Jen didn’t like the owls. She didn’t like the noise they made. That Jurassic World screech. It was a horrible, greedy sound. A wicked sound. 

“Get some exercise“, meant that Jen should go and wear herself out for an hour while mum had one of her Zoom meetings at her kitchen table office. One hour was ten laps around the block. Fifteen if she really went for it. Cycling around the block had been boring from the start, but after three months it had become really boring.

After a while, Jen realised it didn’t really matter where she went, so long as she was back in sixty minutes. She set herself a challenge to see how much of the local area she could cover. Every road, every side-street, alleyway, and track in the neighbourhood, an hour at a time. Then one day, tyres bumping over gnarled roots on an overgrown track known locally as The Fairy Path, Jen heard the owls. 

Eerie screeches mingled with the squeal of brake-pads as she skidded her bike to a stop. The strange sounds Jen thought she’d heard came again, echoing along the narrow, muddy track. Terrified, she looked all around, searching for the source. Something so white it seemed to glow in the dimness of the tree-lined passage drifted silently over her head. 

The barn owls had made their nest high in the hollow trunk of an ancient elm. Jen stood and watched as the adults took turns flying out, only to return carrying tiny wriggling things with brightly coloured wings. Maybe they were butterflies or dragonflies, maybe they were tiny birds. 

The piercing calls of the owlets, hidden somewhere within the elm never seemed to stop, even as meal after meal arrived. Jen really didn’t like that sound. Not just because it had given her such a shock, but because she felt like there was something wrong about it. Something more than hunger, more than greed. Something wicked, she thought.

She couldn’t remember where she’d read it, but Jen knew that owls coughed up the bones, fur, and feathers of their prey. Pellets, they called them. Searching around the base of the elm, she found them. Half a dozen or so dark, damp looking sausage-shaped things. Jen picked them up in an empty crisp packet, pulling the bag inside out like a dog-walker cleaning up after their pet. 

That evening, mum was chatting on the phone to aunty Anne. Aunty Anne’s husband, uncle Dave, delivered parcels. It turned out that uncle Dave had seen Jen pushing aside brambles round the back of the old boarded-up church, making her way onto the Fairy Path. He’d called out to her from his van, but she hadn’t heard him. Jen was in trouble. Mum was furious. No more rides around the block on her own. She couldn’t be trusted. 

Jen knew she’d done wrong. Knew mum wouldn’t be happy if she found out she’d been going further than she was supposed to. Even so, she was surprised just how upset mum was. It was Jen’s ride along the Fairy Path which seemed to upset her the most. 

Days passed. A week.  Jen’s bike leant untouched against the garden shed. 

Mum was in a meeting in the kitchen, but no hour’s exercise for Jen. She had to occupy herself quietly in the house. That was when she remembered the owl pellets. 

Jen found the old magazine where she’d first read about them. To find out what owls had been eating you needed to soak their pellets in water, then carefully tease them apart. The article included pictures of some of the bones you might find. Tiny delicate jawbones, ribs, and vertebrae of rodents and birds.

What Jen found didn’t match anything in the magazine. Each was no larger than the tip of her finger. The bone – if it was bone – so paper-thin that no sooner had she uncovered one it collapsed in on itself, seeming to melt under the glare of the bathroom light. Skulls. 

Tiny skulls with disproportionately huge sockets, where Jen felt certain great big insect-eyes once sat. She remembered the bright, twitching things she’d seen the owls carrying in their beaks. The insatiable screeching of the hungry owlets. That horrible, wicked sound. 

Jen thought of her ride along the forbidden path.

Then she remembered its name. 

 Many old stories tell of sailors landing on mysterious islands, out in the open sea. There they make their camp, and light their fires. Then the island sinks down fast. The drowned become its food. The island is not an island at all. It is the Zaratan – a monstrous sea turtle.

—

Look, there is Fastitocalon!

An island good to land upon,

Although ’tis rather bare.

Come, leave the sea! And let us run,

Or dance, or lie down in the sun!

See, gulls are sitting there!

Beware!

Gulls do not sink.

There they may sit, or strut and prink:

Their part is to tip the wink,

If anyone should dare

Upon that isle to settle,

Or only for a while to get

Relief from sickness or the wet,

Or maybe boil a kettle. — from the poem “Fastitocalon” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, by J. R. R. Tolkien (1962)

In Tolkien’s poem — set in the history of his Middle Earth, and well known to the Hobbits of the Shire — the gigantic Fastitocalon is the last of the mighty turtle-fish. The beast’s huge size causes sailors out at sea to believe that that it’s shell-back is actually an island. Landing there, they set a fire on the back of the Fastitocalon, but the monster dives beneath the waves and drowns them all. Tolkien based poem is based on much more ancient sources, however. 

