Along the cold northern coasts of Scotland and Ireland — in Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, and the west of Ireland — fishermen and their families told stories about the selkies. In the sea, the selkies were seals. But on certain nights they came ashore, slipped out of their sealskins, and danced on the sand as beautiful men and women. If a human could steal a selkie’s skin, the selkie could not return to the sea. Many a fisherman, the stories say, took a selkie wife this way — and many a selkie wife, years later, found her hidden skin and went back to the waves, leaving her children behind.
The selkie legends are among the most haunting in European folklore. They speak of love and captivity, of the pull between land and sea, and of the strange, almost human eyes of seals watching from the waves.
The Name
The word selkie (also silkie, selchie, or sealgie) comes from the Scots word selch or selk, meaning “seal,” itself from Old English seolh. In Orkney and Shetland the seal-folk were also called the Finfolk in some stories, though these were a distinct and more sinister race. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, seals are rón, and the seal-people are sometimes called the Clann Rón or muintir na mara, the “people of the sea.”
What Are Selkies?
Traditions differ about what selkies really are. Various explanations were offered by the people who told the stories:
- Fallen angels. Some said that when the rebel angels were cast out of heaven, those who fell into the sea became seals, and those who fell on land became fairies.
- Drowned souls. In Orkney it was said that the souls of drowned people became seals, and could take human form on one night of the year.
- Human sinners condemned to live in the sea.
- A race apart. Most commonly, selkies were simply an old people of the sea, as real as fish or birds, who happened to be able to change their shape.
Some traditions say selkies could take human form only on Midsummer’s Eve, or every ninth night, or at certain phases of the tide.
The Selkie Bride
The most famous selkie story is the tale of the selkie wife. A fisherman walking on the shore at night sees seal-women dancing, their skins laid on the rocks. He steals one skin and hides it. When the dancers return to the sea, one woman is left behind, unable to go. She becomes his wife and bears him children. But she is always sad, looking out to sea. Years later, she finds the skin — often through one of her children — and returns to the sea forever.
The full tale, with its many variations, is told in The Selkie Wife: A Tale from the Northern Isles.
Selkie Men
Male selkies also appear in the legends. They were said to be extraordinarily handsome, with a seductive power over human women. A woman who wanted to make contact with a selkie lover was told, in Orkney, to shed seven tears into the sea at high tide.
Selkie men were believed to seek out women who were unhappy with their husbands — the wives of fishermen who were often away at sea, or lonely women on isolated farms. Some stories told of children born with webbed fingers or hands, or with a horny skin between their fingers, who were said to be the children of selkie fathers.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry
The most famous selkie ballad is The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry (Child Ballad 113), collected in Shetland in the nineteenth century. A woman sits nursing her baby and laments that she does not know the child’s father. A mysterious figure appears at her bedside and reveals himself:
I am a man upon the land,
I am a selkie in the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae land,
My dwelling is in Sule Skerry.
He gives her a purse of gold and claims the child, prophesying that she will marry a gunner who will shoot both the selkie and their son. The ballad ends with the prophecy fulfilled — and the woman grieving. It is one of the most haunting of the traditional ballads, and has been recorded by many folk singers.
Selkie Families
Several families in the Northern and Western Isles and the west of Ireland traditionally claimed descent from selkies. The MacCodrum clan of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides were known as Clann Mhic Codruim nan Ròn, “the MacCodrums of the seals.” Their ancestor, it was said, had married a seal-woman. In Ireland, families of the Conneelys (Mac Conghaile) of Connemara were said to have seal ancestry, and some members of these families would never kill or eat a seal, because they might be killing a relative.
The Taboo on Killing Seals
The selkie legends gave rise to a widespread taboo against harming seals in many coastal communities. Killing a seal was said to bring storms, drowning, and bad luck, and there were stories of seal-hunters who killed a seal and later found out it was a human selkie, or who were dragged under the sea by the seal-folk in revenge.
In one Orkney story, a seal-hunter wounded a seal that escaped with his knife in its back. Later he was visited by a mysterious horseman who took him beneath the sea to a hall where an old seal lay wounded. The hunter was asked to heal the wound he had caused. He did, and swore never to hunt seals again, and was returned to land with a reward.
Why Seals?
It is not hard to see why seals inspired such stories. Seals have large, dark, liquid eyes that seem almost human. They make sounds like weeping or singing, and they gather in groups on rocky shores, where they seem to watch people curiously. On land they are clumsy; in the water they are graceful. They seem to live between two worlds.
Some scholars have suggested other sources for the legends:
- Sámi or Inuit visitors. Some folklorists have speculated that the stories may preserve memories of people from far northern regions who arrived in skin kayaks, which could have looked like seals in the water. This idea is widely repeated but lacks solid evidence.
- Genetic conditions. Syndactyly (webbed fingers) and conditions that cause scaly skin may have been explained as signs of selkie descent.
- Social history. The stories of stolen skins and trapped wives may reflect the realities of marriage in hard, isolated communities, where women sometimes had little choice.
Related Legends
Stories of shape-shifting animal brides and bridegrooms are found all over the world. The swan maiden tales of Europe and Asia, in which a man steals the feather cloak of a bathing swan-woman, follow the same pattern (see also the Norse Valkyries, who appear as swan maidens). The Japanese kitsune fox-wife stories, the Inuit tales of seal-women, and the Native American stories of animal wives all share the motif of a supernatural spouse who can be held only by trickery and who eventually returns to her own world.
In Irish tradition, the children of Lir, turned into swans, belong to a related family of transformation stories (see The Children of Lir).
Selkies Today
The selkie legends have inspired many modern works: the film The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), directed by John Sayles; the animated film Song of the Sea (2014) by Cartoon Saloon; and many novels, poems, and songs. The selkie has become a symbol of longing, of belonging to two worlds, and of the wildness that cannot be tamed by possession.
Last reviewed: September 2026.