Long ago and far away, in the coastal villages of Scandinavia and the Northern British Isles, people told stories about selkies, shapeshifters who shed their seal skins to walk as humans on land. Although traditional selkie tales were used to explore the boundaries between civilization and nature, they also helped communities examine romantic relationships, unions that can be as intoxicating and as turbulent as the ocean itself.
In selkie folklore, the romantic interaction between a selkie and a human rarely results in a happily-ever-after. The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry, a Scottish folksong, tells of a human woman who gives birth to a selkie child only to learn that her future husband will one day kill both her selkie lover and their son, and Selkie Bride tales usually feature a fisherman who steals a selkie’s pelt to force her into marriage and motherhood. The selkie bride builds a life with her husband and children, but she eventually discovers the location of her hidden seal skin, abandons her family, and returns to her home in the sea. The tragic conclusions of these tales make sense; if a human cannot survive in the water, and a selkie cannot be content on land, any romantic partnership between the two would be doomed. So, why do selkie stories continue to beckon listeners toward their melancholy shores?
While early selkie romances may have highlighted the anxieties of uniting two families in marriage, contemporary novels like Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island and Rose Sutherland’s A Sweet Sting of Salt use selkie folklore to interrogate issues of romantic agency, casting selkie characters as cultural or sexual “others” to propel poignant messages about human desires, marginalized communities, and queer identities. Although the meaning of selkie folklore shifts over time, the stories often turn on the topic of choice, an idea that is also central to one of the most popularly circulated fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast. We all want the power to choose who and what we love, but the act of choosing can be problematic because it requires us to leave the unchosen behind. In this way, our choices, to love others and to love ourselves, transform the landscapes of our lives as surely as the relentless tides reshape the curves of an island’s coastline. Selkie stories and animal bridegroom tales may be woven from ancient threads, but they remain relevant because their old materials can be unraveled and reworked into innovative designs that speak to the difficult choices modern audiences must make.
As a girl who grew up along New England’s rocky beaches, I have always been drawn to stories of the sea, but my fascination with selkies began when I enrolled in a class called The Wine Dark Sea: Folklore of the Ocean at The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. The class featured a guest lecture by Terri Windling who brilliantly discussed the somber themes of selkie tales and explained that you “can’t talk about the seal people without also talking about song, or about stories.” She was referring not only to the beautiful selkie songs carried toward land by ocean winds and waves, but to the songs and stories that humans sing about selkies, songs and stories that are often classified under the folkloric category of legend. Like urban legends, fairy legends, and even the legend of La Llorona examined in Weep, Woman, Weep, selkie legends exist somewhere between fact and fiction, inviting their audiences to negotiate their truth status. Some listeners will believe in selkies, and some will doubt the selkies’ existence, but by choosing to embrace or dismiss their beliefs, all listeners will shape the meaning of a selkie tale. In this way, selkie stories are collaboratively created stories about storytelling itself, and stories about storytelling have enchanted me since I first heard the words once upon a time.
Like the selkie folklore from which it is drawn, my novella, Selkie Moon, explores humanity’s connection to nature and the consequences of choosing to love, but at its heart, it is a story about storytelling. The narrator, Isla, is the daughter of storytellers. Her father, an Orkney fisherman, sends her off to sleep with stories spun of words, while her mother crafts tales using stones and shards of sea glass she gathers along the shore. Isla’s mother speaks in a foreign tongue. She spends her days swimming in rough waters. She, alone, knows where to look for groatie buckies, the elusive cowrie shells rumored to bring good fortune to their island community. But, although Isla uses selkie folklore to understand her parents’ troubled marriage, it is the readers of Selkie Moon who must negotiate the truth status of the story Isla is telling. By using the clues Isla scatters throughout her narrative to unlock their own interpretations, readers engage in the collaborative tradition of storytelling, adding their voices to a new selkie legend.
Whenever we are in the grip of a good story, we all become selkies of a sort, shapeshifters who shed our practical skins to swim in the inky oceans of a writer’s imagination. We are swept away by waves of words, captivated by the silver flash of metaphors which dart like minnows through the corners of our minds, and, even when we choose to understand a tale as fiction, we allow ourselves to be transformed by it, returning to the land of everyday life a little bit different from when we left, leaving a faint trace of ourselves upon the sea of story. Our capacity for emotional shapeshifting through storytelling may be yet another explanation for the enduring nature of selkie lore. If we can experience the loss and longing embedded in a selkie story, so too can we experience its peace and its joy. Perhaps when we engage with selkie stories, we are not searching for the happy ending of a fairy tale; our lives, after all, rarely unfold in fairy tale terms. Perhaps when we engage with selkie stories, we are searching for more elusive treasures, the kind that can only be found between the ever and the after, in the liminal space of transformation where the truest magic resides.
Guest Contributor Bio
Kelly Jarvis teaches at Central Connecticut State University and works as the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her poetry and stories have been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Selkie Moon is her debut novella.
You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author), Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter), Bluesky (@kellyjarviswriter.bsky.social) or visit her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/
Alt Text: Book cover for "Selkie Moon" by Kelly Jarvis overlaid on an ocean beach background. Transcribed Text: The Bruja Professor Presents: Once Upon a Selkie by Kelly Jarvis
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