Selkie

This article is about the mythological creatures found in folklore. For other uses, see Selkie (disambiguation).

A Faroese stamp depicting the capture of a seal woman

Selkies (also known as silkies or selchies) are mythological creatures found in Faroese, Icelandic,Irish, and Scottish folklore. The word derives from earlier Scots selich, (from Old English seolh meaning seal). Selkies are said to live as seals in the sea but shed their skin to become human on land. The legend apparently originated on the Orkney and Shetland Islands and is very similar to those of swan maidens.

Legends

Stories concerning selkies are generally romantic tragedies. Sometimes the human will not know that their lover is a selkie, and wakes to find them gone. In other stories the human will hide the selkie's skin, thus preventing it from returning to its seal form. A selkie can only make contact with one human for a short amount of time before they must return to the sea. They are not able to make contact with that human again for seven years, unless the human is to steal their selkie's skin and hide it or burn it.^{[citation needed]}

In the Faroe Islands there are two versions of the story of the Selkie or Seal Wife. A young farmer from the town of Mikladalur on Kalsoy island goes to the beach to watch the selkies dance. He hides the skin of a beautiful selkie maid, so she can not go back to sea, and forces her to marry him. He keeps her skin in a chest, and keeps the key with him both day and night. One day when out fishing, he discovers that he has forgotten to bring his key. When he returns home, the selkie wife has escaped back to sea, leaving their children behind. Later, when the farmer is out on a hunt, he kills both her selkie husband and two selkie sons, and she promises to take revenge upon the men of Mikladalur. Some shall be drowned, some shall fall from cliffs and slopes, and this shall continue, until so many men have been lost that they will be able to link arms around the whole island of Kallsoy.

Male selkies are described as being very handsome in their human form, and having great seductive powers over human women. They typically seek those who are dissatisfied with their life, such as married women waiting for their fishermen husbands. If a woman wishes to make contact with a selkie male, she must shed seven tears into the sea.

If a man steals a female selkie's skin she is in his power and is forced to become his wife. Female selkies are said to make excellent wives, but because their true home is the sea, they will often be seen gazing longingly at the ocean. If she finds her skin she will immediately return to her true home, and sometimes to her selkie husband, in the sea.

Sometimes, a selkie maiden is taken as a wife by a human man and she has several children by him. In these stories, it is one of her children who discovers her sealskin (often unwitting of its significance) and she soon returns to the sea. The selkie woman usually avoids seeing her human husband again but is sometimes shown visiting her children and playing with them in the waves.

Selkies are not always faithless lovers. Peter Cagan and the Wind by Gordon Bok tells of the fisherman Cagan who married a seal-woman. Against his wife's wishes he set sail dangerously late in the year, and was trapped battling a terrible storm, unable to return home. His wife shifted to her seal form and saved him, even though this meant she could never return to her human body and hence her happy home.

Some stories from Shetland have selkies luring islanders into the sea at midsummer, the lovelorn humans never returning to dry land.

A legend similar to that of the selkie is also told in Wales, but in a slightly different form. The selkies are humans who have returned to the sea. Dylan (Dylan ail Don) the firstborn of Arianrhod, was variously a merman or sea spirit, who in some versions of the story escapes to the sea immediately after birth.

Seal shapeshifters similar to the selkie exist in the folklore of many cultures. A corresponding creature existed in Swedish legend, and the Chinook people of North America have a similar tale of a boy who changes into a seal.

Theories of origins

Before the advent of modern medicine many physiological conditions were untreatable and when children were born with abnormalities it was common to blame the fairies. The MacCodrum clan of the Outer Hebrides became known as the "MacCodrums of the seals" as they claimed to be descended from a union between a fisherman and a selkie as an explanation for the hereditary horny growth between their fingers that made their hands resemble flippers. Scottish folklorist and antiquarian, David MacRitchie believed that early settlers in Scotland probably encountered, and even married, Finnish and Lapp women who were misidentified as selkies because of their sealskin kayaks and clothing. Another belief is that shipwrecked Spaniards were washed ashore and their jet black hair resembled seals. As the anthropologist A. Asbjorn Jon has recognized though, there is a strong body of lore that indicates that selkies "are said to be supernaturally formed from the souls of drowned people".

Selkies in fiction, music and pop culture

See Selkie in popular culture

Examples of stories related to selkies and other seal-people are the ballad, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry along with the movies The Secret of Roan Inish, and Ondine with Colin Farrell.

The Secret of Roan Inish is about Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon near the island of Roan Inish, where the selkies are rumored to reside. It is an old family legend that her younger brother was swept away in his infancy and raised by a selkie.

In Ondine, an Irish fisherman hauls in his fishing net only to discovers a nearly-drowned beautiful young woman he believes to be a selkie. The woman wants no one to see her so he puts her up in an isolated cottage where drama unfolds as she develops relationships with both the fisherman and his young daughter.

Jane Yolen incorporated a selkie into her picture book, Greyling.

One of the main characters of Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee trilogy, the character Sean Songhili, is a selkie. He uses his shapeshifting ability to transform into a seal to explore under-ocean caves on his relatively recently terraformed planet.

See also

• A Stranger Came Ashore (book)
• Dobhar-chu
• Finfolk
• Kelpie
• Lavellan
• Mermaid
• Merrow
• Muc-sheilch
• Naiad
• Nereid
• Nix
• Oceanid
• Ondine
• Rusalka

References

Further reading

• Thomson, David. The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend.
• Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Boogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures, ISBN 0-394-73467-X
• Williamson, Duncan (1992). Tales of the seal people: Scottish folk tales. New York: Interlink Books. ISBN 0-940793-99-7. 

External links

• The Selkie Folk, from Orkneyjar, "a website dedicated to the preserving, exploring and documenting the ancient history, folklore and traditions of Orkney."
• Annotated Selkie resources from Mermaids on the Web
• The Origin of the Selkie Folk from Orkneyjar
• A Home for Selkies by Beth Winegarner
• Some pictures from the play "Kópakonan" (the Seal-Wife", which was performed by children at the Theater in Thorshavn in May 2001
• The First Silkie by William Meikle, read on the Celtic Myth Podshow