Stories about selkies are ambiguous, evocative, sad.
This is largely because of the way seals themselves affect us. Bobbing curiously up around boats, they seem to feel as much interest in us as we feel for them, and there is something human about their round heads and large eyes. Basking on sunlit rocks they are part of our world, yet are also natural inhabitants of an unseen, underwater world in which we would drown. For most of our species' co-existence, only in imagination could we follow them there.
My mother used to sing a lovely song called Song to the Seals (words by Sir Harold Boulton, music by Granville Bantock) about a sea-maid who sits on a reef calling the seals in a lilting, melancholy refrain: ‘Hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran ee la leu ran…’ You can listen to it here, sung by boy treble Sebastian Carrington.
With so much inter-species interaction and fascination going on, it’s no wonder there are many legends and songs about selkies: seal-people who can cast off their thick pelts and appear in human form. The ballad of The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry exists in a number of variants, but the earliest was written down in 1852 by Lieutenant F.W.L. Thomas of the Royal Navy, and it was dictated to him by an old lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland. The ballad tells the tragedy of a woman who has borne a child to a unsettlingly Other selkie man, ‘a grumlie guest’ who brings a waft of salt-sea terror as he appears. ‘I am a man upo’ the land, he announces,
‘An’ I am a Silkie in the sea;
And when I’m far and far frae lan’
My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’
As Lieutenant Thomas explains:
The story is founded on the superstition of the Seals or Selkies being able to throw off their waterproof jackets, and assume the more graceful proportions of the genus Homo… Silky is a common name in the north country for a seal, and appears to be a corruption of selch, the Norse word for that animal. Sule Skerry is a small rocky islet, lying about twenty-five miles to the westward of Hoy Head, in Orkney, from whence it may be seen in very clear weather…
And he tells of coming in from the cod-fisheries on a foggy, windless morning, rowing ‘for nearly a mile through the narrow channels formed by a thousand weed-covered skerries’ and hearing the seals’ ‘lullaby’: ‘groans and sighs expressive of unutterable torment… followed by a melancholy howl of hopeless despair’.
A few years ago, wandering the fractured rocky shore of Longstone Island off the coast of Northumberland, I too became aware of this eerie sound. Keening, moaning, huff-huff-huffing – hooting like children who make long quavering ghost noises – a group of twenty or so seals were crying to one another as they lay on a ridge at the edge of the tide.
The unnamed woman in The Great Silkie is destined to lose both her half-selkie child and its selkie father: the Silkie predicts she will marry a mortal man, ‘a proud gunner’, who will shoot them while they play together in the bright summer sea.
The Sule Skerry selkie is male, but the best-known selkie tales tell of a seal-woman captured by a fisherman who sees her dancing on a moonlit beach. He steals her discarded skin, preventing her from changing back into seal form. Such stories generally end when the selkie bride recovers her hidden sealskin and returns to the sea, abandoning her human husband and children. ‘I loved you well,’ she sometimes calls, ‘but I loved better my husband and children in the sea.’ Unions between humans and faerie creatures rarely turn out well. These are disturbing tales of constraint and capture, power and powerlessness. And they are haunted by loss: the selkie’s longing for her own element and the heartache of man and children left behind.
I was thinking about this story while I was writing Troll Mill, the second of my fantasy trilogy for children set in a Viking-Norway-that-never-was, and I found within it a metaphor for post-natal depression. (That’s not to pin it down; folk and fairy tales are open to many interpretations.) But the thought gave me the heart of my book. Kersten is a seal-woman stolen – and named – by Bjørn, a fisherman. She lives with him in apparent content until one stormy evening she finds her sealskin cloak, races to the shore and thrusts her new-born child into the arms of the young hero Peer, before hurling herself into the sea. Left literally holding the baby, Peer cannot catch her; he yells a warning to his friend Bjørn, who runs to intercept her –
And Kersten stopped. She threw herself flat and the wet sealskin cloak billowed over her, hiding her from head to foot. Underneath it, she continued to move in heavy, lolloping jumps. She must be crawling on hands and knees, drawing the skin closely around her. She rolled. Waves rushed up and sucked her into the water. Trapped in those encumbering folds, she would drown. ‘Kersten!’ Peer screamed. The body in the water twisted, lithe and muscular, and plunged forward into the next grey wave.
