Most of the shapeshifter narratives I’ve come across have focused on creatures of the land and the air—wolves, big cats, bears, various birds. Diane Duane’s Deep Wizardry does wonderful things with whale shifters, and I’ve seen a dolphin shifter mentioned in an urban fantasy or two. But there’s one shifter who doesn’t show up much if at all in urban fantasy, and who somewhat surprisingly doesn’t have a strong presence in shifter romance.
That shifter is the selkie. She—it’s often a she, though it can be a male as well—appears in two forms, as a human and a seal. The native form appears to be the seal form, and that’s the shape that swims in the sea. When the selkie comes on land, she sheds her skin and becomes a human.
Shapeshifters achieve the change in a number of ways. The werewolf can be born that way, or he (it’s usually he) can be infected with the curse through the bite of another werewolf. For the most part he can’t control the change; it’s often brought on by the full moon, and once he shifts, he usually loses his human intelligence. Other shifters may be able to change by willing it, as Nita does in Deep Wizardry. For still others, the catalyst may be a spell or a magical object, a talisman that focuses and forces the change.
The selkie, somewhat like the Native American skinwalker, transforms by putting on or taking off the skin of a seal. If the skin is lost or stolen, the selkie is trapped in human form. She can only become a seal again if she finds her skin.
The skinwalker has an evil reputation, and practices black magic. The male selkie can be dangerous; he may seduce a human woman and have children with her, and take those children away into the sea. The female selkie is a more benign and often tragic figure, a magical representation of the woman abducted and married by force.
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In these stories, which are told in the far north of the world, in the British Isles and Scandinavia and on up into Iceland, a human man finds a woman by the sea, steals her sealskin and hides it, marries and has children with her. One day, inevitably, she finds the skin where he has hidden it, either on her own or with the help of her children. She puts it on and goes back home to the sea.
The selkie’s native form is that of the seal. Humanity is a secondary state, and can become a curse if she loses her sealskin. In that way she’s different from the broader range of shifter species, especially the werewolf. Most of those start off human and spend a great deal of energy trying to get back to that form; even when the shift is voluntary and the powers of the animal form are welcomed and celebrated, it’s still the human that’s the default. It’s rare to find one that goes in the other direction.
Urban-fantasy shifters may live on the fringes of human society, but they tend to gravitate toward population centers. They live in or around cities. They interact with humans en masse, and often with other supernatural beings as well. They often congregate in packs. They’re social beings; it’s rare for any of them to live alone or in the remote places of the world.
The selkie is a creature of the world’s edges. When she comes to land, it’s on remote islands and isolated fishing villages. She stays away from the shipping lanes, and you won’t see her in coastal cities. She’s a rare and wild thing, with a magic that might be captured, but it can never really be tamed. The moment she finds her skin, she’s off to sea again.
Of all the shifters, she’s one of the most elusive. She may be a fallen angel, she may be a faery spirit. Or maybe she’s a way of explaining children born with webbed fingers or scaly skin, or else she’s a trick of the eye, a seal’s head surfacing on the edge of vision, looking like a human swimmer with water-slicked hair. She’s no more human than the sea, and no less magical.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
Selkies pay a large role in several of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series. And yes, their story is often tragic.
Nicole Peeler’s Jane True series is about the misadventures of the daughter of a male human and female selkie.
More than one of Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters novels mention selkies, and at least one involves a generational deal with them.
Tanya Huff’s done stuff with Selkies a couple of times, I think.
And selkie AUs are popular in some of my fandoms.
My kid lost her first tooth in Shetland visiting relatives, and from that point on we had a tooth selkie rather than a tooth fairy.
I’m thinking of Lovecraftian Deep Ones as being a kind of selkie.
George Mackay Brown has a story about the selkie’s son who is left on shore when she returns to the sea. He feels an outsider in his fishing village but goes abroad to study & become a composer. He can be dry eyed at a tragic boat loss at home, but transmute it into music that outsiders can understand. He is physically sterile.
Carrie Vaughn had a couple stories about this.
The second story involved the offspring of a selkie-human cross.
He was (of course) a Navy SEAL.
Though technically a sci-fi story, Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Anne Scarborough’s Petaybee trilogy had selkie characters (and they were not tragic!)
The movie The Secret of Roan Inish is in part a selkie story (or, perhaps more accurately, contains a selkie story-within-the-story). It blew me away when I first saw it in the late ’90s, and I while I have not rewatched for over a decade, I still list it as perhaps my favorite movie,
(The film, in turn, is based on the 1956 novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry by Rosalie K. Fry, although the film is set in Ireland, and the novel was set in Scotland.)
I love this post! Selkies have always been some of my favorite, and saddest in some ways, mythical shapechangers.
