Open Writing

"The seal is a kind of imperfect or crippled quadruped." Thus wrote Aristotle, over 2,300 years ago. There is a disappointingly dull history behind the word "seal" itself. It might come from words meaning "that which drags its body along with difficulty", originating in an ancient Indo-European root, selk-, meaning to pull, to draw along.

However, there are folk in the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Western Isles of Scotland, and in Ireland, who might be coaxed out of their reticence to tell us more about seals. In some remote places where the ocean moodily meets the land, folk memories of faerie mingle with mundane reality. Not too far beyond living memory there are tales of mermaids and also of selkies — you can see the possible link with that ancient root, selk-. In Ireland, selkies are also known as roane.

It is said that in the darkling hours of dusk, a selkie might come ashore, emerge from her seal-skin as a human, and dance and sing until dawn. If a man witnesses this and somehow manages to purloin her seal-skin, she must stay with him until such time as he gives it back to her or she can otherwise repossess it. In some versions of the story, she must become his wife until she can escape back to her real home, the sea.

"Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry" by Rosalie K. Fry tells such a tale. Screenwriter and director John Sayles made a film version "The Secret of Roan Inish" in 1993. It is a film is like no other. There can't be many films where the credits list security divers, wildlife boatmen, gull trainers and seal trainers, as well as animatronics. The animatronics are so well done that they're well nigh impossible to detect.

Filmed in Country Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland, the unfolding story is of a determined young girl, Fiona, searching for her little brother Jamie who disappeared at sea in very unusual circumstances.

Fiona is sent to live with her grandparents in a village which is just a short distance by sea from Roan Inish, which means "island of seals". There, she meets her cousin Dagh, an intense, misunderstood and sometimes reviled young man known as a "dark one" because of both his appearance and his manner. They somehow recognise something in each other. He tells her the family's own tale of a selkie and reveals that her lost brother Jamie was also a "dark one".

Fiona's grandfather evades her questions and cautions her not to raise them with her grandmother. She confides in a boy, Eamon, who eventually believes what she is telling him — she has actually seen little Jamie when she was taken in a small fishing boat to look round Roan Inish. He is still alive. He lives with the seals, somewhere out in the wild waters that surround the island. Fiona discovers that he secretly comes onto Roan Inish to play and sleep in one of the picturesque, derelict, old stone houses where his grandparents lived in years gone by.

Watching how they are eventually reunited, one does not need to suspend disbelief but, rather, to believe in a childlike (not childish) way in a mingling of worlds.

The landscapes and seascapes are a visual delight. The good honest folk are real people without pretensions. Their Irish voices are music to the ears. And the background music is hauntingly beautiful. This is a magical, unpretentious film, a film like no other.

**
Sources:
The Secret of Roan Inish, the film, DVD, Jones Entertainment Group/First Look International, 1995. It is still available from outlets such as Amazon UK.
Faeries, Brian Fround and Alan Lee, Paul Hamlyn, Sydney and Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1978.
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, Reader's Digest Association Limited, London, 1977.
The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, ed. Calvert Watkins, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA, 2000.
Obsidian Magazine at http://www.madstone.com/reviews/roaninish.html
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2009