Selkie
In the folklore of Orkney, Shetland and the Scottish islands, a seal that can take off its skin and live on land as a man or woman, and must return to the sea if it finds the skin again.
Meaning
Selkie (SIL-kee, as Dictionary.com respells it; also selchie or silkie) is the Orkney and Shetland word for a seal, first recorded in the late 1600s, and the name of the seal people of island folklore. Dictionary.com defines the selkie as a creature that looks like a seal in water but takes human form on land. The ballad scholar F. J. Child summed up the Shetland belief: the seal folk live below the sea and come ashore “by donning a seal-skin, which then they are wont to lay off”, and if the skin is taken from them they cannot go home. In the Hebrides the MacCodrums of North Uist were said to descend from one.
Origin and history
The best-known selkie story is the one J. G. Campbell gathered from oral tradition in the Hebrides and published in 1900. The forebear of the MacCodrums saw seals on the shore putting off their coverings to wash, ran home with one of the skins and hid it above the lintel of his door. Its owner followed him; he clothed her, married her and had a family with her, until she found her covering again and disappeared. Campbell gives two explanations people offered for the seals: in Caithness they were fallen angels, and in Gaelic belief seals, like swans, were “king’s children under enchantments”.
In Shetland the seal folk were “Finns”, and Child notes that the women among them sometimes took human husbands.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry
Child printed the Shetland ballad as no. 113 of his English and Scottish Popular Ballads, from a text taken down by Captain F. W. L. Thomas from “a venerable lady of Snarra Voe” and published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. A woman nursing a child is visited at her bedside by its father, who tells her: “I am a man, upo the lan, An I am a silkie in the sea”. He takes the boy to teach him to swim, and tells her she will marry a gunner whose first shot will kill them both.
Selkie and kelpie
The selkie and the Kelpie both come out of Scottish waters in human form, but they are opposite figures: the kelpie is a water-horse that drowns the people it lures, while the selkie is the one in danger, trapped on land by whoever steals its skin.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeKelpieIn Scottish folklore, a water spirit in the shape of a horse that lures travellers onto its back and carries them into its pool to drown.
- The same shape in Diwali symbolsRangoliA pattern drawn on the floor at the threshold in coloured powder, rice flour or petals. At Diwali it welcomes Lakshmi into the house; in Tamil Nadu the white rice-flour kolam is drawn every morning of the year.
See also
Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Harpy, Siren.
Sources
- The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 2 (F. J. Child), Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, volume 2 (1886), no. 113, “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry”, Project Gutenberg, no. 113, headnote and stanzas 3 and 7
- Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (J. G. Campbell, 1900), John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland, Collected Entirely from Oral Sources (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1900), Project Gutenberg, Spells and enchantments: seals, pp. 283–285
- Selkie (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Selkie” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry, pronunciation and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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