Maryara

“I know that story was hard on you,” says Mirna, pulling Niamh closer. “Let’s see if we can think of one with a happier ending!” She pauses, knowing that not many stories of selkies end happily, but then her eyes light up and she begins the next tale.

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Long ago, a woman named Maryara lived on the island of Papa Stour in Shetland, which is near Orkney. Everyone described her as the most beautiful woman in Scotland, but she hated her dark flowing hair and her long, smooth legs. In fact, Maryara hated everything about her body, for she was a selkie.

She had lived happily as a seal off the coast of Norway for many years with her sweet seal husband, but on a fateful trip to Scotland, seal hunters had captured her. She hated to think of it now, but on cold and windy nights she couldn’t help but remember the last time she saw her husband.

It was a stormy night, and the waters were grey and violent. Maryara and her husband were arriving from Norway; they had heard wonderful things about the islands of Scotland. They planned to brave the storm and catch a few fish, and then to retire to a cove for the night before sightseeing the next morning. The weather made it difficult to see their prey, but the two seals worked to keep each other's spirits high.

Nearby, a group of seal hunters off of Papa Stour growled about the storm, which affected them too. Food was scarce on the island, and they needed to bring meat home. The storm surprised them, but they refused to turn back without a seal.

“Ay, look!” shouted one of the hunters over the storm. “We’ve got ourselves a seal!” He pointed toward the unsuspecting Maryara, who was chasing after a fish.

The hunter’s companions congratulated him as he stepped up to the harpoon and aimed it at the quick seal.

Maryara’s husband heard the sound of metal striking flesh, followed by a low bellow. He turned around in panic to see his worst fear: his wife was being dragged away, and he was helpless to save her. He followed, but he could not swim fast enough to catch her before she was pulled onto the boat.

Maryara survived the harpoon, but she knew the men would kill her immediately unless she could outsmart them. “As soon as the hunters have turned around to find their spears, I will shed my sealskin and turn into a girl. Then, I will be able to pull the harpoon out of my skin and put it back on, escaping into the water,” she thought. She knew it was a risky plan, but she saw no other option.

When the hunters turned their backs, she deftly shed her skin, sighing as the pain of the harpoon left her. Unfortunately, the harpoon was hooked, and although she pushed and pulled with all her strength, the hunter who had shot the harpoon turned around before she could free her sealskin.

His shock at seeing a human girl where before there had been a seal gave Maryara an extra moment. She looked down into the cold water below her; with her sealskin, it would have been a safe haven, but without it, she knew she would die in the sea. She had no choice but to let the hunter grab her arm.

“I would be disappointed by our loss of food,” he said nastily, “but you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Perhaps one of us will have a wife.” He confiscated her precious sealskin, and after landing on Papa Stour, he led her to his home and dressed her in coarse sacks instead. Remembering stories of selkies from his childhood, he secretly took Maryara’s sealskin to the neighboring island so that she would be stuck as a human forever.

A year later, she still mourned her old life as a seal. She lived as the hunter’s wife, but she thought of her seal husband every day. Tonight was a stormy night like the one a year ago. As she looked from her window out to the sea, a tear fell, and its saltiness only made her more homesick. She opened the window and called out to her seal husband, but heard only the crashing waves as always. She sighed and used the legs she hated to carry herself to bed.

She woke up to a loud tapping on her window. A strange man beckoned to her, and with reserve she opened the window. Wordlessly, he handed her a slimy bundle and strolled away, whistling. Maryara looked down at the bundle and recognized it as her own skin! Whooping with joy, she ran for the shore and found her beloved husband waiting in the water.

“I followed you back here that night last year,” he explained. “That man took your sealskin to the next island over, and although I knew exactly where it was, I was powerless to get it since I cannot shed my skin like you. But last night in the storm, I found a hunter stranded on that island, and I offered to take him home safely if he would retrieve the skin. It was he who dropped it off for you today. He will no longer hunt our kind.”

Maryara donned her skin and embraced her husband, and they swam back to Norway.

Author's Note: This story is based on "Herman Perk and the Seal," which is a story from the Shetland Islands of Scotland. The original story is told from the perspective of a seal hunter named Herman Perk, who is stranded in a storm and saved by a seal in exchange for the promise to retrieve a sealskin. The sealskin belongs to the seal's wife, who is stranded on the island of Papa Stour. I kept the basic plot of the story, but I decided to retell it from the selkie wife's perspective, since her story was not included in the original tale. I imagined how she could have been captured and what her relationship with her seal husband was like before she was taken away. Also, I wondered how her husband knew where she was and where her skin was, since in many selkie stories the selkie cannot be located unless she is wearing her sealskin. I decided that the husband needed to be with her when she was captured and to follow her to see where she was taken. I wanted to show another way in which a selkie could be stuck on land and her reaction to her new life as a human. I stuck with the happy ending of the original because I wanted Niamh to hear a happier story after the tragic ending of the first one.

Bibliography: "Herman Perk and the Seal" from Some Folktales and Legends of Shetland by John Nicholson. Link to the reading online.

Image Information: Seals resting. Source: Pixabay.