Ballads Weird and Wonderful

Ballads Weird and Wonderful - Imperium Press

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Being a lowland Scot was hard. Life was filled with treacheries. Seals could turn into people and get young maidens pregnant. Young maidens could be seduced by sea-going pirates. Knights could find themselves dead at the hands of their lover (and with any luck, they would get revenge in return.) Worst of all, the fairy folk could take people over to fairyland where the servitude would be long and the separation from family would be dreary.

This book is an anthology of lowland Scottish poems. By and large, the poems are short and punchy. I found them delightfully like a sharp collection of horror short stories. The structure of the story was in the nature of slow burn build-ups, telegraphing the punch a the end. Sometimes the punch comes out of the blue. One such was “The Demon Lover”, which has a wife kiss her baby goodbye and run off with a former lover on his wonderful ship, with disastrous consequences for her. Another was “The Great Sealchie of Sule Skerrie,” which deals with the difficult problem of love between a Scottish lass and a Selkie, a seal that transforms into a man. The Selkie prophizes:

“And it shall pass on a summer's days,
When the sun shines hot on every stane,
That I will take my little young son,
And teach him for to swim the faem

And thou shalt marry a proud gunner,
and a proud gunner I'm sure he'll be,
And the very first shot that e'er he shoots,
He'll shoot baith my young son and me.”

Obviously, the Scottish dialect can be a problem. This volume thoughtfully provides the occasional footnote of explanation or translation. A trick I discovered is to read the poems out loud, which helps to form the sense of the poems and provides a greater appreciation for the story.