In Scottish and Northern English

folklore Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as Narrative, tales, myths, legends, proverbs, Poetry, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also ...

, a shellycoat is a type of

bogeyman The bogeyman (; also spelled or known as bogyman, bogy, bogey, and, in US English, also boogeyman) is a mythical creature typically used to frighten children into good behavior. Bogeymen have no specific appearances, and conceptions vary drast ...

that haunts rivers and streams.

Name

The name comes from the coat of

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses Science Biology * Seashell, a hard outer layer of a marine ani ...

s these creatures are said to wear, which rattle upon movement.

Distribution

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.

Characteristics

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. A common tactic of a shellycoat would be to cry out as if drowning and then laugh at the distracted victim. As described above, the shellycoat shares many of the traits of the Brag,

Kelpie A kelpie, or water kelpie (Scottish Gaelic: '' each-uisge''), is a mythical shape-shifting spirit inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. Legends of these shape-shifting water-horses, under various names, spread across the British Isles, appea ...

and Nix.

Schellenrock

Jacob Grimm Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the ''Deutsch ...

stated in his ''

Deutsche Mythologie ''Deutsche Mythologie'' (, ''Teutonic Mythology'') is a treatise on Continental Germanic mythology, Germanic mythology by Jacob Grimm. First published in Germany in 1835, the work is an exhaustive treatment of the subject, tracing the mythology an ...

'' that the Scottish

goblin A goblin is a small, grotesque, monster, monstrous humanoid creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures. First attested in stories from the Middle Ages, they are ascribed conflicting abilities, temperaments, and appearan ...

Shellycoat is one and the same as the German Schellenrock, that is bell-coat: Thomas Keightley quotes Grimm and classifies the shellycoat as a type of brownie.:Keightley, 1870, in the section "Brownie". The domestic nature of the shellycoat emphasized by Grimm and Keightley 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, . 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

Northumbrian folklore Northumbrian folkloric beings Scottish folklore Scottish legendary creatures English legendary creatures Nixies (folklore) Bogeymen {{Scotland-stub