The Seal-Wife and the Hidden Skin

Selkie tales belong to Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides and the north of Ireland, and they form a coastal genre with a remarkably consistent plot rather than a piece of theology. A seal comes ashore, sheds its skin and becomes human; a man finds and hides the skin, and marries the seal-woman, who bears his children and keeps house, but always watches the sea, and when she or a child at last finds the hidden skin she puts it on and returns to the water, sometimes visiting her human children from the waves thereafter.

Male selkies appear too, as handsome lovers who come to women whose men are away or lost at sea. The tales are often read as an expression of island life, of marriages that could not hold a partner who belonged elsewhere, and of the seal populations that shared these coasts, and folklorists connect them to the wider "swan-maiden" tale-type in which a captured supernatural wife escapes when she recovers her stolen feather or skin. The selkie is a favourite of modern film and fiction, where the melancholy of the returning wife is usually kept intact.