The Black Horse

The Black Horse is one of the strangest and most beautiful of the Scottish-Gaelic wonder-tales — a sweeping romance of a disinherited youngest prince, an enchanted black stallion who is no horse at all, the Prince Underwaves who lives beneath the salt sea, the cool and clever Princess of the Greeks who refuses three weddings in a row until the right man is left standing, and a lake of fire crossed by a horse with iron spikes hammered into every bone. Beneath the marvellous machinery the tale poses, as Highland tales tend to, a deceptively simple question: when an old, lame, useless white garron is the only inheritance left to you, will you have the wit to trade it for a black horse you do not yet understand?

Origin and Canonical Attribution

This tale was orally collected in the late 1850s by John Francis Campbell of Islay (1822–1885), the most important nineteenth-century recorder of Scottish-Gaelic folklore, in the course of his ten-year survey of West Highland storytellers. Campbell printed it in Gaelic and English on facing pages as Tale No. 58 of Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected, with a Translation, Volume II (Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, 1860, pp. 415–429), under the Gaelic title An t-Each Dubh, “The Black Horse.” The reciter was an old Argyll fisherman whose name Campbell preserved on the page exactly as it had been written down, and the transcription was made directly from his Gaelic in Campbell’s characteristic hand — pause-marks, formula-openings (“Bha siod ann roimhe…”) and all. A second, smoothed retelling was published thirty-four years later by the English folklorist Joseph Jacobs as Tale XX of More Celtic Fairy Tales (David Nutt, London, 1894, pp. 57–66, with John D. Batten’s pen-and-ink illustration of the leap of the black horse over the snow mountain). Jacobs lifted his version almost word-for-word from Campbell, lightly modernised the diction for a child audience, and silently dropped a few of the more elaborate Gaelic flourishes; he flagged it in his end-notes as “from Campbell, ii. 415” and noted that “Campbell’s Gaelic version is much fuller than mine.”

In the international Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale-type index the story is principally ATU 531 (The Clever Horse, sometimes Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful), in which a hero acquires a wise speaking horse who guides him through a graduated series of impossible bridal-quest tasks set by a jealous king or supernatural rival. The Highland version is unusual, however, in that it grafts onto ATU 531 a closing episode of ATU 314 (The Goldener) — specifically the disenchantment of the magical helper by an act of seemingly cruel obedience — and a brief introductory swap of ATU 550 (Bird, Horse, and Princess) kind, in which the youngest of three brothers receives an apparently worthless inheritance and exchanges it for the magic helper. The folklorist Reidar Th. Christiansen, in his unpublished card-index of Scottish migratory tales, noted that An t-Each Dubh is “one of the half-dozen finest examples of ATU 531 in the western European corpus,” and the great American folklorist Stith Thompson cited Campbell’s Tale 58 several times in The Folktale (1946) as a witness to the antiquity of the speaking-horse motif in the Celtic west.

The tale itself is much older than its 1860 transcription. The motif of the speaking, sacrificial horse who must be beheaded to release his human form is recorded in Welsh tradition in the Mabinogi cycle (the horse Llamrei of Arthur, and the speaking horses of Rhonabwy’s dream), and the Otherworld realm “under the waves” — Tír fo Thuinn in Irish, An Rìoghachd fo na Tonnan in Gaelic — is one of the oldest of all Celtic Otherworld topographies, recorded in the Old Irish Immrama voyage-tales of the seventh and eighth centuries. The lake of fire ridden by the horse with iron spikes in his bones has analogues in Norse, Slavic and Persian tradition, and the three impossibly mounted barriers (snow mountain, ice mountain, mountain of fire) are a pan-Eurasian fairy-tale convention. Campbell remarked in his prefatory note that the tale was “manifestly very ancient, and brought from far,” and conjectured a partly Norse origin for the underseas court — not implausible in Argyll, where Norse settlement is everywhere written into the place-names.

