Quick story.
In some variations of the selkie story, the selkie continues to visit her children secretly in seal form, or even visits the fisherman husband as a seal to stare sadly at him. This portrayal is one of the versions where she flees outright the moment she has the opportunity.
I guess Our Selkie wasn’t too pleased by how that selkie story went…
I think she’s getting tired of sad stories about broken promises.
I’m guessing it struck a nerve, since Selkies own mother left her behind and went SOMEwhere and didn’t return. In the story, the child is partly responsible for his mothers abandonment, as he told her where to find the sealskin. Lurking in the psyche of every abandoned child is the fear or certainty that it was their own fault that they were left behind, because they were bad or unloveable or not good enough. As Leesai said ” that’s craps”.
The story doesn’t say (and the art doesn’t specify that closely) how old the son was when he told his mother where her skin was. It makes a difference to the story if he was seven, or twelve. A younger child would have told his mother just because he knew she wanted her skin, and would not have foreseen the result.
An older child, on the other hand, might have known or guessed that she would leave, because she really belonged in the sea… but he set his mother free anyway, because he loved her. That’s still a very sad story, but it grants the child some agency. In that version, the son is making up to his mother for the wrong his father did to her, even though he knows it means he will lose her.
He only comes up to his mothers waist. I think he was considerably younger than seven.
Yes, but that’s only a picture of “She would sometimes…” It doesn’t tell us how old the son was when finally, “One day…”
The picture at the end, with his father, shows the top of his head higher than his father’s chin. He COULD be a younger child being carried… or he could be older. What that last picture does show us conclusively, though, is that he and his father are grieving together. We can imagine many scenarios of what they might have said to each other, but in the end, they have both lost her. The son does not hate his father for committing the wrong that brought him into existence. The father does not hate his son for righting the wrong he knew he was doing.
It’s a sad story, though, no matter how you interpret it.
Yeah, if you see the last story picture, I really think that the son was older. It was probably showing that his mom had been telling him about the sea since he was a little kid.
I like your take on it, that the child has agency in the story and reading it back over she tell him she is from the sea and misses her family. I like to think he told her where her skin was so she could escape because he loved her and didn’t want to see her sad anymore. I’ve seen children offer their favorite toy to someone sad, kids can be selfless and compassionate sometimes.
I don’t think the kid was old enough for the second scenario. But I’m going to write that story now, where the kid(s?) are old enough to understand and not appreciate the fact that Dad has made a slave of their mother.
Maybe I’ll also throw in a little epilogue where aunties, uncles and grandparents from the sea, who’ve been wondering all these years what happened to their sister/daughter, come to visit and express their feelings to the fisherman.
It’s a tale of a mythological amphibious mother who abandons her child and the first opportunity she gets. Gee… I bet Selkie LOVES this story. @_@
I’m guessing the name decision just got REAL easy.
Her expression is not that far off mine the first time I read the typical story of the selkie as a kid. 😀
Ditto, I always thought it was a pretty awful story, too.
I can hear it now. “That’s craps.”
As, indeed, can I.
Sometimes a picture can say more than a thousand words. And Selkie´s face in the lower right SCREAMS “That´s craps.”
Kinda sucks how she didn’t care much for her son. I understand not liking the dude who tricked her, but now the kid is mom-less and will feel bad because it was his ‘fault’ for showing her where her skin was.
Except he pretty much forced her into marriage and childbirth, so I kinda think overall, the guy is a horrible person.
The son didn’t trick her. Don’t blame him for his father’s misdeeds.
I doubt she blames him for anything. She’s just escaping after being held prisoner for years. The boy is just another one of his father’s victims.
Hey, the kid gets off lucky in this version – in several versions, the selkie wife drowns her children to revenge herself on the fisher before fleeing.
It does kinda suck that she couldn’t bond with the child that she was kidnapped, enslaved and raped into bearing. But Dad should have thought of that before he kidnapped, enslaved and raped her.
I guess rape babies deserve to be neglected and beaten because they asked to be brought into the world. How dare they exist and want love from their parent.
Nobody said they deserved to be neglected and beaten, just that some mothers will have a hard time bonding with them. It’s not pretty, but it’s true, and it’s not the mother’s fault, either.
Bingo. There is exactly one person at fault in this story, and that’s the fisherman.
Are you saying that a woman who’s been kidnapped and held as a sex slave should pass up a chance to escape because her rapist succeeded in getting her pregnant?
Nah. I’m saying it sucks she didn’t care much for the kid.
It is, but as people keep pointing out to you, that’s not her fault. If the fisherman had wanted a happy family, he shouldn’t have tried to build it by stealing an integral part of a woman’s being, holding it hostage, keeping her prisoner for years and raping her at least once. That does bad things to people, and some of them make it difficult to form loving relationships.
