My Kindred Connections Newsletter Submission for June 2015

My local grove does a newsletter that I regularly submit too. Here is the content I submitted for June on Selkies. Complete with the first drawing I have done in YEARS. I am very happy with it <3 

The Selkie-folk are a super natural race of shape-shifting seal creatures.  They exist in Northern European, Irish, Celtic, Scottish, Norse and Icelandic mythology.  Selkie-folk are ocean creatures in seal form and are able to shed their sealskin and then take human form. It was most important for the Selkie to not lose its seal skin for it was that which gave them the ability to return to their original seal from. Often times Selkies shed their skins to sunbathe on the beaches in human form.

There are many versions of the Selkie myth but generally two versions stand out universally: one female, one male.  The female Selkie is often a otherworldly beautiful woman who is  “captured” by the man who finds her, unable to return to the water because the man has taken possession of her discarded skin. She is surprisingly devotional and loyal to her new husband and often raises children with him but her heart always longs for the sea. If her skin is ever discovered she will not resist to put it back on and be gone for the ocean that calls her home.

 The male Selkie is also renowned for his seductive beauty and charm. When he comes upon land and sheds its skin, he is often noted for his ability to seduce and satisfy the unhappy and dissatisfied women of the area.  Fairly often, these women bear his children, usually children with some sort of “deformity” or oddity about them. In some myths the male Selkie returns for these children after they are born to take them home to the sea to learn the ways of the Selkie beside him.  

 In some versions of the Selkie myth,  Selkies are more active at Summer Solstice and in others at times of the Full Moon, but most stories carry a sense of tragic romance and unrequited love.