- Shellycoat
In Scottish and
Northern English [The Letters of Joseph Ritson, Esq By Joseph Ritson, Joseph Frank, Nicholas Harris Nicolas, William Pikering, London, 1833]folklore , a shellycoat is a type ofbogeyman that hauntsriver s andstream s. The name comes from the coat of shells these creatures are said to wear, which rattle upon movement. Shellycoats are considered to be relatively harmless; they may mislead wanderers, particularly those they think are trespassing upon the creature's territory, but without malice. [Briggs, pp. 58-59.] A common tactic of a shellycoat would be to cry out as if drowning and then laugh at the distracted victim.Many places on the coast of Scotland have names that reference the shellycoat. Supposedly, shellycoats are particularly fond of the area around the river Hermitage, in Liddesdale.
As described above, the shellycoat shares many of the traits of the
Brag ,Kelpie andNix .Schellenrock
Jacob Grimm stated in his "Deutsche Mythologie " [Chapter 17, p. 4.] that the Scottishgoblin Shellycoat is one and the same as the GermanSchellenrock , that is bell-coat:Thomas Keightly quotes Grimm and classifies the shellycoat as a type of brownie. [Keightly, 1870, in the section "Brownie".] :The domestic nature of the shellycoat emphasized by Grimm and Keightly stands in contradistinction to the wild nature of the water sprites mentioned in other sources.
Bibliography
* Briggs, Katharine Mary. "The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature." University of Chicago Press, London, 1967.
* Grimm, Jacob. "Deutsche Mythologie". Vollständige Ausgabe. Marix Verlag: Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-86539-143-8. English version at
Northvegr "Grimm's Teutonic Mythology Translation Project". Available online at http://www.northvegr.org/lore/grimmst/017_14.php* Keightley, Thomas. "The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries." 1870. Available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm130.htm.
References
* [http://www.pantheon.org/articles/s/shellycoat.html Shellycoats] "at Encyclopedia Mythica"
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