Seal songs and legends

 

Stories about selkies are ambiguous, evocative, sad.

            This is largely because of the way seals themselves affect us. Bobbing curiously up around boats, they seem to feel as much interest in us as we feel for them, and there is something human about their round heads and large eyes. Basking on sunlit rocks they are part of our world, yet are also natural inhabitants of an unseen, underwater world in which we would drown. For most of our species' co-existence, only in imagination could we follow them there.

My mother used to sing a lovely song called Song to the Seals (words by Sir Harold Boulton, music by Granville Bantock) about a sea-maid who sits on a reef calling the seals in a lilting, melancholy refrain: ‘Hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran ee la leu ran…’  You can listen to it here, sung by boy treble Sebastian Carrington.

And the sheet music includes a introductory note: ‘The refrain of this song was actually used recently on a Hebridean island by a singer who thereby attracted a quantity of seals to gather round and listen intently to the singing.’

            With so much inter-species interaction and fascination going on, it’s no wonder there are many legends and songs about selkies: seal-people who can cast off their thick pelts and appear in human form. The ballad of The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry exists in a number of variants, but the earliest was written down in 1852 by Lieutenant F.W.L. Thomas of the Royal Navy, and it was dictated to him by an old lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland. The ballad tells the tragedy of a woman who has borne a child to a unsettlingly Other selkie man, ‘a grumlie guest’ who brings a waft of salt-sea terror as he appears. ‘I am a man upo’ the land, he announces,

            ‘An’ I am a Silkie in the sea;

 And when I’m far and far frae lan’

            My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’ 

As Lieutenant Thomas explains: 

The story is founded on the superstition of the Seals or Selkies being able to throw off their waterproof jackets, and assume the more graceful proportions of the genus Homo… Silky is a common name in the north country for a seal, and appears to be a corruption of selch, the Norse word for that animal. Sule Skerry is a small rocky islet, lying about twenty-five miles to the westward of Hoy Head, in Orkney, from whence it may be seen in very clear weather…

And he tells of coming in from the cod-fisheries on a foggy, windless morning, rowing ‘for nearly a mile through the narrow channels formed by a thousand weed-covered skerries’ and hearing the seals’ ‘lullaby’: ‘groans and sighs expressive of unutterable torment… followed by a melancholy howl of hopeless despair’.

A few years ago, wandering the fractured rocky shore of Longstone Island off the coast of Northumberland, I too became aware of this eerie sound. Keening, moaning, huff-huff-huffing – hooting like children who make long quavering ghost noises – a group of twenty or so seals were crying to one another as they lay on a ridge at the edge of the tide.

The unnamed woman in The Great Silkie is destined to lose both her half-selkie child and its selkie father: the Silkie predicts she will marry a mortal man, ‘a proud gunner’, who will shoot them while they play together in the bright summer sea.

The Sule Skerry selkie is male, but the best-known selkie tales tell of a seal-woman captured by a fisherman who sees her dancing on a moonlit beach. He steals her discarded skin, preventing her from changing back into seal form. Such stories generally end when the selkie bride recovers her hidden sealskin and returns to the sea, abandoning her human husband and children. ‘I loved you well,’ she sometimes calls, ‘but I loved better my husband and children in the sea.’ Unions between humans and faerie creatures rarely turn out well. These are disturbing tales of constraint and capture, power and powerlessness. And they are haunted by loss: the selkie’s longing for her own element and the heartache of man and children left behind.

I was thinking about this story while I was writing Troll Mill, the second of my fantasy trilogy for children set in a Viking-Norway-that-never-was, and I found within it a metaphor for post-natal depression. (That’s not to pin it down; folk and fairy tales are open to many interpretations.) But the thought gave me the heart of my book. Kersten is a seal-woman stolen – and named – by Bjørn, a fisherman. She lives with him in apparent content until one stormy evening she finds her sealskin cloak, races to the shore and thrusts her new-born child into the arms of the young hero Peer, before hurling herself into the sea. Left literally holding the baby, Peer cannot catch her; he yells a warning to his friend Bjørn, who runs to intercept her –

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 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. 

I wanted there to be an element of doubt. Is Kersten really a selkie, or is it simply a story the other characters make about her, in an attempt to explain what she did, and why? Years earlier, the daughter of a friend and work colleague of mine had killed herself in the grip of post-natal depression, and a great part of the book – I realised after I’d written it – turned out to be about motherhood and what it does to you, and the different ways people cope or don’t cope. I didn’t plan this, it simply came out that way. There was Kersten, the mother who goes missing, lost or dead. There was Gudrun, older, capable, hard-working, the nurturing but sometimes short-tempered mother. There was a troll princess, drama-queen mother of the kind of spoiled brat other mothers dread. And there was Granny Greenteeth, my version of the dangerous English water-spirit Jenny Greenteeth who drags children into the green depths of the stagnant water she inhabits. She claims the motherless half-selkie baby, Ran, as her lawful prey even though the child will drown. She is the destructively possessive mother. 

