The original title for Song of the Selkie was The Three Sisters, so perhaps it was the characters that came to me first and the mythical theme later. My method for writing fiction is to populate the stage with interesting characters and then let them take the story where they will.
The book starts out with the youngest of the sisters, Frances. In my own family, I am the third daughter, so perhaps that was an obvious place to start. (Just for the record, my two older sisters do not in any way resemble their counterparts in the novel.) I was the one who pursued the academic path, though I was never really cut out for it. Academic writing was always a stretch, because I couldn’t help but throw in the odd literary flourish. One professor wrote on one of my papers that this tendency showed I was intent on remaining an amateur.
After two degrees in philosophy from Edinburgh and Oxford respectively, I moved to America and started writing a column for a local newspaper. It took a while to discard the academic straight jacket, but eventually creative writing brought with it a new sense of freedom. I began to write poetry, and then I wrote a novel. Not this one about the Song of the Selkie, but a novel from many novels ago.
So, Frances walks a path I know well, though I didn’t stay in academia long enough to evolve into the tweedy professor I was on course to become. Just as well. I would not have made a good one. There would have been flourishes all over the place!
I first became aware of the Selkie myth from a song Judy Collins sang called “The Great Selkie.” The myth is ancient, not just in Scotland, but in Ireland and Norway too. A selkie is a seal that comes out of the sea, peels off its pelt and for a short while becomes human. In this song, the selkie is a male, but in the lore it is probably more frequently a female, who leaves her skin on a rock while she enjoys walking or dancing on the shore. Most commonly, she is espied by a man who hides her seal skin and makes it impossible for her to return to the water. However, even though she bears him children, her heart longs for the sea. Most often in the myth, it is a child of hers who finds the skin, and she is off before anyone can stop her. From then on, she visits her children by appearing off shore as a seal looking back to the house where she once lived.
I don’t know when the Selkie myth first came into being, but it was lost, with most of Scotland’s culture when the priesthood declared the old stories to be pagan poison. And then the English, like all good colonisers, worked hard to undermine the indigenous culture. To this end, they forbade the playing of the pipes, the wearing of the kilt, and certainly the passing down of Scottish history. Even in my day growing up in Scotland, only English history was taught in Scottish schools. Scottish Gaelic, the language of myth, came to seen as peasant speak, was forbidden in schools, and consequently went into serious decline.
I didn’t directly set out to revive the Selkie myth. But perhaps it’s in my blood, this gravitation to ancestral stories passed down at firesides in windowless houses on bleak nights when the wind threatened to take off the thatch. On such a night, you might tell the kind of story that one of my island characters conjures about the son of a farmer who went missing after a drunken bout only to emerge a week later for his own funeral. Where had he been? Oh, with the Selkies down in the Davey deep.
I take no credit for the Selkie story. My ancestor Allen McDougall left the island of Islay a long time ago. As the boat, probably a fishing boat, pulled away from his island home, he must have felt what in Gaelic is called cianalas, a profound longing back to the motherland. Perhaps for the rest of his life, he nursed this haunting of his heart. Somehow it filtered down the bloodline. And so, I give it you, dear reader: a story from the old country for the moments when you escape the life of the mind for the life of the heart. For that’s where the Selkie lives – not in linear thought, not in philosophical logic, not in any place that makes any modern sense, but deep in the heartland. Song of the Selkie is nothing more than the song of cianalas.