The Tale Retold

1. The White Garron and the Stranger on the Western Road

There was so before, a king in the Highlands who had three sons, and when the king died his elder sons divided everything between them and gave their youngest brother nothing in the world but an old white limping garron — a worn-out gelding, gone lame in the off hind. “If I get but this,” said the youngest, with the patience of small inheritances, “it seems that I had best go with this same.” He set off west across the heather, sometimes walking and sometimes riding, and on the second day, while the garron grazed in a wet cut, he saw coming towards him out of the heart of the western airt a tall rider on a black horse, riding high and well and right well. “All hail, my lad,” said the rider; “Hail, king’s son,” answered the youngest. “I am after breaking my heart riding this ass of a horse,” said the stranger; “will you give me the limping white garron for him?” “I will not,” said the prince; “it would be a poor business for me.” “Have no fear,” said the stranger; “you do not yet know what you are getting. There is no single place in the four parts of the wheel of the world that this black horse will not take you.” So the bargain was struck and the young king’s son mounted the black horse and saw, in his own mind, the only place he wished at that moment to be: the Realm Underwaves, far away beneath the salt sea. Before sunrise of the next day he was at its gates.

What he found at the gates of the underwater court was the son of King Underwaves holding an open court, and the people of the realm gathered to see if any one would undertake to ride to the city of the King of the Greeks and bring back his daughter to be the underwave-prince’s bride. No man came forward. At last the rider of the black horse stepped out of the back of the crowd. “You, rider of the black horse,” said Prince Underwaves — with the half-smile that means a death sentence in such tales — “I lay you under crosses and under spells to fetch the daughter of the King of the Greeks here before the sun rises tomorrow.”

2. The Princess of the Greeks and the Cup, the Ring, and the Castle

The young king’s son went out to the courtyard, leaned his elbow on the black horse’s mane, and sighed the sigh of a king’s son under spells. “Have no care,” said the horse; “we shall do the thing that was set before you.” On the way to the great town of the Greeks the horse instructed him: he was to do horsemanship beneath the windows of the castle, the princess would come down for a turn upon him, and on no account was anyone but the rider himself to be set in front of her on the saddle. So it fell out: the princess saw the black horse, came out, and tried to set her own horseman upon him; the horse kicked the man off; the rider mounted himself, the princess behind, and before she had glanced from her once she was nearer sky than earth and on the cold floor of the underwave court before the sun was up.

But the Princess of the Greeks was not a girl to marry a thief, and she was not a girl to marry a son of the salt sea either. “Slowly and softly,” said she. “I will not be married till I get the silver cup that my grandmother had at her wedding, and that my mother had as well.” Out went the rider; out went the black horse; and at the horse’s whispered counsel the rider went into the great hall in Greece where the king’s people were gathered round the king in mourning for his lost daughter, sat in their midst as quietly as one of them, took the silver cup as it came round, slipped it under his oxter, and was off. Before sunrise the cup stood in the hands of the princess. “Slowly and softly,” she said again. “I will not be married till I get the silver ring that my grandmother and my mother wore when they were wedded.” This task was the worst of the three, for the ring lay at the bottom of a deep loch, and between the rider and the loch stood a snow mountain, an ice mountain, and a mountain of fire. The black horse said: “Mount me.” With one bound he was at the top of the snow mountain; with the next bound the top of the ice mountain; with the third he went through the mountain of fire. Beyond the mountains, dragging at the horse’s neck like a man about to lose himself, the rider came down into a smithy below the loch.

3. The Iron Spikes and the Loch of Fire

“Go down to the smith,” said the black horse, “and have him beat me an iron spike for every bone-end I have in me.” The rider went down and the smith made the spikes; the rider returned and one by one drove the spikes into the great horse’s body, every spike at the end of every bone. Then the black horse walked into the loch, and as he walked the loch caught fire and blazed up in flame to the height of seven trees. All night the rider stood on the shore beating his palms together and roaring out his fear, and the loch burned. Day came and the loch did not go out. But at the very hour when the sun rose out of the sea, the lake-flame went out, and the black horse rose in the middle of the smoking water with one single iron spike still in him, and on the end of the spike the silver ring of the queens of Greece. He came on shore and fell down beside the loch like a thing dead. Then the rider ran to him, drew out the last spike, dragged the great body to the side of a hill, and lay over him with both his arms about his neck, sheltering him from the morning wind, until at last by midday the black horse rose up on his feet and was strong again. They leaped back across the mountain of fire, the mountain of ice, the mountain of snow, and reached the underwave court before the morning of the third day.

