Sluagh

On a hard frosty night in Uist the sound arrives before anything else, high up and moving fast, a beating and rushing that one Barra woman compared to a covey of birds driving upwind. Nobody goes to the door to look. In the morning the rocks above the shore are wet and stained a deep crimson, and the old people have a name ready for that as well. *Fuil nan sluagh*, the blood of the hosts, spilled where they fought one another somewhere over the machair while the island slept.

The word itself is ordinary. *Sluagh* in Scottish Gaelic, *slúag* in Old Irish, means a host, an army, a crowd of people, and in Irish tradition *slua sí* is simply the army of the fairy folk, no more sinister than any other muster. In the Hebrides it narrowed to one particular crowd. Alexander Carmichael, taking down old lore in Uist at the end of the nineteenth century, was told by a woman he remembered for her sharpness that the hosts are the spirits of mortals who have died. They fly in great clouds up and down the face of the world like starlings, and they come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions. Not one of them is free of the clouds of earth, and none can win heaven until satisfaction has been made for what was done in life. That is the whole doctrine of the sluagh in two sentences, and it is bleaker than any hell, because hell at least is somewhere to arrive.

So they keep moving. On bad nights, the same account says, they shelter behind little russet docken stems and little yellow ragwort stalks, which is a strange and wonderful image for a multitude: an army of the damned crouching in the lee of a weed. On clear frosty nights they can be watched instead of merely heard, advancing and retreating and advancing again in the way that men do on a field. The red left behind afterwards is rock lichen, the fine crimson crotal thawing out of the frost, and Carmichael says so plainly in a bracket, which does not seem to have troubled anybody. A minister from Ross-shire told an American collector the same thing a decade later without mentioning Carmichael at all: after a frost the lichens go yellowish-red, and when the moisture spreads the stone runs bright, and that is the blood of the hosts after a battle, most often the battle fought at Hallowe’en.

Nobody who wrote them down described their faces. This is unusual for Gaelic folklore, which is normally specific about green kirtles and yellow hair and the exact height of a fairy woman, and the silence is worth noticing rather than filling. The sluagh are a sound and a direction and a consequence. What the sources do give is their armament: unerring venomous darts, and elsewhere javelins loosed from bows, aimed at cats and dogs, at sheep and cattle, and at any person working late in a house they happen to pass over. A woman out milking at night was thought to be in particular danger, bent over a pail in the dark with her back to the sky.

And here the tradition turns from strange to genuinely unpleasant, because the hosts do not always shoot for themselves. Marian MacLean of Upper Borve in Barra explained it to W. Y. Evans-Wentz around 1910: the hosts need men to help them shoot. So they take men. They commanded men to follow them, Carmichael’s informant said, and men obeyed, having no alternative. Once conscripted, a man was made to slay and maim at his spirit-masters’ bidding, and for his trouble they used him pitilessly, rolling and dragging and trouncing him through mud and mire and standing pools.

MacLean told a story about what that cost. A man in South Uist had one cow and one daughter. The daughter was out milking at night when the hosts went over, and the man they had lifted that night was her father’s own neighbour, and his order was to shoot the girl. He shot the cow instead, because blood on the arrow was all the hosts actually checked. In the morning he went to the father and asked whether he was missing a beast, and then told him why he ought to be glad of it. Donald McKinnon, a ninety-six-year-old piper who had come to Barra from South Uist in 1836, said he had personally known two men who were lifted, and that this substitution was how such men survived their own errands.

Those men did not survive them well. One in Benbecula was taken up several times, and his friends said that night became a terror to him, that eventually he would not cross his own threshold after dusk, and that he died of sheer exhaustion. A man in Lismore vanished repeatedly from the middle of his own company and came back prostrate, under vows never to say where he had been. John Campbell of Barra, ninety-four when he was asked, named a man he had seen himself, Roderick MacNeil, lifted and set down three miles from where he was picked up. Midnight was the hour. A man awake at midnight, Campbell said, is in danger.