The Physiologus is a didactic Christian text written (or compiled) in Greek by an unknown author around the 2nd century CE. The following passage is contained within it:

There is a monster in the sea which in Greek is called aspidochelone, in Latin “asp-turtle”; it is a great whale, that has what appear to be beaches on its hide, like those from the sea-shore. This creature raises its back above the waves of the sea, so that sailors believe that it is just an island, so that when they see it, it appears to them to be a sandy beach such as is common along the sea-shore. Believing it to be an island, they beach their ship alongside it, and disembarking, they plant stakes and tie up the ships. Then, in order to cook a meal after this work, they make fires on the sand as if on land. But when the monster feels the heat of these fires, it immediately submerges into the water, and pulls the ship into the depths of the sea.

Though the aspidochelone appears to be more of a gigantic fish, or whale than a turtle in some tales, the name zaratan has become more clearly identified with the concept of a giant, island-backed turtle in recent years. This may be something of a mistake, however. 

The Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (كتاب الحيوان; “Book of Animals”) is a mediaeval text in which a vast creature with a hard shell-back, covered with fauna so as to resemble an island out at sea, entices sailors to land upon it before diving to drown them. The text identifies this creature as the saratan; the Arabic word for crab.  

The isle of the Gods and Goddesses, of heroes and heroines; a realm beyond time and death, where the bravest and the boldest live out their eternities. 

The winterless Blessed Isles of Ancient Greek mythology, where those heroes who chose to be reincarnated three times, and were judged as pure and true enough to gain entrance to the Elysian Fields all three times, live out the aeons. 

In the traditions of ancient Hawaiʻi, the living Gods Kane and Kanaloa inhabit “an earthly paradise situated in a floating cloudland or other sacred and remote spot where they drink awa and are fed from a garden patch of never-failing growth. Often this land is located upon one of the twelve sacred islands under the control of Kane believed to lie off the Hawaiian group “within easy reach of and having frequent intercourse with it.” These islands are frequently mentioned in ancient chants and stories before the last Paao migration from Tahiti. Today they are called the Lost Islands or Islands Hidden by the Gods.” [1]

The Isle of Avalon, where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged, and where “the fields there have no need of the ploughs of the farmers and all cultivation is lacking except what nature provides. Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass. The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more. There nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws those who come to them from our country“. [2]

The Yolngu of north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia have spoken for countless generations of Baralku – the island of the dead. Barnumbirr, the creator-spirit, originated there and lives there still; rising into the sky to become visible to all as the astral body we call Venus.  

In Russian medieval texts, Буя́н (Buyan) is a mysterious island, appearing only at certain times. The bothers, North, West, and Eastern winds live on its shores, as do the solar Goddesses the Zorya sisters. 

In these mystical isles also lie treasures beyond the grasp of mere mortals, guarded by monsters worse than any nightmare ever dreamed.  

In Буя́н the soul of Koschei the Deathless lies hidden, meaning that he can never be killed in the mortal realm. The magical stone Алатырь (Alatyr) – with its mystic powers of healing – is guarded there by the metal beaked and clawed Gagana bird, and by the dreadful serpent Garafena. 

In Chinese mythology, fucanglong (“treasure dragons“) guard seams of gold and diamonds buried deep beneath the earth, while their European cousins curl their wyrm-bodies around ancient treasure hoards. The hero Beowulf was slain by one of these fire-breathing beasts, all for the theft of a single golden cup. 

Dragurs – supernaturally strong, undead Nose warriors – guard the riches hidden deep within their burial mounds. The many-headed serpent Naga of Indian mythology dwell in a subterranean realm filled with jewels and resplendent palaces, which they defend ferociously. 

Enchanted armour gathers dust, and great, fat spiders weave their webs between the age-dulled blades of swords which long ago spilled the blood of trolls. Battling through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, the Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, and Heroines have earned their place in the sun.  And yet… 

… they grow restless in their retirement. They crave the old days and the old ways, when evil men paid for their evil deeds with their blood. When monsters were slain, and justice prevailed. They sleep a sleep filled with dreams of battle and magic. They await the call to adventures new. 

References

1. https://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/hm/hm08.htm
2. https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/vm/index.htm

Charles Fort Christened them “Fafrotskies” – a contraction of “falls from the skies”. Frogs, coins, spiders, even blood have been recorded raining down for millennia. In Yoro, Honduras, fish fall so regularly that the Festival de Lluvia de Peces is held annually.

