Recent reading

[luzula]

A Man of Independent Mind by L A Hall (2019)
I have a cold, so it's time for comfort reading! This is basically the 14th in the series, so don't start here. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this volume focusing on the character Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald--it starts out with some diary entries shedding light on previous events from his POV, but then it jumps forward in time quite a lot, and we get the story of two close friends supporting each other and both grieving their romantic partners. I really enjoyed that part, it was beautiful and sympathetic. Later on we finally get Sandy and Clorinda having sex in the spirit of scientific enquiry, which I had been wanting to read. *gleeful* I mean, it's not like I ship them as anything other than close friends, but there had been a certain tension/curiosity there. And then there's a final part where Sandy meets someone new and also there are complications surrounding the Bexbury inheritance. All very enjoyable, A+ comfort reading.

A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter (1975)
A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland. I do have thoughts about gender, though? The most common selkie story I've read is the one about a female selkie whose skin is stolen by a man, and then she becomes his wife and bears his children, and years afterwards she finds her skin again and leaves. This is not that. I think you only need to read the back cover to figure out that the male stranger who comes ashore is the selkie, and that he is a threat to the family's daughter. So in both cases, regardless of whether it's the man or the woman who is the selkie, it's the man who is the threat. Which I guess makes sense, because patriarchy, but it makes for a very different view on the selkies.

Oh, and you might be interested to know that Annick Trent has a free novelette out: Harvest Season, which is historical f/f with two working-class protagonists.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

The male-selkie version I'm aware of (at least in one ballad) is he gets the human woman pregnant and then disappears, possibly coming back later to ask to take the child away with him to also become a selkie.

[sovay]

The male-selkie version I'm aware of (at least in one ballad) is he gets the human woman pregnant and then disappears, possibly coming back later to ask to take the child away with him to also become a selkie.

The male selkie of A Stranger Came Ashore is the Great Selkie of Sule Skerry, except that in Hunter's telling he is a demon lover who lures the girls he seduces down to the sea with him, where it may or may not be true that his palace is roofed with the waving golden hair of drowned girls, but one way or another they never come back to the human world again. I read this book for the first time in fifth grade and still don't know whether there is any traditional basis for this Reynardine take on the Great Selkie or whether Hunter invented it. I incline a little toward the latter; much of her work was based in Scottish and Irish folklore, but not without embroidery, which is completely fair for a fantasy writer rather than a folklorist! The method of defeating the mermaid in The Mermaid Summer (1988), I have never encountered in any traditional source.

[desireearmfeldt]

Besides the Great Selkie ballad, do you know of any other examples of traditional male-selkie stories?

[sovay]

Besides the Great Selkie ballad, do you know of any other examples of traditional male-selkie stories?

Yes; David Thomson has some recorded in The People of the Sea (1954), which I am incidentally pretty sure John Sayles used as a resource for The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). In one, a seal hunter is confronted by a stranger who commissions him for a hundred sealskins, which is only a trick for the stranger, who is of course a selkie, to get the hunter away to the shore where he can seize him and dive down with him to the bottom of the sea where the stranger's father who is an old bull seal is dying of a wound which the hunter gave him, which only the hunter himself can heal, after which the stranger returns him to the land with a promise never to hunt another seal, which he keeps. There's a different one with a seal hunter who is charged by the mother of one of the seals he has skinned with returning her son's skin, without which he is forever exiled to a human form ashore, handsome and alive but unable to take his seal-shape again, and the hunter does what the seal-mother asks. Or the one where the hunter fails to kill his seal, but leaves the half-broken blade of the knife in the seal's hide, and years later when the man is a sailor wrecked in a far country, in the house of the old man who hauled him from the sea he sees his own half-broken knife in the mantel and the man asks meaningfully if he knows it. Not all of them have to do with hunting, either; there's one where a man who has missed the ferry for the fair across the water is given a ride by a seal, who takes his payment in rum when they have reached the fair by turning into a man himself. There are stories about the King of the Seals, glimpsed at sea with his retinue of selkies. There are jokes about seal men entertaining human women while their husbands are away fishing and the story of a woman who could have no children by her husband but bore them to her seal lover, all with the webbed fingers that had to be clipped to keep from giving her adultery away. Thomson does record some of the seal bride stories, which always end when she finds her skin and returns to the sea, and of multiple families which trace their descent to selkies on one side or the other. But a bunch of them are just these weird neighborly stories of shape-change or seals which sing or speak or cry like the human people with whom they interact constantly, which makes up a lot of the point of the book.

[desireearmfeldt]

Interesting, thanks!

[sovay]

Interesting, thanks!

Welcome! I think the tl;dr is that popular culture of selkies has really narrowed down to a couple of stories, but the traditional ones are much more varied. Thomson records one of a human infant lost at sea, discovered safe and suckled by a mother seal. It doesn't have a didactic payoff, it's just the sort of thing everyone accepts happens.

