SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about The Pale, by Liz Williams.
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Lodestone
New user
Reged: Jul 21 2004
Posts: 13
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I got really excited last week when our fiction was Scottish. Now I’m even happier, for we’ve a piece based on a story from the Northern Isles, where I live. I’m in Orkney, and I believe this story is told in Shetland too.
The original is an oft-told folk tale. In it, a crofter is walking along a beach at night, when he sees a group of people dancing. He comes closer, and hides behind a rock. The people are all beautiful, and naked, and he sees a pile of sealskins near to where he is hiding. He realises that these people are not humans, but seals (selkies, aye, and we still use that word - it’s just dialect for “seal”). For whatever reason, he steals a skin.
As the night is ending, each off the seals comes to put on their skin again, but one seal is left behind. The crofter takes her home as his wife. They lead a happy life, and have children, although the seal-wife (the story is usually titled “The Seal Wife” or “The Selkie Wife) always longs for her home. The crofter has locked away her skin in a chest (kist). She knows this, but he always keeps the key with him.
One day, though, he leaves the key in his pocket when his wife is washing the clothes and the rest of the family is away. She knows immediately what it is. She struggles with herself, but cannot do anything but unlock the chest and put on her skin again. She thinks she’s just going to feel what it’s like one more, but in the end she goes back to her whole life forever. When the crofter and his sons come back, she is gone.
A coda is usually added to the tale: sometimes, when one of her sons is sitting by the shore, a seal will come close to them and sing. (There’s a tradition of singing to seals to get them to come closer, and it seems to work, although I’ve never heard a seal sing back).
In one version of the story our crofter is actually a fisherman, and one day, when the seal-wife has left him, he is out fishing and falls into the sea. A seal comes to his rescue and lifts him out of the water, and when he looks at the seal he recognises her by her eyes.
Knowing where this story comes from makes me appreciate this offering more. I’d love to know how Liz Williams came across it, and whether she has any connection to Orkney and Shetland.
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Beatifully written, as was Lodestone's explanation.
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Dawn B
Regular reader
Reged: Mar 31 2004
Posts: 32
Loc: Bay Area, California
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Very nice retelling of the Selkie's Wife. I've read many versions of that tale, but having the SFnal accents were neat.
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 151
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Glad you liked it!
I don't know where Liz first encountered the story, but we see a fair number of selkie stories submitted to us; I think the general outline of the story has become fairly well-known in the speculative fiction writing community. I think I first encountered it in two songs by New England singer/songwriter Lui Collins: "The Silkie" and "Ballad of the White Seal Maid" (a Jane Yolen poem that Collins set to music). I suspect that some Americans first encountered the idea of selkies in the 1994 John Sayles movie The Secret of Roan Inish.
We published another selkie story (very different from Liz's) a couple years ago: "Rhythm of the Tides," by Lisa A. Nichols.
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Selkie stories seem to be one of the most common myth tellings in spec fic these days. The fact that so many are published must mean, I assume, that there are many more unpublished. I would be surprised if anyone who reads regularly hadn't come across the basic selkie story in some form or another, probably in several places.
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Lodestone
New user
Reged: Jul 21 2004
Posts: 13
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That's interesting, because I haven't come across it in spec fic before. That said, I'm not that in on the community, so that's perhaps not surprising.
I'm also not surprised that the story has made it across the Atlantic. It is an Isles story, I think, rather than one from Mainland Scotland (and our cultures are quite different: we have a much more Scandinavian heritage). A great deal of people from Orkney emigrated to America and Canada, though. with the Hudson Bay Company especially, as they had a base in one of our main towns. Washington Irving's family, in fact, came from orkney; his Rip Van Winkle is based on an Orkney story.
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Merrie Haskell
New user
Reged: Jul 22 2004
Posts: 7
Loc: Michigan
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I really enjoyed this one. I thought that it was an inspired take on the selkie story--used my favorite sort of twist, where an ordinary (well, sort of; I don't have any lying around the house) object takes on a mythic significance.
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PickyBastard
New user
Reged: Jul 18 2004
Posts: 21
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Beautiful prose (the first line was, indeed, breathtaking). A good story. I hadn't heard of the myth before (thanks to Lodestone for the brief history), but it smacked of legend. I chalk this up to Williams' style and the wonderful twists she placed on an old story.
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