The Selkie: Seal-People of the Northern Islands, Between Two Worlds and the Longing That Cannot Be Silenced
A juvenile grey seal swimming in the Farne Islands, UK. The grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) is the animal most closely associated with the Selkie legend: its large, dark eyes, its habit of watching from the rocks, its uncanny intelligence and its apparent comfort in both water and land have made it the obvious candidate for the folk tradition of seal-people who can shed their animal form. On the remote islands of Orkney and Shetland, on the western coast of Ireland, in the Faroes and along the Norwegian coast, the grey seals know something about the people who watch them from the shore. They can feel the attention. They turn their great dark eyes toward you with an expression that is, unmistakably, one of recognition — not the blank animal awareness of most wild creatures, but something that seems to go deeper, something that seems to remember. And if you watch long enough, particularly at dusk on a lonely beach with the wind off the sea and the tide coming in, you begin to underst...