What is a Selkie? Selkies, Psyche & Scottish Folklore
Song of the Sea by Tomm Moore
Of all the creatures of Celtic Mythology, none attracts more attention than the selkie. Selkie stories have been retold in novels, films and in self-help books. There is an entire sub-genre of romance novels based around amorous encounters with hunky seal-men. Do kelpies get this treatment? A little. Brownies? The Blue Men of the Minch? Not likely. So what is it about selkies?
What Is a Selkie?
First things first; what is a selkie? ‘Selkie’ (selchie, silkie) is the Scots name for a seal. It has come to denote a mythical creature which takes the form of a seal but can remove its skin to reveal a human underneath. Some stories portray these humans as having webbed hands and feet, and most agree that they are beautiful, with shining brown eyes and hair. Stories about these creatures are found throughout Northwest Europe but are perhaps most strongly associated with Scotland.
Folklore has no rules; there is no way of saying exactly what the qualities of a selkie are, as they will vary from story to story and from place to place. Generally speaking, selkies spend most of their lives as seals, but can and do shed their skins to reveal their human form. In many stories, they do so on auspicious dates such as midsummer or Beltane, coming ashore to dance and celebrate. In other stories, an individual selkie will shed their skin at will, in order to converse with a human or to seek a more intimate encounter. One well-known story recounts the abduction by selkies of a seal-hunter, who is brought to a cave where families of selkies live in their human form, their sealskins hanging from the rock walls.
Selkie Stories
What happens when selkies meet humans? The same things that happen when humans meet humans. Sometimes they help one another; sometimes they fight; sometimes they fall in love, if only for a night.
The most common stories involve a romance. These romances don’t tend to work out well, with a few exceptions. Let’s look at a few examples.
In Mary and The Seal, a favourite of Scottish storyteller David Campbell, a teenage girl from the Western Isles rows out to a small island in her father’s boat every evening. Her mother becomes suspicious after she hears the local gossips discussing why Mary never takes an interest in boys or parties. Mary’s father follows her one evening and finds her playing with a big grey seal. When Mary’s mother hears of this, she orders her husband to shoot the seal.
She said, ‘Angus, Mary’s enchanted. It’s one of the sea-people that’s taken over. Your daughter is finished – ruined for ever more. I’ve heard stories from my grandmother how the sea-people take over a person and take them away for ever more, they’re never seen again – she’s enchanted.’
Duncan Williamson, Tales of the Seal People
You can listen to Scottish storyteller Kirsten Milliken tell Mary & The Seal on House of Legends Podcast here or using the player below.
In The Great Selkie of Sula Skerrie, retold in my book Scottish Myths & Legends as Lady Odivere, an Orcadian woman whose husband has gone away on a crusade is visited late at night by a man she once shared an evening of passion with.
One servant remained. He gave a pointed yawn. Lady Odivere turned and said, ‘Leave us.’
The servant left them together.
‘Why have you come here?’ said Lady Odivere. ‘Does it amuse you to hurt me?’
‘I come for the same reason I first came to you, so many moons ago,’ said her visitor. ‘Because I love you. If Odivere breaks faith with you, why not break faith with him?’
‘You claim my husband is unfaithful. Perhaps it is true; perhaps it is all lies. Lord Odivere has given me a home, his name and his company. You lay with me and disappeared; you never even gave me your name! Why should I trust you?’
He answered by kissing her. She turned away from him at first; but soon she was kissing him back. They lay down together on wolfskins by the fire.
Daniel Allison, Scottish Myths & Legends
The affair between Lady Odivere and the silkie man resumes. When Lady Odivere becomes pregnant, she is forced to give up her son in order to keep him secret from her husband.
The most famous selkie romance by far is the story normally known as The Selkie Wife. In this story, a man is walking on a beach at night when he encounters a group of selkies dancing in their human form. One of the selkie women catches his eye, and he steals her skin and hides it away. Come morning, the selkies grab their skins and return to the sea, save for the woman whose skin is missing. The man leaps on her and drags her home. Sooner or later, she falls in love with him, they get married and have children, and all the while, the selkie woman’s skin is kept locked away in a chest. Years later, she finds the key, opens the chest, puts on her skin and returns to the sea.
She spun, leapt and threw herself across the sand. She laughed and sang, wailed and cried. The sun and moon, the sea and sky, all the beauty and pain of life were in her dance. She seems to feel so much sadness and joy, terror and wonder that if she didn’t dance, she would burst into flames.
