We’ve always been suckers for good stories of the sea, and along with mermaids, selkies are pretty much the best. Ethereal creatures who take the form of seals in the ocean, but then transform into supernaturally beautiful humans while on land: they’ve inspired tales for centuries. Selkies stories tend to be romantic tragedies: female selkies are trapped on land and slowly waste away when men hide their sealskins; fishermen wake to find their beloved wives gone back to the sea; selkie children spirited away to an aquatic life.
But lately people have been tweaking the selkie stories to give them, if not happy endings, at least slightly more hopeful ones. We’ve gathered up a few of our favorite screen selkies below—let us know if we missed any!
The Secret of Roan Inish
This one combines every element of the classic selkie story. Wistful Irish kid? Check. People living on a misty, faraway island? Check. Sad family backstory? Checkity Check! Fiona goes to live with her grandparents on the western coast of Ireland, and soon learns that one of her ancestors may have had a tryst with a selkie. As if that weren’t magical enough, at least a few members of her community think that her baby brother was spirited away by the creatures. When she visits a lonely cove and spots an unusual seal, she needs to decide whether to trust the myths. Could it be her brother?
Sofia Samatar’s “Selkie Stories are for Losers”
I hate selkie stories. They’re always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said “What’s this?”, and you never saw your mom again.
Sofia Samatar’s touching story tells us of a different side of the selkie myth. Our narrator is the daughter of a selkie who has to stay behind and take care of her father, while also dealing with the emotional fallout of not only losing her mother, but of being tied so tightly to the world of myth.
Mercedes Lackey’s Home from the Sea
The eighth book in Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters Series takes us into the world of the selkies! Mari Prothero lives with her father in a fishing village on the coast of Wales. She’s approaching her eighteenth birthday, and she knows that soon she’ll be expected to marry a stranger of her family’s choosing. She hates the idea of this future, but she doesn’t yet know the truth: she is a descendant of selkies—and to continue her line, she must marry into that magical world.
Ondine
Neil Jordan, who dealt with semi-magical horses in Into the West, gives us a semi-magical Selkie story in Ondine. If you’re unfamiliar with Neil Jordan, brace yourselves for the full onslaught of Irish cinema I’m about to unleash: Colin Farrell is a recovering alcoholic fisherman, his daughter is slowly dying of kidney failure and has to use a wheelchair, and her mom, Farrell’s ex, is an active alcoholic who keeps messing up their lives.
One day Farrell pulls a half-drowned woman up in his fishing nets, and when she asks him not to take her to the hospital, he decides that’s not suspicious at all and takes her home. Soon he notices that when she sings he catches more fish, and he and his daughter come to care about her…maybe even love her? Obviously, things get complicated, but Ondine is an often lovely modern fairy tale, and a great addition to Neil Jordan’s particular brand of ethereal Irish cinema.
Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Petaybee Series
Selkies! In! Spaaaaaaaace! In the future! The first trilogy in the series centers on Major Yana Maddock, a spy sent to the glacial planet Petaybee. There she meets geneticist Sean Shongili, a selkie who uses his shapeshifting ability to transform into a seal and explore under-ocean caves on the relatively recently terraformed planet. Together they discover that the planet is sentient, and work to defend it from corporate exploitation.
A second trilogy features Shongili’s two children, who also have traits of selkies. Like their father, each can transform into a seal and converse telepathically with the planet’s creatures—but when a visiting scientist becomes obsessed with capturing the twins for study, Shongili sends them away to live in an orbiting space station.
Song of the Sea
Two children, Ben and Saoirse, live in a lighthouse with their father, Conor. The loss of their mother has shattered the family, and Conor remains inconsolable. Ben is often left to care for Saoirse, who hasn’t spoken even though she’s six years old. When Saoirse discovers a shell flute that used to belong to their mother, the spellbinding music she creates becomes both a means of communication and the key to a magical secret locked deep in their mother’s past. Saoirse and Ben team up to save their family—along the way, she’ll need to find her voice, and he must to overcome his deepest fears. Song of the Sea was created by the same animation team as the equally enchanting Secret of Kells.
John Allison’s Bad Machinery: The Case of the Fire Inside
Bad Machinery tells the stories of three schoolgirl sleuths and three schoolboy investigators attending Griswalds Grammar School in the fictional West Yorkshire town of Tackleford, England. The mystery-solving teens tackle a number of supernatural cases, and in “The Case of the Fire Inside” one of the boys finds himself accidentally in possession of a selkie pelt. In her human form, the selkie takes refuge with a kindly (and slightly senile) old woman who calls her Ellen, mistaking the girl for her own daughter. “Ellen” tries to hide her mythical heritage at school, but her superhuman swimming prowess and inability to read or write might attract unwanted attention…
Selkie
This sweet family movie changes the usual story up by transplanting the Celtic legend to Australia! Jamie has a great life: a decent job, a place on the footy team, and best of all, he spends his nights playing lead guitar in a band. Everything’s going swell until his mom lands her dream job. She’s going to be the head of a marine research base, and the whole family has to move to a remote island. Jamie can’t ask her to turn her back on her dream, but what about his life? But all of his every day problems fade into the background once they’re on the island, because he begins to learn the truth about himself. The funny webbing between his fingers? The uncanny pull of the sea? Could he be a selkie?