[desireearmfeldt]

It's intriguing to think about a setting where people live on the shore and selkies live in the ocean and they more or less treat each other like neighboring villages where the customs are weird and incomprehensible but they're basically just people like us...

[sovay]

It's intriguing to think about a setting where people live on the shore and selkies live in the ocean and they more or less treat each other like neighboring villages where the customs are weird and incomprehensible but they're basically just people like us...

I would like to see more contemporary selkie stories run with it!

[genarti]

Oh, this is a fascinating rundown! Thank you so much for it. I have clearly got to read The People of the Sea sometime.

[sovay]

Oh, this is a fascinating rundown! Thank you so much for it. I have clearly got to read The People of the Sea sometime.

You're welcome! I have a British paperback from 1980 which came from a used book store when I was in college, but I just discovered it was reprinted with an introduction by Seamus Heaney.

[luzula]

Oh, how interesting, thank you--I don't know much about selkies. I like the first one, with the happy ending, and also I'm struck by what you said last, about the neighborliness of it. Two different peoples, half strange to each other and half familiar, and interacting in various ways which can be hostile or friendly or just meeting by chance.

[sovay]

Two different peoples, half strange to each other and half familiar, and interacting in various ways which can be hostile or friendly or just meeting by chance.

It's one of the things I love so much about The Secret of Roan Inish, the idea of the seals as "just another branch of the family."

[luzula]

I have listened to a lot of folk music, but I had never actually come across this ballad before! Thank you, I'm off to listen to it...

[sovay]

I have listened to a lot of folk music, but I had never actually come across this ballad before! Thank you, I'm off to listen to it...

My mother sang it to me as a lullaby! Her version was closest to Joan Baez's. I learned others as I grew up.

[sovay]

A Scottish children's (young adult?) book about selkies, which I enjoyed a lot--it's told from the POV of the twelve-year-old human Robbie and has intriguing folklore and details of the nature and culture of Shetland.

I love this book even though I don't like its take on selkies; I love the guising, and the magic of the tide-lines, and the shape-change.

[luzula]

I thought the Great Selkie in the book was a little too clear-cut a villain for me--I would have preferred more ambiguity. But yes, there's so much that's good about it! I enjoyed the magic, and the scene with Robbie petting the seal pups, and the way I could see Scandinavian words in the language ("lik" smoke for example, "lik" is "corpse" in Swedish).

Have ordered more of the author's books now.

[desireearmfeldt]

That sounds way more villainous than the ballad version, even.

[landofnowhere]

I have not read any of Mollie Hunter's fantasy, but I love her autobiographical(?) novel A Sound of Chariots, which made a big impression on me as a kid (it is heavy reading!)

[sovay]

I have not read any of Mollie Hunter's fantasy, but I love her autobiographical(?) novel A Sound of Chariots, which made a big impression on me as a kid (it is heavy reading!)

More or less so than reading Seaward and The Dark Is Rising and then hitting Susan Cooper's Dawn of Fear?

[landofnowhere]

I had no idea that Dawn of Fear existed, which makes that question hard to answer! (I've read the two you mentioned, and also King of Shadows, and that might be it.) But it's the sort of thing where, when I reread A Sound of Chariots as an adult, I was surprised by how dark it was! (I was a morbid kid, but I also feel like I may have blocked out my memories of how I reacted to the book as a kid, I don't really remember.) It's ultimately a hopeful book, but it is a book about grief, with a protagonist growing up in poverty surrounded by WWI veterans with PTSD.

[sovay]

I had no idea that Dawn of Fear existed, which makes that question hard to answer!

Fair! It's from 1970; it is not directly autobiographical of Cooper's childhood, but it is about being a child when a war is just part of normal life—scrap drives, air raids, barrage balloons, the false sunset on the horizon of London burning—much less daily relevant than the cruelties and games of other children, until all of a sudden it isn't. I read it in elementary school and have it sort of mentally aligned with Robert Westall's The Machine-Gunners (1977), although Dawn of Fear has much less conventional action.

It's ultimately a hopeful book, but it is a book about grief, with a protagonist growing up in poverty surrounded by WWI veterans with PTSD.

I will consider myself warned accordingly. I've never even seen a copy and I read a lot of Mollie Hunter out of libraries over the years.

[landofnowhere]

Dawn of Fear sounds gripping, but not light reading!

A Sound of Chariots won a Phoenix award in 1992, which probably let to it being reprinted in the 1994 edition I found at the library as a kid. There's a copy in OpenLibrary, which is how I reread it a few years ago.

There's also a sequel, Hold on to Love, which I have not read since I was a teenager, and is probably even harder to find! (I just noticed that it also has the alternate title The Dragonfly Years, which is a much better title, but not the edition that was available in my library!)

[luzula]

Interesting! I've ordered a few more of her books now, on the strength of this one.

[chestnut_pod]

I'd never heard of Mollie Hunter, but lots of her books look relevant to my interests, so thanks for the introduction!

[luzula]

I have ordered a few more of them now!