Peer saw her, or thought he did: Granny Greenteeth in human form, sitting at the bottom of the millpond with Ran in her arms. A greenish light clung around them. Granny Greenteeth’s hair was waving upwards in a terrible aureole and she bent over Ran, rocking her to and fro. 

Granny or Jenny Greenteeth is a fresh-water spirit, a nixie not a selkie, and her origin in English folklore is likely to have been as a bogey to frighten children away from dangerous ponds. Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology (1835) says that the Danish water spirit, the nøkke, wears a green hat and that ‘when he grins you see his green teeth’. Grimm adds that ‘there runs through the stories of water-sprites a vein of cruelty and bloodthirstiness which is not easily found among daemons of mountains, woods and homes… To this day, when people are drowned in a river, it is common to say: “The river-sprite demands his yearly victim,” which is usually an innocent child.’

Unlike nixies, selkies are not cruel, though they sometimes take revenge on those who have mistreated them. They are not spirits but creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves, as the Shetland and Orkney islanders who told selkie stories in the 1940s to David Thomson for BBC radio (and published later in Thomson’s book The People of The Sea) knew full well. One story Thomson heard in the radio age was told by Shetlander Gilbert Charlson, and it couldn’t be plainer about the physicality of the selkie race. A band of men land on the Ve Skerries (the ‘Holy Skerries’) to stun the seals there and skin them alive: 

‘Ye’d no sooner stun your seal than you’d set to and skin him, you understand, for if you left him there he might come back to life and go back into the sea while you turned around. T’was hard to be sure if they were dead or no, for it’s very hard to kill them…’ 

The tale was already over a century old, for it is also found in Samuel Hibbert’s Description of the Shetland Islands (1822). Hibbert’s account is just as graphic: 

They … stunned several of them and while they lay stupefied, stripped them of their skins, with the fat attached to them. They left the naked carcasses lying on the rocks, and were about to get into their boats with their spoils and return to Papa Stour, whence they had come. 

As they prepare to leave, a huge swell rises; the men all leap for their boats… The Ve Skerries are the very ones through which Lieutenant Thomas RN rowed in the 1850s  coming back from his cod-fishing expedition, and he described them as “almost covered by the sea at high water, and in this stormy climate, a heavy surf breaking over them generally forms an effectual barrier to boats.” So the men are swift to leave: but one is left behind. Unable to bring the boats close enough for him to jump, his friends give up and row for home, knowing he’ll be washed away.

            And now the seals return to the skerry, moaning and crying for the deaths of their kin; crying even more for those still alive, who without their skins can never return to their home in the sea – this glosses the truth of actual, living, skinned seals still writhing on the rocks... The the one crying the loudest is a female selkie called  ‘Geira’ – or ‘Gioga’ in the older version – for her son Hancie has lost his skin and must now be forever exiled. 

            Seeing the shivering, stranded fisherman fated to die from exposure or drowning, Geira offers to carry him on her back all the way home to Papa Stour, if in return he will find and restore her son’s sealskin. The man is willing, but he is desperately afraid of the turbulent waves. So he asks her permission to cut slots in the thick sealskin of her shoulders and flanks, two for his hands and two for his feet, so that he can hold on firmly ‘between the skin and the flesh’ and will ‘no slip in tae the sea’. So dear is her son to Geira that she agrees, and carries the man away through the storm and all the way back to Papa Stour. The story ends: 

‘And this man went across the island in the night, when he landed. He walked down by the Dutch Loch and on to Hamna Voe. He made sure his comrades were sleeping. And he went there to the skeo [a little stone house used for the curing of fish]. And he chose out the longest and bonniest skin out o’ a’ that lay there and took it to the old mother selkie, Geira. It was the skin o’ her son, Hancie, and away wi’ that she swam.’

            David Thomson: The People of the Sea 

So there’s a tale of co-operation between human and selkie, even though the man was part of a team slaughtering and skinning the seals. The relationship between the two races is not an equal one. The men prey upon the seals in order to live – to sell the skins, and make shoes and garments from them. They use the seals, and also they depend upon them: they owe them. And they’re uneasy about it, uneasy about killing these creatures who seem so much like…  people. One more quotation from The People of the Sea, from eighty year-old Osie Fea: 

‘It’s no wonder they were thought to be like us,’ he said. ‘For the seals and ourselves were aye thrown together in our way o’ getting a living, and everything we feel, they feel, ye may be sure o’ that.’

            ‘I wouldna care to be near them,’ said Margaret Fae.

            ‘I have watched them,’ said Osie, ‘as near as I am to you. I have seen a mother out by the Seal Skerry when the sea was full o’ wreckage. There was a ship wrecked out by and it was rough, and this wreckage was tumbling her young one about so he couldna win ashore. I could see the anxiety gazing out o’ her eyes like a woman’s. The very same. The very same as a woman’s.’ 

