Selkies: Nonfiction

  

And if selkies fascinate you, here are some of the best nonfiction books for your consideration:

The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend by David Thomson

Book description:

A magical book about an ancient legend-that the seal was once human, and can sometimes resume human form--and about the Celtic fishing families who still tell it, sing it, believe it.

Raised among Scottish fishermen and storytellers, David Thomson was obsessed from childhood by the Celtic seal legend, the body of tales and songs about the "selchie," or gray Atlantic seal. In the early 1950's he took a journey to seek the legend out, in the Hebrides, on the east coast of Scotland, on the west coast of Ireland-places where magic co-exists with reality and pre-Christian traditions and beliefs somehow endure.

He gives us here the fruits of his search as he found it, and tells us something of the men, women, and children from whom he heard the stories. He also tells of his own encounters with seals, and the dreamlike hold that these have had on him. The result is, in the words of his friend Seamus Heaney, a poetic achievement-a work of "intuitive understanding, perfect grace, and perfect pitch."

About the Author

David Thomson (1914-1988) was a writer and producer of radio documentaries for the BBC and the author of thirteen books, among them the prize-winning memoirs Woodbrook and Nairn in Darkness and Light.

Tales of the Seal People: Scottish Folk Tales (International Folk Tale Series)by Duncan Williamson and Chad McCail

Book description:

A collection of Scottish folk tales featuring silkies, the seal people who can take human shape.

Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole G. Silver

Book description:

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era.

Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.