More on Selkies

Season1, Episode 8  "The Seal Woman"

Selkies appear in Scotch, Irish, and Scandinavian traditions.  They are seals that can shed their skin to look/become/reveal a human.  Occasionally, they shed their skin and sunbathe naked on the beach.  If you can steal a selkie's skin and hide it, she'll belong to you and be your devoted wife forever.  Of course, she'll spend this time sad and aloof and staring out at the sea, but she'll still diligently make you dinner and knit sweaters and all that good stuff, so no worries!  However, if she ever finds her skin, nothing will stop her from reclaiming it and heading straight back to the ocean.
Every retelling will at this point say "even if the selkie has had human children!  She will abandon them for the sea!"  And then we all clutch our pearls, because she should have stayed for the children.  (If I was writing this, she'd turn the children into seals and they'd all abandon the husband en mass, but maybe that's not a thing selkies can do and they know their babies are better off on land where they can breathe.)

These stories are similar to stories of swan maidens (a swan who turn into a woman at night to bathe, and if a man steals her unattended feather cloak, she'll be forced to be his wife) or other animal wife stories, which range from buffalo to rabbit to fox to crane wives and can be found all around the world.  Wanting an animal wife is a thing.  I recommend Ursula Vernon's short story "Jackalope Wives."  Selkies often get conflated with mermaids to the point where in some traditions they're interchangeable.  This happens a lot with mermaids, who we know in the US as half-human-half-fish but in other traditions are half-human-half-any-and-all sea-creatures or even half-human-half-bird-who-lives-near-water.

Reports vary on if and how often seal-wives return to visit the families they left behind on land.  Some say once they hit the water, they're gone and will never return.  Some say a seal will pop its head out of the sea to watch over her children, but never gets too close.  And some say they can return every seven years or when the tide is just right.

There are male selkies, but these stories are less about forcing the selkie into situations they aren't happy with and more about seal-men seducing human-women who are unhappy with their lives into having a tryst on the beach.  Maybe this is because human women are less interested in entrapping a dude to be their sad sex slave.  But that's just my hypothesis.

Human children born of selkie mothers sometimes have webbing between their fingers (which are easily trimmed back with scissors).  In actuality, this anomaly runs in families, and so the story of the seal-wife could have arisen as a way to explain this.  "I have webbed fingers because my grandma was a seal."

My favorite selkie story is the exceptional film "The Secret of Roan Inish" from 1994, about a little girl from an Irish family with a selkie ancestor and her baby brother who's being raised by seals.  But on reading other stories about selkies, there turns out to be a theme that doesn't set off any alarm bells if you hear one story, but starts to get uncomfortable after the third of fourth: they all have the guilty husband or the abandoned children or some disapproving outsider as the focal character, and the selkie's thoughts on all this are rarely taken into account.  Maybe this is because the selkie is naturally alien.  Her foreignness and her failings at fitting in are recurring themes, so maybe it'd be too strange to have a seal's point of view.  But I was itching for a story about what the selkie is going through being stuck in a relationship she didn't choose, a relationship where the power dynamics are completely unbalanced.  This seems a very relatable situation; abused women often face severe obstacles to leaving.  So that was the direction I went in for "The Seal Woman."