Selkie noun a seal
‘… clinging doggedly to her hands, still talking soothingly, telling stories of silkies and seal catchers, of pipers and elves, of the great giants of Fingal’s Cave, and the Devil’s black horse that passes through the air faster than the thought between a man and a maid.’ (Drums of Autumn)
The earliest references to selkie in Dictionaries of the Scots Language date from c.1128 and c.1277 respectively. Both are recorded the Registrum de Dunfermelyn - the first is embedded in Latin and the second in French; languages of the law in Scotland at the time - and both are concerned with the seals of Kinghorn.
The first record we have in a Scots text is from The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland by Androw of Wyntoun (before 1384): ‘The carle [labourer] was as fat as ony selch.’ So, he must have been doing quite well for a working man.
John Buchan, Scottish author and fifteenth Governor General of Canada, in his novel A Prince of the Captivity (1933) wrote the lovely line: ‘He has heard the silkies singing at dawn on farther islets than St Kilda.’ Perhaps the otherworldly phenomenon of seal song is partly behind the Scottish folklore stories that selkies were creatures or spirits with the appearance of a seal. They had the ability to shed their skins and walk on land as beautiful men or women. But, if they lost their skins, they were trapped ashore. Tales of intermarriage between selkies and humans abounded, but even if they had loving families on land, selkies always return to the sea.
Folklorist Katharine Briggs recorded in A Dictionary of Fairies (1976) that: ‘In Orkney [seals] are called “the selkie folk” because it is believed that their natural form is human, that they live in an underwater world, and put on … the appearance of seals to enable them to pass through the waters from one region to another.’
Perhaps taking inspiration from that, A C Clarke composed a poem called Medallist for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, in which she described a: ‘Triple goddess, three heroines in one Rippling through water as fluent as a selkie, In your wake star-bubbles glitter and vanish.’