Daniel Allison, Scottish Myths & Legends
Other stories feature selkies in a benevolent role, helping shipwrecked sailors to safety. A favourite of mine is The Lighthouse Keeper, which the Scottish Traveller storyteller Duncan Williamson heard from a man named Peter MacKinnon. Peter told Duncan that he had rescued a stranded seal pup while working as a lighthouse keeper, nursed it to health and then set it free. Years later, he suffered what might have been a fatal injury after falling down the lighthouse stairs. He was rescued by a young woman who mysteriously appeared and nursed him back to health.
I’m lying there in a semi-conscious stay when I heard the flip-flip-flip coming towards me… I only had one thought in my mind, it was Flippy the Seal, she’d probably missed me and come back… I looked up and standing beside me… was a young woman, the most beautiful young woman I had seen in my life.
Duncan Williamson, Tales of the Seal People
In most of these stories, the selkie does the protagonist a good deed because the protagonist once did them a good deed, and vice versa. Similarly, there are tales of selkies taking their revenge on those who harm them. In the story of The Seal Hunter, the hunter Duncan MacKinnon is kidnapped by selkies, taken to their cave and threatened with murder unless he helps to heal a selkie man whom he has injured. It is only because Duncan has a code of honour, which has kept him from ever harming a seal pup, that he is given this chance.
‘We could kill you, Duncan. Perhaps we should kill you. But we know a few things about you. We know that although you’ve killed many seals, you’ve never killed a pup. For that reason, we’ll give you this one chance. Come with me.’
Duncan was led out of the cave and into a smaller cave. A solitary fire burned here, and a terrible stench curdled the air. Lying on a sealskin was a silkie man.
The man was old and thin. There was a dreadful wound in his back, a gash surrounded by diseased and rotting skin.
Protruding from that wound was Duncan’s knife.
Daniel Allison, Scottish Myths & Legends
The Nature of Selkies
It’s interesting to note that in all of the selkie stories in circulation among Scottish storytellers today, selkies never feature as antagonists. While the humans in the stories might be kind, cruel or thoughtless, the selkies never act unreasonably. Does this reflect the attitudes of our ancestors or modern sensibilities?
According to the Orcadian website Orkneyjar:
Unlike the finfolk, who retained their malicious tendencies throughout the years, the selkie-folk have come to be regarded as gentle creatures, with the ability to transform from seals into beautiful, lithe humans. This, however, is a far cry from the original folklore.. we have seen a transformation of the selkie-folk into “New Age” spirits of the sea — something completely at odds to the terror and fear they once inspired in the people of Orkney. What angelic being would require a mother to paint a cross on the breast of her daughter before letting her undertake a sea voyage?
The painting of the cross refers to a Christian practice designed to keep away selkie men who might seduce otherwise virtuous maidens. Walter Trail Dennison, a 19th Century Orcadian folklorist, claims that many stories were once told of selkie men doing just that. So have we sanitised the selkies?
I would argue the opposite. Stories of selkies as dark seducers, along with practices such as the one mentioned above, are symptoms of a Christianised society which distrusts and fears the natural world and its non-human inhabitants. The selkie, as a merging of the human with a creature of the wild, represents everything which the church has historically fought against. We can compare this to the way fairies began in Ireland as gods like the mighty Lugh and Manannan Mac Lir, and later became the wicked, spiteful beings found in the Grimm’s tales, before being rehabilitated in our own era.
This isn’t new age, it’s old age. Before the coming of monotheism, the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles revered animals and saw their gods and heroes as shapeshifters. They worshipped the Morrigan, the battle goddess who could take the form of a crow. Finn MacCool married Sabha, a woman who was turned into a deer by a dark druid and who gives birth to Ossian, one of the greatest poets of Celtic Mythology, in whom the speech of the human and the wild worlds meet.
‘My mother was a deer,’ he said. ’We lived in a forest like the one in which you found me. But it was unlike it, because we could not escape it. At every side of it were cliff-walls that my mother could not climb. In every other way, though, it was a good place to be. There were birds, and animals, and streams to swim in and trees to climb. But my mother was not happy there, because she could not leave, and because of the one who kept her there.’
Daniel Allison, Finn & The Fianna
Selkies & Psyche
Humans have always told stories of shapeshifters. We revered them, then we feared them. Now, as we yearn to reweave ourselves into nature’s webs, we revere them again. The story of the seal wife has been picked up outside of the storytelling world and written about as a story of psychic transformation and feminine empowerment. In her bestselling and revolutionary 1992 book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes:
The pelt in this story is not so much an article as the representation of a feeling state and a state of being—one that is cohesive, soulful, and of the wildish female nature. When a woman is in this state, she feels entirely in and of herself instead of out of herself and wondering if she is doing right… the return to the wildish state periodically is what replenishes her psychic reserves for her projects, family, relationships, and creative life in the topside world.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Selkie Movies, Books and More
Since then, and probably in large part due to Estés’ work, selkies have found their way into stories of every medium.
