So what is a Selkie?
All around the cold Northern coastlines, folktales are told about Selkies; they are a merfolk who take the shape of a seal in the water but who can shed their seal skins on land and can pass for human, often with tragic consequences.Selkie stories date from old times and are recounted around the coast of Britain and Eire, but especially in the North of Scotland and the Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides. They are also told in the Faroes, Iceland, Siberia and by tribes in the Northwest of America.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, an eminent Jungian psychologist and storyteller, shares her Inuit version called 'Sealskin Soulskin' in her book, 'Women Who Run With The Wolves'. She says that, "This tale is told across the world, for it is an archetype, a universal knowing about the issue of soul. Sometimes fairy tales and folktales erupt from a sense of place, from soulful places in particular... The story tells about where we truly come from, what we are made of, and how we must all, on a regular basis, use our instincts and find our way back home." (p.57, 'Women Who Run With The Wolves')
The female Selkie is beautiful and gentle, often choosing to shed her sealskin to dance upon silver sand in the moonlight. Many stories revolve around how human men use this opportunity to steal a sealskin and force the land-stranded Selkie to marry them. The accidental discovery many years later of her stolen sealskin, either by the Selkie or her part-human child, gives her the freedom she craves and the ability to return to her people and the sea, her natural environment... but there is a heart-breaking price, for she has to leave her beloved child on the land - without a sealskin, they cannot follow her into her world.
The male Selkie is thought to drown people and raise storms to sink ships in retribution for seals being killed. A darker story of how they sometimes lure beautiful, unwary young women to their deaths in the cold depths of the sea is also told.
There is something soulful, wistful about a seal's almost human, intelligent eyes which makes it very easy to to believe in Selkies. The dark knowing depths of their eyes reach into some ageless depth of our emotions.