Talk:Selkie

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Old

I would like to know if anyone knows how the children of a selkie and a human cross woulld look llike or even how and when they transform to their selkie form? If you know anything i would like t know i would like to write a fantasy story about this subject if anyone can sujest a good book on the subject. Please contact me at aggieboy9@aol.com

apparently they are human, however they might also be able to become selkies themselves. The story teller, Duncan Williamson has some stories which cover this (79.190.69.142 (talk) 21:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC))

The traditional song "The Maiden and the Selkie" a.k.a "The Selkie's bride" or "the selkie and the fisherman's daughter" considers an apparently human woman who wants to marry a selkie, but is unable to return to the sea with him and knows he cannot bear to be on land for long. The couple visit her grandmother - a wisewoman who lives by the sea - who says she can't help but that her mother had had a sealskin coat that she buried beneath a tree and had told her that anyone who put it on would become a selkie. Once the girl found this coat, dug it up and wore it she became a selkie woman and was able to marry her love. This would imply that the girl's great grandmother had been a selkie herself and had surrendered her shifting ability to marry on land. That aside, many selkie legends end with some half-breed children left on land (usually when their selkie mother returns to sea) and implies they were absorbed into the general population. 62.196.17.194 (talk) 10:43, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

it's not traditional - according to Heather Dale's website [1]. It's one of "14 new songs inspired by the Middle Ages and Renaissance". Richerman (talk) 16:45, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Was there a phocomelia outbreak in Orkney or something? --Damian Yerrick 02:20, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

How has the Orcadian origin for the selkie folklore been definately established? What's the etymology of the word? The origin described on the Orkneyjar website seems plausible enough. Lianachan 13:11, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

A. E. Van Vogt wrote a science fiction work called 'the silkie', I recall.

Roane

Are these the same mythological creatures known also as Roane? If so, perhaps the article should mention it? --Bardcom (talk) 09:29, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, afaik, it would be nice to have a ref ClemMcGann (talk) 12:37, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Should we have 'Roane' in this article. Though selkies and Roane are seal-folk, selkies or silkies do not appear in their traditional ballads, only Roane'. - ExplorianCaptain — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.131.252.243 (talk) 17:23, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I believe we should. Numerous sources discuss the Celtic seal people and it's just two words for the same thing. I can't find any sources that say they're different - have you found any? --HighKing (talk) 21:38, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

That's just shoddy anglo spelling of Gaelic ròn, meaning a seal. Akerbeltz (talk) 11:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Songs and Literature

There is a well known song "The Selkie of Sule Skerry. Also, the Scottish storyteller Duncan Williamson wrote a number of books with selkie stories in them (79.190.69.142 (talk) 21:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC))

Should there be a mention of the selkies of Harry Potter stories? Potter lore is unclear on the subject. All it really says is that one of the different types of merfolk is the selkies of Scotland, and so people tend to assume that the ugly merfolk in the Black Lake, since it's located in Scotland, are selkies, though they only ever refer to them in the book as merfolk. --76.203.215.37 (talk) 02:27, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

In Laurell K. Hamiltion's novel "A Kiss of Shadows" (the first in the Merry Gentry series) one of the characters is a selkie named Roane Finn. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.236.110.130 (talk) 18:51, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Silly-long lists

Do the pop culture lists add anything? Or should they be removed? -134.48.112.66 (talk) 19:21, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Finns

By "Finns", do you mean people from Finland, or the Saami people? I think this should be clarified in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.160.234.48 (talk) 14:03, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd assumed it meant people from Finland. Why should it mean the Saami people - were they called Finns too? Richerman (talk) 14:48, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

They are a different people

Selkies are not mentioned in the Finnic mythology article ClemMcGann (talk) 15:07, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, they are also called finns. Excerpt from: Sami people #Etymologies "Another term for Sámi used locally in Hedmark, Trøndelag and Northern Norway is Finn, whereas local Finnish speakers are called kvæn. “Finn” seems to have been in much wider use in ancient times, judging from the names Fenni and

