INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world.
These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.
I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.
DESCRIPTION
Today’s episode is about the lovely water-dwelling Selkies, now these are from Celtic and Scandanavian mythology, specifically Irish, Scottish, Faroese and Icelandic myth.
These amazing creatures are known for being similar to mermaids, so we’re going to call them merfolk - but they can shapeshift from seals to humans by very literally shedding the seal-skin like a little coat, which is why they’re different from mermaids, as they completely strip themselves of their merfolk-ness, and can only transform back if they have the physical skin. Selkies can be either men or women, but are seals whilst in water.
They are described as incredibly beautiful and loving creatures, they would only come to land to find a partner who was being neglected by their partners such as fishermen's wives, due to their husbands’ long terms at sea. Selkies can be on land for as long as they like, but as soon as they turn back into a seal, they cannot come back to human life, some stories say they can come back after seven years, but this is just from the Scottish myths.
Once a Selkie had shed it’s skin, they would hide it either on their person or in a cave. Unfortunately, if a human got a hold of this, they would not be able to return to the sea, forcing them to stay as humans. The most common story is that human men would steal female Selkie skins and force them to marry them, but the Selkie women would be desperate to find their skins and return to the ocean.
Selkie women are known to be amazing wives and mothers, but as soon as they get their skins back, they will run back to the sea, never to be seen again, no matter how many children they have on land. There are some horrible stories of children accidentally returning their mother’s skins, and their mothers leaving them on the shoreline, which I’ll talk about later.
Now in contrast, male Selkies had the power to seduce ladies, especially if they were generally pretty miserable in their marriages. If a woman cried seven tears into the sea, the male Selkie would come and love her, which is nice. Some of these stories would be used to explain why women would have affairs, and if they died at sea, it would be said that the Selkie took her to his underwater home to live happily ever after, yay! Although not sure if women were allowed on boats, so I don’t know how one would ever be on the sea anyway, whatever.
ORIGIN:
The name Selkie comes from the Scottish selich, which literally means grey seal. It’s believed that this came from Scottish sailors getting either shipwrecked or landing in Scandinavia, and marrying women who looked very different from what they were used to, with dark-hair, wearing fur and seal skin as clothing from their Sami culture, because they were obviously used to women like me! Ginger and annoyingly English, waheyy!
Other stories say that it might have been sightings of Inuits, and they would have to dry out their kayaks, which were made of animal skins, and it might have been that they saw these people drying themselves, their clothing or their boats - creating the belief that they turn into seals - makes sense?? Lastly, there’s another belief that shipwrecked Spaniards were washed ashore, and their jet black hair resembled seals - I need to make friends with someone Spanish so I can come up with seal nicknames.
Now a few weeks ago, we spoke about Changelings and the fairies being blamed for any deformities, and they did the same with Selkies! There was a clan in Scotland called the MacCodrum, and their family is known to be “of the seals” as they claimed to be descended from a fisherman and a selkie. They apparently had webbed fingers, so much so that they almost had flippers and scaly skin - which we can figure out now as syndactyly for the fingers fusing together, and was probably ichthyosis, which is a genetic skin disorder.
A cool theory is that once Christianity swept across Europe, Selkies were meant to represent people in purgatory. It’s said that they were the souls of drowned people who were given one night a year to return to their human form and dance on land. That’s nice, innit.
Now let’s delve into some tales about these - firstly in all these places, seals are seen often in their droves! So it makes sense that they have mythology based around these super sweet, playful creatures (especially in contrast to their sometimes vicious Sea Lion cousins, which are not so familiar around the British Isles and Scandinavia).
In the Faroe Islands, which if you didn’t know, are a bunch of little islands between Scotland, Iceland and Norway, but they are a Danish country technically - and they speak both Danish and Faroese over there. It’s a gorgeous place, and I personally would love to go and visit. Now there are two versions of the story of what they call the 'seal wife'.
The first one is that a farmer from the town of Mikladalur on Kalsoy island goes to the beach to watch the selkies dance. He hides the skin of a selkie so she cannot go back to sea, and forces her to marry him. He keeps her skin in a chest, and keeps the key with him at all times. One day he goes fishing and realises that he forgot the key. When he comes home, the selkie wife has gone back to the sea, leaving their children behind. Later on, the fisherman goes out on a hunt, bearing in mind they hunted seals - and he kills both her selkie husband and two selkie sons, and she swears to take revenge upon all the men of Mikladalur. They will either drown, fall from cliffs and slopes and this will happen until enough men to link arms around the whole island of Kalsoy have been killed. They still attribute any of these types of death on the island to be fulfilling the Selkie’s curse.
The other version of this story is that of the fisherman Kagan who married a Selkie. He went sailing in the later year, and his wife was warning him that it was too dangerous, and inevitably a horrific storm hit. In order to save him, the Selkie transformed back into her seal form and rescued him, but meant that she would never be able to return to their marital home.
Now in Iceland, there is a similar story to the key hiding husband in the Faroese one, without all the murder. The tale is called "Selshamurinn'' or "The Seal-Skin". The story says that a man from Mýrdalur, which is in southern Iceland, forced a Selkie to marry him after stealing her seal skin. He also locks it up in a chest, and when he dresses up for Christmas one year, she finds it in his normal clothes. She runs and is reunited with her promised selkie husband beneath the waves.
In contrast, in Irish folklore, they’re often mixed up with mermaids as there’s a story about a mermaid marrying a man, and she later escaped and ran back to her seal-husband, suggesting that she was actually a Selkie. There’s also a story that the clan Conneely was descended from seals, and they were not allowed to hunt them or else they’ll get very bad luck. Then because of this, people called Conneely changed their name to Connelly - which is a pretty cool bit of history. There’s also an island called Roaninish or seal-island off the coast of Donegal.
