The Nuckelavee is a being much dreaded in the Orkney Isles. A sea demon whose breath blights crops, yet even more terrifying on land. Skinless, veins pulsing with black blood, muscles writhing, some say it rides a horse. Others that the horse-thing is part of it
In her book The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, the renowned Folklorist Katharine Mary Briggs proclaimed the Nuckelavee the nastiest of all the demons of Scotland’s Northern Isles. Living in the sea which surrounds the Isles of Orkney, the Nuckelavee was once often blamed for crop failures (Nuckelavee’s Blight), and animal and human illnesses, all caused by the demon’s foul, and poisonous breath.
This Orcadian Devil’s direct opposition is The Mither O’ the Sea – a life-giving Mother Goddess who bestows the blessings of Spring and of the fruits of Summer upon the islanders. Much more powerful than the Nuckelvee, she generally keeps the demon in check. Sometimes however, the Nuckelvee is able to venture on to land and it is then that the true horror of the creature may be glimpsed.
In 1891, the Orkney Folklorist Walter Traill Dennison tracked down an islander named Tammas who had seen the Nuckelvee in the flesh, and lived to tell the tale. Tammas was, apparently, reluctant to tell his tale to Dennison, but with much encouragement did so in the end.
The lower part of this terrible monster, as seen by Tammie, was like a great horse, with flappers like fins about his legs, with a mouth as wide as a whales, from which came breath like steam from a brewing-kettle. He had but one eye, and that as red as fire.
On him sat, or rather seemed to grow from his back, a huge man with no legs, and arms that reached nearly to the ground. His head was as big as a clue of simmons [straw ropes, a clue of which was generally about three feet in diameter], and this huge head kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it meant to tumble off.
But what to Tammie appeared most horrible of all, was that the monster was skinless; this utter want of skin adding much to the terrific appearance of the creatures naked body.
The whole surface of it showing only red, raw flesh, in which Tammie saw blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching, and contracting, as the monster moved. Tammie went slowly on in mortal terror, his hair on end, a cold sensation like a film of ice between his scalp and his skull, and a cold sweat bursting from every pore.
Tammas eventually escaped the nightmarish creature by crossing over a rivulet running from a nearby loch – the demon, like many folkloric beasts having a strange aversion to flowing fresh water.
Originally it is thought that the horse-thing which the Nuckelvee rode on land may have been a local variation of the Kelpie, Ceffyl Dŵr, or Bäckahäst – water-creatures which appears as horses on land to trick humans into mounting them so that they can drown and eat them. As the tales were told and re-told however, the Nuckelvee and its steed appear to have become permanently fused, resulting in monster much more bizarre and terrifying than before.
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