—

Back in the mid-twentieth century the American writer and researcher Charles Hoy Fort christened them fafrotskies (a contraction of “falls from the skies”), but accounts of mysterious objects dropping from the heavens have been around since records began. In ancient times such events were often believed to be bad omens; portents of impending disaster or perhaps even signs of the beginning of “The End”.  Nowadays such occurrences tend to be written off as harmless anomalies; falls of sea creatures are readily dismissed as having been thrown into the upper atmosphere by waterspouts, huge sheets of ice are explained as human lavatorial waste ejected from aeroplanes at high altitudes. 

“In August 2000, a shower of sprats, dead but conveniently still fresh, fell from the skies onto the English port of Great Yarmouth just after a thunderstorm. A torrent of live toads pelted a Mexican town in June 1997. And in 2001, 50 tonnes of alien life forms rained down from the clouds over India.” – Hazel Muir, New Scientist #2541 [1] 

The article “When aliens rained over India” appeared in NS on March 2nd 2006. The piece discussed mysterious falls of red rain which occurred in the Indian state of Kerala in 2001. After examining residue left by the precipitation, a physicist named Godfrey Louis concluded that the red particles which coloured the rain could, in fact, be alien microbes carried to Earth by a comet (a sonic boom was heard before the downpour which could have been caused by a meteorite). The scientific community were, naturally, sceptical of Louis’s theories but, subsequent analysis of the particles forced critics to admit that they “look[ed] biological”.

Eventually, it was concluded that the Indian red rain was caused by algae spores, although Godfrey Lewis remained unconvinced. In August 2010 Louis and his collaborators presented a paper at the SPIE astrobiology conference held in San Diego, USA, claiming that the red rain cells develop internal daughter cells and multiply when exposed to extreme temperature of 121 °C in an autoclave for two hours, and that the fluorescent behaviour of the red cells is similar to the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle nebula (a protoplanetary nebula in the Monoceros constellation) [2]. 

Red rains of “blood” have been recorded for millennia; from Homer’s Illiad to the 9th Century CE Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to the gore showers which splattered down upon Germany in an omen of the coming Black Death in the 1300s. Falls of fish seem to be even more common though, even predictable. 

La Lluvia de Peces (the “Rain of Fish“) is said to occur at least once, and sometimes twice, in a year in the small town of Yoro, Honduas. First documented in the 1800s, the fall of fish takes place with such regularity that it has become an annual festival, beginning in 1998. The date of the Festival de Lluvia de Peces is variable, coinciding with the first major rainfall in May or June, which invariably sees the town’s streets covered with fish. [3]

References 

1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925411-100-when-aliens-rained-over-india/ 
2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960 
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lluvia_de_Peces

The selkie fowk (“seal people“) are shapeshifters of Scottish folklore. The merrow (“moruach” – “sea-maid“) of Irish mythology is sometimes also regarded as a seal-woman, as opposed to the more common notion of a mermaid. The 19th-century Scottish Folklorist Walter Traill Dennison insisted in his writings that selkies were distinct from mer-folk, because they could transform from their human form into seals, rather than being a permanent terrestrial/aquatic hybrid. In the old tales, this was often done by physically removing the sealskin like a garment, and leaving it in a hidden place, as in The Legend of Kópakonan, (kópakonan meaning “seal maiden“) as told in the Faroe Islands which lie north-north-west of Scotland, and about halfway between Norway and Iceland. The tale was retold as The Mermaid Wife in George Douglas’ Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales (1901): 

“A story is told of an inhabitant of Unst, who, in walking on the sandy margin of a voe, saw a number of mermen and mermaids dancing by moonlight, and several seal-skins strewed beside them on the ground. At his approach they immediately fled to secure their garbs, and, taking upon themselves the form of seals, plunged immediately into the sea. But as the Shetlander perceived that one skin lay close to his feet, he snatched it up, bore it swiftly away, and placed it in concealment. On returning to the shore he met the fairest damsel that was ever gazed upon by mortal eyes, lamenting the robbery, by which she had become an exile from her submarine friends, and a tenant of the upper world. Vainly she implored the restitution of her property; the man had drunk deeply of love and was inexorable, but he offered her protection beneath his roof as his betrothed spouse. The merlady, perceiving that she must become an inhabitant of the earth, found that she could not do better than accept of the offer.” [1] 

As in most variants of the story, the seal-woman bears the children of her human captor/suitor, but ultimately deserts both him and them when she has an opportunity to return to the sea and the seal-people. 

Folklore is like a conjuring trick sometimes; you desperately want to get to the bottom of it all, but when you do it only leaves you feeling disappointed and wishing you hadn’t. One possible origin of the seal-people legends is depressingly prosaic: In the Scottish folklorist and antiquarian David MacRitchie’s The Testimony of Tradition (1890), the author put forward the theory that the sea-skins of the selkies were exactly what they appeared to be. [2] Scandinavian fisher-folk, clad in seal-skins and paddling seal-skin lined canoes, arriving on the shores of Scotland and Ireland. Steal their boats and their weather-proof gear, and they won’t be able to leave again. Forced to stay, they might become wives and husbands – mothers and fathers – but there will always be that longing to return to their people. To don their seal-skins, and plunge into the waves from which they came. 