I wanted there to be an element of doubt. Is Kersten really a selkie, or is it simply a story the other characters make about her, in an attempt to explain what she did, and why? Years earlier, the daughter of a friend and work colleague of mine had killed herself in the grip of post-natal depression, and a great part of the book – I realised after I’d written it – turned out to be about motherhood and what it does to you, and the different ways people cope or don’t cope. I didn’t plan this, it just came out that way. There was Kersten, the mother who goes missing, lost or dead. There was Gudrun, older, capable, hard-working, the nurturing but sometimes short-tempered mother. There was a troll princess, drama-queen mother of the sort of spoiled brat other mothers dread. And there was Granny Greenteeth, my version of the dangerous English water-spirit Jenny Greenteeth who drags children into the green depths of the stagnant water she inhabits. She claims the motherless half-selkie baby, Ran, as her lawful prey even though the child will drown. She is the destructively possessive mother.
Peer saw her, or thought he did: Granny Greenteeth in human form, sitting at the bottom of the millpond with Ran in her arms. A greenish light clung around them. Granny Greenteeth’s hair was waving upwards in a terrible aureole and she bent over Ran, rocking her to and fro.
Granny or Jenny Greenteeth is a fresh-water spirit, a nixie not a selkie, and her origin in English folklore is likely to have been as a bogey to frighten children away from dangerous ponds. Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology (1835) says that the Danish water spirit, the nøkke, wears a green hat and that ‘when he grins you see his green teeth’. Grimm adds that ‘there runs through the stories of water-sprites a vein of cruelty and bloodthirstiness which is not easily found among daemons of mountains, woods and homes… To this day, when people are drowned in a river, it is common to say: “The river-sprite demands his yearly victim,” which is usually an innocent child.’
Unlike nixies, selkies are not cruel, though they sometimes take revenge on those who have mistreated them. They are not spirits, but creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves, as the Shetland and Orkney islanders who told selkie stories in the 1940s to David Thomson for BBC radio (and published later in Thomson’s book The People of The Sea) knew full well. One story Thomson heard in the radio age was told by Shetlander Gilbert Charlson, and it couldn’t be plainer about the physicality of the selkie race. A band of men land on the Ve Skerries (the ‘Holy Skerries’) to stun the seals there and skin them alive:
‘Ye’d no sooner stun your seal than you’d set to and skin him, you understand, for if you left him there he might come back to life and go back into the sea while you turned around. T’was hard to be sure if they were dead or no, for it’s very hard to kill them…’
The tale was already over a century old, for it is also found in Samuel Hibbert’s Description of the Shetland Islands (1822). Hibbert’s account is just as graphic:
They … stunned several of them and while they lay stupefied, stripped them of their skins, with the fat attached to them. They left the naked carcasses lying on the rocks, and were about to get into their boats with their spoils and return to Papa Stour, whence they had come.
As they prepare to leave, a huge swell rises; the men all leap for their boats… The Ve Skerries are the very ones through which Lieutenant Thomas RN rowed in the 1850s coming back from his cod-fishing expedition, and he described them as “almost covered by the sea at high water, and in this stormy climate, a heavy surf breaking over them generally forms an effectual barrier to boats.” So the men are swift to leave: but one is left behind. Unable to bring the boats close enough for him to jump, his friends give up and row for home, knowing he’ll be washed away.
And now the seals return to the skerry, moaning and crying for the deaths of their kin; crying even more for those still alive, who without their skins can never return to their home in the sea – this glosses the truth of actual, living, skinned seals still writhing on the rocks... The the one crying the loudest is a female selkie called ‘Geira’ – or ‘Gioga’ in the older version – for her son Hancie has lost his skin and must now be forever exiled.