Phinnoi in classical Roman and Greek works."I'm assuming it meant the sea sami, because they used seal skin as garments (I have not heard about it being traditional for Finnish people to wear seal skin garments). But that is just mere speculation, and I still think this should be clarifieid. I'm asking because I found this:Talk:Sami people#Sami links with Selkie Stories in Scotland 79.160.234.48 (talk)

To answer the first point above, if the Finns were the the ones who were mistaken for selkies they wouldn't be likely to have them in their mythology. On the other point I doubt if the original source says anything about who the Finns were specifically. I've not seen it but in some notes I read on the song "The great silkie of Sule Skerry" It did mention Finns in sealskin kayaks, but wasn't more specific than that. Richerman (talk) 15:18, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

The term "finn" was often used to refer to Saami by Norwegians. The Finnish do not refer to themselves as "Finns" in Finnish. The term "Fenni" comes from Roman texts, I believe. See wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_people#Etymologies . Another point of interest is that some of the earliest sightings of "Finnmen" in canoes came around a time when there was religious persecution of saami in Norway and sweden. Much of this was based around stamping out shamanism, destroying their shamanic drums etc. This would fit nicely with ideas of magic etc(79.190.69.142 (talk) 18:09, 25 June 2011 (UTC))

Very unlikely, because Sami and Suomi (?) - "Lapplanders" and "Finnish people" - were farmers, hunters and reindeer nomads, not fishermen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.188.17.183 (talk) 21:05, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Traditional Shamanic themes.

I have several fairytale and folklore paperbacks at home, and find this same theme of an animal shedding its pelt and becoming a human, usually a female, in Inuit, Siberic and Japanese folklore. So I guess this theme is way older than for instance the Armada, as the article states. Anyone with more knowledge about this??--Satrughna (talk) 22:53, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

In a book I've read called a true spell and a dangerous,There are selkie-like Wolf-People living in a forest.A girl called Ruth finds them and puts on a wolfskin,Managing to turn herself into a Wolf-Person.Weird,Relative and un-relative at the same person. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.8.240.58 (talk) 18:13, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Quite a lot of similar stories are mentioned here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_maiden

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeshiftingLover

Donning and doffing of an animal skin was a fairly traditional method of shapeshifting - various forms were identified, not least the loup-garou type of werewolf which transformed in this manner. 62.196.17.194 (talk) 10:37, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Norse mythology

In Húsdrápa, there's a section where the gods Heimdallr and Loki fight a ferocious battle in the shape of seals. Heimdallr is a vanr, and Loki is part jötunn, and these races are usually depicted as being closer to magic powers than the æsir. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:38, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Song of the Sea (animated film)

There's a lovely Irish film "Song of the Sea" (2014) which features and celebrates selkie folklore. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865505/?ref_=nv_sr_1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.32.98.255 (talk) 00:47, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Selkies: real or myth?

Ancient peoples of Scotland believed they existed, while today we can't confirm their existence without actual evidence of a Selkie presence. The Selkies lived in northern parts of Scotland, the Orkney and Shetland islands, maybe the Faroe Islands, and were "spotted" in Denmark, the Low countries (Netherlands), northwest Germany, and Scandinavia (Norway's coast). There were non-Indo European peoples in Great Britain and Ireland before the arrival of Indo-Europeans like the Celts as legends, mythology and folklore of these peoples are evidently reported. 12.218.47.124 (talk) 20:05, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Peter Kagan

At the end of the section "Faroese legends", there is this paragraph:

Peter Kagan and the Wind by Gordon Bok tells of the fisherman Kagan who married a seal-woman. Against his wife's wishes he set sail dangerously late in the year, and was trapped battling a terrible storm, unable to return home. His wife shifted to her seal form and saved him, even though this meant she could never return to her human body and hence her happy home.

At best, it fails to make it clear why it is in that place; I suppose it is in fact misplaced. It might fit in the sections "Modern treatments" or "In popular culture". Also, it fails to make clear what the title refers to - novel, short story, song, album, webpage, all of the above?--Nø (talk) 13:39, 23 November 2019 (UTC)