The Peoples Songbag Mermaids & Cures

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31239, 10 December 1966, Page 13

The Peoples Songbag Mermaids & Cures

(Specially written for "The Press" by

DERRICK ROONEY)

A TERM AIDS, in Scottish ■ folk-lore, come in both helpful and dangerous varieties. Countless stories and songs have them flapping ashore or perching on rocks to carry off human infants or lure bold young sailors to a watery and premature grave; but an almost equal number has them providing miraculous cures for disease or taking human lovers, as was the case with “The Great Silkie of Sulke Skerrie.” This silkie, a merman able to assume human form, took as lover a beautiful Scots girl, and as he swam off to sea one stormy night, taking his son, he told her that: And thou shall marry a gunner good, And a gey good gunner he shall be; And the very first shot that ere he shoots. He shall kill both my young son and me. Sure enough, the gunner did just that. A happier episode, this time with a mermaid, led to the discovery of a favourite, if not very efficient, remedy for consumption. I quote from Cromek’s “Nighsdale and Galloway Song”: “A charming young girl, whom consumption had brought to the brink of the grave, was lamented by her lover. In a vein of renovating

sweetness, the good mermaid sang to him: <r ‘Wad ye let the bonnie May die r your hand. And the mugwort flowering i* the landf’ “He cropped and pressed the flower-tops, and administered the juice to his fair mistress, who arose and blesssed the bestower for the return of health." A similar story comes from Renfrewshire. As the funeral procession for a young woman who had died of consumption moved along the highway by the Firth of Clyde a mermaid raised her head from the water and mournfully cried: "If they watt drink nettles in March, And eat muggons in May, Sae many braw maidens, Wadna gang to the clay." As should already be obvious, mugwort (also known as southernwood) and a decoction of nettles once formed a favourite folk remedy for tuberculosis. Its use, however, seems to have been confined to Scotland: Nicholas Culpeper, the seventeenth - century English herbalist who could find a cure for almost anything in almost any plant, lists several cures for consumption, but southernwood is not among them. He does remark that it is efficacious “upon the overmuch taking of opium”— implying, perhaps, that mermaids are hallucinations?