Susan Cooper’s Seaward
Cally and West come from different countries and speak different languages. When tragedy took their parents, they were wrenched into a strange new reality, where they must work together to complete a quest: they must reach the sea. Their perilous journey takes them through lands both wondrous and terrifying, but they learn to survive and to love. Along the way they encounter giant insects, living darkness, dragons, and even selkies, until they finally learn the truth of their journey together.
The Selkie’s Lover
Set in the Scottish Highlands, The Selkie’s Lover is another update on the story. After a selkie is trapped on land in her human form, she finds herself falling for a human fisherman. Can she find a way to stay with him? Or does her heart belong to the sea? This one’s a beautifully-shot, poetic indie film that made the festival rounds last year, and will come out in wider release later this year!
Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Tale of the Skin”
Cat Valente gives us a rare male selkie in her short story “The Tale of the Skin,” included in The Orphans Tales: In the Night Garden. Maybe even more rare, we also get a female satyr! The satyr in question is a young girl named Eshkol who visits a skin pedler and is enamored of a dull grey pelt.
After she buys it, she learns that it draws its handsome male owner to her. Knowing the rules of fairy tales, she asks, “If you are a Selkie, and I have your skin, that means you must stay with me and be my lover until you can get the skin back, doesn’t it?” He admits the truth, but then spins the tale of how he came to lose his skin. Will she keep it to win his unwilling love?
Which selkie tales did we miss? Tell us your favorite in the comments!
Melanie Jackson has ‘The Selkie’ and ‘The Selkie Bride’, the latter being a prequel of sorts to the former. Both lovely books worth reading.
I highly recommend Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island, which adds in a sea witch and turns the selkie legend even more romantic and creepy.
Laurie Brooks’ Selkie Girl is a YA take on the legend.
And Jane Yolen’s short story and poetry collection Neptune Rising has selkies, mermen, mermaids, ocean mythology in general–along with some lovely illustrations.
Margo Lanagan’s THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND follows a small, remote Scottish island through a generation of selkie brides and their children, tracking the effects down through the years. It’s beautiful and tragic and exactly what I want from a selkie book. It was marketed as YA, which I think was a mistake: while there’s certainly a type of teenage girl (the kind I used to be!) who will love it, it’s more about parents and children and marriage than any teenage experience. I recommend it highly.
Tanya Huff’s The Wild Ways has selkies, though the dubious consent runs the other way with selkies enthralling human men instead of the men coercing the selkies.
“The Folk Keeper” by Franny Billingsley is a great YA novel about faerie folk AND selkies!
“Local Hero” had a selkie-like figure in it – fittingly enough, a marine biologist when she had her legs on.
I’ve always thought Patricia McKillip’s “The Changeling Sea” has strong elements of the traditional selkie stories, albeit told ‘slant.’
NZ author Rachael King’s “Red Rocks” also explores the selkie tale, from both sides: that of a human boy and his lonely father, as well as what draws the selkies to interact with the human world.
(Both these stories are kids/YA .)
Most definitely Margo Lanagan’s Brides of Rollrock Island, which was published in Australia as Sea Hearts.
@5. Yes! one of my favorites. Although I didn;t realize they WERE selkies until much later
What about The Star Fisher by Laurence Yep? OK, technically the “pelt” in question is bird feathers, and it has just as much relation to say, Swan Lake, but the theme is still there, tangled up with a immigrant family trying to fit into their new life.
Cory Skerry’s “Rendered Down,” which brought the Selkie to the Pacific Northwest and then broke my heart: http://www.ideomancer.com/?p=835
And The Selkie, by Charles Sheffield and David Bischoff. It’s not a *good* book, really, but I read it in the 80s, and I read it again recently, and it just sticks with me. Or maybe to me. You’ll understand when you read it.
Don’t forget Mollie Hunter’s classic A Stranger Came Ashore!
There’s another male selkie (now along the West Coast) in Melissa Marr’s “Love Struck” story. You can find it available at Amazon.
Love selkie stories! I was raised on The Secret of Roan Inish.
I also adore the parallels between selkie and tennyo/hagoromo stories.
My own selkie shelf (right next to the sea serpent/lake monster shelf!) has the following: Rosalie Fry’s The Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (the story on which the film Roan Inish was based; Fry’s book was republished with the Roan Inish title as a tie-in to the movie), Tanya Huff’s The Wild Ways, Margo Lanagan’s beautifully written The Brides of Rollrock Island (yes! get it! read it! now!), Susan Cooper’s Seaward, Franny Billingsley’s The Folk Keeper, and…
one brand new children’s fantasy: Emily Raabe’s Lost Children of the Far Islands. Raabe brings the selkies to the coast of Maine, and I loved this book so much (originally read it from the library) that I bought it in hardcover. It’s the first of a series.
