Selkies and Mermaids

Selkies and mermaids are closely related in the folklore of Scotland and Ireland. In fact, some of the legends are virtually identical:

​

A selkie woman or a mermaid comes ashore in her human form. A man steals the thing that allows her to return to the sea.

For the selkie, it’s her sealskin.

For the mermaid, it’s her belt or cap.

As long as he hides this thing, she is trapped on land and has no choice but to follow him. They marry, have children, and at some point the magical thing is found. The woman puts it on and returns to the sea forever.

Sometimes selkies and mermaids are completely conflated in the story. For example, one story from Sutherland on the northwest coast of Scotland says the man steals her plaid scarf (head tartan), which suggests that she’s a mermaid. But while she lives with the man, a bull seal regularly visits the beach near their house and leaves gifts of fish. When she finds her scarf, she goes back to the sea with her first husband or lover, the seal. That suggests that she’s a selkie.

Walter Traill Dennison, who collected Orkney folklore in the late 1800s, wrote that mermaid and selkies were completely different and unrelated species—at least in Orkney. In other parts of Scotland and Ireland, the difference is not so clear.

The second connection is that mermaids and seals appear together in several stories. Just last night I came across a story from the Isle of Skye in Scotland. A man spied a mermaid sitting on rock in the bay, combing her hair. Several seal pups were hanging out with her. He sneaked up and captured one of the baby seals, while the mermaid and the other seals fled into the water. The mermaid surfaced and begged him to release the seal pup. She granted him three wishes and he let the pup go. The author comments that as is often the case with such things, the wishes did him no good. (Otta Swire, Skye: the Island and It’s Legends)

Another story concerns an aspect of the old practice of hunting seals for their skins. The hunter would stun the seal and skin it, but the seal was not always dead. A mermaid took pity on one such seal and went to the boat to beg for the return of the skin. She got caught in the hunters’ net and died, but storm caused the boat to sink and the skin washed over to the seal. Because of the mermaid’s brave sacrifice, seals became the protectors of mermaids. (Eliza Edmonston, Sketches and Tales of the Shetland Islands)