Sea spirits: Rán's net, the seal woman and the drowned who come home

I never turn my back on the sea. Not on the beach, not on the harbour wall, not on a ferry. When I go down to the water I stand with my face to it for a while before I bend for shells or driftwood, and when I leave I walk backwards the first few steps, the way you leave a room where someone important is sitting.

The sea keeps accounts. It knows what it has given you and it knows what it is owed, and it does not like to be forgotten while you are standing on its doorstep.

That is one of the first rules of my line. Wherever I have looked since, people knew it too, in more places and more thousands of years than I can count.

This is a long one. Pour something warm.

I. Before the gods there was water

Almost everywhere people have told how the world began, water was there first.

In Babylon they said that before heaven had a name, there were two waters mingled together: Apsu, the sweet water under the earth, and Tiamat, the salt sea. Everything else was born out of them. When the young gods grew loud, Tiamat rose against them as a vast and terrible thing of the deep, and the world we live on was made from her split body. Order, in that story, is something cut out of the sea. It was never meant to last forever.

In Egypt it was Nun, the dark and endless water that was there before the first hill rose out of it, and that still lies around the edges of the world, waiting. Every flood of the Nile was a little of Nun coming back to see how things were going.

I think this is the oldest feeling people have about the sea. Not that it is a place, but that it is the thing everything else is floating on. The fields, the houses, the churches, the kings. All of it rests on something older that never agreed to hold it up.

II. Rán and her net

In the old North the sea had a husband and a wife.

Ægir was the one who brewed ale for the gods in his hall under the waves, and that hall was lit not with fire but with gold. That is why the old poets could call gold Ægir's fire, and everyone listening knew what they meant.

His wife was Rán, and she was something else. Rán had a net. The old stories say she used it to catch the men who went out on the water, and those she caught she kept. In one of the poems Loki borrows that net to fish a dwarf out of a waterfall, which tells you it was a real thing in the minds of the people who told it, with weight and knots and a smell of tar.

Their nine daughters were the waves. They had names like the Cold One, the Heaving One and the Blood-Haired One, and the sailors who spoke of them were not being pretty. They were describing who exactly was coming over the side.

What I love about the old North is that nobody pretended Rán could be stopped. They did not pray her away. They bargained. In the saga of Frithiof the Bold, when the storm is at its worst and the ship is about to go down, Frithiof takes the gold ring his beloved gave him, cuts it into pieces and shares it out among his men, so that none of them will come to Rán's hall with empty hands. You go into the deep with something to pay with. You arrive as a guest, not as a beggar.

And there is a story in Eyrbyggja saga that has stayed with me since the first time I read it. A man named Thorodd and his crew were drowned off the coast of Iceland. At their funeral feast, while the household sat drinking to their memory, the drowned men walked in through the door, soaking wet, and sat down by the fire. People were frightened, but they were also comforted. It was believed that when the drowned came to their own funeral ale, it meant Rán had received them well.

Think about that for a moment. Grief, and the sea, and wet footprints across the floor, and somebody saying quietly: that is a good sign.

III. Older than the gods: boats given to the water

Long before anyone wrote down a word about Rán, the people of the North were already giving things to the water.

On the island of Als, in the south of Denmark, a boat was found in a small bog in the 1880s. It had been put there around 350 BC, together with shields, swords and spears, the gear of a whole war band. It was not lost. It was given. The Hjortspring boat is the oldest plank boat we have from Scandinavia, and it survived for more than two thousand years because somebody wanted the water to have it.

Go back further still and the rocks of Sweden and Norway are covered in ships. Bronze Age ships, hundreds of them, chipped into stone with figures standing in them, some holding axes, some with arms raised. Nobody knows exactly what they mean. But you do not carve a ship into a mountain because you like boats. You carve it because the ship is how you cross over. Water was the road to the other side, and the boat was the thing that carried you there, living or dead.

IV. The ones who come back wet

Not everyone the sea takes stays taken.

On the coast of Norway they told of the draug, a drowned man who sails in half a boat. Some said he had no head, some that his face was a clump of seaweed. Fishermen alone on the water at dusk would sometimes see him, or hear his long cry over the waves, and they knew what it meant. Someone in that boat would not see another winter.

