Finfolk

Between Rousay and the Orkney Mainland the tide runs so hard through a narrow sound that when the ebb meets a nor’west gale the sea stands up on both sides of one small island and roars like thunder a long way off. The island is Eynhallow. An Orkney man told the folklorist Walter Traill Dennison that the name had been spoiled by newfangled people, that it was properly Hyn-hallow, hinmost holy, because it was the last land in all Orkney taken from the Finfolk and made holy ground. Before that it was not an island at all. It was a piece of Hilda-land, and Hilda-land came and went as the Finfolk pleased.

Dennison was a Sanday farmer who spent his life writing down what the old people of Orkney told him, and who published the sea material in The Scottish Antiquary in the early 1890s. His informants were precise about one thing that later writers keep blurring. The selkie folk and the Finfolk were not the same race. Seals lived on outlying skerries and were, on the whole, pitiable. The Finfolk had towns.

Their city lay on the sea floor and was called Finfolkaheem. The sand of that country was gold dust. The palaces were coral and crystal, set with pearls and precious stones, and every cup and spoon in them was silver or gold. In the feast hall the walls and pillars and roof and floor were all crystal and gave off a light like the phosphorescence that runs off an oar blade at night, and the curtains in the dancing hall were dyed the colours of the merry dancers and kept moving by a cantrip, so that they showed not only the colours of the aurora but its motion. There was never any night there, and never any morning either.

A young man called Arthur Deerness found this out the hard way. He was lying on his chest on a rock at Hamaness with his head over the edge, reaching for the big limpets, when music came up out of the water and took the strength out of his arms. He had not the power to say God save me. A face rose under him, lovelier than any woman’s, two long arms came round his neck, and the next thing he knew he was sitting in the bow of a boat going west faster than a bird, steered by a golden-haired creature who drove it with the tail of her skirt. Under the skirt he could see two milk-white feet flat on the boards. The tail was a garment. When he tried to remember a short prayer she kissed him and breathed into his mouth, and her breath went down his throat like honey, and after that he did not think about home again.

The wedding they gave him is the best-recorded thing in the whole tradition. Troughs of whale flesh roasted and boiled and stewed in blubber, tubs of seal soup thickened with cod roe, sea-weed boiled in oil for kitchen, and no bread anywhere. Everyone went barefoot, so two of the bride’s maids pulled off Arthur’s stockings, washed his feet, smeared them with ointment and dusted them over with ground pearl. Then an old finman with a beard to his girdle split a roast diver lengthways, gave half to each of them, and warned that the bones would be counted afterwards, because eating the whole half is what makes a marriage among the Finfolk. What saved Arthur was a black cat that nobody else could see, sent by a wise woman on shore. It ate the parts of his half he could not manage, it knocked the wedding horn every time he drank so the wine ran down inside his robe, it lay between the two of them in bed in the shape of an eel and bit his hand when he reached across, and at last, while he was stroking his wife’s hair, it took his forefinger in its two front paws and drew a cross on her brow. She screamed, the sea made a noise louder than thunder, and he woke on the rocks at Hamaness with the wise woman standing over him.

Not everyone wanted rescuing. Annie Norn went down to the shore one evening for salt water to boil the supper in, because salt was scarce and dear that year, and was never seen again. Three or four years later a storm-blind Orkney ship lay becalmed and motionless in a fog somewhere in the North Sea, and a woman rowed out to it alone and came over the rail like a cat. Her cousin was aboard. She put the helm down, called orders like a born skipper, ran them out of the mist into a bright land-locked bay with larks over it, fed the whole crew, gave them a pilot, sent her love to her mother and mentioned that she had three bairns. When her cousin pressed her to come home she said she was far too well off where she was to think of leaving it. Each man threw a silver shilling into the pilot’s boat, and the man sitting in it laughed as the coins fell.

That laugh is the key to them. Silver moved the Finfolk the way nothing else did. When a boatman called Tam Scott ferried a dark-avised stranger and his cow out east of Sanday to a fair island that rose out of a shining fog, he was blindfolded for the landing, heard mermaids singing on the beach, and was paid well for the trip in a bag of money that turned out to be all coppers, because the Finfolk loved the white money too much to part with silver. The same appetite runs through an Orkney charm for toothache that a different collector took down entirely independently, in which three Finnmen come from their home in the sea to free the sufferer from the worm, and are to be paid with the white money. A man who was being chased could sometimes buy himself a few seconds by scattering coins behind him.

