Skip to main content

Scottish water mythical presences 1

Here the preliminary results of a web search about Scottish water mythology:

Ashrays (or Water Lovers)These are translucent nocturnal water creatures, both males and females. They live under water and are often mistaken for sea ghosts. The legend says that if they are captured and exposed to sunlight ashrays melt and only a puddle of water remains.
Keywords:
nocturnal
translucent
melting
puddle

Blue men of the MinchThey supernatural sea creatures that are believed were to live in underwater caves in the Minch straight. They are represented as humans with blue skins and are believed to be related to mermen. Legends say that they used to swim alongside passing ships, and attempting to wreck them by conjuring storms and by luring sailors into the water. "If a captain wanted to save his ship he had to finish their rhymes and solve their riddles, and always make sure he got the last word."
Keywords:
blue
skin
rhymes

Statue of the Selkie. By Siegfried Rabanser - Seehundfrau in Mikladalur, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68573408


Selkies Believed to live on the shores of Orkney and Shetland, Selkies are sea lions that can shed their skin and take human form. It was said that "when a female selkie shed her skin and a human captured it, she was forced to become his wife. If she were to ever find her skin again, she would return to sea, leaving her husband to pine and die"
Keywords
sea lions
shed skin
wife
return to sea

Reference for the above:

Popular posts from this blog

Just to get started

Here I am, at the kitchen table drinking my morning coffee and having a go at this reflective journal. An experiment. To test myself and see if keeping a reflective diary can really benefit my work and give a positive input to my practice. Keeping a reflective blog is what I ask my students to do when developing their research projects. So, why not do it myself at the beginning of a new project? I will ask myself the three main questions that I ask my students to ask themselves to become reflective practitioners: Why do I work in the way I do?  How do I develop solutions to creative problems? How does my work relate to other, current activity in my field? Now that the first post is written, it's just a matter of keeping going...

The Forest: A potential theme

In my PhD research, I marginally investigated the topic of the forest as a place of loss. Enchanted, haunted, feared and attractive, the forest has always embodied a wide range of human emotions and feelings. This is what I wrote in my PhD dissertation and that I might use as a starting point for a new project: "...These places [in the forest] are clearly and intentionally connoted as sacred areas which, before you leave behind the realm of the civilization, introduce and warn you that you are entering the archaic realm that preceded the human world, which was in the darkness before the light (Harrison, 1992, p. 17). And it is still there in the common imagination. The forest is the place of initiations, of the moment that irreversibly changes human destiny; it is the site of obscure rites, whose mystery lies concealed thanks to the complicity of the darkness that reigns there; it is, moreover, the space that surrounds the other world, through which passes the path to tha...