Enchanted Beasts & Faerie Women

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On moonlit nights in England’s Lake District, women with antlers used to wade in the shallow waters of the lakes. In the Scottish Highlands last century, a woman believed that the wounded swan she had rescued was a "devout lady under a spell." In County Kerry, Ireland, it is said that to eat a hare is to eat your grandmother.

These are just a few of the ways in which the boundaries between women and animals continually blur and melt into each other in Celtic tradition. In so many legends and folk-tales, a beautiful faerie woman turns into an animal and then disappears into the Otherworld, or as in the famous story of the selkie, an animal turns into a woman and inhabits our world for a short time, but eventually returns to her own, leaving behind a heartbroken husband.

W. B. Yeats reworked this archetypal theme in his famous poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus:”

I went out to the hazelwood,
Because a fire was in my head,
Cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
And gone to blow the fire aflame.
Something rustled on the floor.
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And vanished in the brightening air.

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