Brollachan

Also Known As: Scottish Gaelic brollachan, an ordinary word for any shapeless or deformed creature; J. F. Campbell suggested “breastling” or “bantling”; the child of the fuath, anglicised in the Sutherland tellings as the Vough
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It has eyes, a mouth and a vocabulary of exactly two words, and it is dangerous mainly because of what its mother will do on its behalf.
Role in Mythos: It is the infant of a Highland water spirit, too young to have grown a shape, and the accidental victim in the Sutherland mill tale that gives the Gaelic version of the Noman trick.
Relation to Humans: It comes indoors to lie by a fire that people have already banked for the night, and it does nothing to them at all. The harm runs the other way, and the person who hurts it survives only because the creature cannot say who did it.

The mill of the Glens stood on a burn running off Loch Migdale, a few miles from Skibo, and a crippled man called Murray slept in it. The neighbours kept him fed by tipping a handful of meal into his bag whenever they carried their own away, so the mill was his in exchange for nothing much. Meal dust settled on everything. The machinery ticked and shifted as the water dropped. One night in the last of the fire, with the peats gone to a grey crust and the heat almost out of them, something came in through the door and lay down beside him.

It had eyes. It had a mouth. The record will not go further than that, because there was nothing further to go to. The word the Highlands used for it, brollachan, is not really a name. It is a plain Gaelic term for any shapeless or deformed creature, and the man who printed the story thought it might be turned into English as breastling, or bantling. That is the honest shape of the thing. A brollachan is a fuath’s child, and it is young enough that it has not yet got a body, so the tellers described it by its length alone: it lay all its lubber-length by the dying fire, which is a precise way of saying it was long and that nobody could tell you one further detail.

It could speak, after a fashion. It had two words. Mi-fhèin, myself, and thu-fhèin, thyself. That was the entire stock. No other speech, and, as the teller put it with some feeling, alas no shape.

Murray reached for a fresh peat and threw it onto the embers. Anyone who has done that on a low fire knows what happens next. The crust broke and the embers came apart and went up in a spray of red, and the brollachan, lying full length in the middle of it, was badly burnt. It screamed. The sound brought its mother in at speed, and she was already furious. Och, my brollachan, she said, who then burnt you?

The creature had the answer. It simply had no way to give it. It said mee. Then it said oo. Myself, thyself, the only two counters it owned, and neither of them a name. Its mother stood in the burnt-smelling dark of the mill with a scalded child and a question she could not get answered, and said the thing that saves the story from being a horror: were it any other, wouldn’t I be revenged. The trick that runs through half of Europe is usually played on purpose. A man tells the monster his name is Myself, and the monster’s kin laugh at him for complaining. Here nobody has told a lie. The brollachan is not being outwitted. It is a baby, and it has been hurt, and it does not have the words.

Murray, meanwhile, had done the only sensible thing available to a man who cannot run. He tipped the wooden peck measure over himself and crouched among the machinery, arranged as much like a sack of meal as a body can be arranged, saying may the Lord preserve me at intervals under the wood. The fuath went past him. He was not touched.

Someone else was less lucky. A woman walking by the mill that same night met the mother still hunting for whoever had done it, and ran. She was fast enough to reach her own door and no faster. The fuath caught her heel and tore it away, and the woman walked lame for the rest of her life. That detail is where the tale stops being a joke about grammar.

The mother is the reason the brollachan exists, and she is the better attested half of the pair. In Sutherland the fuath is a water spirit, and the local descriptions are unusually specific: web feet, yellow hair, a green dress, a mane, a tail, and no nose. There are males and females. They marry into human families, and one line of Munroes was said to have carried manes and tails for four generations afterwards. They are undone by light and injured by steel, and they turn restless when carried across running water. One of the Bethunes took a bet that he could bring the fuath of that same mill bound to the inn at Inveran, and did it, riding with her tied behind him and pinning her down with a shoemaker’s awl and a tailor’s needle while she begged him to use the awl and spare the slender hair-like slave. When his friends came out with lights to look at her, she dropped off the horse and fell to earth like a small lump of jelly, the kind found lying on the moors and always blamed on the stars.

The brollachan inherits none of that competence. Its powers are its mother’s powers, held in trust and exercised on its behalf, which in practice means that anything done to it will be repaid by something much older and web-footed. What it has of its own is the ability to get into a building at night and to lie there being unaccountable. It is not described doing anything. It has no weapon, no cunning, no errand.

Its limits are the strangest part of it, because they are limits of language rather than of strength. A being that cannot name its attacker cannot direct revenge, and a shape that has not formed cannot be recognised, described, warded off, or even sensibly feared. The two words it owns are the two that guarantee the guilty party goes free. Kill the fire and it has nothing to lie beside. Sit still under a peck measure and it will not know you were there.

Versions of the same trap sit all round the northern seaboard, and the Gaelic ones agree on a detail Homer does not. On Islay a girl alone with the cattle told a rough, faceless thing that came to her window that her name was mise mi fhìn, and scalded it, and heard its friends howl with laughter outside. Walter Scott put the same joke at a mill near Loch Lomond. In Cromarty a man roasting a stolen duck flung it into the face of a little wrinkled visitor and gave his name as Mysel’ an Mysel’. A Shetland miller said mysel’ i’ da mill and the trows told the injured woman that self does, self has. Odysseus said nobody. Every Gaelic teller said myself, and Campbell, who could not account for the difference, noted it and left it standing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Brollachan?

A Brollachan is the child of a fuath, a Highland water spirit, in Scottish Gaelic folklore. It is described as having eyes and a mouth and no shape at all, because it is too young to have grown one. The word brollachan is not a proper name but an ordinary Gaelic term for any shapeless or deformed creature.

What can the Brollachan say?

The Brollachan knows exactly two words: mi-fhèin, meaning myself, and thu-fhèin, meaning thyself. It has no other speech. That limitation is the hinge of its only surviving story, because when its mother asks who burnt it, the creature can name nobody.

What happens in the story of the Brollachan and the mill?

A crippled man named Murray, who slept at the mill of the Glens near Loch Migdale in Sutherland, threw a fresh peat onto the dying fire and sent red embers over the Brollachan lying beside it. The creature was badly burnt and screamed, and its mother the fuath came looking for the culprit. All the Brollachan could answer was myself and thyself, so Murray hid under a wooden peck measure among the machinery and escaped unharmed.

Is the Brollachan the same as the fuath?

No. The fuath is the parent and the Brollachan is its offspring. In the Sutherland accounts the fuath is a water spirit with web feet, yellow hair, a green dress, a mane, a tail and no nose, and it is the fuath, not the Brollachan, that chased a passing woman that night and tore off her heel.

Where does the Brollachan story come from?

The tale was collected in Sutherland by Charlotte Dempster in 1859 from a widow named M. Calder, told in Gaelic, written down in English by a gamekeeper, and printed by J. F. Campbell in Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Its plot belongs to a widespread family of tales in which a supernatural visitor is injured by someone called Myself, found from Islay and Shetland to Ireland, Norway and Estonia.