Here in Denmark we have a word for a drowned body that the sea gives back to the beach. We call it a strandvasker, the one the shore has washed. Along the west coast, where the North Sea comes in hard, the old people told of strandvaskere who would not lie still. They wanted what every dead person wants, which is a grave in church earth with a name over it, and until someone carried them up from the sand and gave them one, they would come and stand by the beds of the living at night, dripping.

I never pass anything the sea has left on the beach without at least looking at it properly. Most of the time it is a plank or a bottle or a dead gull. It does not matter. The point is that you look. The point is that you are the kind of person who would notice if it was something more.

V. Women of the water

The havfrue, the mermaid of Danish folk belief, is not the sweet girl from the cartoons. She is beautiful, she combs her long hair on the rocks, and she sings, and the men who follow the singing go down to the bottom of the sea and do not come back. But she also knows things. In the old stories she can see what is coming.

There is a Danish legend that in the spring of 1576 an old farmer from the island of Samsø came all the way to the king's court at Frederiksborg. He said a mermaid had risen out of the sea in front of him and told him that the queen would bear a son, and that the boy would be a great king. He was laughed at, of course. On the twelfth of April the following year, Queen Sophie gave birth to the boy who became Christian IV, one of the most famous kings Denmark has ever had.

In Iceland they had the marbendill, called marmennill in the oldest books, a merman that fishermen sometimes pulled up on their lines. If you caught one, he might tell you your future, and he might laugh at you while he did it. In one old story a farmer brings a marbendill home, and the creature laughs three times: once when the farmer kicks his faithful dog, once when the farmer's wife greets him sweetly at the door though she is false to him, and once when the farmer curses a hummock in his field that has treasure buried beneath it. Then he asks to be carried back to the sea.

And then there is Agnete. The old Danish ballad tells of a woman who went down into the sea with a merman and lived with him for eight years and bore him seven sons. One day she heard the church bells ringing up on land and asked to go to church, just once. She never came back. The merman went up to the church to beg her, and the little ones cried for her at the bottom of the sea, and she did not go.

People argue about whether Agnete is a cruel woman or a free one. My great-grandmother, who spent her life binding women to men and loosing them again, said Agnete was a woman who heard her own bell. Every woman hears one sooner or later, she said, and the trouble only begins when she pretends she did not.

VI. The seal woman of Kalsoy

Up in the Faroe Islands, on the island of Kalsoy, there is a village called Mikladalur, and on the rocks below it stands a bronze statue of a woman stepping out of a sealskin.

The story goes that once a year, on Twelfth Night, the seals came ashore there, took off their skins and danced as people. A young man from the village crept down and stole the skin of one of the seal women, so that she could not go back. He married her. She bore him children. He kept the skin locked in a chest and wore the key on his belt.

One day he went out fishing and forgot the key. When he came home she was gone, and the children were alone by the fire.

That is not the end of it. Later, the men of the village went hunting in the seal caves and killed a great bull seal and two young ones. They were her seal husband and her seal sons. That night she came to the village in her own shape, and she put a curse on Mikladalur: men from the village would drown or fall from the cliffs until so many had died that they could link arms all the way around the island of Kalsoy.

In Orkney and Shetland they tell the same story of the selkies, the seal folk, nearly word for word. Across the whole of the cold northern sea, people understood the same thing. What you take from the water by force, the water remembers.

VII. The ghosts who ask for a ladle

On the other side of the world, in the old fishing villages of Japan, they told of funayūrei, the ship ghosts. These are the drowned, and they do not like being alone down there.

On foggy nights they rise beside a boat and ask, very politely, for a ladle. If you hand them one, they use it to fill your boat with water until it sinks and you join them. So the old sailors carried a special ladle on board, one with the bottom knocked out of it. When the ghosts asked, you gave it to them, and they could scoop all night and never sink you.

There was also the umibōzu, a vast black shape like a shaven head that rose out of calm water, and that you must never speak to. If you saw him, you kept your mouth shut until he went under again.

