Troll Mill - Folklore

The Seal Wife

A fisherman of Unst (on the Shetland Islands) was walking by moonlight when he saw a number of youths and maidens dancing on the shore, and several sealskins flung on the sand beside them. At his approach they threw on their sealskins and plunged into the sea. But the fisherman seized the nearest sealskin, rushed to his house and hid it. Returning to the shore he saw the last of the seal maidens weeping and lamenting, for without her seal-skin she was unable to return to the sea.

At the sight of her the fisherman fell deeply in love, and he persuaded the maiden to come home with him and become his wife. They lived together for several years and had a number of children, but the seal woman would often wander the shore, staring at the sea, and sometimes a great bull seal would appear in the waves. It seemed to be watching her.

One day, the fisherman’s children were playing hide and seek, and one of them discovered a seal-skin hidden beneath a stack of straw. He ran to show it to his mother, who caught it up. She embraced her children for the last time, threw the sealskin over herself, rushed to the sea, and dived into the waves, where the great bull seal was waiting for her. Before she swam away, she called back to her husband who had vainly raced after her: “Farewell! You were a good earthly husband to me, but I always loved my first husband who lives in the sea much better.”

Adapted from Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales, selected and edited by Sir George Douglas

The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie

An earthly nourrice sits and sings,

And aye she sings, ‘Ba, lily wean!

Little ken I my bairn’s father,

Far less the land that he stops in.’

Then one arose at her bed-foot,

An’ a grumly guest I’m sure was he:

‘Here am I, thy bairn’s father,

Although that I be not comèlie.

I am a man, upon the land,

An’ I am a silkie in the sea;

And when I’m far and far frae land,

My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’

From ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’, anon.