The Selkies

The Goodman of Wastness was walking along the shore at low tide when he saw people on a flat rock.

Some were lying in the sun. Others were playing beside the water. Their seal skins had been taken off and left nearby, and when the group realised they had been seen, they grabbed them and fled into the sea.

All except one.

The Goodman had reached her skin first.

The woman followed him across the shore crying and begging him to give it back. Without it, she told him, she could not return to the water or live among her own people. He refused. Instead, having decided that stealing the only means by which somebody can leave is a promising beginning to courtship, he persuaded her to live with him as his wife.

Walter Traill Dennison recorded the story in nineteenth-century Orkney, but even he presented it as one version of something once told across the islands. The details shifted from place to place, while the skin remained at the centre of it all. Whoever had it controlled whether the selkie could go home.

THE SKIN IS THE WHOLE STORY

Selkie is not originally the name of some separate mythological species. It comes from Scots words for a seal, with forms including selkie, silkie and selchie particularly associated with Orkney, Shetland and other parts of northern Scotland. The Dictionary of the Scots Language also records selkie folk specifically for the supernatural seal people of Orkney and Shetland tradition.

They lived in the sea as seals but could remove their skins and appear human on land. Some stories placed limits on when this could happen, although the rules varied enough that it is probably wise not to construct a selkie timetable. What remained consistent was that the skin allowed the transformation to be reversed.

That makes the old stories rather less romantic than they sometimes become in modern retellings.

The selkie woman is often presented as a mysterious sea-wife who marries a human man, has his children and eventually feels an irresistible call to return to the ocean. That sounds beautifully tragic until we remember that she could have returned at any time if he had not hidden her skin.

She was not torn between two worlds because she could not decide where she belonged. Somebody had taken away the choice.

THE WIFE OF WASTNESS

Dennison’s version does not soften that part.

The woman agrees to marry the Goodman because, without her skin, she cannot live in the sea. She becomes a good wife, and they have seven children together, four sons and three daughters. Years pass. She can be happy and affectionate, yet she continues to look towards the water, teaching her children strange songs that nobody around them knows.

One day the Goodman takes the three eldest boys fishing while three of the other children go gathering shellfish. Their youngest daughter stays home because she has a sore foot, and her mother begins searching the house.

The child asks what she is looking for.

Her mother invents an excuse about needing a beautiful skin to make something for the sore foot, and the little girl casually reveals that she has seen one. Her father once took it down from a hiding place above the bed, looked at it, folded it and put it back.

That is all the selkie needs.

She takes the skin, says goodbye to her daughter and runs for the shore. By the time the Goodman is rowing home, she is already in the water, where a male selkie comes to meet her.

Dennison gives her a final exchange with the husband she is leaving. She tells him that she liked him and that he had been good to her, but the man she loves more is the one waiting in the sea. Then she disappears, and the Goodman never sees her again.

That detail makes the story even more uncomfortable. He had not only kept her from a place. He had kept her from someone. The moment she is given the choice, she goes home.

ORKNEY WAS NOT THE ONLY PLACE TELLING IT

A very similar story was printed from Shetland tradition in the nineteenth century. A man on Unst sees sea people dancing beside a voe with their skins lying on the ground. He takes one, and its owner is left stranded when the others escape.

She lives with him for years and has children but regularly goes down to the shore where she communicates with a large seal offshore. Eventually one of her children finds the hidden skin beneath a stack of corn and brings it to her. She is delighted until she looks at the children she is about to leave.

Then she embraces them and runs.

Her husband reaches the shore in time to see her back in seal form, reunited with the male seal she had been meeting there. In that telling she makes the situation admirably clear before disappearing into the water: she cared for the man on land, but she had loved her first husband more.

Different island, different hiding place, same fundamental mistake. Do not steal a woman’s seal skin and assume domestic life will sort the rest out.

THE MEN GOT A RATHER DIFFERENT ARRANGEMENT

Male selkies also came ashore, but their stories often have a noticeably different shape.

One Orcadian tale concerned a woman known as Ursilla, who was said to have made an unhappy marriage and later summoned a selkie man by going to the shore at high tide and shedding seven tears into the sea. He appeared at dawn and arranged to return to her in human form. National Museums Scotland preserves Dennison’s account of the story and the seven-tears detail.

I have questions about who established the required number of tears, but apparently seven was sufficient.

More importantly, nobody has stolen his skin.

The male selkie arrives, has the relationship and returns to the water under his own power. Female selkies are repeatedly captured; male selkies tend to visit. Folklore can be surprisingly efficient at revealing the expectations of the people who passed it down.

THE SELKIE THAT DID NOT FORGET

Not every story ends with a stolen skin. Dennison recorded another Orcadian tale set near Hacksness on Sanday. A man named Mansie Meur was gathering limpets at low tide when he heard a terrible sound among the rocks. He found a female seal giving birth while her mate watched anxiously from the water.

When two pups were born, Mansie took them. He intended to use their skins to make a waistcoat.

The parent seals reacted with such distress that he changed his mind and put the pups back, allowing the family to escape into the sea. That could easily have been the whole story, but Orcadian folklore waited forty years before finishing it.

Mansie was later caught by the rising tide and believed he was about to drown. Something seized him by the collar and carried him towards safety. His rescuer was an old seal, understood in the story to be the same mother whose pups he had spared decades earlier.

She had remembered.

No kidnapping, no coerced marriage, no hidden clothing. Somebody does one decent thing in his youth and forty years later a seal turns up to settle the account.

IT MAKES SENSE THAT SEALS BECAME PEOPLE

The Northern Isles are perhaps the perfect place for stories like these to grow.

The sea was not scenery. It was work, food, travel and danger, and seals occupied the same coastline as the people who depended upon it. In older Shetland and Orkney traditions, boundaries between seals, selkie folk, merfolk and other supernatural inhabitants of the sea could also vary depending on who was telling the story. Nineteenth-century collectors were recording traditions that were already complicated rather than one tidy mythology with agreed rules.

Then there is the animal itself. A seal does not make this particularly difficult.

They surface close to shore and look back. Their faces can seem oddly expressive, and they disappear beneath the water into a world humans can see the surface of but cannot follow them into.

If you were going to imagine that an animal had another life when it slipped beneath the sea, a seal is an excellent candidate.

I know this because I once had one myself.

SYDNEY

A couple of decades ago I visited Shetland and stayed very close to the sea. There was a seal that seemed to know when I was coming along the shore because it would appear beside me, bobbing in the water and following as I walked.

It seemed to show off. I decided it was saying hello and naturally, I named it Sydney.

I still remember it clearly, and after spending this long reading selkie stories I can understand exactly how people living beside those waters began looking at seals differently.

You see a dark head appear offshore and it watches you for a while. You walk further along the coast and it appears again. Technically, you know perfectly well what it is, but folklore has never been especially interested in technically.