Tangie

Also Known As: also tangi, tongie, tanyie; from Norn and Scots *tang*, the coarse seaweed of the genus *Fucus*
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A sea-spirit of the Orkney and Shetland shorelines that appears either as a horse or as an aged man, hung about with wet seaweed and sometimes lit with phosphorescence.
Role in Mythos: It is the danger of the tideline given a shape, waiting on skerries and sand-shoals for anyone foolish enough to walk the shore alone after dark.
Relation to Humans: It preys on solitary travellers, and the tradition dwells particularly on women caught out at night near the lochs, whom it drags under the water and devours. It could also derange people and animals, leaving them witless and easy to take.

The tide goes off a Shetland voe fast, and what it leaves behind is a shelf of black rock roped with weed. Bladderwrack pops underfoot. The smell is iodine and sweet rot, and the whole shelf glistens as though it has been oiled. On a still night the wrack moves anyway, sluggishly, in the last of the swell. Somewhere along that line the islanders reckoned there was a horse standing, and its coat was made of the same brown weed.

Tang is not a poetic word. It is the working name for the heavy seaweed that grows on rock above the low-water mark, and the distinction mattered enough that people went to court over it: tang grows above the low-water mark, wair below, and an Orkney session paper of 1759 says so in as many words. Islanders cut it, burned it for kelp, spread it on their rigs and watched their sheep go down to the ebb to eat it in a hard spring. The word came north with the Norse, and it is still *þang* in Faroese and Old Norse. A tangie, then, is simply a thing of the tang, named for what it wears rather than what it is. The same word stuck to the small common seal, the tangie or tang-fish, supposed to live among the fuci near the shore. That is the register the creature lives in. Not a god, not a name from a poem, just the thing in the weed.

The sources cannot agree on what it looked like, and their disagreement is more interesting than a tidy answer would be. Shetlanders who had emigrated to British Columbia, questioned in the years before the First World War, remembered the tangie in horse form as dark grey going to black, and remembered too that it could glow. Jessie Saxby, writing in Shetland in 1932 from what she had gathered at home, describes something almost heraldic: horse-shaped, with a snow-white mane and a rampant crest, very large blue eyes, and a flowing beard mingling with a curly coat of cream colour. Both portraits keep the weed. Both keep the horse. In its other shape it is an old man, aged and bearded and hung with wrack, which is the same silhouette from a different angle, since the beard and the mane are doing identical work. Earlier glossary-makers, going back to a Scots dictionary note of 1825, add the phosphorescence: a wet green shine on the hide, the kind of light that comes off disturbed water on a dark night.

Saxby also gives it an address. The tangie haunts the rocky coast, the outlying skerries and the sand-shoals, but its home is in the depths of the wide ocean. That division is the whole creature in one sentence. It belongs out there and it comes in here.

In Orkney the name turns up in the plainest domestic register imaginable, the sort of sentence a frightened child would repeat afterwards: old Tangie standing before the bed. In Shetland it turns up in an oath, sworn as truly as there are hill folk, tangies and brownies upon the land. Nobody in either place felt the need to explain it. No origin story survives, no account of where the first one came from or who made it, and there is no sign that anyone ever asked. It was already a common noun by the time anyone wrote it down.

What it does is simpler than what it is. It waits where the sea meets the road, and it takes whoever is walking there alone in the dark. The tradition is unusually specific about young women on night roads near the lochs, and unusually blunt about the outcome: under the water, and eaten. It did not always need to run anyone down, either. It could addle the mind, in people and in beasts alike, so that a victim wandered the wrong way and came obligingly to the water’s edge.

It should not be confused with its freshwater cousin. The njuggle of the Shetland burns and mill-dams is a different being with a different beat, one that jams the tirl of a watermill and belongs to still, inland places. The tangie is salt. Nor should the tang-fish be muddled with the selkie: Orkney tradition split the seals into two classes, and it was the grey seal that could shed its skin and walk. The common seal, the tangie-fish of the ebb, had no such power. It was only ever a seal.

The one narrative anyone attached to the creature belongs to Black Eric, the sheep thief of Fitful Head, and it comes to modern readers through George Stewart’s *Shetland Fireside Tales* of 1877 and a long verse retelling published by the Shetland emigrant Eric Duncan in 1896. In the poem the thief is a squat, long-armed, deep-eyed creature in stolen sheepskins with an iron rod, and the country from Fitful Head northward is losing its flocks to him. A boatman named Hakon Gyar claims to have seen a smoky brightness shoot out of the cave mouth one calm dark night and take the shape of horse and rider at the cliff top. Nobody believes him. Then the local strongman goes up to settle it, wrenches the iron staff away, and is being crushed to death when a horse as black as coal comes up the hill clearing a rod at every stride, fire at its eyes and nostrils, the grass burning to ash behind it. The thief vaults on and they go over the edge together.

The second meeting comes in December snow, and it is the better scene. The strongman’s pony flounders in a drift, so he takes a strange horse waiting on the far side of the gully and mounts it. The hide grows hot under him. Snowflakes fizz on it and vanish. It carries him up to the crest and pitches him off into the frost, and then the screaming starts below, because the tangie has gone down to the ledge outside the cave where its own master is clinging, and is tearing him off it. That is the ending the story wants. The creature had never been anyone’s servant.

Its powers follow from where it lives. It is fast, it is strong enough to carry a man over a cliff, it shifts between horse and old man at will, it can walk out of the sea and stand on land without any apparent cost, and it can rot a person’s judgement from a distance. Its limits follow from the same place. It is a coastal animal, tied to the ebb and the skerries and the loch roads, and everything recorded about it happens within sight of water. Against the njuggle a burning peat was said to serve; against the tangie nothing is recorded at all. There is no charm, no iron, no rowan, no saint’s name. There is only the practical advice buried in every version of the story, which is not to be down at the shore in the dark, and not to get on a strange horse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tangie?

A tangie is a shape-shifting sea-spirit from the folklore of Orkney and Shetland. It appears either as a horse or as an aged, bearded man, and in both forms it is covered in wet seaweed. Its name comes from *tang*, the Northern Isles word for the coarse *Fucus* seaweed that grows on rock above the low-water mark.

What does the tangie do to people?

The tangie waits along the shore, on skerries and sand-shoals, and takes solitary travellers, with the tradition dwelling especially on women walking near the lochs at night. It drags them under the water and devours them. It could also cause derangement in humans and animals, leaving victims disoriented and easier to catch.

Is the tangie the same as a kelpie or a njuggle?

They are related but distinct. Scots dictionaries class the tangie as a species of kelpie, but the tangie is specifically a creature of salt water and the coast, while the njuggle of Shetland belongs to fresh water, burns and mill-dams. The tangie is also separate from the selkie, even though the common inshore seal shares the name tang-fish.

What is the legend of Black Eric and the tangie?

Black Eric was a sheep thief who lived in a cave in the cliffs of Fitful Head in Shetland and rode a tangie in its horse form, which gave him supernatural speed and reach. A local strongman fought him twice, and in the second encounter Eric went over the cliff. The tangie then turned on him and tore him from the rock face rather than saving him.

What did the tangie look like?

Accounts disagree. Shetlanders interviewed in the early twentieth century remembered a dark grey to black horse that could glow with phosphorescence, while Jessie Saxby’s 1932 collection describes a cream-coloured horse with a snow-white mane, very large blue eyes and a flowing beard. Every version keeps the matted seaweed and the equine shape.