Selkies and Swan Maidens

The seal people

In the northern and western isles of Scotland, in the Faroes, in Iceland and along the Irish coast, people told of the seal folk. The Scots word is selkie, which simply means seal. In the water a selkie is a seal like any other. On certain nights it comes ashore, draws off its skin, and is a human being, beautiful and strange, who dances on the sand with its kin until the tide turns.

The islanders who told these stories lived by the sea and knew seals well: their round dark eyes, their curiosity, the way they rise beside a boat and look at the people in it, and their voices at night, which sound unnervingly like singing. It is not hard to see where the belief came from.

The seal wife

The central story hardly varies from island to island. A young man sees the seal folk dancing and steals one of the skins. Its owner cannot return to the sea. She begs for it; he refuses; she goes home with him because she has no choice. She is a good wife and a loving mother, but she is often found standing at the shore, looking out. Years later one of her children comes upon a strange soft bundle hidden in the thatch, or in a chest, or under a stack of oats, and asks what it is. She takes it, kisses her children, runs down to the water, and is gone. Sometimes a large seal is seen afterward watching the children from the waves. Sometimes fish are left for them on the rocks.

The library's own retelling is on the story shelf as The Seal Wife of the Outer Skerry.

There are selkie men as well. They are said to be handsome and gentle, and to come to a woman who weeps seven tears into the sea at high tide. An old ballad tells of one who fathers a child with a human nurse, returns to pay her a purse of gold for the boy's keeping, and foretells that her future husband, a hunter, will shoot them both.

Several island families were said to descend from such unions, and were proud of it.

The swan maidens

Inland, the same story is told of birds. A hunter comes at dawn to a lonely lake and sees swans alight, lay aside their feathers, and bathe as young women. He hides one robe. Its owner must stay, and marries him, until the day she finds her feathers.

This tale is among the most widely spread of all folktales. It is known across Europe, through Siberia and Central Asia, and in the Far East, and it has been told for a very long time.

• In an Old Norse poem, three swan women sit by a lake spinning flax, their feather cloaks beside them. They live seven winters with a smith and his two brothers, and in the eighth they grow restless, and in the ninth they fly.
• In Irish legend a king's four children are turned into swans by a jealous stepmother and must spend nine hundred years on three cold waters, keeping their human speech and their gift of song.
• In another Irish tale a young god dreams of a girl who is a swan every other year, finds her on a lake among a hundred and fifty swans, and, instead of capturing her, becomes a swan himself and flies away with her.
• Peoples of the Siberian steppe trace their clans to a hunter and a swan woman, and honor swans as kin.

Feather robes and the crane wife

Japan has two famous relations of the tale. In one, a fisherman finds a robe of feathers hanging on a pine by the shore. A heavenly maiden asks for it back, since without it she cannot go home. He agrees, on condition that she dance for him, and she does, rising slowly into the sky. Here, for once, the skin is returned freely, and the story ends in beauty instead of loss.

In the other, a poor man frees a crane from a trap. Soon afterward a woman comes to his door and becomes his wife. She weaves cloth of astonishing fineness, on condition that he never watch her at the loom. Of course he looks at last, and sees a crane plucking out her own feathers to weave with. Having been seen, she cannot stay.

What the skin means

In all these stories the skin is more than a costume. It is the self. Whoever holds it holds the person, and whoever hides it has done a wrong, however kindly they go on to behave. Modern readers tend to feel this more sharply than some of the old tellers did, and newer retellings usually side with the one who was kept.

The tale is also about the pull of a first home. The seal wife may love her children, and in most versions plainly does. She goes all the same, because the sea is not a preference of hers. It is what she is made of.

It is easy to see why these stories are cherished by many therians and otherkin, who know something of living a full and loving human life while another shape waits, folded away, in the rafters. The old tale offers no cure for that. It offers company, which is sometimes better.