Sheila Currie and Scottish Banshees
I am so honored to have Sheila Currie here on my blog. I’ve known her for the last few years as a serious Scottish researcher, and now I’m so excited to talk a bit about her research and her coming book! Whoo-hoo! Here’s some music to enjoy while you’re reading. And now, here’s Sheila!
The Banshee of Castle Muirn
The English word ‘fairy’ does not translate sìth at all well. You know that old expression ‘lost in translation’? Well ‘fairy’ is the ultimate understatement. The sìthaich have awesome powers and should be treated with great respect.
Particularly the ban-sìth or banshee as she is called in English. 
Ban-sìth in Gaelic means ‘fairy woman’. They’ve have had a bad reputation in English stories; they screech and howl and scare folk. But, in a lament to a MacCrimmon piper, a banshee is said to ‘sing a sad lament’–sheinn a’ bhean-shìth a torman mulaid. So much for screeching.
But here is the interesting bit. According to Gaelic folklore in Scotland and Ireland, only Gaelic families are worthy of a banshee. Worthy! In the seventeenth century in particular the banshee is seen as a protectress of the people who rightfully hold the land. People believed in the banshee in the Scottish Highlands as well. A friend whose people came from the Hebrides said he had heard the banshee lament in a close, a hallway in a block of flats in Glasgow. This in the modern era!
My novel is about a woman who can become a banshee. So what does a banshee do that is valuable? A banshee is a death-messenger. Horrors! How can a banshee be a sympathetic heroine and death messenger you might ask? In Gaelic tradition a warning of death is a good thing. With her lamenting, she told people close to the dying person that the time had come to prepare a funeral; she cried early enough for people far away to give them a chance to go home and prepare for a proper funeral. See? Banshees are considerate, but so much more.
In my story, The Banshee of Castle Muirn, the village wise woman, a banshee in reality, requires an apprentice to take over her duties. She is getting too old for the business. The wise woman is feared and shunned just for being a healer; yet her services are eagerly sought. They have no idea why she is such as good healer. They suspect magic of some sort of course. They have no idea she is a banshee.
The only possible candidate for training is Shona Campbell, the daughter of a Campbell chieftain. She agrees to train as a healer as some knowledge of that art is expected of a good wife. The wise woman mixes a little banshee training in with the healing. But Shona wants nothing but to marry a good man who is acceptable to her clan: a distant cousin perhaps, a Campbell man. Then she finds out that she is expected to marry a particularly nasty Lowlander. Her father far away in Edinburgh is in grave danger. Can she protect her family as a banshee? 
The Banshee of Castle Muirn will be published in 2016.
Sheila Currie lives on the west coast of Canada, but is a native of the east coast where she learned to love Gaelic folklore and traditions. The Banshee of Castle Muirn is her first novel.
