Selkie

Low tide on a Sanday beach, and the skerry is crowded with grey seals asleep in the cold. One of them lifts its head. The eyes are wrong: too dark, too level, far too interested in the man walking the tideline with a creel on his back. Every Orcadian who ever hauled a boat up the shingle knew that look, and knew better than to hold it.

Selkie is only the Scots word for seal, selch or selk in older spelling, written selchie and silkie in the ballads and in the island dialect glossaries of the nineteenth century. Somewhere in the Northern Isles the plain animal word acquired a second meaning, and the seal-folk arrived with it. They live in the sea as seals, and they come ashore, on certain nights and in certain tellings, to peel the skin away and walk about as people. The skin comes off whole, like a coat unbuttoned from the neck down, and is left folded on a rock while its owner dances or sits in the sun or simply stretches out on the grass above the beach. Under it there is a person: tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, better-looking than anyone in the parish. The skin is the whole story.

Steal it and you own them. This is the shape of nearly every selkie tale collected in Orkney, and Walter Traill Dennison, the Sanday farmer who spent his life writing down what his neighbours told him, found that practically every island had its own version. He published the best-known of them in the Scottish Antiquary in the 1890s. A young farmer called the Goodman o’ Wastness, a confirmed bachelor with no use for wives, comes over the links one morning and sees the selkie-folk sporting on the sand, their skins heaped beside them. He runs. They scatter into the water. He gets one skin, and the woman it belongs to comes up out of the shallows and begs him, weeping, to give it back. He does not. She goes home with him instead, and by every account she was a good wife and a good mother and bore him seven children, and never once stopped watching the sea. Years later one of the children mentions the bonnie skin their father keeps hidden away. She has it out and on and into the surf before anyone can reach the door.

Dennison also recorded the traffic running the other way, which the Victorian collectors handled with visible discomfort. A woman of Orkney called Ursilla, married and dissatisfied, went down to the shore at high water and shed seven tears into the sea, which was the way to call a male selkie. Her children afterwards were said to be born with webbed hands and feet, and the horny growths that were pared off in infancy grew back as hard scales.

The male selkie’s most famous appearance is a ballad. A woman sits nursing a baby and complaining that she does not know the father’s name or country. He rises at the foot of her bed and tells her: he is a man on the land and a selkie in the sea, and his home is Sule Skerry, a bare rock some twenty-five miles west of Hoy Head. He takes the child, leaves a purse of gold, and adds a flat prophecy on his way out. She will marry a gunner, a good one, and the gunner’s first shot will kill both the selkie and their son. A version of seven verses was taken down from a woman of Snarra Voe in Shetland and published by Captain F. W. L. Thomas in the 1850s, and Francis James Child later gave it the number 113. Nothing in it is redeemed. The prophecy simply arrives, and the ballad ends.

Where the selkies came from depends on who is telling it. One tradition makes them angels who fell, like the fairies, except that these ones fell into the water and could not get out. Another says they are the souls of the drowned, permitted ashore in human form for a single night of the year. A third, sourer version holds that they were people once and were sentenced to the sea for some wrong nobody now remembers. Dennison was firm that the selkie-folk were not the finfolk, the malevolent sorcerous sea people of the same islands, and that their home beneath the water was not Finfolk-a-heem; later folklorists have argued the two traditions bleed into each other more than he wanted to admit.

Further south and west, the kinship claim gets specific. The MacCodrums of North Uist were known across the Hebrides as Clann ‘ic Codrum nan Ròn, the MacCodrums of the seals, on the strength of an ancestor who married a seal-woman in exactly the usual way. Their descendants would not hunt seals, would not eat them, and treated a shot seal on the beach as a death in the family. In the Faroes the story turns vengeful. The seal-folk of Mikladalur on Kalsoy come ashore on the twelfth night after Christmas; a young man steals a skin and keeps the woman for years; when she finally recovers it and goes back, she curses the men of the village to die at sea and off the cliffs until the drowned could join hands around the whole island. A bronze figure of her, two and a half metres of seal-woman rising out of the harbour with the skin over her arm, was set up on the shore at Mikladalur in 2014.

What a selkie can do is narrow and absolute. It changes shape at will, it moves between two elements that no one else can hold at once, it is beautiful enough to derail a life, and it can father or bear children who carry the sea in their hands. In the ballad it also knows what is coming. What it cannot do is get home without the skin, and the skin is a physical object that can be hidden in a rafter, locked in a kist, or buried in a stack of corn. That single vulnerability is the engine of every story: a creature of enormous freedom reduced to a woman standing at a window doing sums about the tide. Out in the water the selkie is only slightly safer, because a seal is a target, and the tales are full of hunters who struck one and found a human hand on the shaft, or came home to a wound that had opened on somebody they knew.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a selkie?

A selkie is a shapeshifting seal of Scottish, Irish and Faroese coastal folklore, particularly concentrated in Orkney and Shetland. It lives in the sea in seal form and can shed its sealskin to walk on land as a human. The word itself is simply the Scots term for seal.

How do you catch a selkie?

By stealing its sealskin while it is ashore in human form. Without the skin a selkie cannot return to the sea, and in the standard Orkney tale a man hides the skin and keeps the selkie as his wife. The captivity lasts exactly as long as the hiding place holds, which is usually until a child finds it.

Are selkies male or female?

Both. The best-known tales are about selkie wives taken by theft, but male selkies appear throughout the tradition, most famously in the Orkney ballad of the great silkie of Sule Skerry, who fathers a child on a mortal woman and returns to claim him. Orkney tradition also held that a woman could summon a male selkie by shedding seven tears into the sea at high water.

Where do selkies come from?

The traditions disagree. Some accounts make them angels who fell into the sea rather than onto land, some make them the souls of people drowned at sea, and some say they were human beings condemned to live as seals for an old offence. No single origin story dominates the Northern Isles material.

Are selkies the same as mermaids or finfolk?

No. A selkie is a seal that becomes a whole human being, not a permanently fish-tailed one, and Orkney tradition kept selkies distinct from the finfolk, the hostile sorcerous sea people of the same islands. Walter Traill Dennison insisted the selkie-folk did not live in the finfolk’s undersea home, though later folklorists have found the two traditions harder to separate than he claimed.

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Finfolk, Nuckelavee, Tangie, Trow, Ceasg, Kelpie, Each Uisge, Merrow, Mermaid, Merman, Swan maiden, Melusine, Ningyo, Encantado, Sedna