Scottish Sgeulachdan - The Bride Who Out Talked the Water Kelpie

I recently got my hands a book of Scottish folklore collected by Sorche Nic Leodhas that I'd been trying to find for awhile, Thistle and Thyme.  Thistle and Thyme is full of sgeulachdan (skale-ak-tan), a Scottish word for tale, told by master story-tellers.  Sgeulachdan were told at celebrated events like weddings and Christenings and often held a moral or lesson for the listeners and "in the old days, the high point of the entertainment was the sgeulachdan" (Leodhas 9).  My favorite tales from this collection are The Stolen Bairn and the Sìdh, The Bride Who Out Talked the Water Kelpie and The Fisherlad and the Mermaid's Ring. 

The Bride Who Out Talked the Water Kelpie

Now I loved this story from the very title because it featured a kelpie and at the time I read it, I had found very few stories about kelpies.  According to Leodhas this sgeulachdan was told at a wedding and I'm sure holds a lesson for newly weds about living together and putting up with eachother, but all I could focus on in this story was the  kelpie.  And this kelpie didn't live in a stream or a loch like most kelpies, this kelpies had some special digs, it lived in a well.  Another thing about this kelpie is that it didn't try to trick anyone into riding on it's back or shape-shift into a man to seduce a young lady.  The kelpie of this story cast a spell so that a young woman would not be able to speak. Not one peep.  A soldier falls in love with her and marries her, glad that she is not chatty as other lasses he's met.  However her silence eventually unnerves him and the couple goes to see a woman of the second sight who tells them that the maiden has offended a kelpie by dropping her comb in his well.  I can understand the kelpie's frustration since wells aren't that big to begin with, imagine all the room that comb took up!  So the maiden took back her comb, but being wickedly mischievous, as kelpies are, the kelpie put another spell upon the lass so that she would not shut up! The solution to this turned out to be leaving the chatty lass at the well for a whole day, chatting away to the kelpie.  The kelpie replies to everything the lass says in a rather echoey well-like way.  When the soldier returns for his wife the kelpie is tired of having listened to her chatting all day and so:
"she called down the well. 'I bid you good day, kelpie.  'Tis time for me to go home.'  There wasn't a sound from the well for a moment.  Then in a great loud angry voice the kelpie shouted. 'GO HOME!' " (Leodhas 97).  From then on the lass did not speak too much or too little and they all lived happily ever after.