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So Mirna looks down at her daughter and begins the first story:
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Once there was a young grey seal who lived with her mother in the sparkling waters of Orkney. She liked to catch fish and have swimming races with her brothers, and she garnished almost everything she did with a song, for she was a happy seal and had a lovely voice.
She had always been careful not to stay too long at the shore. Nothing in the world could compare to the feeling of the direct sun on her sealskin, but she had heard the stories of seals who lose their skin and must live as girls. Valuing her mother above all else, she took those stories of forlorn seal-girls seriously and was cautious around the coast. Although she loved the sun and the sand, nowhere could ever feel like home as the ocean did to her.
She knew that she should never stay past the turning of the tide and that, should she take her sealskin off, she must always keep a close eye on it. It was a popular activity amongst the young seals to climb upon the coast at night and shed their skin to dance under the moon together. The older seals claimed they never dreamed of doing such a thing, but what young and joyous seal would turn down an outing like that?
The young seal, full of life and song, often attended these moonlit gatherings, although she was always among the first to leave out of fear of losing her skin. Unbeknownst to the seals was the fisherman who lived on the cliff that overlooked their stretch of shoreline. The fisherman was lonely and desperately searching for a wife. The first time he saw the grey seal dancing in the moonlight, he thought he was in love with her.
He began to stay awake later, always listening for the song of the seal-people. When he heard them, he would walk out to the edge of the cliff and gaze upon his favorite creature. Each night he became more convinced that he loved her, and eventually he made up his mind to marry her.
The next night, the fisherman snuck down to the shore and watched as his favorite seal shed her skin. When she began to dance, he dropped into the water, swam over to the pile of sealskins, and stole away with hers.
The seal was horrified when she could not find her skin at the end of the night. At first, she thought her older brothers took it to teach her a lesson. Then, she thought that it might have fallen into the water, and she sent her friends out to look for it. With frightened expressions they dove out to sea, but as the night grew longer, she realized that she was no longer a seal – she had become a selkie. Without her sealskin, she was trapped in this girl’s body that was not her own. She cried out, and her voice had lost all of its sweetness and youth. In despair, she sank down to her new knees. How would she spend even one night without her family?
The next morning, the fisherman strolled down to the shore and found the selkie weeping bitterly, her face swollen with pain and grief. Feigning surprise, he asked, “What’s wrong, my girl?”
“I’m not your girl,” she snapped. “I’m a seal, and my skin’s been stolen!” She began to cry harder, but her sweet nature made her pause. “I’m sorry,” the poor girl said sadly. “I know it’s not your fault, but I miss my mother terribly, and I don’t know how long I’ll have to spend away from her.”
Not even such an earnest plea could move the desperate fisherman. “Why don’t you come back to my cottage, where I can warm and feed you?” he said slyly.
The selkie realized her stomach was rumbling and that her human skin, not equipped to deal with the wind from the early morning sea, was covered in goose bumps. Feeling lost and afraid, she agreed to go with the fisherman.
She stayed with him many weeks, miserable all the while despite her usually cheerful disposition. She still sang, but now it was only a call to her mother and a hopeless attempt to mend her own heart. While the fisherman slept, she would wander down to the shore and wail, her voice broken and desolate. The young seals had stopped coming to the shore after her incident, out of fear, and she felt completely alone.
Eventually, the selkie lost hope of finding her skin, and she agreed to marry the fisherman, who had been proposing since the morning they met. Her life was a circle of loneliness until she had her first child, who was born with a light layer of slime resembling a seal’s skin. She loved her daughter, whose fondness for the ocean made her proud and whose sweet voice restored some of the happiness back into her own. The selkie still missed her mother and brothers bitterly, and she still longed to swim and toss in the waves, but at least her daughter had given her the gift of love again.
One morning, when the fisherman had gone out to sea, the selkie was playing hide-and-seek with her daughter when she noticed a bit of grey material glinting behind the fisherman’s dresser. With rapture she picked it up and brought it to her nose, and the smells of her old world came flooding back to her. She was so excited to return to her home that she didn’t think of her daughter, who was hiding in the kitchen.
The selkie ran with her sealskin to the shore, pulled it on as she climbed over the rocks, and leaped underwater. No sooner had she reunited with her mother than she remembered her own daughter and began to howl again.
Author’s note: This story is based on “The Mermaid Wife,” a story from the Shetland Islands of Scotland. This story is one of many that describes the pain of selkies, which are seals who lose their sealskin and must live as humans. My retelling uses the plot and characters of the original story, but I have expanded on the motivations and emotions of the characters. I imagined the main character's life before she became stuck in a girl's body, and I also imagined what her daughter would mean to her, since my retelling is narrated by a mother seal speaking to her daughter. I wanted to focus on the tragedy of this story, since I am framing it as a cautionary tale to a young seal, so I put extra emphasis on the despair that the selkie must have felt at losing her family for so long. I also wanted to emphasize the strain that it put on her in terms of familial connections, since my frame-tale is about a mother seal and her daughter. I think the saddest aspect of selkie stories is that the selkie begins by leaving her seal family behind and must end by leaving her human family behind if she wants to return home. There can be no happy ending because she has family in two different places and they cannot possibly be merged into one.
Bibliography: "The Mermaid Wife" from Folk-Lore and Legends: Scotland by W. W. Gibbings. Link to the reading online.
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