Folklore

The Nuckelavee

The Nuckelavee is a malevolent sea-being of Orkney folklore, remembered in the islands as the most feared of all their supernatural creatures. According to tradition it dwelt in the sea but rode ashore as a monstrous horse fused with a rider — in the most detailed accounts a single skinless body, black blood coursing through yellow veins, with a single fiery eye and breath that blighted crops and sickened livestock. Islanders blamed it for drought, epidemics and the horse-disease mortasheen, and held that it could not cross fresh running water. The principal record is the collection of the nineteenth-century Sanday folklorist Walter Traill Dennison.