Title: People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal Folk (LT)
Author: David Thomson
Series?: Nope.
Basic Reason for Beginning: It’s about selkie legends!
Basic Reason for Finishing: It’s about so much more than selkie legends!
Texture: It’s all warm and lovely and homely and wonderful.
Blurb: David Thomson developed a love of seal legends. This is his recount of some of the ones he heard from the people who told them to him.
Book Rereadability: Oh, yes. This is so pretty. It’s definitely a book I’d reread (once TBR is under more control)!
Author Rereadability: If all his books have this same atmosphere, I want the lot!
Recommendation: Anyone who’s interested in Celtic (sea) folklore, seals, earlier ways of life, folklore in general, the way of a folklorist… David Thomson as a person… This is a must-read if you’re interested in any of the above. (And if you’re not, read it anyway because the whole thing is beautifully told.)

Pages: 229
ISBN: 1841951072
Challenges: Summer Reading challenge. (2 books down, 8 to go! And I’ve only joined two days ago!)

Thoughts, Burbles, Etc

Oooh, where do I start? I suppose I should start, really, with the point made in the introduction by Seamus Heaney. That introduction boils down to “It is hard to classify this book as non-fiction or fiction”. And that’s an understatement! The book is filled with two things: a memoir (making this non-fiction) and scads of folklore (making it fiction).

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether you count this as fiction or non-fiction what matters is the detail to the lives described, the honesty and beauty of Thomson’s writing, the simplicity and beauty of the stories told even in their complexity, the characters and the personalities and the clash between the old ways and the newer ways and the beginning of the loss of a great oral tradition and a great culture. (Both of which Heaney remarks in his introduction. If you’re the kind of person who skips introductions by others and decide to read this, please, please read this one. It’s not terribly long and it is worth every single moment of it.

Ye gods but this book was beautiful. Lyrical and haunting and filled with all kinds of subtle and beautiful goodies you only need a willingness to see. I love this book so much I even have quotes for you.

Mrs Charles clicked her tongue. ‘The old people were full o’ superstitions,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ said Gilbert.

‘And maybe superstition is right,’ said his father.

‘Well,’ said Gilbert, ‘I think maybe the old people saw what we canna see. There is no doubt, Mother, that your mother saw things. Now if ye think o’ the trows, the little people — I believe there were some who could see them. And there’s no doubt the little people were in Shetland one time. Ye can see the houses they lived in down at Jarlshof where the excavations are and the doors are only so high.’ He held his hand by his knee. ‘So maybe the people one time had the power to see what’s hidden from us. In the hills there’s something to be seen, I’m sure o’ that. And on the sea.’

‘We believe what we believe,’ said his father, getting up and moving to the door. ‘And there’s no way to ken is it right or wrong.’

I went out with him.

Isn’t that an awesome quote? It covers most everything I love about this book, except for the attention to the crofter’s lives here.

Have another quote:

‘It’s no so long since it happened,’ Mrs Charleson said.

‘It would be a hundred years syne.’

‘Or maybe less,’ said Mrs Charleson. ‘It happened in the lifetime o’ a woman we all know. She died in 1914 and she was eighty-four.’

‘Well, that could be a hundred years,’ said Thomas. ‘She used to tell me the seals were Finns — Norway Finns.’

‘There was no truth in that,’ said Mrs Charleson.

‘There was truth in the crofter’s cows dying.’

‘Aye. But a lot o’ those other stories is lies.’

‘We think it is liesm,’ said Thomas. ‘But it was true some time. It happened some time. All those things happened.’

You may notice, I’m not giving you samples of the seal stories themselves. In truth, they’re woven through the narrative that is Thomson traveling across the northern parts of the coasts of Ireland and Scotland (not that Scotland has a southern coast, being attached to Britain there and all). And the love he has for these people and their way of life. The respect and the simply honesty… Sure, he’s fiddled a bit with the stories. He admits as much in his foreword. If only because he respected the wishes that some names be left out. If only because some of these stories were told to him in Gaelic then reinterpreted. But in these samples, mostly you can see the mindsets of various people regarding the stories. There’s a passage in the book, somewhere, about how Irish was treated in schools at the time or a generation before. It. Is. Heartbreaking.

There’s also a short chapter on seal music, by the by. I would have loved for that to be more in-depth than it was. As it is, it’s just a smidgeon of musical phrases, lyrics and miniscule drops of information – and the book without a ‘further information’ list!

I suppose what I should have started with are these quotes from the afterword.

‘I never know how to explain my obsession [with the seals],’ he comments when recounting a visit to Shetland in his search for seal legends. No explanation is necessary; but should one be required it is probably to be found in his answer to the Uist girl who, in tears, said the tales were all lies. ‘But,’ he replied, ‘I don’t think of the stories that way — as lies or truth. I like to hear them; that’s all.’

(And truly, he rarely, if ever, passes judgment on the stories he hears.

The People of the Sea, an exploration of this accumulation of folk traditions, is a truly unique book. On one level it is a masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, the product of a disciplined critical intellect. At other levels, it reflects the author’s singularly imaginative engagement with his subject, and his sympathetic rapport with the men, women and children on his travels in quest of seal legends and traditions.

It is a truly heart-warming piece of work. I wish I had more quotes for you. I wish the book came with a glossary for those not so good at piecing together the non-English words from the text. (Usually there are translations for the hard ones.) I wish I could give you all a copy and make you read it. It. Is. gorgeous. Really it is. I loved it. There’s a lyric and beauty to it that seems utterly perfect for the creatures it speaks of, and nothing Seamus Heaney (who wrote the foreword) or Stewart Sanderson (who wrote the afterword) have to say about seals and a more scientific approach to seals can change the magic that lies within these words. Not that Heaney or Sanderson try to prove the seal legends wrong, mind you. (Mostly, by the by, this is Sanderson.) But the difference in tone with Thomson’s work is easy to feel.

Other Reviews

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