Selkies are beautiful maidens and men who, when they wear the magical pelt of a seal, turn into seals themselves. If their pelt is taken from them, they cannot return to seal form, or to the water from whence they came; it is in this fashion that men sometimes capture the females for wives.
In Orkney, England, the common seal was thought to belong to the animal world, but larger seals such as the great seal, the grey seal, and the crested seal, were known as 'the selkie folk.' It was thought that their natural form was human, and that they donned seal skins and the appearance of seals so that they could travel through the waters from one region of air to another. They were said to live either in an underwater world or on lonely skerries. The selkies of Shetland are very similar.
In Orkney and Shetland, it was believed that when the blood of a selkie was shed in the sea, a storm would arise that was often fatal to shipping. The death of a mermaid was said to have had the same effect.
Tanya Huff's The Wild Ways is the only current fiction book we've read that deals with selkies, and she does an excellent job of describing the selkies and creating a selkie society (though we may wish she did even more with them); she stays true to the old legends, which we liked. In this book, oil drillers have stolen the selkies' pelts in order to get them to stop protesting the drilling of oil near a seal rookery. If you're interested, this is the second book of the series, the first being The Enchantment Emporium, which does not deal with selkies.
We consulted Katherine Briggs' An Encyclopedia of Fairies for this post. We got the picture courtesy of Google Images, https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1024&bih=600&q=selkies&oq=selkies&gs_l=img.1.0.0l7j0i5j0i24l2.1061.2202.0.5639.7.7.0.0.0.0.43.279.7.7.0....0...1ac.1.27.img..0.7.277.Cj3oPR6CDrk.
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