The People of the Sea, page 24
Is the song I sang really a seal song, and did the Isles folk learn it from the seals? I noted it many years ago from an old Uist woman. Did the seals mistake me for one of themselves, and had the phrase I sang a meaning for them, and did they instantly grasp it and answer it?
In their answering phrase the solo seal sang the interval of an ascending sixth, a favourite melodic step with the Isles folk in their tunes. Did the Isles folk borrow this of the seals or the seals of the Isles folk?
That these seals knew the whole of my tune, although I had sung only half of it to them, appeared when later in the same month and year, my friends discovered them singing the second half.
Was singing perhaps the earliest form of human speech, as Hudson, with his ‘Rima’, would suggest, and were the Syrens of Greek story and the Lorelei of the North just such pre-human singers?
The sounds made by the seals are in fact so foreign to the ear, and so elusive, that it would be almost impossible to note them accurately on paper after a single hearing at a distance in the open air. Only by using recording gear can one be certain. Thanks to the skill and endurance of Dr Ludwig Koch, the world’s first and greatest expert on recorded sound, there does exist one record of a Grey Seal singing. By placing his microphone in the caves and on the cliffs and shores of the island of Skomer, he obtained many perfect recordings of the voices of seals at play, in love, in anger, in distress; and during a terrible storm, which wrecked the temporary hut built to protect his gear, he heard through his earphones these notes:
Ludwig Koch’s Seal
* This note rather sharp in pitch.
Francis Collinson transcribed this from Ludwig Koch’s disc and contributed it to the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (see Ethel Baisin’s article in Vol. VI, No. 3).
One cannot get a true idea of the phrase by playing it on the piano. The chanter or the fiddle get nearer to it. Ludwig Koch tells me that he thinks it was sung by a bachelor seal, lonely and disconsolate upon a rock.
Afterword
The grey Atlantic seal is a familiar sight around the shores of Europe’s north-western rim. But though familiar, seals are strange creatures, living partly on land and partly in the sea, ungainly and vulnerable in one element, graceful and agile in the other. Wary of mankind, they keep a watchful eye on human intruders from the safety of the water. Human beings in their turn have long kept a speculative eye on the seals, exploiting them for their skins and the oil from their blubber, yet remaining half in awe of them, sensing something uncanny about the duality of their natural habitat and fascinated by the seals’ apparent interest in the human race.
Over the centuries a substantial body of legends, beliefs, practices and historical anecdotes has developed around man’s relations with the seals. Some of this material has been published in scholarly monographs and journals; more is to be found in the collections of folklore archives in Ireland, Scotland and the Scandinavian countries in particular; more still, though today a diminishing store, is conserved and transmitted through the memories of tradition bearers in the fishing and farming communities of the Irish and Scottish Gaeltachts, the Northern Isles and Norway’s western coast.
The People of the Sea, an exploration of this accumulation of folk traditions, is a truly unique book. On one level it is a masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, the product of a disciplined critical intellect. At other levels, it reflects the author’s singularly imaginative engagement with his subject, and his sympathetic rapport with the men, women and children encountered on his travels in quest of seal legends and traditions.
David Thomson’s curiosity about the seals seems to have been aroused at a very early age through overhearing, and only half understanding, largely frivolous gossip in his grandmother’s drawingroom in Nairn. But it was starkly reinforced a year or two later when, playing truant from a children’s party and wandering along the shore at dusk, he came to a remote salmon fisher’s bothy. Torn between curiosity and fear, since he was trespassing where he had no business to be, he let himself in, and panicked on stumbling across something moving on the bothy floor in the dark. It was something wet but warm; he could hear heavy breathing; suddenly he felt an old man’s hairy head pressing against his bare ankle. He was rescued from his terrors by the return of a Gaelic-speaking fisherman, who violently despatched a seal which had been stunned and left for dead earlier that day by the rest of the bothy crew, and who got the young boy to help him drag the body out to the midden. When this gruesome task was done and the bothy cleaned up, the fisherman brewed mugs of tea and talked about the selchies.
Killing a selchie, he said, was an unlucky thing to do. His grandfather, however, had earned his living in the old days as a seal hunter; and he showed David Thomson the old man’s tobacco pouch made of a seal’s paw, telling him how the hair on the skin would sometimes lie smooth and sometimes stand on end, as if it were still alive. He also told a story about another seal hunter who wounded an old seal which escaped. A stranger came to the seal hunter’s door and carried him off to a land beneath the sea where he was led to the wounded seal. He was asked to heal the wound by drawing its edges together with his hand. On promising never to maim or kill a seal again, he was returned safely to his own door and rewarded with a purse of fairy gold.
This introduction to the folklore of the seals, with all its magical and irrational elements, is recounted in the first chapter of this book. It is a beautifully crafted introduction. Projected through the author’s childhood vision, it assembles a variety of themes which are developed further as the book progresses. I have sometimes wondered whether the legend of the seal-killer and the wounded seal was in point of fact recited in the bothy on that unforgettable night, or whether David Thomson chose to place it there, from some other occasion, when planning the structure of the book. I never dared to ask him, for – literary technique aside – it is an irrelevance. Whether told on that night or anther, it is a tale charged with power and mystery, the product of a culture whose values are not those of modern materialistic societies. Stories of this kind were bound to make a lasting impression on a boy whose mind was already alerted to anomalies and ambiguities in the real world about him.
