Spinning ancient straw into contemporary gold: transforming folklore into supernatural crime fiction

ABSTRACT Folktales inspire me, as a reader, an academic and as a novelist. That the story has come from an aural tradition makes me wonder about its hidden truths. My creative practice is concerned with the question of how to balance supernaturalism with realism in the contemporary thriller, when adapting a folktale, in this case, ‘The Mermaid Wife’, a Selkie tale from the isle of Unst. My artistic process begins by extrapolating from the not-said, finding chinks in the perspective and narration of the original tale in order to form the basis of the questions posed by my novel. In both of the folktales I have novelised, I began with the assumption that the male point of view was dominant, whereas in both of my novels I choose to shift the perspective to the feminist. I argue here that by doing this, the supernatural aspects – or even magic – in the original tales form part of their rational, pre-scientific worldview. In my novel, by contrast, the supernatural is transformed into a metaphor for the female experience. I recognise, nonetheless, that my reading of the folktale as ‘male’ and the novels as ‘female’ raises some troubling and difficult questions.