I think about that bottomless ladle a great deal. It is one of the wisest things I know of. You do not refuse the dead. You do not argue with them. You give them exactly what they ask for, and you make very sure it is useless.

VIII. The mother at the bottom of the sea

The Inuit of the Arctic tell of the woman who lives at the bottom of the sea. She is known by many names, and Sedna is the one most people have heard.

She was a young woman who was thrown out of her father's boat during a storm. When she clung to the side, he cut off her fingers, one joint at a time, and she sank. Her fingers became the seals, the walruses and the whales. She lives down there still, and every animal that people need to survive belongs to her.

When people break the old rules, she grows angry, and her hair becomes tangled with all the wrong they have done. She cannot comb it herself, because she has no fingers. So she keeps the animals away, and the people go hungry. Then the angakkuq, the shaman, has to make the long journey down to her through the water, comb out her hair, braid it, and speak to her gently, until she lets the animals go again.

Of all the sea spirits in the world, she is the one I feel the most for. A woman who was thrown away, who is still holding everything, and who only asks that someone come down and tend to her.

IX. White flowers on the waves

Not every sea spirit is to be feared. Some of them are mothers.

Among the Yoruba of West Africa she is Yemọja, the mother of waters, whose children are as many as the fish. When people were taken across the Atlantic in chains, she crossed with them. In Brazil she is Iemanjá, and every New Year's Eve hundreds of thousands of people dressed in white go down to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro and give her white flowers, perfume, mirrors and little boats with candles in them. In Salvador they do it on the second of February. If the waves carry your gift out to sea, she has accepted it. If they bring it back to the sand, she has said no.

Along the coasts of West and Central Africa there is also Mami Wata, the water mother, a beautiful woman with long hair and often a snake wrapped around her, who can bring great wealth and who asks in return to be honoured, and sometimes to be loved.

In China and all along the coasts of southeast Asia, sailors pray to Mazu. She is said to have been a real girl, Lin Moniang, born on the island of Meizhou in the year 960, who could see ships in danger in her dreams and went out to save them. After she died she became the goddess of the sea, and there are temples to her on almost every coast where Chinese sailors have ever landed.

A girl who dreamed the drowning before it happened, and went out into the storm anyway. There is a whole religion built on that. I find it very hard to read about her and not think of the wise women of the North, the ones the village called on when a boat was overdue.

X. What the sailors carried

All of this lived on in the pockets of ordinary sailors right up until very recently.

A child born with the caul, the thin veil of skin over the face, was believed to be safe from drowning, and so was whoever owned the caul. British newspapers in the 1700s and 1800s carried advertisements selling dried cauls to seamen, sometimes for a great deal of money. In Denmark we call it the sejrshue, the victory cap, and families kept it hidden away.

You did not whistle on board, because whistling called up the wind, and you never knew how much wind you were going to get. You did not say certain words at sea. You did not turn a loaf upside down on the table, because that was a ship turning over. Some fishermen would not learn to swim at all, on the reasoning that if Rán wanted you, it was kinder to go quickly.

None of this was stupid. All of it was a way of living politely beside something that could kill you at any moment and owed you nothing.

XI. What the sea asks

When I put all of these stories side by side, from Babylon to Kalsoy, from Rio to the Arctic ice, the same few things keep rising to the surface.

The sea is older than us, and it does not belong to us. What it takes, it keeps, and sometimes it sends them home to sit by the fire. What you take from it by force, it remembers. It wants to be greeted, and paid, and honoured, and above all it wants not to be forgotten. And every coast in the world seems to have had a woman who stood between the water and the village, who knew how to talk to it.

I put a coin in the sea before I go out on the water. Not a big one. The size does not matter. What matters is that you show you know whose house you are walking into. The first coin I ever gave it, my grandmother put in my hand.

I have given one every time since. And I still walk backwards the first few steps when I leave.

If the unseen powers of land and water call to you the way they call to me, you might like my guide The Hidden Folk, about the old ways of living beside the ones who were here first. And if you have a sea story of your own, from your family or your coast, I would very much like to hear it.

~Hazel