Seeing the shivering, stranded fisherman fated to die from exposure or drowning, Geira offers to carry him on her back all the way home to Papa Stour, if in return he will find and restore her son’s sealskin. The man is willing, but he is desperately afraid of the turbulent waves. So he asks her permission to cut slots in the thick sealskin of her shoulders and flanks, two for his hands and two for his feet, so that he can hold on firmly ‘between the skin and the flesh’ and will ‘no slip in tae the sea’. So dear is her son to Geira that she agrees, and carries the man away through the storm and all the way back to Papa Stour. The story ends:
‘And this man went across the island in the night, when he landed. He walked down by the Dutch Loch and on to Hamna Voe. He made sure his comrades were sleeping. And he went there to the skeo [a little stone house used for the curing of fish]. And he chose out the longest and bonniest skin out o’ a’ that lay there and took it to the old mother selkie, Geira. It was the skin o’ her son, Hancie, and away wi’ that she swam.’
David Thomson: The People of the Sea
So there’s a tale of co-operation between human and selkie, even though the man was part of a team slaughtering and skinning the seals. The relationship between the two races is not an equal one. The men prey upon the seals in order to live – to sell the skins, and make shoes and garments from them. They use the seals, and also they depend upon them: they owe them. And they’re uneasy about it, uneasy about killing these creatures who seem so much like… people. One more quotation from The People of the Sea, from eighty year-old Osie Fea:
‘It’s no wonder they were thought to be like us,’ he said. ‘For the seals and ourselves were aye thrown together in our way o’ getting a living, and everything we feel, they feel, ye may be sure o’ that.’
‘I wouldna care to be near them,’ said Margaret Fae.
‘I have watched them,’ said Osie, ‘as near as I am to you. I have seen a mother out by the Seal Skerry when the sea was full o’ wreckage. There was a ship wrecked out by and it was rough, and this wreckage was tumbling her young one about so he couldna win ashore. I could see the anxiety gazing out o’ her eyes like a woman’s. The very same. The very same as a woman’s.’
It is surely from this sense of identification, of empathy and of guilt, that the stories were born.
Picture credits:
The Seal Woman of Kopakonan, Faroes. Read her story on the Faroes website at this link
The Seal Woman of Kopakonan: photo by Annebjorg Andreasen
'The Celtic Vanguard' from 'Ridpath's History of the World', 1897 |
The dwarf Eitri making the hammer Mjölnir. |
All voyages are voyages of discovery; all voyages are dangerous. Even in these days when cruise liners are thought of as little more than floating hotels, disaster sometimes strikes. Departing on a voyage is already a little death, a farewell to loved ones who may never be seen again, either because of the dangers of the passage or because the travellers mean never to return. To the oppressed and poor of Europe in the nineteenth century, America seemed a promised land, a western paradise of plenty and equality. But they had to leave behind all that was familiar if they were to make a better life across the sea. As a traditional Irish emigrant ballad The Green Fields of Canada says:
Oh my father is old and my mother’s quite feeble
To leave their own country it grieves their hearts sore:
The tears in great drops down their cheeks they are rolling
To think they must die upon some foreign shore.
But what matter to me where my bones may be buried
If in peace and contentment I can spend my life?
Oh the green fields of Canada, they daily are blooming:
It’s there I’ll put an end to my miseries and strife.
