Selkies: The secret world of shapeshifters - by Lu Hersey

NB. I wrote a version of this post for writer Steve Gladwin as part of his project on selkies. If you're interested in the subject, Steve will be posting other posts about selkies by various authors over the coming months.

 
As a child, I was obsessed with the idea of shapeshifting after reading a piece in Look and Learn about Geronimo. According to the article, the Apache tribes believed their most famous medicine man escaped from his enemies so often because of his ability to turn into a crow. He simply flew away. This really stuck in my mind. Was it actually true? I was completely captivated by the idea. I wanted to be a shapeshifter. 

Over the years, I read widely on the subject. A belief in shapeshifting was widely held by indigenous people across the globe. Shamans that can turn into bears, mountain lions or crows. Men that turn into werewolves. Witches able to turn into hares. And most dear to my heart, the selkies of the Celtic coasts and islands of Britain. Magical folk who are people on land and seals in the sea.

Painting by Jessica Shirley

My love of seals started many years ago, when my parents took me to visit a naturalist who lived on Dartmoor. His name was HG Hurrell and he had a captive grey seal called Atlanta, rescued as injured pup, that lived in a pool in his garden. That visit made a lasting impression on me. I must have been very small as the seal seemed so big - her huge, mournful face appearing out of the tiny pool like magic. I was captivated by her. When she made a sound, she sighed sadly, as if she was mourning for lost oceans - and I wanted more than anything to take her from this place in the heart of Dartmoor, back to the sea. I can't remember why Hurrell couldn't re-wild Atlanta - maybe because she thought she was human. She certainly seemed very human to me. And perhaps that's the key to the selkie myth - grey seals sound like people. They have eyes that seem to look into your soul. It isn't much of a leap to believing the change is possible.

These days, most people don't believe shapeshifting is possible, just as they don't believe faeries - or any other folkloric beings - exist. The puritans, and later scientists, knocked it out of us. And it seems when people no longer believe something exists, they no longer see it or experience it (or if they do, they tend to keep quiet about it.)*

But stories of these 'others' are peppered throughout our folklore, and any in-depth study makes you wonder. Magic is just out of reach, touching the edges of our collective conscious and haunting our dreams. Read any collection of folk stories, especially those told by people who have experienced these things themselves, and you realise just how close they are. Lost, maybe - like watching haunting video footage of life on St Kilda - but perhaps still out there somewhere, just under the surface.

Children are generally more open to such possibilities than adults - and that seems to be another requirement to becoming a shapeshifter. You have to start young. From all my reading, it seems shapeshifters are mostly born to families of shapeshifters - but often the first time they experience the change into another form is around puberty.

Adolescents, especially girls, go through so many changes during puberty - body shape, hormones, menstruation - it's no coincidence that poltergeists mostly manifest in houses where an adolescent girl is present. These body changes can be hard to deal with. You remember that bit in Carrie when she starts menstruating and screams the place down? Ignorance can make these changes terrifying.

It wasn't that bad for me, but even so, the only information I had on the subject (weirdly I knew more about actual sex from playground talk than I did about periods) was my mother telling me that one day when I was a bit older, my body would start to produce an egg once a month. 'What like a chicken?' I asked. 'No, much smaller,' she said. So I was thinking maybe wren's egg or even tiny hummingbird size. And that's all I knew until it happened. Worse, we were staying with some friends of my parents I'd never met before. There were whispered conversations and knowing looks and I just wanted to disappear through the floorboards. Adolescence is the most awkward, painful time for a lot of teenagers. We should give them more credit. It's not easy being a teen.

And that's what drew me to writing for teens. In Deep Water, I wanted Danni, the main character, to be the kind of age where girls go through these changes. Her symptoms are a lot more extreme than most teens (water starts pouring through her hands, that kind of thing) until the big change happens and she discovers (plot spoiler alert) that she's actually a selkie. Frankly I wish that had been my experience. The awkwardness would have been so much more worth it for the joy of gliding underwater as a seal.

I'm not alone in my obsession. Selkies abound in art, folksongs and folktales, and if you want to read the best ever non-fiction collection of oral folktales about them, try The People of the Sea by David Thomson. It's one of the most haunting books I've ever read. Thomson was a fluent Gaelic speaker, so as he travelled the Scottish and Irish islands between the wars, the inhabitants trusted him with their selkie stories - of men rescued by seals from stormy seas, taking seal women as their wives, seals suckling their children, island clans still known to be descended from selkies. Even back then, many of the island folk were wary - the story happened to an uncle, a friend, a distant relative. But they all believed, as did Thomson himself following a harrowing childhood experience, that selkies were real.

I challenge you to read it and not consider the possibility.

* Recently, folklorists like Jo Hickey-Hall have started recording people's personal encounters with faeries and other folkloric beings. If you're interested in the subject, or have experiences yourself, you can get in touch with her via Modern Fairy Sightings https://www.scarlettofthefae.com/

Deep Water is being reissued in paperback and ebook this summer by publisher Tangent Books. The trailer my daughter made for me when the book was first published by Usborne has a soundtrack taken from Emily Portman's song Grey Stone, about a selkie girl. The tune was originally noted down by David Thomson in The People of the Sea as an ancient Hebridean song actually sung by real selkies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8_g-fmcS-w&ab_channel=thatcherryfilm

Lastly, here's a sneak preview of the cover art for the new edition of Deep Water, by wonderful artist Rhianna Wynter  - and thanks to Mark at the Folklore Podcast for putting us in touch.

By Lu Hersey

twitter: LuWrites