Caoineag

Also Known As: also caointeag, caoineachag, caointeachag and caoinheag; Scottish Gaelic for “weeper” or “mourner”, from caoin, to weep, and caoidh, to mourn; called the Caointeach in Islay
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She knows in advance who is going to be killed and mourns them aloud before it happens, and unlike her washing counterpart she cannot be caught, questioned or bargained with.
Role in Mythos: She is the hereditary mourner of a clan, warning an entire kindred rather than a single household that violent death is on its way.
Relation to Humans: Her weeping was dreaded on the hill roads after dark and dreaded most in houses whose sons had gone to the fighting, because it meant the fighting had already gone badly. Warning is the whole of what she offers, and at Glencoe whether anyone acted on it was the difference between the people who walked out over the hill and the people who stayed.

For several nights before the killing started, the people of Glencoe lay awake listening to a woman weeping somewhere out in the dark. Not screaming. Weeping steadily, the way someone weeps over a thing already finished and past arguing with. Soldiers had been quartered in their houses for over a week by then, eating their food and giving assurances, and the assurances were good ones. Some of the MacDonalds believed the soldiers. Some believed the weeping, went up over the hill in the night, and lived.

The weeper had a name, or rather a small drift of names: caoineag, caointeag, caoineachag, caointeachag, caoinheag, every one of them built out of caoin, to weep, and caoidh, to mourn. Alexander Carmichael, who spent decades gathering Gaelic hymns, charms and lore across the Hebrides and the western mainland, set down the fullest account of her in the glossary to the second volume of Carmina Gadelica. She is the one who foretells the deaths of those slain in combat and weeps for them beforehand. Her business is not sickness or old age. Her business is the sword.

She is seldom seen and often heard, and Carmichael’s list of where she is heard has a pattern running through it: in the hill, in the glen, in the corrie, by the lake, by the stream, by the waterfall. Every one of those places is already making noise. A burn in spate under a February sky throws up a sound with a human edge on it, rising and falling and catching in the rock, and the Highland ear had a name ready for what it was hearing. Night travellers dreaded her most, for the simple reason that they were the ones out in it.

A man on the hill road stops, and says into the dark, Co tha sid? Who is that? The answer never varies. Co ach caoineachag. Who but the weeper. Who but little caoineachag of the sorrow.

She is easy to confuse with her better-known neighbour, and the confusion matters. The bean-nighe, the little washer at the ford, does her work where she can be found: crouched at a pool, beating and folding the shirts of people who do not yet know they are dying. In Mull and Tiree her breasts were said to be so long they got in her way as she stooped, so she threw them back over her shoulders, and a man who crept up behind her, caught one, put it to his mouth and named her his foster-mother could make her answer anything he asked. In Skye she was squat and small and pitiful, like a sad child. Either way she could be taken, and once taken she could be used. The caoineag cannot be approached and cannot be questioned. There is no bargain in her.

She belongs to a kindred rather than to a person. There was a caoineag of Clan Donald much as there was a piper of Clan Donald, carried down the generations with the name, so that her crying was addressed to everybody at once and to nobody in particular. Carmichael noted that her mourning brought much anxiety to parents whose sons were in the wars, which is a mild way of describing what it must have been to sit at a peat fire and hear that noise come down off the hill while your boy was away with a raiding party. Nobody could ask her which boy.

Then Glencoe. On 13 February 1692 more than a hundred soldiers of the Earl of Argyll’s regiment turned on the MacDonald households they had been billeted amicably upon for over a week. Alexander MacDonald of Glencoe had left his oath of allegiance to William III until the last day of December, found no magistrate at Fort William to receive it, and swore it six days late; Sir John Dalrymple used the delay. The chief was killed, and thirty-three other men, and two women, and two children. Many of the clan got away into the hills.

Carmichael, collecting in that glen long afterwards, found fragments of what she had sung there still in circulation. One of them runs:

Little caoineachag of the sorrow Is pouring the tears of her eyes, Weeping and wailing the fate of Clandonald. Alas my grief! that ye did not heed her cries.

The blame in that last line does not land on Dalrymple, and it does not land on the regiment. It lands on the people who heard her and stayed.

Carmichael’s own hand is a complication that has to be admitted. When his manuscripts were finally set beside what he had printed, it emerged that he had tidied, extended and antiqued a great deal of it, and even the scholars who rose to defend him conceded that the early volumes read as literature rather than as transcript. The caoineag is older than his book and is attested well outside it. The polish on her dirges is another question.

Down in Islay she goes by a slightly different name and does a slightly different job. James MacDougall, taking tales from oral tradition in Argyll and the islands, recorded the Caointeach of the Rhinns, attached to the MacKays and to other families there. She came when a death from sickness was coming rather than a death by the sword, and she came where she could be seen: standing outside the door of the sick man’s house with a green shawl about her shoulders, raising a low wail. The moment his people heard her, they stopped hoping.

She has not been heard in the Rhinns since one particular winter night. It was wet and windy, and she had taken up her station on the windward side of the house where the rain came in. Somebody inside pitied her. He went out by the sheltered door, laid an old plaid on the seat beside it, and called round to her to come to the lee side and cover herself with a piece of it. The wailing stopped at once. That is the last of her in that district, and the shape of the story is a very old one: a spirit attached to a household is given clothing, and never comes back.

What she can do amounts to one thing done perfectly. She knows before it happens; she knows it about a people rather than about a person; and she says so at a volume that carries the length of a glen. She cannot be seen, so she cannot be evaded or ambushed. She cannot be interrogated, so nothing she knows can be got out of her beyond the bare fact of the grief.

What she cannot do is everything else. She has no power over the thing she is mourning, no hand in it, no ability to hold it off by an hour. She cannot name a house or a boy. In Islay one unthinking act of kindness ended her permanently, which is a strange fragility in something that had outlasted generations of the families it followed. And her warning only functions if it is believed, which puts the entire weight of her usefulness on people standing in the dark deciding whether a noise on the hill is a woman or the water.

Neither Carmichael nor MacDougall records a night when she wept and nobody died.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the caoineag?

The caoineag is a Scottish Highland death spirit whose Gaelic name means “weeper”. She is almost never seen, but she is heard weeping at night in the hills and glens or near running water, and her crying means that someone in the clan she follows is about to be killed. She attaches to a whole kindred rather than to a single family.

What is the difference between the caoineag and the bean-nighe?

The bean-nighe can be caught and the caoineag cannot. The bean-nighe is seen at a stream washing the clothes of those about to die, and a person who creeps up behind her and takes hold of her can force her to answer questions. The caoineag can neither be approached nor questioned; she only weeps.

Was the caoineag heard before the Massacre of Glencoe?

Yes, according to the tradition Alexander Carmichael collected in the glen. He recorded that she was heard on several successive nights before the massacre of 13 February 1692, that this roused the suspicions of the MacDonalds despite the soldiers’ assurances of peace and friendship, and that those who left the glen because of her escaped. Carmichael also collected surviving fragments of the dirges she was said to have sung.

How was the caoineag of Islay driven away?

By kindness. In the version recorded in the Rhinns of Islay, where she is called the Caointeach, she stood wailing on the windward side of a house on a wet winter night until a member of the family left an old plaid on the seat by the sheltered door and called to her to come round and cover herself. The wailing stopped instantly, and she has not been seen or heard in that district since.

Where does the name caoineag come from?

It comes from the Scottish Gaelic caoin, to weep, and caoidh, to mourn, and it means simply “weeper” or “mourner”. The same spirit appears in the sources under several closely related forms, including caointeag, caoineachag, caointeachag and caoinheag, and as the Caointeach in Islay.