Beithir

Also Known As: Scottish Gaelic, “serpent” and also “lightning”; also spelled Beither; glossed in the nineteenth-century collections as “great snake” and “large serpent or dragon”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The beithir is the largest and most deadly kind of serpent in Scottish Highland belief, armed with a sting that kills unless the victim reaches water before the beast does.
Role in Mythos: It is the monster a common snake becomes when it is killed carelessly, and the venomous thing that haunts dark caves and mountain corries.
Relation to Humans: Highlanders were told to smash the head of every serpent they killed and carry it far from the body, so that it could not come alive again as a beithir. Anyone stung had to run for the nearest water and get there first, or die of the wound.

Kill the snake, and then keep killing it. That was the rule in the Highlands and Islands, as the Tiree minister John Gregorson Campbell set it down in a book published in 1900. A serpent met on the road had to be killed, because leaving it alive was an omen of evil. Then the head had to be smashed completely and carried well away from the rest of the body. A man who skipped the second part, who wiped his stick on the heather and walked on, had left a job half done. The tail, if any life remained in it, would creep back and join the body. The serpent would live again. And the head would become a beithir.

Campbell gives the creature one line of definition: the largest and most deadly kind of serpent. He adds what it does. It stings, and the sting starts a race. The victim must run for the nearest water, a burn or a loch or the sea itself, because the beithir is already making straight for the same water. If the person gets there first, the wound can be survived. If the serpent wins, the person dies. There was one other cure on offer, and it has the logic of folk medicine everywhere: water in which the head of another serpent has been steeped.

The scene is easy to see, and it is not comfortable. Someone goes down in the bracken with a cry, gets up, and runs downhill through wet grass toward the sound of a stream, not daring to look at what is moving alongside.

Nobody recorded what it looked like. The collectors who wrote the word down gloss it as a great snake, or as a large serpent or dragon, and leave it there. No one mentions wings, legs or fire. What the stories give instead is scale. Campbell tells of the big beast of Scanlastle in Islay, which he counts as one of the kind. It ate seven horses on its way down to Loch Indaal. A ship was lying at anchor in the loch, and the people laid a line of barrels from the shore out to the ship, each barrel bristling with deadly spikes and baited with pieces of flesh. The beast smelled the meat and crawled out along the barrels, feeding as it went. It was killed by the spikes and by the ship’s cannon. Campbell calls it a loathly worm, borrowing the phrase from the old ballads, and seems rather pleased with it.

The name carries a second meaning, and it may be the older one. In Gaelic, beithir is also lightning. Alexander Carmichael, gathering charms and hymns in the Hebrides, listed it among the words used for the serpent and translated it simply as lightning. He also took down a tale of the fall of the angels in which the Proud Angel, storming out of heaven, struck prickly lightning and biting lightning from the doorstep with his heels. The biting lightning is beithir. In 1908 E. C. Watson, writing in the Celtic Review, put the two halves together. Beithir was a venomous and destructive creature that lived in dark caves and corries in the mountains, and the word meant both the lightning and the serpent. The legends, Watson thought, had probably grown out of the destructive character of the element and the beast alike. A thing that strikes from nowhere, leaves a burn, and kills. It is not hard to see how one word came to cover both.

The beithir turns up in a wonder tale as well, in a far stranger form. In the introduction to his Popular Tales of the West Highlands, published in 1860, John Francis Campbell recalled a story told to him by an old travelling tinker named Macdonald. A king of Ireland had a son called Sheen Billy and, in time, a second wife. The stepmother, put up to it by a henwife, sent the boy a magic shirt and coaxed him into wearing it. Once on, the shirt was a beithir coiled about his neck, and he was under spells. After many adventures he reached the house of a wise woman, whose daughter fell in love with him and would not be talked out of it. Her mother warned her that it would cost her hair, and then her right breast. The girl said she did not care if it cost her life.

So a cauldron was filled with plants and the prince was put into it, stripped to the shirt. The girl stood by, bare to the waist, holding a great knife. In the steam the shirt took its own shape again, a great serpent, and it sprang from the prince and fastened on her. She cut away its hold. The spell broke, the two were married, and a golden breast was made for the bride.

Taken together, the accounts give the beithir a short list of strengths. It has size, venom, a sting that can be answered only by speed, and a habit of coming back from a death that ought to have been final. Its limits follow from the same accounts. It is no faster than a frightened human being with a head start, since the race to the water can be won. It is greedy enough to crawl onto a row of spiked barrels for a few scraps of meat. It can be cut loose by someone willing to pay the price. And the ordinary beithir, the one born from a badly killed snake, need never exist at all. A properly smashed head, carried far enough away, ends the matter on the road.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a beithir?

A beithir is the largest and most deadly kind of serpent in Scottish Highland folklore. It has a venomous sting and was said to live in dark caves and mountain corries. Nineteenth-century collectors translated the word as great snake, or as large serpent or dragon.

How is a beithir created?

A beithir comes from a snake that has been killed carelessly. Highland belief held that the head of a killed serpent had to be completely smashed and taken far from the body. If this was not done, the tail would rejoin the body, the serpent would come alive again, and the head would become a beithir.

What happens if a beithir stings you?

A person stung by a beithir had to run to the nearest water. The beithir also made straight for the water, and if it arrived first the victim died of the wound. The other recorded cure was water in which the head of another serpent had been placed.

What does the word beithir mean?

Beithir is a Scottish Gaelic word meaning both serpent and lightning. Alexander Carmichael recorded it as one of several terms for the serpent and translated it as lightning. E. C. Watson suggested in 1908 that the legends grew from the destructive nature of both the lightning and the snake.

What was the big beast of Scanlastle?

The big beast of Scanlastle was a beithir of Islay recorded by John Gregorson Campbell. It ate seven horses on its way to Loch Indaal. It was killed when it crawled out along a line of spiked, meat-baited barrels laid between the shore and an anchored ship, and was finished by the spikes and the ship’s cannon.