Read an Excerpt
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Celtic myths and folklore have always been extremely weird. In Ireland there
is Balor, the Demon King, tyrant leader of the Fomorians. He had one eye,
which could kill you if he opened it and always had to keep that one eye
closed to stop him tripping over all of the dead bodies in his wake. There’s
also the tale of Angelystor, the Welsh spectre who lives under a 3,000-year-
old yew tree and announces the names of those who will soon meet their
doom. The Welsh also have, alongside the Cornish and Bretons, Ankou,
the servant of death and the first child of Adam and Eve who is doomed to
collect the souls of others before he himself can go to the afterlife. The Scots
have the Mester Stoor Worm, a sea serpent who can destroy humans and
animals with its stinking breath. And finally, in the Isle of Man, there is the
Buggane, a massive ogre who couldn’t cross water but sported a large red
mouth and huge tusks.
Many of those myths, told in the oral tradition, were the ancient ances-
tors of the Celtic Revival tradition, where they were rescued and studied and
debated and the concept of Celtic identity became a pulsing, living concept
and the legends, folklore and poetry became forever locked in Celtic DNA.
From there, one would have thought that the languages of the ancient
tribes would have been brought back from the brink and would have flour-
ished and have been a part of everyday culture. Alas, while people may like
to buy stickers and fridge magnets of Celtic crosses, native languages are on
the brink. In 2020 a study concluded that only 10,000 of 50,000 Gaels spoke
Gaelic as an everyday language,*less than 1,000 people speak Cornish,†and
French government policies have given little support to preserving the Breton
tongue—even though there are currently half a million speakers, most of
them are over sixty years of age. In Ireland and Wales the numbers are better,
but it can simply take a few generations of neglect on the behalf of authorities
for those numbers to plummet.
While the languages that form the Celtic traditions may be dying, there
is still a keen interest in the historical study of traditions and folklore.
This volume is a tribute to the many works that have come before it. In
1905, the Celtic Revival was in full swing, with a magazine called the
Celtic Reviewleading the charge, aiming to present a journal which was
‘for the social, religious and literary history not only of the Celtic races
themselves, but also of the many people with whom they came into contact
during the long centuries in which the Celts have influenced so strongly
the Western world’, but it came with the sad understanding that ‘the study
of Celtic literature of the past opens a wide yield of investigation as yet
comparatively untouched’.
But nine years after 1905, there was of course the Great War which culled
many Celtic voices and historians. Traditions that had been given and were
to be passed down to future generations, instantly snuffed out by the cruel
machineries of man, in turn creating their own awful lore. Then the Second
World War compounded an already decimated landscape.
We recover. The stories come back; they always do. Folk tales, myths and
legends are interpreted by different generations in different ways. Sometimes
you can see their influence, other times, maybe only a whisper. And that’s
where research has flourished in the last few decades—with the digitiza-
tion of manuscripts and newspapers and magazines—it has never been a
better time to be a researcher and a book like this is easier to put together
than it was, say, twenty years ago. And there is also the duty to honour
the many ‘locality legends’ books that you can still find in tourist shops
and newsagents to this day. WhileCeltic Weirdis not that kind of book,
I read many of the micro-published Cornish and Scottish legends books,
just to get right in my head what kind of anthology I wanted to do and
how I wanted to go about doing it. The resulting book is a weird hybrid;
stories that are hardwired as they can be into folklore and others that are
distant cousins, but are no less powerful, no less important because they
may have been written by a jobbing author in the 1960s for a popular horror
anthology of the day.
There are also some outsiders hidden within the pages from this book,
stories by non-Celtic authors who were entranced by folklore and myth and
perhaps wanted to make sense of those traditional tales by putting their
own spin on it. The Breton section is the most obvious to point out here,
but all three stories absolutely nail the sense of place and lives lived. The
Scots section also has a very welcome interloper; Robert Aickman, with
his spin on ancient folklore with his masterpiece ‘The Fetch’. It is a con-
ventional and old-fashioned story, but Aickman’s writing turns ‘The Fetch’
into a work that’s deeply uncanny and is one of my personal highlights of
this book. Other tales that have been an honour to include are Katharine
Tynan’s ‘The Death Spancel’, a ‘lost’ work I first came across in 2017 and is
a tale that I really want to see reach a larger audience. It’s also thrilling to
include stories by Nigel Kneale, Edith Wharton and Dorothy K. Haynes,
all authors I read during my teenage horror years and to include them is
also my way of thanking them for the many hours of enjoyment I took
from their words.
It would be remiss of me not to talk about Gaelic and Manx sections
where the writers are all male. With regards to Gaelic literature, women also
transmitted oral stories, but they have yet to come to the fore for a variety of
reasons. Hopefully there will be funding to translate and transcribe stories
in the near future and that anthologies edited by others down the line will
remedy this imbalance. With the Manx tales (apart from the Kneale story the
two others could have been written by females under a pseudonym, but there
is no evidence to suggest it), try as I might I couldn’t find any older supernat-
ural tales written by women. I hope to address this in any future work I do,
and if there are any Manx researchers out there who know of some, please
get in touch.
* gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community, University of the Highlands and Islands.
†https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180412-the-rebirth-of-britains-lost-languages,
accessed August 2022