Lastly, let's talk Scotland, now specifically, the stories are from Orkney and Shetland - where the ponies are from!
Now this one is probably the saddest tale in my mind, a man from Orkney steals a Selkie’s skin and forces her to marry him, ya know, the usual, and she spends her life trying to find it so she can return home. Unfortunately, her daughter finds her seal-skin, as she saw her dad hide it on the roof and innocently returns it to her mother, who promptly runs back to the sea, leaving her daughter behind on the shore.
In Shetland tradition, there’s a lovely ballad called The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry which talks about them, here’s a little extract;
I am a man upo' da land;
I am a selkie i' da sea.
An' whin I'm far fa every strand,
My dwelling is in Shöol Skerry.
In the story "Gioga's Son", there were a group of seals that were killed by nearby fishermen, but these were actually Selkies. The blood caused a big wave, and one fisherman on his boat was left abandoned. The Selkies survived by turning to their human forms, but their seal forms were lost forever. A Selkie called Ollavitinus was really upset as his wife was in the sea, but his mum Gioga made a deal with the fisherman, offering to carry him back to the town on condition the skin would be given back to him. She even let him carve gashes into her shoulders so he could hold on easier, but the skin was returned and they all lived happily ever after, yay!
One last story from Scotland, the story of the Seal Killer. There was a fisherman who went out six days a week to kill seals by using a silver whistle to summon them to his boat, he’d then turn their skins into trousers and stuff. Then one day, the biggest seal came up and he stabbed it in the back of the head, it didn’t kill the seal and it took his inherited knife with it. The next night a man appeared at his door, asking him to do a job. They rode to the shore, and the stranger kissed him, filling him with air, they then jumped off the cliff and sunk to the bottom of the sea. There, they found the great seal, and the stranger told the fisherman that this was their great Selkie queen, and that he must take the knife out and kiss it better. She made him promise to never kill another seal, and gave him a package full of gold coins. Now every full moon she comes out and dances to the tune of his whistle on the shore.
Creatures similar to Selkies exist in the folklore of many other cultures too. A similar legend exists in Sweden, and the Chinook people of North America have a similar story of a boy who changes into a seal. However, they’re mostly related to the story of Japanese swan maidens, who as you can imagine, turn into swans.
CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE:
Now for cultural references, we’ll start with art - for this one, I would say have a look at independent artists, there aren’t many famous paintings of Selkies - but they are featured on one of the Faroese stamps!
There is also a beautiful statue of the Selkie in Mikladalur and her name is Kópakonan, she stands at 2.6 metres tall and is a gorgeous bronze statue of the Seal Woman shedding her skin. She stands just out to sea, and gets a lovely smash from the waves every now and then, honestly the pictures are amazing. I would recommend looking up Eivor, an incredible Faroese musician performing her song Trollabundin in front of the statue with the waves crashing behind her on YouTube - she’s amazing. You might recognise her music from the Netflix series The Last Kingdom.
There are a couple of really amazing movies with Selkies, such as the Song of the Sea, which is an animated film about a boy who deals with the disappearance of his selkie mum.
The Secret of Roan Inish, a 1994 film based on the novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, by Rosalie K. Fry. It’s about a girl who discovers her Selkie ancestry. There was also a film called Selkie, a 2000 made-for-TV film which was made in Australia - it’s a film for TV, I generally would steer clear myself.
In TV, Selkies appear in the anime My Hero Academia, with a character actually called Selkie who has the same powers.
There’s a similar kind of Selkie in Disenchantment, made by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, but she’s actually a bear but has the same kind of skin shedding power, and one of the main characters steals her skin to keep her with him.
Gaming wise, not many references for this one. They feature in Magic: The Gathering card game as a playable monster card - but that’s about it from what I can find!
The book recommendation this week is A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter. It’s a novel, but it’s about a boy in Scotland who is protecting his sister from a predatory Selkie. There’s also a lovely story called ‘Sealskin’ by George Mackay Brown, who wrote a lot about his love of seals off the Scottish shorelines.
DO I THINK THEY EXISTED?
Now it’s time for, do I think they existed? I really like the idea of Selkies, you know, they just seem like they might just be really nice people. However, ya know, I’ve seen a seal on land, and they do not turn into beautiful people - can confirm. I have seen many seals in my short lifetime, and they are hella cute, but they are not people. I first heard of Selkies when I was told the Faroese myth as a child, and always associated them with trying to escape back to the sea - and as someone who grew up on the coast, I get it.
I love the idea of them having little half Selkie babies, but what I don’t like is this idea of forced marriage, like at all. That’s not nice. The thing I actually love the most is that while Selkies are not as known as the other merfolk creatures, instead of being vengeful and nasty like Mermaids and Sirens, they literally come to land for love and families - which I like a lot.
I see that these cultures at the time saw the sea as both dangerous and essential to their survival. Also the sea is super unpredictable, and can be both calm and tranquil, or tempestuous and life threatening. These cultures, and some even to this day, see the sea as bountiful and feed their families primarily with fish and other creatures. As I said, they’re also representative of love and sacrifice for love, which is so nice and makes them the perfect creatures for any romantic shore-based tragedies in myth and folklore.
OUTRO:
Awh I thought that one was quite nice, they’re not as intensive as Mermaids or Sirens, but I do think they just look very soft and squishy and I want to be friends with them so I could pet a seal in real life please.
Next week we’re hopping back across the pond to South and Central America for the spooky tale of La Larona, who drowned her babies to get back at a dude. I’ll tell you all about this ghostly spirit that will haunt you next Thursday!
For now thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The twitter is @mythmonsterspod or the instagram is @mythmonsterspodcast. Or you can email me, old fashioned-style on mythmonsterspodcast@gmail.com And share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.
Stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.