Caorolyn Allan and Jenny Keldie sings the song and explains it's meaning to Phil Cunningham. Selkies are seals that can shed their skin to become humans. The legend apparently originated on the Orkney and Shetland Islands
An earthly nourris sits and sings, And aye she sings, "Ba lilly wean, Little ken I my bairn's father, Far less the land that he staps in." Then ane arose at her bed fit, And a grumly guest I'm sure was he, Saying "Here am I, thy bairn's father, Although I am not comely." I am a man upon the land, I am a silkie in the sea, And when I'm far frae every strand, My home it is in Sule Skerry." “It was na weel”, the maiden cried, “It was na weel, indeed” quo she, “For the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie, To hae come and aught a bairn to me!” Then he has taken a purse of gold, And he has laid it on her knee, Saying, "give to me, my little young son, And take thee up thy nouriss fee. It shall come to pass on a summer's day, When the sun shines hot on every stone, That I shall take my little young son, And teach him for to swim the foam. And thou shalt marry a proud gunner, And a very proud gunner I'm sure he'll be, And the very first shot that e're he shoots, he'll kill both my young son and me." An interpolated 5th stanza has also been heard: 'Twas weel eno' the night we met, When I'd be oot and on my way, Ye held me close, ye held me tight, "Just ane mair time ere the break o' day!"
hi, thanks for writing out the lyrics, this version is really nice! I was just wondering, if you or anyone knows what 'it was na weel' and 'twas weel eno' means?
Great rendition. I always wondered why the mother is described as a nurse(nourris) in the first line as if she's not really his mother but then she calls the baby "my bairn". Also wonder why there's no protest when he wants to take the baby away. But a great story to be sung on a wild and windy Orkney night!
Maybe it's as simple as the fact that mothers nurse their kids. As for why she does not protest - a single mother at the time might be in a bit of a pickle in terms of securing the future of a child and there may have been some stigma of illegitimacy. The selkie is obviously rich and makes a living off the sea and offers gold and to teach the child his ways. Arrangments such as these may not have all that been uncommon at the time I am sure and I have certainly seen similar things in poorer parts of the world. Also as the childs father he might have had certain rights under the cultural and social contracts of the time. In some versions of the song he offers her marriage although he is sure she will not accept it. And she doesn't. It feels to me like she does not really want to take the thing further than that one original night of passion that they share. Like she is ashamed of it and that's holding her back. Then again - maybe there is just not a lot you can do when a magical being appears in the middle of the night with ominous messages and to claim his child.
On a somewhat deeper cultural & psychological level, the song speaks to the viewpoints of illegitimacy & the old pagan ways, in which a young girl with a fatherless child would not have been censured to the degree that she is under the newer Christian ways (which are based upon the male domination incorporated into the beliefs of a harsh Middle Eastern nomadic group of tribes, as shown by the Old Testament's brutal punishments for straying women). The death of her illegitimate son at the hands of her "proper, Christian" hunter-husband, is a punishment of the mother for listening to her heart & bearing a bastard, rather than locking her heart away in passive submission to the Christian arrangement of docile domestic slavery to her husbandly "head", as dictated by the Judeo-Christian belief system.
Um, sorry, but that interpretation is too extreme and rather unlikely. What's more likely is that's she's described as a nurse because a) she IS one (to someone else's child) which would be a good way for a single mother with a nursing baby to get by or b) she is the selkie's son surrogate mother/ nurse and he has come to reward her for caring for his child. A woman who becomes a nurse/nanny to a fae (troll, fairy....etc)child and is rewarded accordingly is a frequently occuring motif in fairy tales. And yes, there might be some social stigma involved, but describing murdering the child and father as the norm? Come on! I'll hate to inform you, but illegitimate children weren't all that rare in the past and most communities had better and usually nicer ways of dealing with it than that ( top of my head, a sixteenth century Flemish text I had to transcribe once where a pair of twins were born after two unmarried people had a brief fling at the fair. Each parent got one twin and the father had to pay the mother a stipend to help raise said child. That's it. Nobody got killed.)