His family were, to use an old-fashioned term, gentlefolk of the professional classes. His father was an Indian Army officer, invalided out of the service after being devastatingly wounded in the First World War, while his mother was a niece of the distinguished international jurist and sometime Lord Chancellor, Viscount Finlay who, every summer liked to gather his brothers and sisters, and their children and grandchildren, around him at his country house on the outskirts of Nairn. From the age of eleven David Thomson was brought up in his grandmother’s home there (the Tigh nan Rosan of this book, lovingly recreated here and in his preize-winning Nairn in Darkness and Light) after an accident which seriously damaged his eyesight and caused him to be withdrawn from school. In this milieu he became acutely aware of the social constraints which both bound together and separated his family and their servants, and which divided him from the farm workers, tradesmen and their children amongst whom he spent much of his time, helping with the horses and the harvest on a nearby farm and driving the milk cart on its daily round. Genuine friends were of course built across the dividing gulf; but still the gulf remained, separating people whose habits and assumptions were often remarkably different from each other. This was particularly true of the inhabitants of the fisherrow, whom townsfolk and farmers in those days generally thought of as almost an alien race.
Though no doubt Thomson often felt embarrassed, not to say isolated, by these perceptions as an adolescent, the effect on his imaginatiuon and ability to empathise with all sorts and conditions of people were to prove an asset later. Folklorists need sensitive antennae if they are to win the trust, and be admitted to the confidences, of those amongst whom they work; and though sadly all too many of the people who figure in The People of the Sea – fishermen, crofters, ferrymen and folklorists – are, like David Thomson himself, no longer with us, he is remembered affectionately by the survivors and their families as a man who was always keen to hear stories of the seals and, in the words of Tadgh the South Kerry schoolmaster, to gather up the bits he could about them.
There is a question which is continually put to folklorists by those who know little or nothing of folklore: what is the origin of this or that belief or custom? The honest answer is almost invariably ‘I don’t know; nor does anyone else, whatever they may tell you.’ This answer is not helpful to media journalists with two or three vacant inches or minutes to fill, for ideas transmitted orally in preliterate societies cannot be addressed in that way. Yet curiously enough the search for origins is often reflected in oral legends themselves.
One of the most interesting examples is referred to on several occasions, sometimes obliquely, in The People of the Sea – the notion that seals and fairies are somehow connected. A well-known Shetland storyteller, the late Brucie Henderson of mid Yell, had a tale which explained how the trows came to be on the land and the seals in the sea. It was when there was a mutiny in Heaven. There were some angels who sided with the Prince of the Morning that is Satan now; and God gave the order that they were to be cast out of Heaven. Those that fell on the land became trows or fairies, and those that fell into the sea became seals; and that is why if you look carelessly at a seal you might think he was a man. And if you should come across one on your foreshore or near your boat, you shouldn’t touch him, for he is unsanctified; and if you do you will live no time.
The reverberations of this version of the fall from Heaven are beyond number; but the Reverend Robert Kirk in The Secret Common-Wealth also tells us that fairies are unsanctified. There is too a common belief that you can protect yourself from ill luck by grasping cold iron when you encounter a seal or a fairy. And the seal folk, like the fairies, have a special relationship with mankind.
The rich harvest of folklore in this book is fascinating in itself, with its tales of seal maidens and seal views, ancient kings of Ireland and Norway, families who are descended from marriage with seals, melodies learnt from the singing of the seals, and anecdotes about encounters with seals while fishing in the dangerous waters round the Atlantic cliffs and skerries. But readers will be equally fascinated by David Thomson’s vivid recreation of the settings in which this harvest was gathered, of the people who welcomed him to their hearths, of those who gently prompted reminiscences and stories, and of the storytellers’ own thoughts about the things they told him. Belief, degrees of belief and scepticism, even the outright rejection of these strange outdated notions, are sketched in with understanding and humanity. This is a skilfully organised and compellingly evocative book, quite unmatched by any other writer.
‘I never know how to explain my obsession [with the seals],’ he comments when recounting a visit to Shetland in his search for seal legends. No explanation is necessary; but should one be required it is probably to be found in his answer to the Uist girl who, in tears, said the tales were all lies. ‘But,’ he replied, ‘I don’t think of the stories that way – as lies or truth. I like to hear them; that’s all.’
Stewart Sanderson
THE PEOPLE OF THE SEA
David Thomson was born in India of Scottish parents in 1914. Much of his childhood was spent in the Scottish countryside, where his grandparents lived. He went on to study Modern History in Oxford, and joined the BBC in 1943, where he wrote and produced many distinguished radio programmes, including The Irish Storyteller series and a number of documentaries on animal folklore. He died in 1988.
First published in 1954
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1996
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © David Thomson, 1954
Introduction copyright © Seamus Heaney, 2000
Afterword copyright © Stewart Sanderson, 1996
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant
towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 846 1
eISBN 978 1 84767 459 3
Typeset in 10pt Plantin
by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Grangemouth, Stirlingshire
canongate.co.uk
‘Hogg’s enduring masterpiece is a triumph’
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‘A blazingly brilliant writer, a true original’
Robert MacFarlane
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David Thomson, The People of the Sea
