The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry

An airthlie nourrice sits and sings,

And aye she sings, Ba lily wean!

Little ken I my bairnis father

Far less the land that he staps in.

So begins the old ballad of 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry'. As Laura Marjorie Miller discussed a few weeks ago in her guest post here, most selkie tales – or at least, most of those familiar to a modern audience – concern a seal woman who is captured or taken to wife by a mortal man, usually a fisherman who spies her dancing in mortal form on a moonlit beach and steals her sealskin robe, so preventing her from returning to her kindred in the sea.

In Margo Lanagan’s thought-provoking ‘Sea Hearts’ (UK title 'The Brides of Rollrock Island’), the men of the island take beautiful, passive, mournful selkie brides in preference to ordinary human women, but this communal act of selfish, sexual exploitation rebounds upon them. The men cut themselves off from genuine relationships, and they and their children suffer from the seal women’s terrible, unspoken grief.

My own 'Troll Mill' (the second part of 'West of the Moon'), opens when a fisherman’s wife, Kersten, thrusts her newborn baby into the arms of the young hero, Peer, and flings herself into the sea. Hampered by the baby in his arms, Peer tries to stop her:

Rain slashed into his eyes.  His feet skated on wet grass, sank into pockets of soft sand. She was on the beach now, running straight down the shingle to the water. Peer skidded to a crazy halt.  He couldn’t catch her. He saw Bjørn, bending over the boat, doing something with the nets. Peer filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Bjørn!’ at the top of his voice.  He pointed.

Bjørn’s head came up. He turned, staring. Then he flung himself forwards, pounding across the beach to intercept Kersten. And Kersten stopped.  She threw herself flat and the wet sealskin cloak billowed over her, hiding her from head to foot.  Underneath it, she continued to move in heavy, lolloping jumps.  She must be crawling on hands and knees, drawing the skin cloak closely around her.  She rolled. Waves rushed up and sucked her into the water. Trapped in those encumbering folds, she would drown.

‘Kersten!’ Peer screamed. The body in the water twisted, lithe and muscular, and plunged forward into the next grey wave.

Writing 'Troll Mill', I found myself exploring various themes of possession – can one possess a child? – a wife? – another person? – and motherhood. I wanted to explore the paradoxical selfishness of a ‘good’ and likeable man, Bjørn, who has used love as an excuse for trapping the woman he wants. And I saw the selkie’s return to the sea, abandoning her child, as a metaphor for post natal depression.

'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry' differs from the ‘selkie bride’ legends insofar as the selkie in question is not female, but male. The earliest known version was collected by Captain F.W.L. Thomas of the Royal Navy, who heard it sung by ‘a venerable lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland’ some time around 1852: he sent it to The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.  Later in the century it made it into Child’s Ballads, number 113, and an original tune for it was collected in 1938 by Professor Otto Andersen on the island of Flotta, Orkney, who heard it sung by John Sinclair:

Sadly I can’t find a recording. The best known tune for the ballad was written by James Waters in the late 1950s (sung below by Joan Baez).

As with most stories of human/otherworldly liaisons, in 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry' things have gone wrong from the very start. The ballad opens with the ‘airthly nourrice’ – the mortal woman nursing her child – lamenting that she doesn’t know who his father is. ‘Little ken I my bairn’s father, far less the land that he dwells in’. It’s easy to let the beautiful tune sweep you away into a pleasant mood of romantic melancholy. But stop, stop and think!  What does it mean, when a woman doesn’t know who her child’s father is? How can that happen? It can happen if that woman has been raped.  There’s a lot of rape in ballads, much of it quite casual, probably reflecting everyday life.

So here’s this woman, this unnamed woman, rocking and nursing her child, not knowing who his father is, and then something fearful happens.

Then ane arose at her bed-fit

And a grumlie guest I’m sure was he:

‘Here am I, thy bairnis father,

Although I be not comelie’.

‘One arose at her bed foot’ – in her home, in her bower, into the safe place where she’s nursing her child, there emerges, surges up like an apparition from the foot of the bed, this grim, rough creature which once forced itself upon her. (The illustration by Vernon Lee, above, powerfully suggests the uncanny terror of the moment.) And he acknowledges her child as his. And he tells her the terrible truth: he’s not even human, and if he has a home at all other than the wild sea, it’s only a tiny rock far out in the North Atlantic, far from land.

