Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please

Subject: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: katlaughing
Date: 11 Jul 99 - 10:47 PM

When I was a young girl I read a book I just adored and identified with called the Water Witch. It was about a girl in Scotland who was called Kelpie. The translation given was "water witch".

I know there are Kelpie dogs in Australia and actually quite a few in Wyoming; I've a cat named Kelpie who sits on me when I take a nice hot bath and dips her tail in the water; and, of course, that was my "playname" after reading the book because I wanted to be her.

Now, tonight I saw a silly Disney tv movie and the little Scottish "gel" in it calls the Loch Ness monster (such a misnomer!) a water kelpie.

So now they've got me wondering who was most accurate and is there any kind of kelpie which doesn't have to do with water, as the distinction was made in the questionable accuracy of tonight's movie?

So how about it? Anybody know? Thanks,

katlaughingwhostilllovesthenamekelpie

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: George Seto
Date: 11 Jul 99 - 11:11 PM

Kat, as far as I recall, a Kelpie is a WAter Spirit in the Scottish Culture. Something to do with horses I believe. There is a note about them in Majory Kennedy-Fraser's first volume (Songs of the Hebrides). I can't find my copy right to hand.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Barry Finn
Date: 11 Jul 99 - 11:18 PM

Kelpies are the best known of the Scottish Water-Horses. They prefere to haunt rivers rather than lochs & sea. They could assume human form looking like a rough, shaggy man. They're heard to howl & wail before storms & their most usual form is a young horse.

From "An Encyclopedia Of Fairies". Barry

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Murray on Saltspring
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 01:41 AM

The word evidently comes from the Gaelic "cailpeach", = bullock or colt. It's a malevolent water spirit who lures humans to drown, but can be coerced (probably by trickery) into performing difficult labour. It's usually like a black or white horse [sometimes finely caparisoned], but now & again like a grey wrinkled old man. There's a wee rhyme about it: "The old family of the Grahams of Morphie was in former times very powerful, but at length they sunk in fortune, and finally the original male line became extinct. Among the old women of the Mearns, their decay is attributed to a supernatural cause. When one of the lairds, say they, built the old castle, he secured the assistance of the water-kelpy or river-horse, by the accredited means of throwing a pair of branks over his head. He then compelled the robust spirit to carry prodigious loads of stones for the building, and did not relieve him till the whole was finished. The poor kelpy was glad of his deliverance, but at the same time felt himself so galled with the hard labour, that on being permitted to escape from the branks, and just before he disappeared in the water, he turned about, and expressed, in the following words, at once his own grievances and the destiny of his taskmaster's family:
'Sair back and sair banes,
Drivin' the laird o' Morphie's stanes!
The laird o' Morphie'll never thrive
As lang's the kelpy is alive!'"
[- Chambers' Popular Rhymes].

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Philippa
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 04:31 AM

there was a related thread a while agoeach uisge
One contribution from me is a long list of relevant URLs, but that was before I learned to make clickable links. The each-uisge (water-horse) isn't the same as the kelpie, not quite so nasty, but the two often get mixed up, especially in translation to English.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: SeanM
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 06:09 AM

Wonderful faerie tale about a water-bull who is rescued by a little girl... the water-horse tries to seduce and drown her, but the bull fights him off...

Well, that's the short version, anyway.

M

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Art Thieme
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 10:35 AM

"Kelpie"---n. someone addicted to smoking kelp. (A 12-step program for these unfortunate folks has been in existence since anciant times when that bullwhip-like sea plant started washing up on beaches back in paleolithic times (named after Tom Paley). Indeed Lash Larue and many others used these like bullwhips are now used. If you need that 12-step group, you'll find it in the Yellow Pages under KKK. (Kelp Kelp Kelp Help)

Art

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: katlaughing
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 06:08 PM

Well, Art, I see one more year hasn't put a dent in your wit! I am LMAOWROTF!

Thanks to you all. My poor cat is now in an identity crisis, "You named me after a HORSE?! And, MALE, at that!??"

Of course, now, I have to deal with my own, as while I love horses, esp. the one that raised me, I've never remotely felt as though I WAS one!:-) Ah, well, crisis all round!

Thanks, really.

KAtlaughing

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Liam's Brother
Date: 12 Jul 99 - 06:49 PM

Hi Art!

That was Lush LaRue.

All the best.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Andrés Magré
Date: 13 Jul 99 - 01:55 AM

Just as a curiosity, I may recall that "kelper" is a very familiar term for us Argentinians. There is a group of 2000 or 3000 people living in an island far down the South Atlantic Ocean that still pertains to the British, though we consider it as argentinian territory. In 1982 Argentina took the islands by force and this gave origin to the Falklands War. Yes, the inhabitants of the Malvinas (or Falklands) are called by the British, and call themselves, KELPERS, a name taken from the sea plant that abound in their coasts. The term "kelper" has been adopted by local newspapers and media to name a person who is a second-class citizen, because that was the status a native of the islands had before the war. They were UK citizens but only in the islands, and needed a visa to visit the UK territory. Now, as a consequence of the war, they hold first-class British citizenship. Curiously, Argentina always offered that citizenship to all of them, but they always refused, (except one or two cases) and this is reasonable because they are all descendants of British and Scottish and have never had contacts with the continent, since 1853. This is one of the very few cases of colonialism that remain in the world, and that war (in my personal opinion) one of the many cases of stupidity that plague the world. - Best regards - [e-mail]

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Helen
Date: 09 Feb 00 - 05:53 PM

Philippa

Your blue clicky thing address didn't work, but I found the old thread so here it is:

Water Kelpie

http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=4374&messages=31

The reason I am interested in this again is because a discussion about kelpies, silkies, etc has come up this week on the Harplist (e-mail mailing list)

Helen

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 09 Feb 00 - 06:35 PM

Here... a damn good song about the kelpie, and if you follow the links, you'll find some neat annotations...