Anyone who’s stood at the seashore and watched the sun going down over the waves may have wondered what it would be like to seek lands beyond the sunset. Voyages have been associated with Otherworld journeys since the days of Gilgamesh (second millennium BCE). When his beloved friend Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh becomes afraid of death. He sets off to the end of the world – to the mountains where the sun rises and sets – and makes the dark journey through a tunnel called the Path of the Sun, to emerge in a garden of jewelled trees. Here he begs the goddess Siduri for advice on how to cross the ocean to find Uta-napishti, hero of the Flood, who was granted immortality by the gods. Siduri tells him to find Ur-shanabi the ferryman, who with his crew of Stone Ones can take him over the Waters of Death. The enterprise is about as successful as most Otherworld journeys and Gilgamesh learns the usual lesson, that death is inevitable and had better be accepted. It’s fascinating to find the motif of the ferryman, and of the goddess in the paradisal garden, in this four-thousand year old text. The ferryman Charon, the Garden of the Hesperides, the island of Circe – how long has humanity been imagining them?
The association of ships and suns is exemplified in the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carries him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travels through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew…
So speaks the aged Ulysses to his companions in Tennyson’s poem. Unwilling ‘to rust unburnished’ and die by his own hearth, he sets out for the lands beyond the sunset, home of the heroic dead. Yet in the Odyssey, Odysseus has already sailed to the Otherworld. Leaving the island of Circe he reaches the shores of Hades and the groves of Persephone, fringed with black poplars, where he encounters many spirits of the dead, including his own mother whom he vainly tries to embrace:
…Three times
I started towards her, and my heart was urgent to hold her,
and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow
or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me.
The Odyssey of Homer, tr. Richmond Lattimore, Harper & Row 1965
In this beautiful red-figure oil jar, we see Charon the ferryman welcoming the soul of a young man into his ferry. Charon gently extends his hand towards a fluttering soul as delicate as a mayfly. It is an extraordinarily tender gesture.
On his death, the Norse god Baldr is laid by the other gods on a pyre in his ship Ringhorn, which is set alight and pushed out to sea. The Old English poem Beowulf tells how the hero-king Scyld Shefing was laid with many treasures in ‘a boat with a ringed neck’ and sent to sea, where –
Men under heaven’s
shifting skies, though skilled in counsel,
cannot say surely who unshipped that cargo.
Beowulf, tr. Michael Alexander, Penguin 1973
Ship burials occur all over the world (for more information visit this link) – throughout all of Europe, Asia and South East Asia. In some cases people were buried in boats or in boat-shaped coffins, while others in burials which reference a sea-journey, such as this beautiful burial jar – the ‘Manunggul Jar’ – found in the Philippines’ Tabon Caves, and dated 890-710 BCE:
The boatman […] is steering rather than paddling the “ship”. The mast of the boat was not recovered. Both figures appear to be wearing bands tied over the crowns of their heads and under their jaws; a pattern still found in burial practices among the indigenous peoples in the Southern Philippines. The manner in which the hands of the front figure are folded across the chest is also a widespread practice in the islands when arranging the corpse.
The Tabon Caves, Robert B Fox, Manila: National Museum, 1970
In Northern Europe, high-status people were sometimes buried in their ships, like the king or warrior laid to rest in the East Anglian Sutton Hoo ship burial, circa 700 CE, and the two women in the famous Norwegian ‘Oseberg ship’, thought to have been buried in or after 834 CE.
The marvellous Welsh poem Prieddeu Annwfn or ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’ (dated by linguistic evidence to around 900 CE) tells of a raid by Arthur in his ship Prydwen on the Welsh underworld, Annwfn. Most of the eight stanzas end with a variation on the recurrent line: ‘Except seven, none returned’. By ordinary standards the expedition sounds disastrous, but this is no ordinary poem. Fateful, gloomy, mysterious, we gain a vision of a venture by sea to an Otherworld mound or island where a pearl-rimmed cauldron full of the magical life-giving mead of poetry is guarded in a four-peaked glass fortress with a strong door.
