Along the northern coasts of Scotland, people once said the seals were only seals some of the time. On certain nights, so the story goes, they came ashore, slipped free of their skins, and stood on the sand as women and men: the selkies, seal-folk, told of most often in Orkney and Shetland, where the North Sea and the Atlantic meet and rarely agree. Out of the water they were said to be beautiful, and gone again by first light. They danced, in the telling, until there was no more night left to dance in. Everything depended on the skin. Lose it, and there was no way home.
Have You Been Told About Scotland?
The people who came ashore
The tale told most often begins with a fisherman, out too late, who watches the dancers from the rocks and falls hopelessly for one of them, then does the one thing a person in these stories must never do: takes what is not his. He hides her sealskin in the rafters of his house, and she, unable to return to the water without it, stays and becomes his wife. She keeps a good home. She raises his children with real tenderness. Every version of the story agrees on that much, and every version also notices, quietly, that she stands at the window a little too long, looking towards the sea. Years later, a child finds a strange soft bundle pushed into the roof and brings it to her mother, delighted with the find, and by nightfall the mother is gone. In the gentler tellings, a grey seal swims close to shore for years afterwards, whenever the children walk the tideline, watching them the way only a mother would. She loved them: the stories are certain of that. But the sea had been hers before he was, and so had the skin, and he had no right to either.
The lore is as precise as lore about important things tends to be. Weep seven tears into the sea at high tide, they say in Orkney, and a selkie will come. It costs nothing to try.
An old ballad, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, gives the creature its own voice: “I am a man upon the land, I am a selkie in the sea.” Some families on the islands were said to carry the blood themselves. The MacCodrums of North Uist were known for generations as the children of the seals, said to feel the pull of open water in a way that never quite left them, whatever shore they later settled on.
It isn’t hard to see how the belief took hold. A grey seal, watched too long from an empty shore at dusk, has eyes that are dark and disconcertingly human, and a voice, when the water is still, that carries for miles and sounds unsettlingly like longing.
