Janna King

June 2007

Selkies in Irish Folklore

In Irish folklore, there are many stories about creatures who can transform themselves from seals to humans. These beings are called selkies, silkies, selchies, roane, or simply seal people. The seals would come up onto rocks or beaches and take off their skins, revealing the humans underneath. There is no agreement among the stories of how often they could make this transformation. Some say it was once a year on Midsummer’s Eve, while others say it could be every ninth night. Once ashore, the selkies were said to dance and sing in the moonlight. Although most mythological sea creatures were considered hostile or even evil, selkies were considered to mostly be gentle beings, perhaps because of seals’ kind-looking eyes. Selkies are also seen in Scottish, Icelandic, and Scandinavian mythologies.

One of the most common themes found in selkie folklore is romantic tragedy. Selkie women were supposed to be so beautiful that no man could resist them. They were said to have perfect proportions and dark hair. They also made excellent wives. For this reason, one of the most common selkie stories is that of a man stealing a selkie woman’s seal skin. Without her skin, she cannot return to the sea, and so she marries the human man and has children with him. She is a good wife and mother, but because her true home is in the sea, she always longs for it. In the stories, she ends up finding her seal skin that her husband has hidden, or one of her children unwittingly finds it and brings it to her. According to legend, once a selkie find her skin again, “neither chains of steel nor chains of love can keep her from the sea” (The Secret of Roan Inish). She returns to the ocean, usually leaving her children behind with their grief-stricken father.

Selkie men were also said to be very handsome, with almost magical power to seduce human women. They would take off their seal skins and go looking on shore for “unsatisfied women,” mainly women unhappy in their marriages. If a woman wished a selkie man to come to her, she had to shed seven tears into the sea at high tide. These stories may have been used as an explanation for married women who had affairs or ran away from their families. It was also said that if a woman went missing while at sea, it was because her selkie lover had taken her back to their underwater home.

The origin of selkies is variable, but it is often said that they were fallen angels like the fairies, except that they had fallen into the sea and became seals. Others insist that the selkie were once human beings who, for some grave offense, were doomed to take the form of a seal and live out the rest of their days in the sea. It is also said that selkies were actually the souls of those who had drowned. One night each year these lost souls were permitted to leave the sea and return to their original human form. Another possibility is that when Ireland became Christianized, selkies came to stand for humans in purgatory, caught between two worlds.

Stories of selkies come from Cornwall, Ireland (especially from Donegal county), and Scotland (in particular the Orkney and Shetland Islands). This is likely because people there made their living from the sea, fishing all day long. The word “selkie” means “seal” in the dialect of the Orkney Islands, “selk” or “selch” being the Scots words. However, it likely that selkie folklore comes from Norse origin, rather than Celtic: “On the face of it, the selkie-folk stories don't appear to have a Norse origin - only a few scattered accounts of selkie-folklore are found in Norway and Iceland. Instead, the distribution of the myths - from Shetland, through Orkney and down the west coast of Scotland into Ireland - seems to clearly point to a Celtic origin. That is, until we remember that the tales are confined to a relatively narrow area around northern and western Britain - an area known to have been a Norse 'seaway' and an area of Norwegian settlement” (Towrie). One folklorist theory of the origin of the belief is that the selkies were actually fur-clad Finns, traveling by kayak.

It is likely that selkies often served as a social explanation for women who did not fit in with the rest of the community. In Rosalie K. Fry’s novel, The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry, she describes the village’s reaction to a new woman (who, in the story, is in fact a selkie): "Well, of course there was much shaking of heads when Ian married the dark-eyed stranger. She was quite unlike the island women and some of her ways were so strange. Why, she'd go out on the rocks when the tide was low to talk to the seabirds and seals.”

It is also possible that the legend was at least fueled by accounts of conditions we would now recognize medically. In David Thomson’s The People of the Sea, his Orkney informants tell him that when a selkie and a human reproduce, “all their children have webbed fingers and toes at birth. When this webbing is clipped, to allow hand-work, a horny growth appears” (Holler). Webbed toes and feet is a condition called simple syndactyly and it appears to be hereditary. Sometimes children were born with seal-like faces, which could have been a rare medical condition called anencephaly, while others had scaly fish-smelling skin, probably resulting from icthyosis (Eberly, 73). The selkie legend was probably attributed to these conditions that people could not explain at the time. Even within families, children who may be different than the rest of the family members were thought to take after the selkie part of the family, as shown in Fry’s novel: "For although most McConvilles have red hair…a child would be born from time to time with the wild black hair and strange dark eyes of Ian McConville's wife. And when this happened the islanders would remark, Ah, another child of the Ron Mor Skerry!" (Fry).

In the 1940’s and 50’s, David Thomas surveyed people in Ireland and Scotland about selkies. When he asked if they believed in selkies, he found: “Some older people, particularly those who have lived their whole lives in isolated villages, say they believe them literally. Some younger people, particularly those who live on the mainland, admire the stories and see them as a part of their cultural heritage, but do not believe them to be literally true” (Holler). For many people both in the past and present, selkies represent a wild, untamed beauty. For a country surrounded by the ocean and a people who make their living off it, it is natural that its folklore reflects that beauty. There is a spiritual freedom, mystery, and gratification of magically being able to travel between the separate worlds of the sea and land, which relates to the people’s strong dependence on and bond with the unpredictable sea. As the grandfather says in The Secret of Roan Inish: “The sea gives and the sea takes away.” This is best represented in the folklore of selkies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Briggs, K M. "The English Fairies." Folklore 68.1 (1957): 270-278.

Eberly, Susan. "Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids and the Solitary Fairy." Folklore 99.1 (1988): 58-73.

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Holler, Paul. "Critique: People of the Sea." Rev. of The People of the Sea: a Journey in Search of the Seal Legend, by David Thomson. Counterpoint Magazine 2000.

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The Secret of Roan Inish. Dir. John Sayles. Perf. Jeni Courtney, Mick Lally, Eileen Colgan, John Lynch. Videocassette. Sony Pictures, 1994.

Teit, J A. "Water-Beings in Shetlandic Folk-Lore, as Remembered by Shetlanders in British Columbia." The Journal of American Folklore 31.120 (1918): 180-201.

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Turner, Mark. "The Origin of Selkies." Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.5-6 (2004): 90-115. 19 June 2007 <http://markturner.org/turnerorigin.html>.