The hero Bran (keeper of another magical cauldron which restores the dead to life) is the subject of one of the traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama, in which a hero or saint sets out for an Otherworld, stopping at numerous fantastic or miraculous islands along the way. These islands have a more sunlit appeal than that of Annwfn: Bran is invited by a mysterious woman to seek for the beautiful Emain Ablach or ‘Isle of Women’ where there is peace and plenty and no one is ever sick or dies. He puts to sea with twenty-seven companions and three curraghs – nine men in each boat. Eventually reaching the island, Bran’s boat is drawn into port by a ball of magical thread which the queen tosses to him. Each man is paired with a beautiful woman, Bran sharing the bed of the queen, and there they remain, unaware how much time is passing in the real world, until Nechtan son of Collbran becomes homesick and Bran resolves to return home. The queen warns against it, and especially against setting foot on land. When they reach Ireland, so many years have passed that Bran’s name is an ancient legend, and when Nechtan leaps out of the curragh he crumbles to dust. Seeing this, Bran and his companions sail away (presumably back to the Island of Women) and never return.
The hero Maelduin's is a longer voyage and a happier homecoming: he's advised by a hermit that he will return home only once he has forgiven his father’s murderer. This he finally does, and makes safe landfall. But on the long voyage he and his companions see such wonders as the Isle of Ants ‘every one of them the size of a foal’; an island where demon riders run a giant horse race; an island of a miraculous apple tree whose fruit satisfy the whole crew for ‘forty nights’; an island of fiery pigs, an island of a little cat; an island where giant smiths strike away on anvils and hurl a huge lump of red-hot iron after the boat (surely a volcanic eruption?) so that ‘the whole of the sea boiled up’. Here’s a lovely passage:
The Silver-Meshed Net
They went on then till they found a great silver pillar; four sides it had, and the width of each of the sides was two strokes of an oar; and there was not one sod of earth about it, but only the endless ocean; and they could not see what way it was below, and they could not see what way the top of it was because of its height. There was a silver net from the top of it that spread out a long way on every side, and the curragh went under sail through a mesh of that net.
Diuran, one of Maeldune’s companions, strikes the net with his spear to obtain a piece:
“Do not destroy the net,” said Maeldune, “for we are looking at the work of great men.” “It is for the praise of God’s name I am doing it,” said Diuran, “The way my story will be better believed; and it is to the altar of Ardmacha I will give this mesh of the net if I get back to Ireland.” Two ounces and a half now was the weight when it was measured after in Ardmacha. They heard then a voice from the top of the pillar very loud and clear, but they did not know in what strange language it was speaking or what word it said.
The Voyage of Maeldune, ‘A Book of Saint and Wonders’, tr. Lady Gregory, Dun Emer Press 1906
I love the way these stories delight in the marvellous inventions of God (or the poet) and the wondrous things men find when they set out to cross the illimitable sea.
Stationed on the western edge of Northern Europe, the Irish were well positioned to wonder what might be beyond the watery horizon. Following a dream of ‘a beautiful island with angels serving upon it,’ the 6th century Saint Brendan set off into the Atlantic in search of Paradise. In a hide boat, a curragh, with twelve companions he spent years wandering the ocean from one marvellous island to another, including a landing upon the back of an amiable giant fish which allowed him to celebrate Easter there. All nature is included in Brendan’s Christianity: when he says Mass, even the fishes attend ‘and came around the ship in a heap, so that they could hardly see the water for fishes. But when the mass was ended each one of them turned himself and swam away, and they saw them no more.’
After years of sailing, and coming near the borders of a hell of ice and fire which sounds suspiciously like Iceland, Brendan and his companions reached the Land of Promise, the blessed shore.
…clear and lightsome, and the trees full of fruit on every bough… and the air neither hot nor cold but always one way, and the delight they found there could never be told. Then they came to a river that they could not cross but they could see beyond it the country that had no bounds to its beauty.
