The Skin Left on the Rocks

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the Orkney shore, late winter

An old man mending creels on an Orkney jetty told me the shape of it, though he was careful never to name the thing directly, calling it only "the grey folk" and glancing once at the water when he said even that. The selkie is a seal that becomes human by shedding its skin, and the story is told with only minor variation from the Northern Isles to the Faroes to the west coast of Ireland, wherever seals haul out on rock and shingle and men have gone to sea for their living. In every telling the skin is the whole of the matter. Wearing it, the selkie is a seal; without it, cast off on the shore for an hour of dancing in human shape, it cannot return to the water at all.

The story that recurs, region after region, is the same theft. A man walking the shore at night, or before dawn, finds sealskins heaped on the rocks and human figures dancing near them, and he takes one skin and hides it — in a kist, under the thatch, at the bottom of a peat stack — before the dancers can dress again. The selkie woman left skinless is his by a logic the old tellers never troubled to justify: she cannot go home, so she goes with him, and in time becomes his wife and the mother of his children. Orkney and Shetland families used to point to certain surnames and certain broad, webbed hands as the mark of that ancestry; the MacCodrums of North Uist were known locally as the sons of the seals, and wore the name, I was told, without embarrassment.

The second half of the story is always a finding, not a forgiving. Years pass, the wife is a good wife, the children grow — and then, by an accident too neat to be an accident, she comes on her own skin, forgotten under a floorboard or discovered by a careless child. She puts it on where she stands. What follows is not cruelty so much as inevitability: she goes down to the shore and into the sea and does not come back, though some versions allow her to surface offshore afterwards, at a distance, watching her children from the water on the same day each year, never closer than the tideline.

The Faroese carry a harder version of it. On Kalsoy, at Mikladalur, they tell of a seal woman taken in exactly this way, kept skinless and married for years, until she recovered her skin and returned to the water and to her own kin among the seals. Later, the village men went out on a seal hunt and killed among the catch her selkie husband and son. She is said to have cursed the village from the sea afterwards, prophesying that men of Mikladalur would drown until there were enough of them, drowned, to link arms and reach around the whole island. A bronze woman stands on the rock there now, looking out, and the story is told locally less as folklore than as an accounting still open.

Beneath both halves of the tale sits an older unease about the seals themselves — that they were not quite animal, and that killing one might be settling a debt you did not know you owed. Fishing communities up and down that coast held, in various forms, that harming a seal invited storm, or drowning, or a grief that arrived by water. Whether the story exists to explain misfortune after the fact, or to prevent it before, I could not get anyone to say with confidence; the two purposes have plainly folded into one another over generations of telling.

What stays with me, more than the theft or the curse, is the shore itself as the story's real subject — that particular stretch of wet sand and black rock where a skin might be left, however briefly, within reach of a man walking home in the dark.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.