I am a man, upo’ the lan,

An I am a silkie in the sea,

And when I’m far and far frae lan

My hame it is in Sule Skerrie.’

The woman reproaches him.  ‘It wasna weel,’ she says, ‘That the great Silkie of Sule Skerrie should come and aught a child to me.’ But in response, this happens.

And he has ta’en a purse of gold

And he has put it upo’ her knee,

Saying ‘Gie to me my little young son

And tak thee up thy nourris-fee.’

He’s paying her off, flinging money into her lap. ‘Pick up your money and give me my son.’ It’s like a blow to the face; his indifference to her is chilling. This is not a happy story, and the selkie, being a supernatural creature, has the gift of foreseeing how it will all end: badly.  One summer day, ‘when the sun shines hot on every stone’, he will take his little half-mortal son ‘and teach him how to swim the foam’. But by this time the woman will have married a man who can shoot with a gun. (I wonder if when this ballad was new, guns were new too?) At any rate, either by accident or by design, he will shoot both the selkie and his son.

An it sall come to pass on a simmer’s day

When the sin shines het on evera stane

That I will tak my little young son

And teach him for to swim the faem.

An thu sall marry a proud gunner,

An a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,

And the very first schot that ere he schoots,

He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.

What was the point of it all, then?  If it was always going to end in such tragedy?  Why did the selkie take the woman in the first place, why did he father her child? You might as well ask, ‘What is the point of “Hamlet”?’  The ballad is a song, a poem, and if it’s about anything it’s about the harshness and unfairness of the world, and the brevity and beauty of life.  The best moments are in the last-but-one verse: it’s full of light: the glorious heat of the sun on the shoreline stones in the short, bright northern summer, and the sensuous joy and tenderness of the bond between the selkie and his ‘little young son’ as he teaches him to ‘swim the foam’. Those are the moments that make the story bearable – and surely, the ballad says, those are the moments which make human life bearable, however brief it may be.

 Joan Baez' haunting version of 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry', tune by James Waters.


Picture credit:  Vernon Hill's illustration of the tale. From Richard Chope's 1912 collection Ballads Weird and Wonderful

"Knitting With Seaweed": Margo Lanagan on Selkies

Margo Lanagan is my guest today to talk about selkies and the inspiration for her book 'The Brides of Rollrock Island'. 


I can't remember where I first heard about selkies. I feel as if I've always known about them, though, so it must have been early, in some collection of fairytales or folklore borrowed from the Raymond Terrace Library in the sixties.

A Selkie Story artwork copyright © Kate Leiper 2009
www.kateleiper.co.uk

At any rate, when I picked up some strange seaweed-like knitting-wool in a discount store a few years ago, and wondered what it would be like to knit actual seaweed, and why a person would be even trying to do so, selkies presented themselves as the most likely reason behind it. I thought at first that the seaweed blankets were more like nets; the husbands threw them over their wives to keep them on land, when the women got desperate and tried to return to the sea; they were a means of entrapment. (So even in the first stages, I envisaged all my selkies as women.) But in the end I made them more like security blankets, under which the selkies lay and brooded and wept, consoled by the sea-smell.

Selkie stories are all very sad, and even the ones that end well have a poignancy; a selkie mother may come and dance every year with her children on Midsummer Eve, but what about the rest of the year's yearning? What about the lovelorn husband left behind?

Against this incurable sorrow, this irreconcilable difference and distance between the loved ones, is always set the spellbinding beauty of selkies, whether they be male or female. It's never worth what is sacrificed for a land-person to claim this beauty, but they are helpless to resist it. Part of the attraction of writing The Brides of Rollrock Island was to communicate that rather terrifying beauty, the alienness of it as well as its allure.

Part of it, too, was to counteract wafty Celtic Twilight interpretations of the selkie tales. I wanted blunt, practical people to fall, improbably, for the selkies; I wanted the selkie-coats to smell strongly and to be heavy and slippery and hard to manage and a problem to store and keep secret; I wanted the full unnaturalness of the process to be pointed up, and the full misery of the situation to be admitted. Selkies' passivity in the face of their imprisonment on land seems to me a dreadful thing that's often camouflaged by their beauty, and the attractively melancholy picture they present, wandering longingly beside the sea - and in this way, the men who love them are always, always let off the hook for the injury they've caused the selkie, and in turn their children. I think I wanted to make them more accountable, and to make them see what they'd done and feel remorse; I wanted to focus on their loss and their children's, rather than just be dazzled by the wonderment of a beauty's emerging from the sea, instead of the expected monster.

