suzanne's journal

4.26.02
Do you know about the Selkies? You should rent, beg, borrow, or steal The Secret of Roan Inish, which is one of my favorite movies. Then you will learn about the Selkies. Or, a much less entertaining yet perhaps equally informative option is to just keep reading.

The Selkies are half-women and half-seals who have come ashore (these tales mostly come from the north of Ireland and Scotland -- the Orkney and Shetland Islands in Scotland, and especially County Donegal in Ireland -- where people make their living from the sea, fishing all day long) and cast aside their seal skin, living as humans for a time to marry and have children.

(Strangely, the Selkie women are always breathtakingly beautiful, and not all blubby or whiskery like seals. Very suspicious, if you ask me.) But here is some interesting information about them (harbor is a verb in the first sentence):

"The seas around Orkney and Shetland harbor the shy Selkies or Seal-Faeries (known as the Roane in Ireland). A female Selkie is able to discard her seal skin and come ashore as a beautiful maiden. If a human can capture her skin, the Selkie can be forced to become a fine, if wistful, wife. However, should she ever find her skin she immediately returns to the sea, leaving the husband to pine and die."
(Brian Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries)

Actually, there are also male Selkies, but they're kind of wild, and this is a mostly G-rated website (with occasional slips into PG or possibly PG-13, but definitely mostly G) so we're going to skip the male Selkies for now, but if you're interested in them, I'm sure you know how to use a search engine. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

And actually, if you want to know more about Selkies, visit A Home for Selkies, where I just swiped all the info I shared with you above. (Except the bit where I mention how they're never blubby. That was all me. Oh, and also recommending Roan Inish, entirely my idea.)

Anyway, I was thinking about Selkies earlier, and it was reminding me of something, and I couldn't think of what. And suddenly, I realized, yes, of course! It's Sarah, Plain and Tall. (This is where I lose the rest of my male readers who have held on this far in hopes that something exciting was going to happen with those wild Selkie women.)

Remember how Sarah is a mail-order bride and moves to Kansas all the way from Maine? She is also a "wistful wife" who pines for the sea. Although unlike the Selkies, she eventually settles down and seems to solve the problem by buying some colored pencils of blue and gray and green, the colors of the sea, and noticing that the wheat fields of Kansas are kind of like the sea, and also falling in love with her new husband and his children, but that's another book and movie we don't have time to discuss right now, so quit distracting me with these tangents.

I was also reminded how the Owens women in the book Practical Magic had extremely bad luck with men, as any men who loved them died because of an old curse put upon the men by an Owens woman who had been scorned. (In the movie, and I can't remember about the book, Maria Owens had been banished to an island, and she looks like drawings of Selkies with her long black hair, so I always think "Selkie" because of the ocean and her hair when that part of the movie comes up, although I think she was a witch.)

And of course there were the Sirens in Greek mythology, who sang sailors to their deaths, and then there are always good old mermaids.

I'm not interested in doing a feminist reading of Selkies and talking about women's empowerment or bolognie (see, sometimes it's PG-13) like that. But I am extremely interested in all these legends that have beautiful women in the sea making men pine away and die.

I don't think the story is really in the Selkies or Mermaids or Sirens themselves. I think it's the sea. I think the sea makes people think about their own death when they look at it, because the tide counts off the days, and the waves feel like a pulse, and the spray sounds like breath, and I think the people who made up the legends looked at the sea too long and felt their own mortality, and spun it off into these myths of beauty and unhappiness and death.

What do you think?