The Voyage of Brendan, ‘A Book of Saint and Wonders’, tr. Lady Gregory, Dun Emer Press, 1906
The immrama combine delight and discovery as well as spiritual journeys. And in fact it was the practice of many early monks to set up their cells on remote islands such as the Arans. Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne would pray all night, standing in the sea. Was it only for the solitude, or was the sea crossing itself a holy act which could bring the traveller to the shore of another world? Even before Christianity, were islands – liminally placed between earth and sea, like Lindisfarne, Iona, St Michael’s Mount – already considered holy? And it's worth considering that the rite of baptism is a passing through water to symbolic new life.
The age-old tradition of crossing water to the otherworld recurs in Thomas Malory's Le Morte D’Arthur when Arthur is taken away in a barge to the Isle of Avalon ‘to heal him of his grievous wound’. And he is not the only character to make such a post-mortem or near-post-mortem voyage: the Fair Maid of Astolat, dead Elaine, drifts down the Thames to Westminster in her black barge.
During the quest for the Holy Grail, Sir Percival’s sister dies, having given a dish of her blood in order to heal a lady. Perceval lays his sister’s body...
in a barge, and covered it with black silk; and so the wind arose, and drove the barge from land, and all the knights beheld it till it was out of their sight.
Soon after (in Book XVII Chapter 13), Lancelot is woken from sleep by a visionary voice which commands:
‘Lancelot, arise up and take thine armour, and enter into the first ship that thou shalt find’. And when he heard these words he start up and saw a great clearness about him. And then he lift up his hand and blessed him, and took his arms and made him ready; and so by adventure he came by a strand and found a ship the which was without sail or oar.
And as soon as he was within that ship there felt he the most sweetness that he ever felt, and he was fulfilled with all thing that he thought on or desired. Then he said, ‘Fair sweet Father, Jesu Christ, I wot not in what joy I am, for this joy passeth all earthly joys that ever I was in.’
And so in this joy he laid him down… and slept till day. And when he awoke he found there a fair bed, and therein lying a gentlewoman dead, the which was Sir Perceval’s sister.
This unsteerable ship of the dead conveys Lancelot to a castle where he will encounter that ultimate symbol of unknowable holiness, the Grail. Putting to sea in a boat without sail or oars – or for that matter in an overloaded inflatable run by traffickers in the middle of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – is to cast yourself upon the guidance of God. Such faith must be in the hearts of many of the brave, desperate people we call migrants.
In ballads too, as in life, to sail the sea is to face danger and possible death. The eponymous Wife of Usher’s Well sends her three sons ‘to sail upon the sea’. Barely three weeks later the news comes that they’ve drowned and the grieving mother tries to bring them back by cursing the elements that caused their death:
“I wish the winds may never cease
Nor fashes [disturbances] in the flood
Till my three sons come hame to me
In earthly flesh and blood.”
The Wife of Usher’s Well, Oxford Book of Ballads, 1969
So they do come home, at Martinmas, the liminal time between autumn and winter ‘when nights are long and mirk’. But their hats are made of the birch bark that grows on the trees of Paradise, and they can stay only one night.
‘I’ll set sail of silver and I’ll steer towards the sun’, a girl threatens in the folk song As Sylvie Was Walking, for then ‘my false love will weep for me after I’m gone.’ As for the foolish lady who betrays her lover and runs away to sea with a plausible suitor who has promised to show her ‘where the white lilies grow/On the banks of Italie’ – he turns out to be The Daemon Lover of the title, who halfway over conjures up a storm to sink the ship, crying, ‘I’ll show you where the white lilies grow/At the bottom of the sea!’
Over countless millennia voyage tales have explored the marvels of life and the mystery of death. We humans have always embarked upon hopeful voyages, seeking a new world, a better life, a better self. But the tales acknowledge that we cannot always be in control. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus wanted to go home, but instead he spent ten long years wandering the Mediterranean, exposed to storms, shipwrecks and the whims of the gods. Still, he made it in the end despite the odds. Death is a journey we’re all going to take, but maybe not yet, not this time, although the ferryman is always waiting. One day we will leave our friends behind, set sail of silver, steer for the sun and cross the ocean to the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.
One day… one day.