References 

1. https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sfft/sfft57.htm 
2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40290/40290-h/40290-h.htm 

Well, here it is. The last of folklore thursday!

I wanted to end on something that tried to draw as much in as possible (without appearing too cluttered) like an idiot I redrew all of those monsters, you won’t be able to tell. I could have just cut and pasted them. But no. I thought redrawing them was sensible. Oh well.

I am smugly pleased with where the last caption has ended up. Treasures, and weapons, fit only for heroes. Yes. Yes, take a bow me and John. We’re the heroes here. 

From a silly little idea, to a full years worth of weekly comic strips. I’m glad we did it. I’m glad we’re doing something new.

Nothing next week, folks. It’ll be the first week off, I think we’ve had. (We’ve come very close to missing a week, but never have done). But we’re ending on three pages of art and comics for you this week, so I hope you feel you’re getting your monies worth.

There’s a fair few nods to previous strips in there, I hope you can spot them all. And I hope you beg my indulgence if I couldn’t get everything in.

Thanks for joining us. See you in a couple of weeks with something new!

And we’re coming to the end, so time to revisit some old friends 😛

The look of the selkies here is a bit of fail on my part (seeing how the sausage is made is what you expect from me, by now, surely?) based on a thing I saw on twitter of a 3d artists approach to doing mermaids – they looked like women covered in silk – merged with it and I like it, I though something similair but silky hair. Instead it looks like a partially drowned chewbacca. Oh well.

Still nice to come back to the Zaratan. If you joined us late, the Zaratan was the very first strip we did as the folklore Thursday. I did it, had so much fun, I coloured it expecting to never colour any more, and here we are, 50+ full colour strips later.

A slightly different angle, and a bit less cartoony than the last time, but it’s nice to see him.

Don’t forget, we’ll be continuing the patreon- but instead of folklore thursday we’ll be doing a page a week on another subject. At least initially, before we come round to a project we’ve been thinking as our follow up, just before the pandemic hit and changed everyone’s plans.

You are, of course, welcome to unsubscribe from the patreon, but I’d really appreciate if you stick round. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the new thing just as much (and maybe more so!) 

Out in the ocean west of Ireland lies Hy-Brasil. Whispered of for centuries, the island was first marked on a map in the C14th. No longer though, for Hy-Brasil is enchanted. Visible only every 7 years. Last sighted in 1872, its next appearance will be in 2026.

—-

On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell,

A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell;

Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest,

And they called it Hy-Brasail, the isle of the blest.

From year unto year on the ocean’s blue rim,

The beautiful spectre showed lovely and dim;

The golden clouds curtained the deep where it lay,

And it looked like an Eden, away, far away. 

— From Hy-Brasil – Isle of the Blest by Gerald Griffin, taken from Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) [1]

In 1325, an Italian-Majorcan cartographer named Angelino Dulcert included the island of “Bracile” off the west coast of Ireland on his latest nautical chart, and in doing so he created the oldest surviving cartographic record of the island of Hy-Brasil. Already spoken of for centuries, the island’s name is thought to derive from the Irish Uí Breasail meaning “descendants of Bresail clan“, who were themselves the descendants of the ancient High Kings of Ireland. The island was often depicted on those early maps as a perfect circle, bisected by a large central river. 

Under the heading Hy-Brasail in Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1898), we find the following information:

“The people of Aran [a group of three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland], with characteristic enthusiasm, fancy, that at certain periods, they see Hy-Brasail, elevated far to the west in their watery horizon. This has been the universal tradition of the ancient Irish, who supposed that a great part of Ireland had been swallowed by the sea, and that the sunken part often rose and was seen hanging in the horizon: such was the popular notion. The Hy-Brasail of the Irish is evidently a part of the Atlantis of Plato.” [2] 

Many sources tell of a Captain John Nisbet having landed on Hy-Brasil in 1674, finding the island populated by strange, huge black rabbits and a lone man who lived in a castle. This account however, is taken from a satirical pamphlet written and distributed by Irish author, playwright and bookseller Richard Head at the time. [3]

It is possible that Old Irish tales of Hy-Brasil stem from folk-memory, and tales passed down over generations. 120 miles (220 km) west of Ireland lies Porcupine Bank – a sea-shoal which, thousands of years ago, would have been visible above the waves. 

REFERENCES

1. https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/fip/fip56.htm
2. https://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/teia/teia24.htm 
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Head