The storms of January battering the landscape originates from the sea, and beaches around British Isles and northern Europe are empty. They appear uninviting, cold and treacherous. It brings out many stories and folk legends of various monsters and mythical beings associated with the coastlines. Among them are the Selkies, a type of creature that is also a shapeshifter. These Selkies usually appear like beautiful women and handsome men wearing seal skins, because they're also seals other times. Selkies appear in legends of the Orkney Islands, Ireland, the Faroes, Shetlands, Scotland and Iceland.
The Selkies would gather as seals, and then during moonlit nights on the beach, and transform into humans. They would transform either once a year, or every ninth night, or every seventh stream. They would become human and then dance on the beaches at night. They have sealskin, which gives them transformation. If the sealskin vanished, the Selkie would be trapped in human form and unable to return to the sea. There Selkie men would seduce human women. Orkney tradition have beliefs that a lonely woman may want to find a magical Selkie man, and she would need to go to the shore and cry seven teardrops into the sea. The Selkie man would answer her and swim to shore and be with her for the night. It's also believed that Selkie men would whisk human women away.
There are many stories of Selkie women seducing human men and sometimes marrying them. If a Selkie woman's sealskin was stolen by a human man, she would be trapped by him and need to live with him as his wife. She would find her sealskin that way, or if not, she would be forever stuck on dry land. There's a sad story of a man who wouldn't return the sealskin to his Selkie wife, even when she begged and pleaded. She stayed with him and had his children. Years later her children found her sealskin and returned it to her, but she had to leave. The Selkie mother returned to the sea after kissing goodbye to her grown up children. They never saw their mother again.
More on the magical Selkies:
Read: "When humans encounter Selkies" HERE.
She Wolf Night
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