Where do Selkies Come From?
No one knows for certain.
The legends are distributed across Northern Europe from Norway to Iceland. There areas were settled by the Norse Vikings, suggests a Norse origin. In fact, some of the stories specifically mention Norway. But there’s only one version recorded in Norway, which weakens that theory. Irish folklorist Daithe O hOgain thought the stories originated in Ireland. A few others suggest Scotland as the point of origin.
Then there’s the question of where selkies (or seals in general) come from.
Some legends say they were angels thrown out of heaven for a minor infraction—at least, it wasn’t bad enough to justify going to hell. The ones who landed on solid ground became fairies, and the ones who landed in the water became seals.
Other legends say they are people who drowned—the details vary: Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea, shipwrecked sailors, children of the King of Lochlan (Norway) who have been cursed, or suicides who threw themselves into the sea. Girls who were lost at sea where not believed to have drowned, but to have been taken to live with the selkies.
As far as I can tell, legends of the seal folk are confined to the European North Atlantic region. I’ve looked at a few Eskimo and Native American stories about shapeshifters that can take seal form, but their intent seems different from the European stories.
Phyllis Fast, an Alaska Native anthropologist, shared with me a Yup'ik story of a boy sent by the elders to live with the seals for a year. The story was told by Paul John of Toksook Bay, Alaska and translated by Marie Meade and Anna Jacobson.
“In the story an angalkuq (“shaman”…) sends an uninitiated youth to dwell in the seals’ underwater home, where the boy simultaneously views the seals as persons and is given glimpses of the human world from the seals’ point of view….” In the Yup’ik worldview, “even today many do not view animals as distinct from humans. Rather, humans and animals alike are considered human and nonhuman persons possessing awareness and meriting respect.”*
Northern European portray humans and animals (specifically, in this case, seals) as a unrelated. Unlike the Yup'ik story, humans cannot take the form of seals, even for a short time. But selkies operate in an in-between state: seal and human. The catch for seal hunters is that they can't tell who's a selkie and who is a regular seal until it is skinned. In some stories, the hunter must heal the seal that he's injured or lose his own life. And many seal hunters, unnerved by their contact with selkies or with seals who remind them strongly of humans, give up the seal hunt altogether.
"The Boy Who Went to Live with the Seals," in Hunting Tradition in a Changing World, pp. 58-81, by Ann Fienup-Riordan with William Tyson, Paul John, Marie Meade, and John Active. 2000, Rutgers University Press.