Glashtyn

Also Known As: also Glashtin, Glashtan, Glashan; plural Glashtinyn
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Manx Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: He works a farm’s night labour without being asked and takes the shape of a man, a colt or a water bull as it suits him.
Role in Mythos: He is the Isle of Man’s hairy household and field spirit, half brownie and half water horse, attached to particular farms and particular pools.
Relation to Humans: He threshes corn, folds sheep and walks a benighted farmer home, and asks nothing for it. He is also coarse, easily offended and too fond of the women of the house, and a gift of clothes will send him away for good.

The snow came on in the afternoon, and the farmer sent his sons up the hill to bring the sheep down before the drifts closed the gaps. They found the fold already full. Every ewe was in, packed tight and steaming, and out in the dark beyond the wall something was complaining bitterly about one small loaghtan that had run three times round Barrule before it would be driven. Seven curses on her, it said, in Manx. Then it went quiet and the snow kept falling.

The Isle of Man could never quite agree on what that voice belonged to. Kelly’s dictionary calls the glashtyn a goblin, an imaginary animal which rises out of the water. Cregeen, writing in 1835, files him plainly under goblins and sprites. By the time the Anglo-Manx vocabulary was compiled in 1924 he had two meanings and both were in use: a hairy goblin, and a big hulking boy. John Rhys, going round the island with a notebook, found the confusion alive in the people he spoke to. One or two of them mixed the glashtyn up with the Manx brownie. Another was flatly certain there was nothing human about him, that he was a sort of grey colt haunting the banks of lakes, and that he was never seen except at night.

Charles Roeder, collecting in the south-west a few years later, met a different creature altogether and met a great many of him. His informants described the glashtins as big, strong, powerful men, hairy and dark, and they were adamant that there were she-glashtins as well as he-glashtins. They were good-natured on the whole, ready to help the farmers and protect them. They were also, everyone agreed, downright stupid. He was not clever, and the stories do not pretend otherwise.

Ballachrink in Kirk Arbory was thick with them. Whatever sheaves the people loosed in the barn at night would be found threshed by morning, the whole floor done and nobody the wiser. Somebody eventually stayed up to watch and saw them at it, big men like giants and stark naked, working in the dark. So the household did the kind thing and made them clothes. When the glashtins saw the clothes laid out for them they left, and did not come back. The same bargain broke the same way across the water in the Furness country, where a tailor made the local hob a coat and hood and heard him singing his own goodbye in the night.

They were not all so easily got rid of. In a glen in the north a beggarman took a night’s lodging and watched his host carry in an armful of peat at bedtime and build the fire up high. Asked why, the farmer said there were friends of his wanting to come in and warm themselves. The beggar got up later and found two big naked men lying in the hearth in front of the blaze. In the morning the farmer told him they had been in the house in his father’s time and his grandfather’s, that they had never harmed anything about the place, and that if he was out late one of them would always walk him home. In all those years not one of them had ever spoken a word to him.

Where he did speak, it was usually to complain. A woman somewhere in the north of the island was caught by the apron and slung over a glashtin’s back, and had the presence of mind to work the apron string loose on the road. She dropped off behind him and he carried on, and only at his journey’s end did he look at what he was holding. Rumbyl, rumbyl, cha vel ayms agh yn sampyl, he said. Only the skirt of the thing. Only the sample.

He was a nuisance to the women of Ballachrink in the same blunt way, coming in on them while they sat spinning late, until one evening the men of the place put on the women’s clothes and sat down at the wheels to wait. Two young glashtins came in. Behind them came the big glashtin, who took one look at what the young one had got hold of and told him, in Manx, exactly which parts of a woman were missing from it. Roeder wrote the speech down and declined to translate it.

The horse shape ran alongside all this without ever displacing it. John Creer, driving pork to Douglas market in the dark, had two horses trail his cart the whole way, working at the load, and he stood up and lashed backwards at them for miles and never once connected. At daylight they were gone. Roeder’s friends were clear that the glashtins were not always in human form, that they came as horses and sometimes even as the tarroo ushtey, the water bull of the bogs. Down at Cregneish, where the corn kilns were fired all night, a glashtin’s wife was seen turning a fish over the heat and coaxing it along, roas’, Kissack veg, roas’. Somebody once climbed up to look over the kiln wall at them and was heard. The he-glashtin caught him and pitched him into the fire, and the she-glashtin pulled him straight back out, being the more merciful of the two.

His powers all come out of that double nature. Because he belongs to the water he can rise from it in whatever body suits the night, colt or bull or man. Because he belongs to the farm he has the strength to thresh a barn between dusk and dawn and the standing to see off incomers, as the Ballachrink glashtins did when strangers of their own kind came over the hill and were told that if this place was theirs, merry Glen Rushen was not theirs yet.

His limits are the same joints reversed. Daylight ends him. A whip cannot touch him but an untied apron string can lose him his prize, and a set of clothes laid out by a grateful household breaks whatever holds him to the hearth. Being slow, he can be tricked by farmhands in petticoats. Being quick to resent, he punishes small insults out of all proportion. And the name itself came in from the cold in the end, so that a Manx coroner could stand in court and summon Glashtin mooar Mac Killey to the jury, big glashtin Mac Killey, and everybody present would know he meant a large clumsy man and nothing worse than that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a glashtyn?

A glashtyn is a spirit of Manx folklore that lives in or near water and attaches itself to particular farms on the Isle of Man. The Manx dictionaries call him a goblin that rises out of the water, while the people who told stories about him described big, hairy, dark men who threshed corn and folded sheep at night. He is also reported as a grey colt and occasionally as a water bull.

Is the glashtyn a water horse or a goblin?

The Manx record disagrees with itself, and both answers are genuinely attested. Kelly’s dictionary and one of John Rhys’s informants give a creature that rises from the water and appears as a grey colt on lake banks at night. Charles Roeder’s south-western informants give a hairy man who works farms, and add that he could also take the shape of a horse or of the tarroo ushtey.

What does the glashtyn do to people?

Mostly he works for them without being asked, threshing barns, penning sheep in bad weather and escorting benighted farmers home. He is also coarse and grabby, and the Manx tales include a woman carried off by her apron and repeated intrusions on the women of Ballachrink while they sat spinning. Injuries in the stories are usually indignities rather than deaths.

How do you get rid of a glashtyn?

Give him clothes. The household at Ballachrink watched the glashtins threshing their barn by night, made garments for them, and the glashtins left and never returned. Daylight also ends his activity, since he is only ever active between dusk and dawn.

Why do the glashtyn and the fenodyree get confused?

They do the same work in the same places and the Manx sources treat them as overlapping. Rhys said outright that no hard line could be drawn between the glashtyn, the fenodyree and even the water bull, and Moore noted that the dooiney oie was being folded into the same group because he too was said to thresh corn. Roeder found all three names being used interchangeably on the island.