The Great Silkie

Just finished reading The People of the Sea by David Thomson, a work that purports to be about Thomson’s journeys in the Highlands of Scotland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and western Ireland in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s searching for seals and traditional stories of seal people before radio and television changed the way people transmitted their histories.  For a variety of reasons, it resonated with me.

Today, one can listen on U-tube to any number of people sing a version of The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, but I first heard it about 1956 or 7, before folk music became popular, in Ballad Club in college.  From a young age, one of my passions was listening to and singing folk songs.  I was perhaps 8 or so, at my Grandparents’ or my Aunt Bubs’ house, where I found a Burl Ives’ album of 78s, and for some reason, I was allowed to play them, which I did, over and over.  I remember Mr Froggie Went A-Courtin’, The Fox went out on a Chilly Night, and Barbie Allen, songs that told stories that captured my imagination.  I wanted to learn to play the guitar.  My parents thought we—my brother and I—should be involved in music.  We always had an upright piano in the house.  They paid a teacher to give my brother piano lessons but she gave me lessons.  That did not work out so well, although later she paid for my trumpet lessons.  Jim took trombone lessons.  For a short time, we played in our respective school bands.  For some reason connected to her sense of propriety, she refused to let me get a guitar.  When we lived in North Adams, and I was perhaps 14, without telling her, I hitch-hiked 46 miles west across the mountains and the state line, to Albany, New York, which at the time had a run-down business section with a number of pawn shops where I found a potato-back mandolin.  (I have no memory of how I knew to go there or how I knew there were pawn shops.)  A mandolin was the closest instrument that I could find to a lute, an instrument that stirred my imagination with visions of medieval minstrels.  It cost, I think, $25.  When my mother saw what I had gotten, she did not object.  I was not aware that her brother, my Uncle Simon, as young man had played the mandolin.  I taught myself to play, badly, and learned folk songs that I found in books.  The music I could listen to on the radio I thought was soppy.  

I started college at Western State, a story in itself, and when I transferred Spring Quarter to Colorado State University, I found the Ballad Club, I do not remember how.  The members played guitars, sang and traded folk songs.  For the most part, they were not happy with America of the 1950s, or the university world, so in the club there was a sense of comradery and defense against the general society.  A lot of the songs were protest songs, sung by people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, lamenting the injustices of life, the waste of war, and the danger of nuclear holocaust.  We met every Friday evening, talked, sang, and drank home brewed beer.  In this world, I first heard The Great Silkie.  I was 17, and its sentimental tragedy struck a chord.

It had been published in 1860 by Francis James Child as one of 305 traditional ballads in his monumental 2,500-page The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 

         AN eartly nourris sits and sing,

         And aye she sings, Ba, lily wean!

         Little ken I my bairnis father,

         Far less the land that he staps in.

         

         Then ane arose at her bed-fit,

         An a grumly guest I’m sure was he:

         ‘Here am I, thy bairnis father,

         Although that I be not comelie.

         

         ‘I am a man, upo the lan,

         An I am a silkie in the sea;

         And when I’m far and far frae lan,

         My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’

         

         ‘It was na weel,’ quo the maiden fair,

         ‘It was na weel, indeed,’ quo she,

         ‘That the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie

         Suld hae come and aught a bairn to me.’

       

         Now he has taen a purse of goud,

         And he has pat it upo her knee,

         Sayin, Gie to me my little young son,

         An tak thee up thy nourris-fee.

         

         An it sall come to pass on a simmer’s day,

         When the sin shines het on evera stane,

         That I will tak my little young son,

         An teach him for to swim the faem.

         

        An thu sall marry a proud gunner,

         An a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,

         An the very first schot that ere he schoots,

         He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.

                                                            Child Ballad #113

At the time, I knew nothing about shape-shifters or seal people, so “Great Silkie” was to me just the name of the creature in the song.  With the stimulus of Thomson’s book, however, I have done a little research and found that in the Celtic world of the northern British Isles, seals are known as selkies.  It is easy to imagine that in oral transmission “selkie” became “silkie” and “grey”—for many of the seals in the area are “grey seals,”—easily becomes “great.”  In fact, some versions of the song identify the shape-shifter as a “grey selkie.”  And I have learned that his abode when not pursuing maidens is an actual place, an island some 40 miles west of the Orkney mainland, about half a mile long and reaching a height of about 40 feet above the sea.  According to the Guinness Book of Records, the Sule Skerry lighthouse was the most remote manned lighthouse in Great Britain from its opening in 1895 to its automation in 1982.

 

Some 60 years after I first heard The Great Silkie, its chords resonate still.