The most extravagant of the stories runs the other way, and the hosts carry someone in from a great distance rather than out. The daughter of a king of France was taken up and carried over lands and seas, continents and islands, and finally laid down on the little island of Heistamal behind Creagorry in Benbecula, so badly used by the journey that she died of it. She lasted long enough to tell the people what countries she had crossed and what the travelling had done to her. They buried her where they found her. A woman in Barra who had also been lifted turned her own flight into a song, and the surviving verse has her standing at her brother’s funeral without anyone seeing her, a while on her feet, a while on horseback, a while folded in green satin.

The Hebridean tradition is careful to keep the hosts distinct from the fairies proper, and the distinction is not sentimental. Fairies walk on the ground at dusk and live without material food; the hosts travel in the air over inhabited places and live off their own plunder. Fairies, McKinnon said, were generally good, and the hosts were evil. A child taken by them was returned within a day and found at the back of the house with the palms of its hands pressed into the holes of the wall and no life in its body. It was dead in the spirit. People dropped from a height, the islanders reasoned, are simply killed by the fall.

The bird business, it should be said, has grown in the telling. Two of the earliest witnesses reach for birds as a comparison, starlings in one case and a covey in the other, and both are describing how a moving crowd sounds and behaves in the air rather than what it is made of. Somewhere in the last century that simile hardened into plumage, and the sluagh of modern retellings and games has become a literal flock of black birds crowding a dying person’s window. The older record grants them flight, weapons, numbers and appetite, and grants them no feathers at all.

What they can do follows exactly from what they are. Being unburdened by bodies, they go where wind goes, cross oceans in a night, and pass over a roof without a door being opened. Being dead and unabsolved, they are drawn to the places where they sinned and to the moment when another soul is about to leave, which is why a deathbed brought them close. Their darts do not miss. Their strength over the living is a kind of press-ganging, and a man once taken can be taken again.

Their limits are equally exact. They come from the west, so the west door and the west windows are shut and secured over a dying person, and that simple carpentry was believed to be enough. They need mortal hands for part of their work, which hands their own conscripts against them: an arrow bloodied on a cow satisfies the order as well as an arrow bloodied on a girl. They keep to the dark and mostly to midnight, and they shelter from weather like anything else adrift outdoors. Above all they are bound to their own unfinished accounts, circling the face of the world because the sins of earth are not yet paid for, and no amount of flying settles them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sluagh?

The Sluagh is the host of the unforgiven dead in Scottish Gaelic and Irish folklore, a flying multitude of the spirits of people who have died and cannot enter heaven until the sins of their lives are answered for. The Gaelic word simply means a host, army or crowd. In the Hebrides the hosts were understood as distinct from the fairies, who walk on the ground, while the sluagh travel through the air above inhabited places.

What does the Sluagh do to people?

The Sluagh shoot venomous darts at livestock and at anyone working outdoors after dark, and they lift living men into the air to make them shoot on the hosts’ behalf. Men who were taken were said to be dragged through mud and mire as payment and were sometimes set down miles from where they were seized. One Barra tradition holds that a conscripted man could cheat his orders by shooting a cow instead of the person he was told to kill, because the hosts only checked for blood on the arrow.

How do you keep the Sluagh out of a house?

Because the Sluagh were believed to come out of the west, the west-facing door and windows of a house were shut and made fast when someone inside lay dying. The hosts were thought to be seeking a soul at the point of death, so the precaution was taken specifically at a deathbed. They were also creatures of the dark and particularly of midnight, which made the hours around it the dangerous ones.

Why is red lichen called the blood of the hosts?

Highland tradition held that the Sluagh fought battles against one another in the air on clear frosty nights, most famously at Hallowe’en, and that the crimson found on rocks the next morning was their spilled blood, *fuil nan sluagh*. The collectors who recorded the belief noted its natural cause: red rock lichen brightens and runs wet as frost thaws out of it. Both the explanation and the belief were reported side by side by the people who wrote them down.

Does the Sluagh look like a flock of birds?

Not in the older sources. Two of the earliest recorded witnesses compared the passing hosts to starlings and to a covey of birds, but both were describing the sound and motion of a crowd in the air rather than its shape. No early account describes the Sluagh’s bodies at all, and the image of a literal flock of black birds at a dying person’s window belongs to modern retellings rather than to the Hebridean record.

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