But probably the thing that excited me the most about writing a selkie tale was the necessity to enter into the experience of the change, the sensations (mental and physical) involved in the transformation from seal to person or person to seal, the sights and sounds and emotions involved in witnessing such a change. I've written several stories from animals' points of view, and I thought it would be an absorbing challenge to try to maintain the other-species foreignness of the seals even as they became almost-credible humans. I wanted to get up close to the actual skin-shedding, or to the first swimming-twitches as the selkie returned to seal form; I wanted it to be a clumsy, heavy process as well as a magical one.

Retelling folk and fairytales, you always start from the powerful bare bones of the story that have lasted through the ages; I wanted my story to grow a thick layer of seal fat and muscle and cover itself in tight, slick sealskin, to have it thrash around in an ungainly way on land, forever longing to take flight in the sea. No amount of magic should be allowed to diminish real seals in all their weight and agility, in their eerie likeness to us, yet their utter unknowability.

"The Brides of Rollrock Island" by Margo Lanagan, David Fickling Books

Many thanks Margo!  You can follow Margo on Twitter, or read her own blog Among Amid Awhile

"The Brides of Rollrock Island" by Margo Lanagan

Of all the underwater peoples, the selkies – the seal people – have the closest connection with human beings.  You’ve only to go out in a small boat anywhere around the north coast of Britain, to see the grey seals poking their curious round heads out of the waves, to see them sprawling on the rocks, and to meet their dark, expressive eyes. They exist – unarguably, incontrovertibly – in a way which mermaids and sirens don’t.

And they come out on land, and they suckle their young in a very human fashion: no wonder, then, that legends of selkies sprang up – of how the grey seals could cast off their skins and come dancing on moonlit beaches in the form of beautiful young men and women. 

Especially women.

But the stories about selkies never have happy endings. If mermaid stories are often concerned with the mermaid’s lack of an immortal soul, selkie tales are about capture and imprisonment, abandonment and loss.  They are about the changing balance of power within a relationship.  They are about depression and grief.

Margo Lanagan’s utterly wonderful book ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ explores all these themes.  It’s set in a tiny, almost incestuous fishing community, so isolated (I’m reminded that isolated literally means islanded) that the opinion of family and neighbours is the opinion of the world. And it’s a place which the humans share with a population of seals.

Misskaella Prout is unhappy.  Plump, ungainly and difficult, the youngest of several children, butt of many a family joke and sisterly unkindness, one day she wakes to find in herself a terrifying but transforming power over the seals. She can see sparks and seeds of humanity within them, and stir them into growth: she creates for herself a beautiful man who steps out of his bull seal carcass to make love to her.

Even this transient encounter has tragic and unforeseeable results; but gradually word of Misskaella’s powers gets about, and one by one the men of the village begin coming to her to ask her to provide them with seal brides.  

Including the men who already have wives and children.

Margo Lanagan's writing is astoundingly good.  It's physical and shocking and brilliant, like reading poetry by Ted Hughes, except in prose. Everything is distinct, clearly imagined - especially the moment of transformation, the human birth, the moment when the sealskins split, unzip, and out of that blubbery fleshy darkness step the slender and beautiful seal girls.  But are they really human?  To the men, the seal brides are the perfect women: meek, beautiful, domestic – but even the men become gradually, uncomfortably aware of the deep, helpless sadness of their chosen mates.  A great wrong has been done to them.

As years pass, the story is taken up by a succession of voices. Bitter, complicated Misskaella, naïve, well-meaning Dominic Mallett, and finally young Daniel Mallett, whose own mother is a seal bride – each has a different view of the tragedy which is being enacted and perpetuated on Rollrock Island.

‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ is about greed, and injustice, and the unforeseen consequences of getting what you think you want. It’s about the shamefaced, pathetic gestures by which the guilty attempt to palliate crimes which they have no intention of redressing.  It’s about seeing the world through a distorting lens and telling yourself you can see straight, it’s about self-deception – and, finally, salvation.

'The Brides of Rollrock Island' by Margo Lanagan is published in the UK in hardcover by David Fickling Books.

And on Wednesday, Margo Lanagan will be a guest here on the blog, with much more to say about selkies and the background to her marvellous book!  

 

 Photograph: Joe Cornish/NTPL