Some Brit- Can’t you imagine for a moment how hard it would be to love a child that looks exactly like your rapist/jailer? This story doesn’t have her do anything to her kid but leave him with his father, the kid doesn’t have a sealskin, how would she have been able to take him with her do you think?
She didn’t even say goodbye. She didn’t look back. She made absolutely no notion that she cared an ounce for her child. Yeah, she couldn’t have taken him, but she could have returned every now and again to check up on him. Not, “LOLNOPE LATER SUCKER!” it’s just sad. It’s not the child’s fault. Clearly he loved his mom enough to go against his father’s wishes and give her, her seal skin because she sad.
I’m just saying it’s really sad how she bailed on her kid without a second thought.
There’s more than one way to look at that.
Either she didn’t look back because she didn’t care–or perhaps because if she had looked back, let herself have second thoughts, she wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to leave.
And then what? Her husband would’ve recaptured her, hidden the skin again, or possibly destroyed it…and she’d have spent the rest of her life as a slave/rape victim. That doesn’t strike me as being particularly good child-rearing either, to let your son grow up believing it’s okay to treat other people that way.
Every bit of blame that you place on the selkie is grossly mislaid and deeply unjust. There is exactly one bad guy in this story. If years of enslavement, rape, and forcible separation from half of her nature did bad things to her mind and heart, things that made it impossible for her to bond with her son, that is the fisherman’s fault and his alone.
Okay, I think a lot of people aren’t realizing there is just no right answer for the selkie. All of her choices are bad at that point. I sort of wish language had a few more varying terms for blame and fault, because it would be much easier to express what I’d like to say here, but here it goes anyways. What is certainly true about the story is fisherman clearly did wrong by forcing her to stay and marry him. It is also true that the boy is a victim here due to his mother abandoning him. The boy has the right to be angry with his mother, and it is reasonable for people to be upset that the selkie couldn’t/didn’t take an option that didn’t abandon the boy.
Being upset at the fact the selkie didn’t take one of those options IS NOT, I repeat, IS NOT, the same as believing the selkie deserves to have the boy angry at her, or any reprocussions at all from her choice. The selkie had every right to leave.
This was a bad situation all around.
This next part is sort of hard for me to write, but I should mention calling the fisherman a rapist may or may not be accurate. Jailer, scumbag, and a few other things are certainly true… but given the times during when the story would have originated, thier married life may (or may not) have been closer to an arranged marriage. Whether or not THAT still means she was forcibly impreganted, or was just willingly making the best of a bad situation for herself is not mentioned in the story, and pretty much up to the viewer.
Yes. A victim of his father’s original crime.
Yes. But she’s still not really the person he should be angry with. As adults, with a perspective of the whole situation, we can see that.
…and by including the word “didn’t” with the word “couldn’t”, blame starts creep back in.
What options? You don’t mention any.
Maybe not necessarily. But so far in this conversation, they’ve been the same.
Having sex with your prisoner counts as rape, even if they consent. The power you hold over them, the coercion applied, makes the consent meaningless.
There’s a few things I’d like to ask of you. The first, and most important, is to try not to chop up my points and take them outside the context of the other ones. The next is to try to counterpoint my meanings not my language. (Seriously, I do NOT intend to suggest what the selkie is a negative action that should be frowned upon)
I will attempt to do the same. If I mess up on that, just let me know, sometimes I miss things, especially with uncomfortable topics involved.
With that said… I didn’t mention any other options because the point wasn’t that she didn’t take the options, just that there was more of them, and most of the ones she could have taken would have been just as justified. For example, the obvious alternate would have been to stay and raise the boy. It’d suck for her, but it would STILL be a choice people should respect, just for the sheer sacrifice for another’s sake aspect. There’s also the option of causing the fisherman to have an “accident”. There’s possible reprocussions for that too, though. There’s probably a few other options the selkie had as well, (like calling in an angry mob of selkies to protect her reclaimed skin while she visits)
I should also repeat my dislike of the lack of blame variants. There really isn’t a word for “this happened because she made an action” that doesn’t pile on a ton of negative connotations on it. It’s her fault that… because she… etc, all have grown to have the same negative connotations as “blame”. I don’t think any rational modern civilized person (Which from what I’ve seen, is everyone in the comments) NEGATIVELY blames the selkie for what she does, just recognize that the boy getting left behind is an unfortunate side effect of her actions, as justified as they are, and are expressing sympathy that it had to happen this way for the selkie to be happy.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never seen a version where she just leaves – she either comes back to play with her kid(s) in the waves, sings to them at night, or kills them before she goes (on purpose or on accident, trying to take them with her and they drown). Also bear in mind we have NO CLUE what her life was before the kidnapping – she sometimes has a selkie husband and kids in the ocean mourning her.
