I was fascinated by selkie legends as a child. But even as a wee lass, I sensed an injustice. In the stories about the female selkie, a covetous fisherman steals her sealskin while she is in human form so she can’t go home. She’s distraught at her predicament and the fisherman ‘kindly’ offers to marry her and share his home with her. They’re together for many years and have varying numbers of children depending on the tale. One child usually eventually shows mum where the pelt is hidden. The selkie woman, who has often spent her life on land mute, staring sadly to sea, discovers her sealskin and the skullduggery and heads straight back to the ocean. She usually gets a bad press for leaving the poor fisherman to look after the children. Many years ago now, I wrote a song called The Selkie’s Rant as I felt certain  she would have been ragin’ at the fisherman and may well have had a lover and a family already under the waves.

I had meant at that time to write a second selkie song in response to the male selkie folktales but I never got around to it till over a decade later. In many of these stories the wife and her husband are delighted to find a bag of gold instead of their child and look forward to living out their lives in luxury. Once again, even as a lass, I suspected that this was not a realistic picture and that the mother, and likely her husband too, would have been heartbroken.