Ms. Tarr, I don’t know if you read these comments or not, but if you do, I wanted to say that 20 years ago, you wrote a book called His Majesty’s Elephant, set in the time of Charlemagne. I read that book in my middle school’s library 10 years later, and now, another 10 years past, that same book is now living in my own personal collection. That was the first book that taught me about the Emperor Charlemagne and his court, and all these later, it still sticks with me. I just wanted to say thank you for writing it.
Very intersting! I did not know the legend of selkies!
Cartoon Saloon’s Song of the Sea is a wonderful selkie film, and the great Traveller storyteller Duncan Williamson collected and retold many lesser known selkie stories in the West Highlands.
It’s a spoiler to add it to this list, since the mystery of one of the main characters and the abusive behavior of his father turns out to be explained by the fact that his mother was a selkie and so is he, and that’s not discovered until late in the book. But Salt Magic, Skin Magic by Lee Welch has a male selkie in a m/m romance with the magician who is called upon to help him.
There’s also a heroic Selkie knight in Gordon Dickson’s The Dragon Knight series, from memory he and his family show up from the third book onwards.
Absolutely seconding the October Daye series for Selkies – there’s a male love interest in the early books and a tragic tale of their history in the later ones.
Thirding the October Daye books on the topic of Selkies. They play a significant role in several of the books.
I’m always on the lookout for middle-grade/YA stuff with a selkie theme.
Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island (also published as Sea Hearts) (2012) is about the descendants on an island where the men are human and the women are selkies. This has not played out organically: rather, it has been engineered by the local witch, feeling rejected and scornful about it. She has ensured that the men bond with their selkie wives, then lose them when they return to the sea en masse.
Daughter of the Sea by Berlie Doherty (1997) involves a couple finding a baby selkie and deciding to hide the pelt and pretend the little girl is theirs.
I will not spoil The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley (1999) but let’s just say there’s a lot going on there.
A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975): Rare male example. On the Shetland Islands, our protagonist (a 12-year-old boy) watches as a mysterious young man shows up claiming to have been in a shipwreck – and charms the heck out of his older sister. Except the entire thing feels ominous and menacing – at least to Robbie.
Seal Child by Sylvia Peck (1989): A ten-year-old on an island in Maine befriends a selkie girl (whose ability to shapeshift is subject to a few extra conditions that might throw a wrench into things).
Recently acquired a copy of Selkie Girl by Laurie Brooks (2008), which has a cutesy teenage-mermaid cover and not at all a cutesy story (as in, it needs a whole pile of TWs). That must have irritated the author.
Okay, weird – my paragraph about short stories somehow disappeared. Janni Lee Simner’s “Water’s Edge” in Half-Human (2001), edited by Bruce Coville, introduces a nifty twist: the girl who finds the selkie pelt is the woman’s granddaughter, and she has enough in common genetically with her grandmother that the pelt attempts to grab her. Adventures ensue.
Sarah Ellis also has a selkie-ish story, “Knife,” in Back of Beyond (1997), which is a little bunch of short, punchy stories that we might now call magical-realism (lightly supernatural or ambiguously so).
There’s a beautiful ballad, The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry. You can find it online very easily. Like most good ballads, it’s very sad.
If anyone is in the mood for a short story about selkies that wonderfully captures the atmosphere of selkie tales in general, Beneath Ceaseless Skies published one last September. https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/upon-the-land/
Roger Zelazny wrote a short story involving a (male) Selkie called “Alas! Alas! This Woeful Fate,” which is in volume three of his collected stories.
C. J. Cherryh’s The Rusalka (1989) set along the Dneiper, in Ukraine.
I love the selkie concept. There’s gorgeous artwork out there – some usually pop up during the MerMay art push.
Susan Cooper’s Seaward has selkies, though not as main characters.
Thank you all for the many wonderful recommendations!
@11 Thank you for the nice words.
@19 That is indeed a gorgeous ballad. Terri Windling in one of her articles on Selkies (her blog, Myth and Moor, is one of my favorites) links to a very nice version with commentary.
Possibly the weirdest offshoot of selkie mythos is A. E. van Vogt’s The Silkie, a fix-up of shorter works following one of a group of what we’re first told are genetically-altered humans who have both a seagoing form and a third form that can survive and travel in space. I read this book long before I’d heard of selkies and so didn’t realize the connection until later.
Like the Silkies, McGuire’s version of the selkie starts as human — but the skin is still needed, adding to the usual family disputes about who gets to inherit the favorite Xxx. (Not a spoiler — this was the core of the story they were introduced in a decade ago.) This turns even darker later, as @15 notes.
There’s a selkie in the movie Local Hero, although this isn’t revealed until near the end.
More prosaically, there’s some reason to believe that the selkie legend, on the islands north of Scotland, had some basis in visits from straying visitors from Lappland, in their skin boats, or Inuit that were way off course – http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/selkiefolk/origins/origin5.htm
A selkie skin seems to work just like an Old Norse hamr (“hamur”, “ham” and “hamn” in the various Nordic languages). A hamr is an animal form, often a bird form, that one puts on and takes off like a garment. The wearer gains the animal’s abilities, such as flying if it’s a bird hamr. There are for example valkyries who have swan forms, and Freyja has a falcon hamr that she sometimes lends to other gods to let them fly in falcon form.
