The Fishermen’s Luck: The Maritime Clavie and Its Variants

Abstract

The Burning of the Clavie is a calendar custom traditionally associated with the ancient Pictish seaport of Burghead, but fishermen in north-east Scotland had their own ‘needfire’ version of the Clavie, used to instantly remedy spells of poor catches believed to have been caused by evil spirits, witches, or other forms of ill-luck. This article aims to delineate the maritime or fishermen’s Clavie as a reactive ritual rather than a calendar custom. The Clavie will be compared against other beliefs held and rituals re-enacted by the fishing communities, demonstrating that the fishermen had a specific set of ‘crisis’ rituals thought to rid them of ill-luck at sea. This article also offers, by its use of oral reminiscence, a snapshot of the contemporary belief concerning the Clavie found in mid twentieth- to early twenty-first-century fishermen in north-east Scotland and Shetland.