I believe there is a version of this story where she steals her kid’s skin back too and they both leave him.
I think I remember that.
First she’s told “the Eel and the Maiden” story, and now this? What ever happened to those “And they lived happily everafter” type of stories?
You mean the ones where only the bad guys die horrible deaths? Or do you mean stories that were (re)invented in the 20th or 21st centuries by well-meaning numbskulls? Because pretty much all folklore everywhere involves people narrowly avoiding grim fates, suffering those grim fates, or inflicting those fates on others.
Kids won’t listen to adults if they’re told not to mess with the corn field, so they need to be scared of the Corn Witch until they are old enough to figure out that the Corn Witch doesn’t exist and congratulations: you’re old enough to help dad tend the corn. Don’t go swimming when the tide is going out, not because you might be swept out to sea, but because the carnivorous mermaids will certainly eat you. That’s 90% of folklore right there.
The old fairy tales were not meant to have happy endings, they were most often meant to teach a moral lesson. Most of the very oldest fairy tales were very brutal and bloody, and quite often unfair. But if you worked hard, made the right choices, and made some pretty big sacrifices you often came out ahead of the game. Usually older, wiser, and forever changed.
It is only since the advent of Disney that these stories began ending in “And they lived happily ever after”. It’s my opinion, (and only my opinion) that we have lost quite a lot due to the shift to making everything have a happy ending. These stories no longer teach as much of the valuable lessons as they did, instead the general message is “Be a damsel in distress with an unfair life and eventually a handsome prince will come along and rescue you”.
Though thankfully they do seem to be trying to change that underlying theme and actually making some of their damsels a bit more self sufficient. Even though I really didn’t care for the movie Frozen, (I felt that they had far too many unneeded songs) they did get at least one thing going in the right direction by making the younger sibling strong enough to rescue both herself and her older sister.
I also don’t think that they really needed to make the guy she winds up falling for a complete doofus in order to make her look stronger, but eh… that’s Disney for you. They like to give their heroes and heroines the most dysfunctional family lives that they can. I mean seriously, most of their heroes and heroines are either orphans or their victims of abusive foster or step parents, or greedy uncles, friends, or advisers.
I think Tangled is the only one where both parents were not only alive, but they were kind and caring as well. That’s one good family out of how many?
Oof, sorry about the Disney rant. I really do think we should go back to the old school way of telling fairy tales. Give them a decent moral lesson and make the characters really have to work for it if they want a happy ending.
In all fairness to Disney (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d be typing), the sanitization of the old stories actually predates Disney by a fairly large margin. There were several different schools of thought concerning such stories, y’see, dating back to Napoleonic times, and reinvention of the stories happened at various periods for a variety of audiences.
There were the ‘court stories’ of the French court under Napoleon, where they were sometimes spiced up and generally given happier endings, because, well, they weren’t really keen on bad things happening to their heros and heroines. In the Victorian era, you had on the one hand the people who made up grim entirely new stories for moral edification and on the other hand you had them cleaning up old stories, because children were sensitive and shouldn’t be exposed to the wrong messages.
(There’s actually an interesting dichotomy too with stories for girls vs stories for boys, there; boys were often encouraged often to be pretty violent and treated with tolerance if they were jerks up to a certain age, because it was so expected that they would go off to fight for the Empire. A boy who DIDN’T display ‘what it takes’ was more suspect.)
And then there were several popular movements between the Victorian era and the rise of Disney – Disney is certainly complicit in the end result of sanitized happily-ever-after endings, but it was a continuation of a trend rather than an origin of it. (You seem interested in this kind of thing, so while you might already know this, if you don’t, I thought you might like to!)
Thank you for the lovely history tidbit 🙂
Yes, but the Tangled parents had their daughter kidnapped, then raised by a controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive old woman, and so it still counts as a dysfunctional upbringing.
Let’s face it, happiness is boring. It must be crushed for the sake of a good story. It may only blossom when all the interesting drama has passed, hence the popularity of a happy ending. Of course, the happy ending itself is unnecessary. The misery before it is vital.
