Book Review: The Kelpie's Pearls

Title: The Kelpie’s Pearls

Author: Mollie Hunter (McIlwraith)

Date: 1964

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-022656-0

Length: 134 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Stephen Gammell (in 1976 “Weekly Reader” reprint)

Quote: “To think I should have lived to be seventy-two before I see a kelpie!”

In this short novel Mollie Hunter imagines how old Scottish folklore might come to life in a “modernized” Scotland, with tour buses. People who believe Morag MacLeod to be a witch think of her as a curiosity, not an evildoer to be killed.

Morag, age seventy-two, lives in a little old house she inherited from remote ancestors, and although surprised, she’s willing to believe that what looks to her like a man a bit younger than herself is actually a kelpie.

Kelpies were a Scottish species of the Faeries or Longaevi of medieval European folklore. This whole order of lifeforms was increasingly identified with ghosts or devils by theologian, but in the classical tradition they were a separate order of creation, more or less like humans but with longer lifespans. They could be comical, numinous, dangerous, or a useful cover story for anyone who needed to “go underground” in times of war or persecution. Hunter’s kelpie, who can appear as a man, a horse, or a sea monster, qualifies as all four.

Some storytellers tried to classify the Longaevi as good or evil in terms of human morality. Most agreed that they were simply alien, willing to help humans if it served their purposes—or to harm humans. Hunter’s kelpie meets this traditional standard of alien-ness. He doesn’t kill humans, but he punishes some of them, and the whole story leads up to a refusal to say whether he helps or harms Morag in the end.

Though not terribly “old,” Morag has already outlived all her close friends and relatives. She has only two fully human friends, the child Torquil for whom she boards pet animals, and the greedy trapper Alastair, to whom she talks out of loneliness although she knows he’s not a very nice person. She feels safe talking to the kelpie because he can reminisce about the good old days of her youth. She warns Torquil, though, to look at the kelpie from a distance but never come close enough to talk to him, because “it is the young and the strong and the beautiful that the creatures of the other world seek to capture and bind...He will not harm me.” Then again, she tells Alastair about the kelpie’s hoard of pearls, a few of which he’s given to Morag to wear as a necklace. Then Alastair’s greed leads Morag to dig out her grandmother’s book of spells, use one, and tell people she’s used it, which leads to...a plot this review refuses to spoil.

Written within the rules for child-friendliness—no serious violence, no explicit sex, no theological doctrine, no profanity—this story never was very popular with children. I remember reading a copy at a library, as a child, and thinking I was glad I hadn’t chosen it as my book for the week. The one child character is a boy, and more a spectator than a protagonist; the bittersweet ending appeals more to the old than to the young. As an adult, I like the “moral” that Morag is unhappy because she indulges her extrovert tendencies. As a child, I wasn’t even interested enough to notice that dynamic.

So, as with several children’s books I’ve read as a grown-up bookseller...I don’t particularly recommend The Kelpie’s Pearls to children. It’s unlikely to give them nightmares, it won’t teach them bad language, but it’s also unlikely to hold their interest. Buy it for yourself if you like imperfect, nostalgic, delightful old ladies, or are interested in the mix of Christian and Pagan influences on European folklore. As an adult I found it a nice, short bedtime story.

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