It’s reversed in a way, in that the selkie takes off her native form instead of putting on a temporary form. On the other hand it’s consistent that one puts on an animal form, and takes it off to take human form.
@22 Rusalka is excellent, but NOT a selkie story, nor even a shapeshifter story. There are ghosts and nature spirits, but no selkies.
Anne McCaffrey’s Petaybee books have Selkies which may be a slight spoiler.
@4 Tanya Huffs The Wild Ways has a lot about Selkies.
Sofia Samatar’s “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” is another great short. It appears in Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century.
I was introduced to selkies in the early ’60s when I heard Joan Baez sing a ballad about a woman whose lover was a selkie, although the word was pronounced silkie in the song. “I am a man upon dry land. I am a silkie on the sea…” The story is about the woman bearing a son by the silkie and later marrying a human man who happens to be a hunter. “And the very first shot that ere he did shoot killed both the son and the great silkie.”
The old ballads are great story telling. The prose is very economical. You don’t need a cloud of words to express complex ideas if you know what you’re doing.
It is amusing how many different civilizations had similar stories about a supernatural woman being held hostage as a wife by a man stealing a garment from her. Some are already in the comments. Another is the Japanese “Tennyo” (Heavenly Woman/Celestial Maiden). Basically, she’s kind of like the equivalent of an angel, but definitely not your Abrahamic Religion-based angel. This type has a cloak, or robe, called a “hagoromo”. A man would steal the hagoromo, and she would not be able to ascend back into her celestial realm, losing her powers, and becoming human. I think my favorite story based on them is an anime/manga called “Ayashi no Ceres”. In English, they called it “Ceres: Celestial Legend”, which is not a direct translation. In this story, a man stole the hagoromo, made the Tennyo his wife, and was an obsessed and abusive husband. The story starts with two of their descendants, fraternal twins, on their 16th birthday, when they find out they are the reincarnation of their ancestors.
I want a book list!
Are the shapeshifters in the Riddle Master of Hed series Selkie? I always thought they were.
@medrith You beat me to it. Joan Baez covered it.
I learned all this in bits and pieces over the years, last bit first:
My paternal line, the Kerry County Sullivans — to be precise, the Dingle Bay Sullivans — are gossiped about as having fooled around with selkies, and their descendants therefore are selkie-adjacent. I myself, like some of the aunts and uncles, am rather more furry than I’d prefer: rabid feminist who shaves her legs in summer.
The embarrassing bit is that I get seasick at the drop of a drop. Where did I leave that skin?
My Sullivan grandfather had webbed toes.
@27: I remember an anecdote from Somewhere by an Alaska Native, relaying the oral history of first contact with Europeans, to the effect that the ancestors had trouble figuring out what they were looking at when they first saw wooden ships because they were just so alien. I find it plausible that Irish onlookers would be just as baffled by a kayak, especially because the classic way to survive going to sea in a kayak is to wear an intricately sewn garment made of large mammal intestines (a kamleika in local parlance) and a spray skirt, which are all tied to one another and to the kayak so that you are effectively a single waterproof object.
A selkie shows up in the background of Theresa Edgerton’s Green Lion series. One of the characters is a descendent.
A selkie is an important secondary character in Poul Andersen’s The Mermaid’s Children. The future Sule Skerry selkie, in fact, and he is fully aware of his fate.
A lot of great recommendations here! If you enjoy comics, John Allison wrote/illustrated a series that I enjoyed as an adult but could be read as Middle Grade called Bad Machinery. Each book acts as a standalone fantastical mystery but the story I loved most is largely about a selkie, called “The Fire Inside.” I can’t recommend it enough.
Susan Cooper’s Seaward (1983) features selkies–non-tragic too if I recall correctly.
A favorite picture book of mine is The Seal Prince by Sheila MacGill-Callahan with illustrations by the talented author/artist Kris Waldherr. It’s a Celtic fairy tale about a princess and a selkie. It has a happy ending!
Also, a recent fantasy romance by Elizabeth Hobbes is also titled Daughter of the Sea (2021). I haven’t read it, but it received some favorable reviews. From the description the hero is the selkie and the heroine is caring for his baby daughter, hence the title.
The Mercedes Lackey book, part of the Elemental Masters series, is set in Victorian times, titled Home from the Sea. It’s set in Wales, and again it’s the male character who‘s the selkie.
Talis Kimberley wrote a fabulous selkie song, “Still Catch The Tide.” https://filkyeahfilk.com/2017/10/04/filksong-genealogy-sealskin/ contains a youtube video of the song being performed by Seanan McGuire and friends, as well as links to several other selkie songs [including one with a happy ending by Heather Dale]. There is a link to Talis’ lyrics.