The Princess of the Greeks took the ring without a word, and looked at Prince Underwaves with a face like cold weather. “I will not be married yet,” she said. “Make me a castle for which your father’s castle will not even be washing-water.” Prince Underwaves swore an oath; the rider of the black horse went out; the horse said “There never came a turn in my road yet that is easier for me to pass than this,” and a glance from the rider showed the wood and the moor full of carpenters and stone-masons, and before sunrise a castle stood that put the underwave palace to silence. “It is well made,” said the princess at the gate, “but for a small matter. There is no well within the courtyard. Water must not be far to fetch when there is a feast or a wedding.” The black horse made the well: seven fathoms deep, three fathoms wide. They went out at evening to look at it together, the princess and the underwave prince and the rider, and as they stood on the lip of the well the princess pointed and said, “I see one little fault yonder,” and as Prince Underwaves bent over the parapet to look she set her two small hands flat upon his back and pushed him in. “Be thou there,” she said. “If I am to be married, thou art not the man; but the man who did each exploit that has been done.”

4. The Forgotten Horse and the Sword Stroke

So she went away with the rider of the black horse to be married, and there was a great wedding in the new castle, and the rider became a husband of the Princess of the Greeks. But three full years went by in the joy and business of his new life before he so much as remembered that there had ever been a black horse. On the morning of the third anniversary the thought struck him cold; he ran out to the place where he had last seen his friend, and there the black horse was standing exactly where he had been left, three winters in his mane and a kind look still in his eye. “Good luck to you, gentleman,” said the horse, mildly. “It seems you found something you liked better than me.” “I have not got that,” said the rider, in tears, “and I never shall have. But it came over me to forget you, and I am ashamed.” “I do not mind,” said the horse. “It will make no difference between us. Now lift your sword and smite off my head.” “Fortune will not allow that I should do that,” said the rider. “Do it instantly,” said the horse, “or I shall do it to you.” So with shaking hand the rider drew his sword, and at one stroke he smote off the great black head, and lifted both his palms in a doleful Highland cry of grief, and the head rolled in the heather. And what should he hear behind him but the laugh of a man’s voice, and the words “All hail, my brother-in-law!”

He turned, and there at his back stood the finest young man he had ever set eyes on, in the dress of a king’s son. “I am the black horse,” said the stranger; “and if I were not, how should you have all those things you went to seek out of my father’s house? Many a man have I run with under spells before I met you, and they had but one word among them: they could not keep me, nor manage me, and they never kept me a couple of days. But you kept me until the time of my enchantment ran out. And now you shall come home with me to my father’s house, and we shall have another wedding in his hall.” So they went, and the king’s son who had been the black horse was restored to his father’s kingdom, and the rider of the black horse and the Princess of the Greeks lived in the new castle, and the friendship between the brothers-in-law was a friendship that lasted, the West Highland storytellers say, for as long as either of them drew breath.

The Moral

Cha ‘n èireadh leis an-aon a chuireas an taic ris an each cheart.
“Nothing but good will rise to him who sets his trust on the right horse.” — West Highland proverb, recorded by Alexander Nicolson, Gaelic Proverbs (Edinburgh, 1881)

The moral of The Black Horse is at once simple and very deep, in the manner of the great Highland tales. On the surface it teaches the worth of an apparently worthless inheritance: an old white limping garron, in the right hands, becomes the price of a black horse who carries his rider through fire and flood to a princess and a kingdom. More importantly it teaches the price of true companionship. The young king’s son does not earn the cup, the ring or the castle on his own. Every great deed in the tale is performed by the black horse; the rider’s only contributions are loyalty, obedience and the courage to bring the iron spikes when they are needed, and to lay the great body in the lee of a hill when the lake of fire has taken almost everything out of it. And at the end the rider is asked to do the one thing he most fears — to lift the sword and end the life of the friend who saved him — because only obedience to a hard instruction can free his friend from enchantment. The Gaelic proverb above, recorded by Alexander Nicolson in his great 1881 collection, captures this exactly: the right horse, trusted at the right moment, raises a man to good fortune, but only if the man does not flinch when the trust costs him something. The tale also rebukes a smaller human failing — the fading of gratitude in the comfort of three years of married life — which is one of folk-narrative’s most sober warnings to those of us who forget our friends in good weather.

