Ceasg

A grilse is a salmon that has spent one winter in salt water and come back up the river that made it, silver, hard along the flank, not yet full grown. Highland tradition gives the ceasg exactly that tail. Not a generic fish’s, not a seal’s: the body of a creature that belongs to the sea and the burn in the same year. She turns up at the mouth of a loch and equally three miles inland in a brown peaty stream, and nobody telling her stories seems to have thought that odd.

Alexander Carmichael, who collected in the Gaelic-speaking west between 1860 and 1909, set her down in his glossary as a supernatural creature of great beauty, half woman and half grilse, a fresh-water mermaid with hair long and flossy. The hair is not decoration. In Gaelic, ceasg means floss before it means anything else. Ceasg lin is a tuft of fine lint, ceasg sioda a tuft of fine silk, ceasg cloimhe a tuft of fine wool, and the same word will do for a sheep with a long soft fleece. She is named for her hair, not her tail.

The storytellers themselves rarely used the word. When John Francis Campbell’s collectors took her tales down in Argyll and the Isles in the 1850s, what they heard was maighdean mhara, maid of the sea, and the fishermen saying it never paused to explain what they meant.

The oldest of those tellings was written out in April 1850 by Hector Urquhart, from the dictation of John Mackenzie, a fisherman at Kenmore near Inveraray. It begins with a poor old fisher having a bad year. He is on the water with nothing in the boat when she comes up at the side of it and asks him, quite civilly, whether he is getting any fish. That is a small scene, and it is her whole method. She does not menace. She arrives at the gunwale, at the one place where a man’s living is decided, and she opens with a question.

Then the price. Plenty of fish, she says, for your first son. He laughs it off, because he and his wife are long past children. So she hands him nine grains and tells him to give three to his wife, three to the mare, three to the dog, and to plant the last three behind the house. Three sons, three foals, three pups, and three trees that will serve as a tally: when one of the sons dies, one of the trees withers. Come back for the boy when he is three years old.

He does not come back. She gives him four more years, and then seven more, and each time he walks home light-hearted, and each time the years run out under him. That is the engine of the whole cycle, and it is a patient, cruel one. She never has to chase anybody. She waits, and lets a man find out how much he was willing to owe.

What happens when the debt falls due depends on which island you were standing on. Donald MacPhie of South Uist, aged seventy-nine when he told it in September 1859, has her rise while the young man is walking the shore with his wife, and take him, and swallow him whole, and he stays alive inside her. His wife carries a harp down to the water and plays. The sea-maiden comes up to listen, because sea-maidens are fonder of music than any other creature, and each time the playing stops she gives a little more of him back: the head first, then to the waist, then the whole man standing on the flat of her palm. He turns into a falcon and is gone before the hand can close. She takes the wife instead.

A woman named B. Macaskill, on the small island of Berneray, told a version in 1859 in which the mermaid is simply bought off. The wife spreads every dress she owns out along the beach, all of it laid on cold wet shingle, and the mermaid gives the man back in exchange.

The kinder half of her reputation comes from Donald Alexander Mackenzie, in Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life, published in 1935. He reports that a ceasg who is caught can be made to grant three wishes; that she sometimes marries a mortal, and that celebrated pilots and navigators were said to descend from those marriages; and that after the marriage ends and she has gone back to the water she keeps an interest in her human descendants, steadying them through storms and putting them over good fishing ground. Mackenzie also offered a suggestion of his own, which is his and not the tradition’s: that somewhere behind her there may have stood a sea goddess to whom people were once given.

Past the flossy hair and the young salmon’s tail, nobody describes her. There is no face in the record, no colour of eye, nothing about what a man saw at the gunwale beyond the fact that he saw her and answered her. The tellers spend all their detail on what she can do, which suggests they thought that was the interesting part, and they were probably right.

Her powers run along one line: she gives, and giving is how she takes. She can turn an empty year into a full one and an empty house into three sons, three foals and three pups. She can hold a grown man alive inside her body for as long as she likes. She can leave the water for a marriage, keep human children, and go back without losing her authority over the sea her descendants sail on.

Her weaknesses run along a matching line. Music stops her, because she cannot help listening. Fine cloth spread on a beach will buy a man back, because she wants it. And her life is not kept inside her at all. In the South Uist telling it sits in a glen, in a venomous bull, and in the bull a ram, and in the ram a goose, and in the goose an egg, and in that egg her soul; a lion, a wolf, a falcon and an otter fetch it out between them, and the man puts his heel on it. On Berneray it is smaller and stranger still, her breath shut in an egg a pigeon has laid at the top of a tree, and the man has to become a hoodie crow to climb to it. Either way she goes the same way. The most dangerous thing in the loch had put its life somewhere it could not defend.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a ceasg?

The ceasg is a mermaid of Scottish Highland tradition, with the upper body of a woman and the tail of a grilse, a young salmon back from one winter at sea. She is also called maighdean na tuinne, maid of the wave, and maighdean mhara, maid of the sea. Because a grilse moves between salt water and fresh, she is found in sea lochs, rivers and streams alike.

What does the ceasg look like?

Alexander Carmichael described her as a creature of great beauty, half woman and half grilse, with hair long and flossy. Beyond that hair and the salmon tail, the Gaelic tellers give almost no physical detail, no face and no colouring. The Gaelic word ceasg itself means floss or a tuft of fine lint, silk or wool, so her name is really a description of her hair.

What does the ceasg do to people?

She bargains. In the tales collected by John Francis Campbell’s fieldworkers in the 1850s, she gives a struggling fisherman plenty of fish and three sons in exchange for his firstborn, then comes to collect years later. Donald Alexander Mackenzie also recorded that a captured ceasg grants three wishes, and that she sometimes marries a mortal and protects the descendants of that marriage at sea.

How do you kill a ceasg?

You have to destroy the egg that holds her life, because she does not keep it in her body. In the South Uist version her soul is in an egg inside a goose inside a ram inside a venomous bull, and crushing the egg kills her. In the Berneray version her breath is in an egg laid by a pigeon at the top of a tree.

Can you get someone back from a ceasg?

Yes, and there are two recorded ways. In Donald MacPhie’s South Uist telling a wife plays a harp on the shore until the sea-maiden, who loves music more than any other creature does, raises the swallowed man higher and higher out of her mouth. In B. Macaskill’s Berneray telling the wife lays out every dress she owns on the beach and the mermaid trades the man for them.

Related Entries

Each Uisge, Kelpie, Selkie, Blue Men of the Minch, Cirein cròin, Finfolk, Tangie, Shellycoat, Glaistig, Bean-Nighe, Caoineag, Merrow, Mermaid, Morgens, Melusine