Against that greed and that sorcery the Orkney answer was salt and the cross, and the tale of how Eynhallow was won is the demonstration. The goodman of Thorodale in Evie lost his second wife off the ebb while his back was turned and he was tying the string of his shoe. He heard the scream, saw a tall dark man hauling her into a boat, and got into the water too late. He pulled up his breeches, pulled down his stockings, knelt below the flood mark and swore that living or dead he would have his revenge. Later, fishing in the sound, he heard her singing where he could not see her, telling him to stop grieving because he would never see her again, and to go and ask the wise woman of Hoy. He went. Then for nine moons, at every full moon, he crawled nine times round the Odin Stone of Stenness on his bare knees and looked through the hole in it and wished for the power to see Hilda-land.

One summer morning just after sunrise he saw a little island lying in the sound where there had never been land. He did not dare blink. He shouted his three sons out of the house with three baskets of salt, and they rowed for it, and the sea filled with whales that were not whales, and a mouth opened wide enough to swallow the boat, and he threw two handfuls of salt into it and the whale went out like a candle. Two mermaids sang on the beach until he flung a cross of twisted tangle at each of them. A monster with tusks as long as a man’s arms and feet as broad as quern stones stood spitting fire until he threw salt between its eyes. Last came a tall man with a drawn sword, the same one who had taken his wife, and Thorodale put a cross made of sticky wild grass on his face, and he ran roaring, because pulling it off with his hand would have hurt worse than leaving it.

Then the sons walked the island abreast, sowing salt as they went, and every Finman and mermaid and cow on Hilda-land bolted for the water like sheep with dogs behind them and never came back. Thorodale cut nine crosses in the turf and sent his sons round three times each for nine rings of salt. The youngest had a big hand and sowed too fast, and near the end of his last circuit he ran out, and his brothers would not spare him any. So the ninth ring was never closed. That is the flaw in the working, and the old people used it to explain something they could all see, which is that cats and rats and mice will not live on Eynhallow.

Dennison, having written all this down, offered a reading of his own. The fin-men are always dark in the face, and Orkney has no forests or mountains for a beaten people to hide in, only rocks and caves on the outlying isles. He thought the stories might be a blurred memory of the Picts under the Norsemen, and the freeing of Eynhallow the folk memory of a last remnant being cleared off a small island by men who had decided to be rid of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Finfolk in Orkney folklore?

The Finfolk are a sorcerous sea people of Orkney tradition who live in an undersea city called Finfolkaheem and on hidden islands called Hilda-land. They come ashore to carry off Orkney men and women as spouses, and they are notorious for hoarding silver. Orcadian tradition treats them as a separate race from the selkies, not a version of them.

Where do the Finfolk live?

Their winter home is Finfolkaheem, a city on the sea floor with gold-dust sand, palaces of coral and crystal, and a feast hall that glows like sea phosphorescence. In summer they occupy Hilda-land, floating islands with houses, cornfields and cattle that most people cannot see at all. One old Orkney man put it that only the eye which sees the unseen can see Hilda-land.

Why do the Finfolk want silver?

Silver, called the white money in Orkney, was the one thing the Finfolk could not resist. A boatman who ferried a finman was paid in coppers because the Finfolk would not part with silver, and a person being chased could scatter coins to slow a pursuer down. An Orkney toothache charm calls on three Finnmen who come out of the sea to cure the sufferer and are to be paid with the white money.

How was Eynhallow taken from the Finfolk?

The goodman of Thorodale, whose wife had been carried off by a finman, gained the power to see Hilda-land by crawling nine times round the Odin Stone of Stenness on his bare knees at nine full moons. He then rowed out with his three sons and a boatload of salt, drove off the Finfolk’s illusions with salt and with crosses of tangle and sticky grass, and had his sons sow rings of salt around the island. The Finfolk fled into the sea and never returned to it.

Why are there no rats or mice on Eynhallow?

In the Orkney tale, Thorodale’s youngest son had a big hand and scattered his salt too quickly, so he ran short before finishing the ninth and last ring around the island, and his brothers refused to give him any of theirs. Because that final circle of salt was never completed, the protection was imperfect. The old people gave this as the reason cats, rats and mice cannot live on Eynhallow.

Related Entries

Selkie, Nuckelavee, Trow, Tangie, Shellycoat, Ceasg, Kelpie, Each Uisge, Blue Men of the Minch, Mermaid, Merman, Ran, Nix, Näkki, Rusalka