Water Horses and River Spirits

A horse by the water

Wherever there are cold lochs, fast rivers and deep pools in northern Europe, there are stories of a spirit that lives in the water and comes out of it in the shape of a horse. It may be black or gray or white. It is always handsome, and it always seems tame. It stands by the bank as if waiting for a rider, and anyone who climbs on its back is carried into the water and seldom seen again.

The water horse is a shapeshifter in two senses. It takes a horse's form, though it is not a horse, and many tales say it can also appear as a handsome young man, a rough old one, or something too strange to name. Each country has its own word for it, and the details shift with the landscape, but the outline holds. The overview of shapeshifter mythology counts it among the many shape-changers of the world.

The kelpie

The kelpie of Scottish folklore haunts rivers and streams, especially fords and the pools below waterfalls. The word is usually traced to a Gaelic word for a colt or heifer. Tellers describe it most often as a dark horse standing on the bank, or as a fine young man who offers to help a traveler across a flooded ford.

In the commonest story a group of children find a pony by the river. One climbs on, then another, and the pony's back stretches to make room for them all. One child, uneasy, holds back and only lays a finger on its neck, and finds the finger stuck fast. In many versions the child cuts off the finger and runs home, while the kelpie plunges into the water with the rest. The tale is told with variations across Scotland and well beyond it, and it is plainly meant for small listeners.

Some rivers were said to claim a life each year. In one Highland legend a voice is heard from the water saying that the hour has come but not the man, and before the day is out a stranger has hurried to the river and drowned.

The each-uisge

In the Highlands and islands the more dangerous water horse is the each-uisge, Gaelic for "water horse," which lives in sea lochs, freshwater lochs and the sea itself. A horse of this kind may be ridden safely inland. But if it sees or smells water on the way, the rider is lost: its hide holds him fast, and it carries him into the depths. The old tales add a grim detail, that the only part of the rider ever found afterward was the liver, washed up on the shore.

The each-uisge also comes as a young man, and its best-known stories are about the women who saw through the disguise. A girl sits on a hillside with a handsome stranger who lays his head in her lap and falls asleep. As she strokes his hair she finds water weed in it, or sand. Very quietly she cuts away the part of her skirt he is lying on, slips free, and runs. In some island stories a water horse that was killed left nothing behind but a soft, jelly-like mass, like a stranded jellyfish.

Brook horse, nykur and nix

Scandinavia has its own water horse. In Sweden it is the brook horse, a beautiful pale horse seen by streams and rivers, often in mist, which carries away anyone who mounts it. In Iceland and the Faroes it is the nykur, a gray horse whose hooves, in some accounts, are set on backward. Some Icelandic tales say a nykur cannot bear to hear its own name, and flees back into the water when someone speaks it.

Behind these stands a larger figure, the water spirit known in German as the nix, in Norwegian as the nokken and in Swedish as the nacken. He is usually a male spirit of lakes, rivers and waterfalls, and he can take many shapes. In Norway and Sweden one of them is a white horse. In another he is a young man playing a fiddle in the waterfall, who might teach his art to a bold student in return for a gift. Iron was the old protection against him, as against most uncanny beings: a knife or a needle dropped into the water, or a nail in the boat. The word is ancient. The hero of the oldest English epic boasts of killing nine sea monsters called by a related name, nicors.

Wales, Man and Ireland

Wales has the ceffyl dwr, the water horse of mountain pools and waterfalls. Some tellers made it a sly, shining creature that would let a traveler mount and then rise into the air with him, only to melt into mist and let him fall. The Isle of Man has the cabyll-ushtey, its name again simply "water horse," said to come out of the sea or the pools to take cattle and, in darker tales, people. Manx tradition also tells of a goblin of the shore, the glashtin, sometimes described in a horse's shape.

In Ireland the each uisce, close cousin of the Scottish water horse, is said to live in lakes and in the sea. Irish water lore is also a haunt of the pooka, which often takes the shape of a dark horse with burning eyes and gives a terrifying night ride to anyone foolish enough to mount it, before tipping the rider into a ditch, a bog or a stream. A waterfall on the upper Liffey was known as the pooka's pool. The pooka is more mischievous than murderous, and it is treated more fully among the tricksters.

How to know one

The tales give their listeners a short list of warnings, and the list is much the same from one shore to another.

• A wet mane. The water horse is never quite dry, even on a hot day.
• Weed or sand in the hair. In human shape, something of the riverbed is caught in its curls.
• A sticky hide. Whoever touches it cannot let go.
• A back that grows. However many children climb on, there is always room for one more.
• Something wrong with the feet. Hooves turned backward, or, in some tales of the horse in human form, hooves where feet should be.
• A horse with no owner. A gentle horse standing alone by deep water belongs to no one in the parish.

The bridle that binds

A water horse has one weakness, and it is the bridle. If a person can slip a bridle over its head, or take from it the bridle it already wears, the creature must obey. It will plow, haul and carry like an honest farm horse, and it will be stronger than any. In a tale from the east of Scotland a laird bridled a kelpie and made it carry the stones for his new castle; when the bridle came off, it fled to the water and laid a curse on his family. In the Highlands, bridles said to have been taken from water horses were kept by some families as heirlooms, and water in which one had been dipped was thought to cure sickness.

The binding never lasts. Sooner or later someone slips the bridle off, out of pity or carelessness, and the horse is gone in a burst of spray. It is the selkie's story turned inside out. On the shore, a hidden sealskin keeps a gentle creature from going home. By the loch, a stolen bridle keeps a dangerous one from doing harm.

Why the tales were told

It is not hard to see what these stories were for. The places where the water horse waits are the places where people really drowned: a river in spate, a ford that looked shallow, a loch that drops away suddenly into black cold water, a bog that keeps whatever falls into it. A child who believed that the pretty pony by the river might be a kelpie would keep away from the river, and that was the point. The many tales of a stranger with weed in his hair carried a second warning, to young women, about charming strangers.

The tales also gave shape to grief. A drowning is sudden and senseless. To say that the water took a life, that the river claims its due, is at least to give the loss a cause. Old rhymes in Scotland still name the rivers said to demand their yearly toll, and they are quoted, half seriously, by people who know those rivers well.

A plain word. The water horse is folklore, but the danger it stood for is real. Cold, deep and fast water is treacherous even for strong swimmers, and the caution of the old tales is good advice still.