The world of the selkies.(The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal-Folk)(Book Review)

The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal-Folk, by David Thomson; Canongate Classics, 2001, $30.40.

THIS BOOK was first published in 1954; this is its third edition since then. It is deservedly a classic--a most gorgeously written, elusively elegiac, delicate evocation of a vanished way of life, and an almost vanished way of thinking and being in the world. More than that, though, it is a mysterious, numinous presence that inhabits it, both attractive and frightening, grand and gentle, like the spirit of the sea itself, and the peoples that live by and with it.

David Thomson, who was born in 1914 in India, of Scottish parents, was sent during his childhood to his grandmother's place in Nairn, Scotland, to recover from a serious eye injury. He stayed there for some years--and those years had an enormous impact on his imagination. During this time he first became fascinated by Celtic ways of seeing the world, most particularly those evoked by the stories of selkies. Selkies, or grey Atlantic seals, have the reputation of being shape-shifting faery beings--"man upon the land, selkie in the sea", as the famous song "The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry" puts it.

This book is the result of that fascination. It starts with memories of Nairn and the people there--the sealkillers, the woman who everyone maintained was a selkie, the fishermen, the children--and elides naturally into the Otherworld of the Celtic imagination, through the stories told first of all to the child, then to the adult Thomson as he goes further in search of more selkie stories. His wanderings take him to other parts of Scotland, to Ireland, to Orkney, the Hebrides and Shetland, all places where selkie stories abound (another, which he doesn't visit but mentions, is Norway).

In all these places he is told the most extraordinary stories, and meets a ...