I agree with the direction you were getting at here. But there is also the Joseph Campbell sorta position, here, (he is the authority on fairy tales and myth after all) and maybe Dr. Clarissa Estes, to consider. The old fairy tales are brimming with archetypes that we find in ourselves, others, and the outer world of our daily lives. The whole point of myth and fairy tale is that they are symbolic expressions of the ineffable and practical alike. The evil stepmother, for example, who makes an appearance in so many of our favorite stories, represents the inner voice (and voice of society) which tells you that you aren’t good enough. It is the voice that keeps you from fulfilling your dreams, and imprisons you within the walls that you build in yourself, to shield the pure vulnerable child (that is your true self, and is the true center behind the cloud of chaos or maya in all people) from the dangers of the unpredictable world. Of course these are only a couple out of hundreds of archetypes that can be identified and are represented as characters, but also even within different stages of a hero’s development. Furthermore events such as the blunders which begin so many tales, like the girl who drops her golden ball in the water in the story of the princess and the frog, (or the way that Persephone is captured by Osiris), represents un-manifest desires i.e. the desire of an adolescent to become a mature adult, thus leading to the unfolding of just that very thing– the frog springs out of the well and Osiris, on his terrible horses, comes thundering out of the underground. Then on a different note, the stereotypical prince generally is the yang principle to the yin natured princess. The idea of the prince and princess coming together is one of a person embracing themself in their own wholeness and, yeah, living happily ever after. 🙂 On the other hand, the tragic endings serve more as cautionary tales, I guess. If you are ruled by the voices that oppress you, then your life will be one of suffering. You may even disassociate the voice of your inner child, allowing it to fade away or die. So, we must not ever live in servitude of the voices which enslave us. Life is a pathway that we have to keep moving along, and each step presents us with new choices. It is our job to live it according to our hearts. Reading fairy tales and myths with this awareness lends a great deal of meaning to every story that you encounter. In the same stroke it’s easy to see that our society has effectively lost touch with these original symbolic intentions within not just with fairy tales, but also with myth (think of the implications there <.< ). This is the tragedy in modern story telling, not happy endings themselves. I'll… do everyone the favor and stop myself there 😉
sorry no paragraphs. d’oh!
Guys guys, it was a rhetorical question. Don’t hate the mouse.
It would seem that all the stories Selkie has access to were writen/edited by George R.R. Martin
Nah, they’re just closer to what the original versions of those stories were like before the Victorians and Disney got hold of them.
Ugh… I hate it when I do stupid typo’s. “most of their heroes and heroines are either orphans or THEY’RE victims of abusive…” is what that should have said.
Here are a couple of variations on the selkie myths. This one takes the counterpart tale, that a male selkie can’t live on land for more than a day but selkie men fall in love with human women anyway, and gives it a happy ending:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQwyMQFE6g
And this one is even sadder than the original stories, by adding in the Celtic idea of the geas–that is, a human man who sees a selkie woman naked must marry her, but he also must fulfill certain other conditions or lose her forever, and in the old myths it doesn’t matter whether you break the geas on purpose or accidentally:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F19OokpS1So
The last verse just breaks my heart.
Heather Dale? You must be in the SCA.
I thought the garb and the lath-and-plaster-and-no-light-bulbs tavern in the second video would be the clue. 🙂
(Seriously, if you get the chance, go to Gulf Wars! They have a tavern and an entire early medieval village permanently on site, and it isn’t just stages dressed up either–these are buildings made with the old techniques so that people can practice the old crafts inside them!)
On that high bright day that I make my way to the Green Dragon, I will lift my cup to Jenny Islander and drink to your good fortune.
Didn’t make it to Gulf this year… But Lilies and 2 weeks of Pennsic are on the calendar… 🙂
What fairy tale? This is documentary. Recorded in every northern culture with a coast, Scandinavian, Germanic, Celtic. There are families in the Orkneys with Selkie blood.
Dear Sir or Madam,
Despite the widespread sightings of selkies, we must still classify this sort of story as a fairy tale unless the existence of such “selkie” beings is conclusively confirmed, which, to my knowledge, it never has been. So, unless a selkie shows him- or herself to us, or some enterprising person catches on film a selkie transforming, this will, sadly, be consigned to the ranks of fairy tale.
And indeed, even if selkies were real, should we not still protect the secret of their existence? If they are real, surely scenarios like this poor family’s would happen at a greatly increased rate, with foolish people hoping to snag themselves a contractually-bound wife or husband. And – you know there are idiots who would do this – some enterprising fool would certainly capture one and make him or her perform in some freakshow, or, perish the thought, some person would think that a seal-skinned humanoid would look absolutely splendid in their trophy room.
In short, selkies have not been conclusively proved to exist, and even if they had, I’d like to think that the discoverers would have the decency to keep it quiet.
Why yes, I am a sir or madam!
You make a valid objection, Annwyl Mort the Ghost. But neglecting all other reports, and in this case alone, how else do you account for the disappearance of the mother?
