The selkie myth: what a selkie is, in Irish and Scottish folklore

A selkie is a seal that can become a woman or a man. The whole selkie myth turns on one object: the skin. A selkie who takes off her sealskin on the shore is human until she puts it back on, and whoever holds the skin holds her. That one idea runs through hundreds of stories from Shetland and Orkney down the west coast of Ireland, and it’s why seal families, sea-wives and lost children keep turning up in Irish and Scottish folklore. Below: what a selkie is, where the word comes from, the main stories, the Irish versions (including one at the Cliffs of Moher), and the films, which are honestly the easiest way in. It’s part of our guide to Irish mythology.

What is a selkie?

In folklore, a selkie (also “selkie folk” or “seal folk”) lives as a seal in the sea and can shed its skin to walk on land in human form. Three rules come up again and again:

1. The skin is the selkie. Without it, a selkie cannot go back to the sea. Shetland lore adds that each skin is unique and can’t be replaced.
2. Whoever hides the skin has power over the selkie. That is how most selkie marriages begin.
3. The sea always wins. When a selkie gets the skin back, she or he goes home, whatever is left behind. (If you were hoping for a happy ending, this is not your folklore.)

Selkie meaning

The word comes from the Scots selch, “grey seal”; selkie is the diminutive, so it means something like “little seal.” The folklorist Alan Bruford pointed out that in Orkney and Shetland the word on its own could mean any seal, not just a shape-changing one. In Irish, a seal is rón, and a mermaid is maighdean mhara, “sea maiden.” Irish and Scottish Gaelic stories often don’t draw a firm line between seal-women and mermaids, so don’t expect the labels to stay put.

The selkie wife: the most common selkie story

Folklorists classify the core tale as ML 4080, “The Seal Woman,” and link it to the swan-maiden stories found across Europe. It usually goes:

1. A man on the shore sees a selkie woman who has taken off her skin to bathe.
2. He takes one skin and hides it.
3. Its owner can’t go back into the sea. She follows him home and marries him.
4. They have children.
5. Years later, she finds the skin.
6. She puts it on and goes back to the sea, often leaving the children behind, and sometimes to a seal husband she had all along.

Male selkies and the Great Silkie of Sule Skerry

Male selkies in Orkney and Shetland stories are handsome and seductive, and they come ashore for women who are unhappy in their marriages. (You can see why romance writers like them.) In one Orkney tale recorded by Walter Traill Dennison in 1893, a woman named Ursilla was rumored to summon her selkie lover by shedding seven tears into the sea. (Dennison himself thought the story was invented by gossips.)

The best-known selkie song is “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry,” number 113 in Francis James Child’s collection of English and Scottish ballads. A version was collected from a woman at Snarra Voe in Shetland and published by Captain F. W. L. Thomas in the 1850s. A woman nursing a baby says she doesn’t know who the father is. A man appears and tells her he is the father: a silkie, a man on land and a seal in the sea, from the island of Sule Skerry. He pays her in gold, takes the child, and predicts that she will marry a gunner who will shoot them both.

Selkie folklore by place

Place	The selkie tradition
Orkney	Many recorded tales (Dennison, Ernest Marwick); selkies kept separate from the “finfolk”; webbed-fingered descendants
Shetland	Seal folk called haaf-fish; selkies who lure islanders into the sea at Midsummer; the Sule Skerry ballad
Outer Hebrides	The MacCodrum family, said to descend from seals
Connemara, County Galway	The Conneely family, said to descend from seals; killing seals was taboo
Tralee, County Kerry	The Lee family, said to descend from a man who married a mermaid, who later returned to her seal husband
County Donegal	Roaninish (Rón-inis, “seal island”), the island name used in The Secret of Roan Inish
Cliffs of Moher, County Clare	The mermaid of Moher, whose magic cloak was hidden by a fisherman
Mikladalur, Faroe Islands	Kópakonan, the seal woman, whose curse is said to bring deaths on the island of Kalsoy

Irish selkie stories

Irish versions often call the woman a mermaid or merrow rather than a selkie, but the plot’s the same. Same skin, different name.

