Selkie's Son: The Boy of Both Worlds, The Root of Her Return

What becomes of the child born between sea and shore—who must choose whether to hold on, or to let his mother return to the waves that once knew her name? What does it do to a son, to release the one who birthed him, the one who mothered and nurtured him—carrying the ache of absence in exchange for restoring what was stolen from her before he was even born?

It is into this tide of longing and love that the story of the Selkie unfolds—a timeless Irish and Scottish folktale of a shapeshifting seal woman whose pelt is taken by a human man, binding her to the land and to the child she bears him. Trapped without her skin, she lives captive on shore until her son, perhaps sensing what has always been missing, finds the pelt and offers it back to her. In some tellings, she leaves him. In others, she visits the shoreline often. In still others, she believes he will learn to swim in both worlds. Yet the deeper question remains: what becomes of a soul born to a mother who must leave in order to remember who she truly is?

To begin to answer this, we must descend with the Selkie herself. Her stolen pelt sets in motion her captivity to a human, to the land, and to the son—the seal-human, liminal child she bears from this union. As she nurtures this child of both worlds, her experience becomes a descent: a journey away from her true self, into forgetting, confinement, and loss—until her son finds her pelt and she reclaims it on her path of return. The bond between them is deep, but so is the call of the sea. And when the moment of return comes, it is not without ache.

In the foreground is a hand carved and hand printed linocut inspired by the story of Selkie. In the background are the sketch and carved lino block.

It is from within this ache that the son of the Selkie emerges as a creature of the threshold. He is born of betrayal, but does not replicate it. He carries loss in one hand and love in the other. The moment when he discovers the hidden pelt and returns it to the one whose stolen skin carried the weight of her whole life beneath the waves—he shoulders the sorrow his mother could not fully voice, taking on the burden of restoring balance to a rupture he did not create. He mends what his father broke—not only the theft of the pelt, but the deeper wounding of trust, of belonging, of the right to be whole. And yet, in giving his mother the pelt which returns her to herself, he must endure the ache of her absence—becoming both the healer and the one left behind. What lingers with haunting certainty is she leaves him with her captor, the one who betrayed her, and we are left not knowing if her son is captive too or encouraged to swim in both worlds without being claimed by either. The soul of this tale reminds us the ocean can old the ache of this heartbreak when it is too much for us to bear. For a son, this is no small inheritance: to stand at the crossroads of love and loyalty, and choose restoration over silence, truth over complicity. It marks him. It shapes him. It awakens in him a wisdom beyond his years. He becomes a mythic messenger: one who does not seal the story, but opens it again.

And when we listen closely, we hear in his story that some myths do not resolve—they echo. In the tale of the Selkie, we glimpse a deeper truth of grief and loss threaded through many families: that sometimes, to find oneself, one must lose another. Sometimes, becoming whole demands an act that feels like betrayal. And behind every wounded mother is a child who grows beneath the shadow of her ache—no matter how much she heals, some current of her loss is woven through the tides of the child’s becoming. These wounds may not be the fault of only the ones who carry them—they may be the ripple of a theft that happened long before, a theft of a skin, the colonizing of freedom, a silencing deeply rooted in the past. And so, what remains is not closure. It is not a puzzle meant to be solved, but a tide of love and longing, absence and becoming, that must be carried and felt—like saltwater tears pulling at the heart and soul.

And yet, stories like this are layered. There are other ways to understand the “child” in this tale—ways that speak less to bloodline and more to soul-line, to the deeper truths tucked beneath the skin of the myth.

A carved block of artist’s linoleum freshly inked ready for printing.

Seen through a mythic lens, the Selkie’s son is a liminal figure. In folktales, liminal figures often serve as healers or initiators—those who appear at the threshold and invite transformation. Baba Yaga is one such figure. She lives in a hut deep within a birch forest—a liminal place in itself. Birch trees are the first to grow after fire, standing between ruin and rebirth, between the known and the wild unknown. In many Baba Yaga stories, the heroine must venture far from the familiar, completing impossible tasks that test her intuition, endurance, and courage. In doing so, she awakens strengths that had been hidden within her all along. Similarly, in East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the heroine encounters a shapeshifting bear prince. Though she begins her quest to save him, she ultimately discovers herself—her own courage and resolve. And the bone-gathering woman—Wolf Woman or Bone Woman or La Huersa—teach us the power of descent and reassembly: of singing over scattered remains until they spring back to life. These liminal figures—child, witch, shapeshifter, bone-gatherer—do not rescue; they reflect. They invite a necessary descent. They ask us to remember in order to transcend.

Which brings us deeper still, into the symbolic realm of the inner child. In the archetypal landscape, Selkie’s son may not be just her child—he is the one within us who remembers what the adult self has been asked to forget. In finding the pelt, he does not only restore his mother’s freedom—he restores her memory, her wholeness, her shape. And perhaps this is true for us, too. That when we get distracted by the overculture, when it leads us off-course and we become lost to ourselves, we lose our luster, we lose our pelt. It is the child within us who knows the way back. The child who still knows the smell of the sea and the weight of our true name. Like all liminal figures in myth, an inner child sits at a threshold within each of us. Not merely a passive presence, this child becomes the quiet catalyst—one who senses what has been lost and dares to retrieve it. He notices where balance has been broken and gently guides us toward what must be restored, making transformation possible.

A handcrafted linocut print inspired by the folktale of Selkie.

And so we begin to see the story of the Selkie and the story of her son as twin tales, intertwined like tide and shore. Each is incomplete without the other, echoing the same ancient song of departure and return, surrender and reclamation. The mother who must honor her own soul by leaving her child behind, restoring balance to a life fractured by theft and loss—and the child who chooses to set his mother free, carrying the weight of her absence as he learns to navigate the space between land and sea, belonging fully to both worlds yet claimed by neither. This interplay of parting and holding, absence and presence, traces a pattern as old as myth itself—an archetypal dance weaving through stories across cultures, where opposing forces circle and embrace, creating wholeness through their very tension.

And so with the tale of the Selkie and her son we are left to wonder about the meaning of this in our own lives: do we have the courage to hold both grief and loss, love and longing, shadow and the light—and in that embracing, find the strength to become whole?

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