It is surely from this sense of identification, of empathy and of guilt, that the stories were born. 

 

 Picture credits:

The Seal Woman of Kopakonan, Faroes. Read her story on the Faroes website at this link

The Seal Woman of Kopakonan: photo by Annebjorg Andreasen

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

Watermill Stories

I like stories about watermills. A watermill figured largely in my first two books, ‘Troll Fell’ and ‘Troll Mill’, and if you think about it, in past centuries the mill which ground your corn was about the most important building in any village after the church – and for similar reasons. The church provided your spiritual food, the mill provided your daily bread. The miller was an important man in any community. And like the church, the mill was a hub, a place where you could expect to meet your neighbours on a fairly regular basis, even the ones who lived on outlying farms.

Millers, like clergymen, were not always liked, of course. (The ones in my books certainly endear themselves to no one.) The song ‘I am a jolly miller and I live by myself’ has the refrain, ‘I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody cares for me,’ and rather suggests that millers felt themselves a little above the rest of the community. People couldn’t afford to offend the miller, whose mill with its machinery was one of the first non-cottage industries. No one wanted to go back to hand-grinding their own grain with a quern.

Machinery at Venn Mill, Oxfordshire, just up the road from me and the model for Troll Mill! © Copyright Steve Daniels and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence 

This tension between the miller – whose hands were never dirty, but on the contrary who was always powdered in white – and the labouring villagers, may help explain the number of ghost stories and horror stories set around mills and millpond – but I think one also has to take into account the fact that a working mill is an impressive place. The whole building comes alive, full of purpose:

Everything vibrated. Old dust trickled and cobwebs shook on the walls. …And the noises were so spooky: the rhythmic thumping of the water wheel like a dark heart beating, the creaking machinery, the clatter of the shoe that shook down the grain, and the sibilant mutter of the rotating millstone.

(Troll Fell)


Here are a couple of folk-tales about watermills. One from Peter Asbjørnsen’s collection of Norwegian tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon:

There was a man who had a flour mill, close to a waterfall, and there was a mill-goblin in that mill. Every time he went to grind his corn, the goblin got hold of the tub-wheel and stopped the mill, and he couldn’t get any corn ground. The man knew very well it was the goblin who had his hand in this and one evening when he went to the mill, he took a big pot full of pitch-tar with him and put it on the fire. He turned the water on to the wheel and the mill went for a while, but then it stopped as he had expected it would. He opened the door which led out to the wheel and there stood the mill goblin in the door, gaping. His jaw was so big that it reached from the threshold up to the lintel.


“Have you ever seen such a jaw?” said the goblin.
The man ran for the pot and pitched the boiling tar into the gaping jaw and said, “Have you ever felt anything do hot?”
The goblin uttered a terrible shriek and let go the wheel. He has never been seen or heard there after that time, nor has the mill been stopped since.

Serbia's most famous vampire, Sava Savanović, was said to have lived in an old watermill, where he drank the blood of the millers: Serbian folk legends held that water mills were an invention of the devil and a gathering place for demons – a belief which seems reflected by this tale from Ireland, from Great Blasket Island off the coast of County Kerry, told in Gaelic by a woman called Gobnait and written down by Robin Flower some time in the early 1900’s. ('The Western Island', Robin Flower, Oxford 1944) It’s an extract from a much longer tale, itself a version of ‘Mother Holle’, in which a king’s daughter is sent by her jealous stepmother to perform an number of difficult tasks, and succeeds though courtesy and goodness, while her ugly stepsister fails through rudeness and selfishness. For one task she is sent to a mill to get a bag of wheat ground: ‘and nobody in the world ever came back from that mill’. She has to stay there overnight:

And it wasn’t long till a tall, black man came down the chimney to her. “Stretch out your long white legs beside my long black legs.” “I’ll do it,” she said, “if you’ll make me a golden cupboard.” He wasn’t long in making it. “Stretch out your long white legs beside my long black legs.” “I’ll do it if you’ll make me a golden dresser.” “Stretch out your long white legs beside my long black legs.” “I’ll do it if you’ll make me a golden ladder.” Yerra, he hadn’t put the last nail in the ladder when the little cock flapped his wings and crowed, and the tall, black man went through the chimney.

Of course the stepsister makes the mistake of being rude, and ‘All he did was to gulp her up in his mouth and fly out of the chimney with her.’

Was it because of the elemental power of the water, that mills were regarded with awe?  In contrast to the Serbian legends, here’s a poem attributed to the epigrammatist Antipator of Thessalonica, dated 85 BC: it celebrates the change from the wearisome female task of hand-grinding at home to the miraculous power of the water-driven millstones:

Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age...

Or, in an 18th century translation:

Ye Maids who toiled so faithfully at the Mill
Now cease your word and from these toils be still,
Sleep now till dawn and let the birds with glee
Sing to the ruddy morn from bush and tree
For what your hands performed so long and true
Ceres has charged the Water Nymphs to do.