Another book due out this July is Secrets of Selkie Bay by Shelley Moore Thomas. She has written books for various age levels, but this will be her second middle-grade fantasy. Her first, The Seven Tales of Trinket, was excellent, very well reviewed.
Put the last two books together with the movies “Song of the Sea” and “The Selkie’s Lover,” and I’d say we are officially in the Year of the Selkie.
Can’t say I’ve read any of the stories mentioned, but I was raised singing “The Keeper of the Eddystone Light”, and “Mermaid (Rule Britannia)”, the UK’s unofficial national anthem, which actually is based on reality, at least as far as being married to a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea goes.
Then I discovered folk tales and fairy tales, and stories about Selkies. They’re Scottish and Irish; I don’t know if the English have any such stories, though we still sing about liaisons dangereux with mermaids …
Another entry for this being Year of the Selkie: the weekly webcomic Eth’s Skin (http://eths-skin.tumblr.com/) has just finished its setup and introduced the selkie.
Oh come on. I reviewed The Visitors—what? Three weeks ago? Four? Best selkie story since the Lanagan Stubby also overlooked. Long story short, you’ve been a very naughty rocket!
For those who don’t want to spend the time I just spent going through Niallalot’s posts to find the author’s name…The Visitors is by Simon Sylvester. Another datum supporting 2014/15 as the Year of the Selkie!
Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye novels introduce a significant selkie/sea faery population as the series progresses, perhaps most notably (not surprisingly) in One Salt Sea.
The first five (maybe six?) October Daye books by Seanan McGuire have a selkie character, and there’s a main character (Luidaeg!) whose backstory interacts with selkies quite a lot. There’s a short story about her and the selkies on Seanan’s website called “In Sea-Salt Tears.”
Also Sophie Moss has a whole trilogy called Seal Island Trilogy about a selkie (I think, I haven’t read them yet, they’re in my never-ending To Read list). They’re The Selkie Spell, The Selkie Enchantress, and The Selkie Sorceress.
There’s a selkie short story on an old episode of ‘Every Photo Tells…’ – Episode 83 – The Selkie
“Seal Woman” by Ronald Lockley.
Just guessing, since I haven’t read my copy yet, that Shulamith Oppenheim’s “The World Invisible” deals with selkies: the cover has a woman playing a harp, surrounded by seal, and says that she wrote another novel called “The Selchie’s Seed”. So a safe bet?
I just finished Tides by Betsy Cornwell (Kindle ebook for $8.39 from Amazon.ca). It is an excellent story concerning Selkies living near the islands in the state of New Hampshire & their interactions with the humans, both well meaning & evil, that they encounter. It is well written, engaging, and the ending is perfect. I highly recommend this book.
Anne Stuart’s “A Dark and Stormy Night” is about a male selkie. It’s category romance, but Anne Stuart writes original and good fantasy and science fiction in her categories. I think Sharon Shinn’s Troubled Waters is a selkie tale of sorts, but it’s hard to tell after just the first book in the series.
Nicole Peeler’s Tempest series has a daughter of a selkie as the protagonist. Highly entertaining and full of snark.
I offer some songs from the Society for Creative Anachronism. First up, from Tim Jennings (known in the Society as Garraed Galbraith), “Sealskin Jacket.” Have Kleenex ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F19OokpS1So
For a unicorn chaser, try Emily Holbert-Kellam’s (Emer nic Aidan’s) “The Maiden and the Selkie,” which combines two bits of selkie lore with a happy result. This performance is by Heather Dale (Mistress Marion of Heatherdale). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh8BNzbSZP0
Also of interest, Lord Garraed’s quite funny story of how he came to write “Sealskin Jacket.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmd-VrZQe6s
Don’t forget Talis Kimberley’s classic song “Still Catch the Tide.” There’s a cover of it on youtube by best-seller [& -singer] Seanan McGuire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOXHcaHJRss
An erotic novella – Remember Me by Lilly Cain. Has a selkie man. Short but sexy romantic take on the genre.
I loved the selkie short story “Somewhere Beneath Those Waves” by Sarah Monette, in the eponymous collection <i>Somewhere Beneath Those Waves</i>.
I wrote the Never Forgotten series about Selkies and other lesser-known water creatures, for those who are looking for new Selkie reads. Great list!
The children’s book series ‘Fabled Beast Chronicals’ are a must for children (and adults?). They feature a range of mythological creatures depending on the book (I think there is 4 in the series). We are on book 3 and Rona the selkie is featured in each one. The third book specifically (Storm Singing) is about her quest. Highly recommended!
Seven Tears at High Tide by C. B. Lee. It was her first published book before her Not Your Sidekick series took off. Seven Tears won the 2016 Rainbow Award for bisexual fantasy and romance. It is a beautiful love story mixed with lore and legend.
Sylvia Peck’s SEAL CHILD was the very first selkie story I read. Its sealfolk transform without removing their pelts — like the Roane in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series. It’s a lovely, bittersweet friendship story set off the coast of Maine.