Historical and Cultural Context

The world of An t-Each Dubh is the world of the Gaelic-speaking western seaboard of Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — a world of small farms, fishing villages, peat fires, sea-paths between Argyll and the Hebrides, and long winter ceilidhs in which a single tale might take three hours to tell, with all its formulaic interludes and proverbial asides. Campbell’s collectors found the tale strongest in Argyll and Skye, but variants were known on the Long Island and as far south as Galloway. The “Realm Underwaves,” Rìoghachd fo na Tonnan, is one of the oldest of all Celtic Otherworld topographies; it appears in the Old Irish voyage-tales of the seventh and eighth centuries (Immram Brain, Immram Mael Dúin), and it is the same realm the Welsh poets called Annwn, the same the Highlanders called Tir fo Thuinn, the country beneath the wave. To send a hero to fetch a bride from “the King of the Greeks” while keeping the home country in the western islands was a stock device of West Highland storytelling: the Greek setting marks the bride as far-travelled and exotic, but the geography of the rest of the tale — mountains of snow, ice and fire, lochs that catch fire, smithies at the foot of glass-walled hills — is the geography of Highland imagination throughout.

The black horse himself belongs to the very oldest stratum of Celtic mythology, in which great horses are often divine or semi-divine beings — Llyr’s horse Llamrei in the Welsh Mabinogi, the speaking horses of Cuchulain in the Irish Ulster Cycle, and the horses of the Tuatha Dé Danann who can run on the surface of the sea. As the Celticist Anne Ross argued in Pagan Celtic Britain (1967), the speaking horse who is also an enchanted prince reflects an ancient Indo-European belief in the horse as a creature of liminal power, capable of crossing between this world and the next. The disenchantment by beheading — jarring at first hearing, but quite consistent across the corpus — is the standard Highland mode of releasing a person from animal-shape; cognate examples are found in Grimms’ The Donkey-Cabbage (KHM 122), the Irish The Brown Bear of Norway, and many of the swan-maiden tales of northern Europe. The iron spikes of the lake of fire have particularly close parallels in Norwegian and Russian wonder-tales, suggesting again the cross-North-Sea inheritance Campbell himself suspected.

Reflection and Discussion

For modern listeners, The Black Horse is unusually rich in invitations to discussion. The hero is not especially clever; he barely speaks; almost every important act is performed by his horse or by the Princess of the Greeks, who is the cool architect of her own marriage and who, at the end, calmly disposes of Prince Underwaves with two firm hands at his back. The young king’s son’s chief gifts are loyalty, simplicity and the capacity to obey a hard instruction without arguing. It is a tale for thinking about what we owe to those who help us at our worst hour, and how easily even our best friendships can be eclipsed by the comfort of a happy three-year marriage. The episode of the iron spikes is famously unsparing — the horse asks to be tortured, in effect, in order to win the ring — and Highland storytellers used this moment to teach children that some great gifts cannot be obtained without cost to the giver, and that the receiver of such a gift incurs an obligation of memory that does not lapse with time.

The tale also rewards a feminist reading. The Princess of the Greeks is not a passive prize. She names every condition of her marriage, sees through the spells of the underwave court, and personally executes the false bridegroom by pushing him head-first into a well of seven fathoms. She marries the rider not because he has won her, but because she has chosen him — on the explicit ground that he is “the man who did each exploit that has been done.” This pattern — the bride who is also the architect of her own marriage — is one of the secret strengths of the West Highland tradition, and it persists in many of Campbell’s other tales (The Battle of the Birds, The Sea Maiden, The Daughter of the Skies).

Why This Story Has Lasted

It has lasted because it is generously made. There are three different stories woven into a single chain — the swap of the worthless inheritance, the bridal-quest of three impossible tasks, and the disenchantment by beheading — and each of the three is complete in itself, so that a listener can take the tale in pieces or as a whole. It has lasted because its images are unforgettable: the lame white garron in the heather, the black horse rising out of the burning lake with one iron spike still in him and the silver ring on its end, the well at the wedding-feast and the two small hands at the underwave prince’s back, the great horse’s head rolling in the grass and the laugh of the freed man behind it. It has lasted because it is honest about loyalty — about the way ordinary forgetfulness can wreck even the deepest friendship, and about the patience required, on both sides, to set things right at last.

And it has lasted because, like all the great tales John Francis Campbell wrote down in his careful Gaelic, it carries the rhythm of the firelit ceilidh inside it. Read it aloud and you can almost hear the slow Argyll voice of the old fisherman who told it, the long pause at “and the lake did not go out,” the rise of the listeners’ breath at the appearance of the iron spikes. It is a tale for telling, not merely for reading; and as long as one Highland grandparent passes it on to one Highland grandchild, or one curious reader anywhere in the world stops to listen, An t-Each Dubh — The Black Horse — will be exactly as alive as it was on the late-1850s evening in Argyll when an old fisherman first dipped a peat-stained voice and began with the words “Bha siod ann roimhe.”