Selkie
Selkies , also known as “ selchies ”, are creatures from Scottish mythology .
The Orkney Islands and Northern Scotland have stories to tell of seals who come ashore and transform into humans by shedding their fur. They hide their fur and walk around as humans. Allegedly, selkie women are indescribably beautiful as humans.
A seal fairy tale
A story is told about a hunter who met a beautiful woman on the beach. He fell in love with her and soon afterwards the two married. But the young woman was seized by the longing for the sea and she fetched her fur again on the beach, put it on and turned into a seal. But later the hunter, her own husband, shot this seal because he had no idea who she really was. With this he had unwittingly killed his beloved wife.
Selkies in literature and film
The Selkie stories can be found in books about fairy tales and legends.
The author Susan Cooper has written a children's book about selkies, the illustrator Nikolaus Heidelbach designed a picture book. Films also deal with selkies, for example the fantasy film The Secret of the Baby Seal , in which ten-year-old Fiona learns that her ancestors were Selkies, or the Australian feature film Selkie - The Seal Man , in which a teenager turns into a seal. In the movie Ondine by Neil Jordan , a young woman from an Irish fisherman (is Colin Farrell ) saved in the net from the sea. She thinks his daughter is a selkie.
In Bernhard Hennen's fairy novels, selkies appear as curious seals that live in the seas of the Albenmark. When they come ashore, they shed their fur and appear as pretty young elves.
There are some similarities with the Japanese sky fairies who descend from heaven and shed their "mana" dress in order to then live as a human. You can only go back to Heaven when you get your dress back.
The novel Whisper Island features a Selkie who has lost her child.
In the series Winx Club , Selkies also appear from season 5, who are portrayed as the goalkeeper of every kingdom. Each of the Winx gets a personal Selkie, who is the guardian of the gate to their home.
The artistically animated, Irish fantasy film The Melody of the Sea is about the Selkie girl Saoirse and her family, who in the loving story are strongly interwoven with stories and characters from Celtic mythology .
Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock takes up the motif in the children's book The Smell of Other People's Houses (2016), in which a girl, Selma, whose mother is unknown and who grew up as a foundling, considers her missing mother to be a hybrid of man and seal.
In the following dive into the unknown (203) of the three question marks , the legend of the Selkies plays an important role in the framework.
The Selkie character is also used in the novel Die kleine Sommerküche am Meer (2018) by Jenny Colgan.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Description of mermaids
- ↑ Lise Lunge-Larsen (author), Beth Krommes (illustrator): The Hidden Folk: Stories of Fairies, Dwarves, Selkies, and Other Secret Beings. Houghton Mifflin, 2004, ISBN 0-618-17495-8
- ↑ Cathie Dunsford: Song of the Selkies. Spinifex Press, 2001, ISBN 1-876756-09-8
- ↑ Susan Cooper: The Boggart And The Monster . Aladdin 1998, ISBN 0-689-82286-3
- ↑ Nikolaus Heidelbach: When I grow up, I'll be a seal . Beltz & Gelberg 2012, ISBN 978-3-407-79443-7