Sometimes people just run away.
And sometimes they swim!
And sometimes people are entirely made up and nothing actually happened.
I’ve never met anyone who was just made up.
At least no one who’s admitted it…
A story about a mother abandoning her family so she can run off to play with her siblings? What would the little orphan Selkie think about that?
Hopefully some adult can give her a bit of perspective on the selkie’s real reasons for fleeing back to the sea. It might be a bad thing if she identified the wrong person in that story as the bad guy.
Why yes, I am a sir or madam!
You make a valid objection, Annwyl Mort the Ghost. But neglecting all other reports, and in this case alone, how else do you account for the disappearance of the mother?
Yeah, as much as I enjoy the selkie concept, the stories are sad. This one is, basically, kidnapping, forced marriage, and worse. As someone said above, they get darker, too. Wonder which makes Selkie madder – what happens to the selkie mom, or the selkie mom abandoning her kid? And will this impact her choice of name?
Selkie’s face: ‘That’s craps!’ Have I mentioned how much I love this comic recently? I do. I really, really do.
Not only that but I heard a variation where the selkie attempted to bring her children with her, but since they were mostly human, they couldn’t breathe underwater and drowned. And the husband went mad with grief and left the sea altogether because he felt he would do something terrible if he was near the sea any longer. (I figured it was either commit suicide because of the memory of the family he lost, or try to hunt down his selkie ex-wife for killing their children. The story didn’t go into detail. )
Either way, the story of the Selkie is never a happy one.
yes, give an orphan a story about a mother (named like the orphan) that abandons her family the first opportunity she gets… that wont result in a bad way, never in a bad way
Yeah, I always thought that story was messed up. I sense Selkie-rant…
There’s a modern Selkie story in a short anthology (Half-Human by Firebird books) where the daughter of a Selkie finds her mother’s (or grandmother’s can’t remember and I lost my copy) skin and returns goes into the ocean. She nearly drowns. It has a bittersweet ending but it’s worth reading.
It was grandmother. Most of the other stories in it are really good, too. It would be hard to pick a favorite, but Water’s Edge (the selkie story) has a special connection with me due to me sharing the girl’s name.
Selkie…is not amused.
Meh, this was only justice. Sometimes she drowns the kids before she leaves as revenge. Or the fisherman has stolen her from her own marriage and goes and kills her selkie husband and kids and she starts wreaking havoc (hide yo kids, hide yo wives, and hide yo husbands cos they drowning errybody out here!)
So… Selkie’s been told, dreamishly, that she will have to pick her name and work with it. Name meanings and destiny and what-all, I think we’re going to have to start calling her Nei Li. Maybe.
Typo alert: drop the apostrophe in “it’s hiding place”.
Abandonment issues. I totally get it, Selkie.
Hmm…kind of interesting that we have some Chinese myths based on a similar concept. In one, the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid, he simply takes her clothing in order to talk to her, and she likes him enough that she stays willingly, until her father gets annoyed and calls her back forcibly. In another, the woman is a crane maiden, and it ends similarly to this, except that she also turns her children into cranes so that they can come with her.
There’s also Swan Maidens in european folk lore, which are swans that can turn into beautiful women by shedding their feathers as a cloak. Guess what most of the stories revolve around.
:T
I read a version were there was three brothers, they all took a seal skin cap from the beach. When the Selkies the caps belonged to came to ask for them back the two eldest brothers made the women kneel before them and swear to be their brides. The youngest however fell in love with the woman whose cap he held. He kindly asked her if she would be his wife. She said yes because he held her cap. Almost a year goes by. The two eldest have lost their wives. One found her cap and escaped into the sea. The second one burned alive when her husband threw her cap into a fire and she lept after it.( Don’t you just love happy stories). But the youngest brother loved and cherished his bride. However every night before they went to bed she would sit on a rock over looking the sea and sing a heartbreakingly tragic song. He came over and asked her kindly who she was singing to. She responded “I am singing to the sea and to my sisters who are in it. I know you love me and would never cause me harm but I miss the sea so much.” The brother looked at his beautiful bride and because he wanted only for her happiness returned her cap to her. He watched as she lept of the cliff into the sea below laughing with joy. He would walk the beach every night and think of her. One night he saw her standing on the beach bathed in moonlight. She walked up and embraced him. She told him that although she belongs to the sea. She loves him and every 9th night she will join him. Now the ending has multiple versions. One being that he became a Selkie and joined her in the sea. Another says that she decided to live on the land in a house next to the sea, and yet another speaks of children who look just like her. Either way I like this version better because the youngest brother actually loved her and wanted only for her happiness.