Dozens if not hundreds of novels about selkies can be found. One notable example is Janis Mackay’s excellent series about a half-selkie boy named Magnus Fin. Books for younger children include Selkie by Gillian McClure and The Selkie Girl by Susan Cooper.
Most books about selkies, though, are in the romance category. The women in these books are rarely in a hurry to paint a cross on their chest; titles include Her Selkie Harem: A Steamy Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance by Savannah Skye and The Selkie Prince’s Forbidden Mate by J.J Masters. On the more literary side of things, Su Bristow’s Sealskin, a retelling of the selkie wife story, won the Exeter Prize and has been lauded by critics.
Selkies feature in my own novel The Shattering Sea, which is set in Iron Age Orkney and loosely based on the Orcadian story of Asipattle and the Stoor Worm. I’ve depicted selkies as living alongside and in an uneasy truce with the Orkadi people. While the Orkadi live in a feudal society and have turned their back on magic, the selkies live in a palaeolithic-style clan society. My own taste for is for children’s stories that combine beauty and wonder with a darker tone, such as Wolf Brother, His Dark Materials and The Deptford Mice, which have all influenced The Shattering Sea as much as the folklore it is derived from.
A roaring peat-fire gave off a sweet smell that soothed his aching lungs. Nalga, Rugi and Skeen sat around the fire. Sat by Runa was an old woman with milky-white skin. She was naked but for the briefest of fish-skin clothes covering her chest and loins. Though she was old, her flesh was tightly-muscled and her bone-white hair shone in the firelight. Her bold, brown eyes followed her gnarled hands as they worked at preparing a herb-bundle.
Around the edges of the cave were other fires. Around the fires sat women, men and children. They were purposefully not looking at Talorc. Others had gathered around him, wary parents clutching their children close to them, staring at the strange newcomers with a mixture of curiosity and anger.
One corner of the cave had been painted, depicting a many-limbed, fearsome creature. Candles burned beneath it, on either side of a bowl full of fish; an altar to some god of the deep sea.
Hung from the rock walls were row upon row of sealskins.
Silkies.
‘Yes,’ said the dolphin-man. ‘Silkies.’
Talorc looked around again. The silkies sat at the fires were looking everywhere but at him. The ones gathered around him did not look friendly.
‘As you can see, not all of the people welcome you here,’ said the dolphin-man.
‘Why not?’ asked Talorc.
‘Because your kind kill their kind. Before the Dark Sky War there was friendship between your races. Seals were hunted but never silkies. That all changed, and now they fear and despise you.’
Daniel Allison, The Shattering Sea
In the prequel story Silverborn, we meet Thrain, the Selkie King who later makes war upon the human clans that will later unite as the Orkadi. This war will be the focus of a future series.
That same day, Tark, Chief of the Sea Eagle Clan, was at home when there came a knock on the door. He called for his visitor to enter.
Through the door came the biggest man Tark had ever seen. His dark eyes glowered at Tark, and he wore the skin of a seal as a cloak.
The man sat down without being asked.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked.
Tark nodded dumbly. This could only be one person.
‘You’re Thrain,’ he said. ‘The Silkie King.’
‘I am. You are Tark, Chief of the Sea Eagles. Your daughter is a lawbreaker, and so is my son. ’
Tark listened as Thrain told him of their children’s love affair; for Thrain was Sarmi’s father. His eyes widened as Thrain spoke of the beating he had given his son.
‘My son has broken the law,’ said Thrain, ‘and the law is for all. Sarmi will die.’
Tark knew what was coming next.
‘Kesta must die too.’
Daniel Allison, Silverborn & Other Tales
One of the most compelling of all modern selkie stories is The Song of the Sea, a film by Irish director Tomi Moore which is based on (you guessed it) The Silkie Wife. Gorgeous visuals and a haunting soundtrack add to a lyrical retelling which is accessible for young children yet doesn’t shy away from the pain and longing inherent in the story. It’s a masterpiece of children’s cinema, right up there with The Land Before Time and The Dark Crystal.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has given you a clear picture of selkies as featured in traditional and contemporary stories. There’s much more that I could write; we haven’t even touched on the parallels that exist between selkies and the encantados, the river dolphin-people of Amazonia, or the selkie stories of North America.
In the meantime, over to you. Do you have stories of seal-people where you’re from? What do selkies represent to you? Comment below.
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