Jethro Tull's Kelpie

A damn good lyric site on the whole...

;-)

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Callie
Date: 09 Feb 00 - 06:58 PM

There's a wonderful children's book inspired by the kelpie legend by Patricia Leitch. From memory, it's called The Horse from Black Loch. After reading that and others of her book as a child I wanted wanted wanted to go to Scotland! Callie

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Feb 00 - 07:45 PM

Very good example of what I call "thread lurch" from Andres Magre.

Yes that was an even sillier war than most wars. But Maggie had an election she wanted to win, and General Galtieri thought she'd given him the green light to invade by withdrawing the British Navy. Naive bastard.

The ironic thing, as I understand , is that if a few more of the bombs sold to the Argentine by Britain had exploded when they landed on the ships, the war would have gone the other way. We'd have lost Thatcher, and you'd probably still have Galtieri.

The other thing that sticks in the memory is that during I think it was a World Cup match between Argentina and England a few years before the war thwere was a big banner displayed by England Fans saying "Give us Ossie Ardiles and you can have the Falklands".

I sometimes wonder if that could have contributed to an unfiortunate misunderstanding.

"Magre" - that's not a worn down version of "McGrath" is it? I've got cousins out there.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 09 Feb 00 - 09:46 PM

G'day Kat,

They all forgot the dog.

The Australian sheepdogs called Kelpies are (despite local non-urban myth that claims they are interbred with the Dingo) all descended in some degree from a champion Scottish sheepdog (a brownish short-haired collie) named Kelpie.

Maybe the Kelpie habit of standing with its front feet in a water trough or creek, whenever possible, is a distant race memory of boggy Scotland ... pretty distant when they are chasing sheep about the dry inland plains.

Regards,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: katlaughing
Date: 10 Feb 00 - 12:20 AM

Hey there, Bob! Nice ta see ya on here! How's it going? Thanks for that. I'd forgotten all about this thread, until Helen refreshed it. So does that mean my border collie may have kelpie "leanings"?**BG**

All the best,

katlaughing

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Escamillo
Date: 10 Feb 00 - 01:44 AM

McGrath, thanks for your comments on the Falklands. Though I would not want to distract the attention from the subject of Kelpies, I would only add that the War only had one possible result, which was the defeat of the invasion, not only for the enormous difference in forces and resources, but for the brutal blindness of the Argentinian military government, seeking for popular support through the worst method, a war.

Thanks to that imbecility and to many hundreds of brave young men (almost children in our side), democracy returned to Argentina. Sad benefit for all of us. Best regards - Andrés Magré (Magré is French, from Finisterre as far as I know, but who knows ? could it be the result of another past war ?) :))

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Bert
Date: 10 Feb 00 - 09:47 AM

Andrés, just to complete the circle. The people in Finisterre consider themselves British.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: GUEST,Julie
Date: 11 Feb 00 - 07:50 AM

Going back to the original point ( sorry I hadn't read this before) The little girl in the film refers to Nessie as a Kelpie because there is a story that St Columba battled with the Kelpie at the Fort Agustus ( I don't think that's how you spell it ). This is at the west end of Loch Ness. If you ever get a chance go and visit its wonderful area of the country.

On another note one of the sixes (small groups) that Scottish Brownies ( small girl guides) have is Kelpies. I was a Kelpie when I was 7-11.

Julie

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: GUEST,Philippa
Date: 11 Feb 00 - 03:23 PM

Andre.
That's interesting about the kelpers. So many Gaelic-speaking Scots went to the Malvinas to herd sheep that they actually have a Gaelic name for the place, Eilean nan Caoraich (Island of the sheep). I was surprised to hear some people who were born in Argentinia speaking Gaelic on a tv series about emigration from Scotland. But it turned that either the parents returned to Scotland or else sent their children to be fostered with relatives in Scotland when the children were around about 10 years old. They did this because they lived in very remote areas of Argentina and had no educational facilities. I'd often heard of Welsh speakers in Patagonia, but that programme was the first time I heard about Argentinian Gaels.

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: katlaughing
Date: 11 Feb 00 - 03:30 PM

Julie, thank you! That is very interesting and if I ever get a chance to get over there, that will be one of the places I visit.

I love that your Girl Guides have Kelpies! And, my cat who is named that, does like the "lead the way", especially towards the kitchen where her food is!

All the best,

katlaughing

Subject: RE: Exact meaning of 'Kelpie', please
From: Escamillo
Date: 11 Feb 00 - 07:19 PM

Sorry for continuing on the subject of Kelpers/Falklands, but Phillipa is responsible ! :)
There's a very interesting community of Gaels in Argentina, mainly in Patagonia, up to the point that their towns and their activities, including musical, is an important issue in tourism catalogues in Argentina, and their culture has been long appreciated for more than a century. I'll gather more info and come back.
Un abrazo - Andrés (who as a child liked to attend to Scottish family parades in the garden of a neighbour)