It’s hard to prepare a short talk on folklore and fairy tales. The scope of these subjects is vast. What I’m going to do tonight is talk a bit about our myths and folk tales and try to explain some of the symbology behind them.

Many people find it difficult to understand the Celtic myths, because they don’t seem to relate much to our modern life. What we need to understand is that Celtic tales are always histological and spiritual. To the Celts, their myths are their history and their history is who they are. Each one is always part of a larger web. That means that no matter how much we dig for the meaning of a tale, there will always be a deeper meaning behind that one and they always have an important truth to tell us. It’s part of the spiral of Celtic life and wisdom and it is a form of pilgrimage which is always inherent in these tales.

Tonight we’re going to talk specifically about selkies and swans, two beasts that figure in many of our folktales.

The familiar story is that a human man steals a seal skin or swan feathers from a maiden who has dropped her faery guise so that she may enjoy the benefits of a human body for a brief time. Sometimes this is a mermaid who has shed her tail for a short while to walk on dry land. The man takes her to his home and makes her his wife, hiding her faery skin or feathers. She bears him children and over the years is a dutiful if not completely happy wife. At some point the magical concealing shape is discovered, usually by one of the children of the union, and the selkie returns to the sea. The children remain with the father, but sometimes the mother comes back to the shore to visit and the children swim with her.

Aside from this being an interesting story to tell and to inspire discussion about the reality of magic, what does this story have to tell us?

Let’s examine the elements of the story.

First we have a maiden from the world of faery who is gifted with the skill of shape-shifting. Maidens, whether selkie, swan or mermaid, represent innocence, unpolluted knowledge, and grace. They also represent the human soul.

Faeryland or the otherworld as the stories sometimes term it, represents the hidden, unknown and mysterious side of life. Shape-shifting is a gift that only magicians and shamen possess. It implies an ability to change one’s everyday consciousness in order to experience life from a different point of view.

Selkies and mermaids come from the water. In Celtic lore, water is usually accepted to represent intuition, the feminine aspect of life, and all things magical/mystical.

Swans are identified with the sky, which represents the gods, knowledge, and revealed spirituality.

In all Celtic stories there is an element of a quest. In this particular one, a man who represents the questor, tries to appropriate hidden or revealed wisdom for himself by forcing the owner of a magical or spiritual gift to do his bidding. He then attempts to hide the evidence of his theft and he succeeds for awhile. But even when spiritual wisdom is polluted by an act of negativity, it still manages to produce ideas (children) of divine inspiration. One of these ideas or children realizes the enormity of the theft and returns the gift of shape-shifting to the rightful owner -- the soul. At this point the soul returns to the water or the air, leaving the divine offspring (children) with their father. Every so often the children would return to the sea to visit their mother, or to immerse themselves in the feminine spiritual aspect of life.

So we see that the important truths revealed by these two particular stories is two fold.

First, we understand that we cannot possess indefinitely that which is not rightfully ours. But we also see that the children or the divine ideas which were a natural result of the magic being in the man’s keeping for even a little while, were not taken away from him. They were left there to live in his house (his consciousness) so that he could nourish them and care for them. So even though his motives were not good in the beginning, they did produce some good results that he was then put in sole possession of.

There are other meanings here too. Remember the old saying, Neither fish nor fowl? Where do you think that saying might have come from, in view of the story we just talked about? It means that someone or something is neither one thing nor the other.

It’s easy to dismiss the ancient Celts by saying they were primitives who believed in sympathetic magic, that if they’d had technology they wouldn’t have wasted their time on faery stories. But those who say such things are missing the whole point of these myths. The people used them as a way of explaining life, of integrating complex ideas and beliefs into everyday language that even children could assimilate and understand.

Besides telling stories, our forebears loved to put words to music. Many of the old tales were passed on from bard to bard in the oral tradition until the middle ages when writing began to come into popularity. Songs and poems were a traditional way of learning for the Celts because rhymes were much easier to remember than dry, lengthy historical recitations.

~ Muireall Donald ~ 15 April 1999 ~ www.laughingowl.com/muse.htm