The Conneelys of Connemara. Nineteenth-century folklorists recorded that the Conneely family of Connemara were believed to descend from seals, that killing a seal was taboo, and that so many people started calling seals “conneelys” that many family members changed their name to Connolly.

The mermaid of Moher. The Cliffs of Moher Experience tells of a fisherman near the cliffs who met a mermaid and saw her cloak, which she needed to go back to the sea. He took it and hid it at home. She married him and they had a son and a daughter. Years later, while he was out fishing, she found the cloak and went back to the sea, “vanishing without a trace.” It is a selkie story with a cloak in place of a skin. See our guide to the Cliffs of Moher.

Seals and the fairy world. In the west of Ireland, seals were treated as belonging to the Others. Lady Gregory recorded this from one storyteller in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920):

But the thing it is not right to touch is the ron (seal) for they are in the Sheogue. It is often I see them on the strand, sitting there and wiping themselves on the rocks. And they have a hand with five fingers, like any Christian.

“The Sheogue” is the fairy world. Another speaker in the same book warned: “There is not much luck in killing a seal.” For more on the fairy beliefs behind this, see fairies in Irish folklore.

Song of the Sea: the selkie film

If you watch one selkie film, make it this one. Song of the Sea (2014) is an animated film from the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, directed by Tomm Moore, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It’s set in 1987 on a lighthouse island off the northwest coast of Ireland, and in Dublin. It’s made for families, and it’s packed with real Irish myth for the grown-ups.

• The selkie story. Ten-year-old Ben resents his little sister Saoirse, who can’t speak, because their mother, Bronagh, disappeared the night Saoirse was born. Bronagh was a selkie who went back to the sea. Saoirse is a selkie too, and the fairy folk will die unless she puts on her sealskin coat and sings by dawn.
• The myth borrowings. The witch is Macha, the name of one of the Morrígan’s sisters in Irish myth, here an owl witch who takes away feelings by turning people to stone. Her son is the giant Mac Lir, a nod to Manannán mac Lir, the sea god, turned to stone by his mother to stop his grief. The Great Seanachaí, a keeper of stories whose beard hairs hold the old tales, takes his name from the Irish word for a traditional storyteller.
• Moore has said he wanted to “reimagine folk tales for a modern audience,” and he named Ben after his son (Irish Examiner).

For the Morrígan and her sisters, see the Morrígan.

The Secret of Roan Inish and other selkie films

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), written and directed by John Sayles, is set in 1946 among the Coneelly family of an Irish fishing village. Young Fiona hears that an ancestor married a selkie, and comes to believe her baby brother, lost at sea, is living with the seals on Roan Inish, the “seal island” the family left. Most of it was filmed in County Donegal. It’s based on Rosalie K. Fry’s 1957 novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, which was set in Scotland.

Ondine (2009), written and directed by Neil Jordan and filmed in Castletownbere, County Cork, stars Colin Farrell as a fisherman who hauls a woman out of the sea. His daughter is sure she is a selkie; the film keeps you guessing.

Film	Year	Director	Where it’s set
The Secret of Roan Inish	1994	John Sayles	Donegal coast (Fry’s novel was set in Scotland)
Ondine	2009	Neil Jordan	Filmed in Castletownbere, County Cork
Song of the Sea	2014	Tomm Moore	A lighthouse island off the northwest coast, and Dublin

Selkies in romance

The selkie wife story is, at heart, a romance with a hard ending: love on one side, freedom on the other, and children in between. Read it today and it’s hard not to notice that the “romance” starts with a man stealing a woman’s skin so she can’t leave. That tension is exactly why selkies keep showing up in fantasy and romantasy. Our list of fae romance books includes books that draw on Irish and Scottish sea folklore.

On our Midsummer in the Burren trip, up to 15 women stay at Gregans Castle Hotel in the Burren, County Clare, 17 to 25 June 2028. One evening is a film night with Song of the Sea; another, after the ferry to Inis Mór, is The Secret of Roan Inish. We also walk with a local farmer from Doolin up to the Cliffs of Moher, with the legend of the mermaid of Moher on the way.