparts in some regions of Scotland include the shoopiltee and nuggle of Shetland and the tangie of Orkney; in other parts of the British Islands they include the Welsh ceffyl dŵr and the Manx cabbyl-ushtey. Parallels to the general Germanic neck and the Scandinavian bäckahäst have been observed; Nick Middleton observes that "the kelpie of Scottish folklore is a direct parallel of the sic bäckahästen of". The wihwin of Central America and the Australian bunyip are seen as similar creatures in other parts of the world.
The kelpie is usually described as a powerful and beautiful black horse inhabiting the deep pools of rivers and streams of Scotland, preying on any humans it encounters. One of the water-kelpie's common identifying characteristics is that its hooves are reversed as compared to those of a normal horse, a trait also shared by the nykur of Iceland. An Aberdeenshire variation portrays the kelpie as a horse with a mane of serpents, whereas the resident equine spirit of the River Spey was white and could entice victims onto its back by singing.
The creature's nature was described by Walter Gregor, a folklorist and one of the first members of the Folklore Society, as "useful", "hurtful", or seeking "human companionship"; in some cases, kelpies take their victims into the water, devour them, and throw the entrails to the water's edge. In its equine form the kelpie is able to extend the length of its back to carry many riders together into the depths; a common theme in the tales is of several children clambering onto the creature's back while one remains on the shore. Usually a little boy, he then pets the horse but his hand sticks to its neck. In some variations the lad cuts off his fingers or hand to free himself; he survives but the other children are carried off and drowned, with only some of their entrails being found later. Such a creature said to inhabit Glen Keltney in Perthshire is considered to be a kelpie by 20th-century folklorist Katharine Mary Briggs, but a similar tale also set in Perthshire has an each uisge as the culprit and omits the embellishment of the young boy. The lad does cut his finger off when the event takes place in Thurso, where a water kelpie is identified as the culprit. The same tale set at Sunart in the Highlands gives a specific figure of nine children lost, of whom only the innards of one are recovered. The surviving boy is again saved by cutting off his finger, and the additional information is given that he had a Bible in his pocket. Gregorson Campbell considers the creature responsible to have been a water horse rather than a kelpie, and the tale "obviously a pious fraud to keep children from wandering on Sundays".
Kelpie myths usually describe a solitary creature, but a fairy story recorded by John F. Campbell in Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860) has a different perspective. Entitled Of the Drocht na Vougha or Fuoah, which is given the translation of the bridge of the fairies or kelpies, it features a group of fuath. The spirits had set about constructing a bridge over the Dornoch Firth after becoming tired of travelling across the water in cockleshells. It was a magnificent piece of work resplendent with gold piers and posts, but sank into the water to become a treacherous area of quicksand after a grateful onlooker tried to bless the kelpies for their work. The same story is recorded by Folklore Society member and folklore collector Charlotte Dempster simply as The Kelpie's Bridge (1888) with no mention of Voughas or Fuoah. Quoting the same narrative Jennifer Westwood, author and folklorist, uses the descriptor water kelpies, adding that in her opinion "Kelpies, here and in a few other instances, is used in a loose sense to mean something like 'imps.
Progeny resulting from a mating between a kelpie and a normal horse were impossible to drown, and could be recognised by their shorter than normal ears, a characteristic shared by the mythical water bull or tarbh uisge in Scottish Gaelic, similar to the Manx tarroo ushtey.
A folk tale from Barra tells of a lonely kelpie that transforms itself into a handsome young man to woo a pretty young girl it was determined to take for its wife. But the girl recognises the young man as a kelpie and removes his silver necklace (his bridle) while he sleeps. The kelpie immediately reverts to its equine form, and the girl takes it home to her father's farm, where it is put to work for a year. At the end of that time the girl rides the kelpie to consult a wise man, who tells her to return the silver necklace. The wise man then asks the kelpie, once again transformed into the handsome young man the girl had first met, whether if given the choice it would choose to be a kelpie or a mortal. The kelpie in turn asks the girl whether, if he were a man, she would agree to be his wife. She confirms that she would, after which the kelpie chooses to become a mortal man, and the pair are married.
Traditionally, kelpies in their human form are male. One of the few stories describing the creature in female form is set at Conon House in Ross and Cromarty. It tells of a "tall woman dressed in green", with a "withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl", who overpowered and drowned a man and a boy after she jumped out of a stream.
The arrival of Christianity in Scotland in the 6th century resulted in some folk stories and beliefs being recorded by scribes, usually Christian monks, instead of being perpetuated by oral tradition. Some accounts state that the kelpie retains its hooves even in human form, leading to its association with the Christian notion of Satan, just as with the Greek mythology god Pan. Robert Burns refers to such a Satanic association in his "Address to the Devil" (1786):
Just as with cinematic werewolf, a kelpie can be killed by being shot with a silver bullet, after which it is seen to consist of nothing more than "turf and a soft mass like jelly-fish" according to an account published by Spence. When a blacksmith's family were being frightened by the repeated appearances of a water kelpie at their summer cottage, the blacksmith managed to render it into a "heap of starch, or something like it" by penetrating the spirit's flanks with two sharp iron spears that had been heated in a fire.
A popular and more recent explanation for the Loch Ness monster among believers is that it belongs to a line of long-surviving plesiosauria, but the kelpie myth still survives in children's books such as Mollie Hunter's The Kelpie's Pearls (1966) and Dick King-Smith's The Water Horse (1990).
Historian and Charles Milton Smith has hypothesised that the kelpie myth might originate with the that can form over the surface of Scottish lochs, giving the impression of a living form as they move across the water. Sir Walter Scott alludes to a similar explanation in his epic poem The Lady of the Lake (1810), which contains the lines
in which Scott uses "River Demon" to denote a "kelpy". Scott may also have hinted at an alternative rational explanation by naming a treacherous area of [[quicksand]] "Kelpie's Flow" in his novel ''The Bride of Lammermoor'' (1818).
Victorian artist Thomas Millie Dow sketched the kelpie in 1895 as a melancholy dark-haired maiden balanced on a rock, a common depiction for artists of the period. Other depictions show kelpies as poolside maidens, as in Draper's 1913 oil on canvas. Folklorist Nicola Bown has suggested that painters such as Millie Dow and Draper deliberately ignored earlier accounts of the kelpie and reinvented it by altering its sex and nature.
Two steel sculptures in Falkirk on the Forth and Clyde Canal, named The Kelpies, borrow the name of the mythical creature to associate with the strength and endurance of the horse; designed by sculptor Andy Scott, they were built as monuments to Scotland's horse-powered industrial heritage. Construction was completed in October 2013 and the sculptures were opened for public access from April 2014.
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