Are Selkies Real? Orkney Folklore Explained (Trows, Finfolk)

Step into the mystical world of Orkney folklore, a realm of shape-shifting seals, mischievous mound-dwellers, powerful sea sorcerers, guardian spirits and a serpent so vast its teeth became the islands themselves. Shaped by centuries of Norse and Scottish influence and bound tightly to the ever-present sea, these traditional tales are more than entertainment — they explain the landscape, enforce old rules of good behaviour, and record how generations of Orcadians made sense of a beautiful, unforgiving place. Here is a field guide to the creatures that haunt the Orcadian imagination, and where you can still feel their presence today.

Where Orkney's Legends Came From

Orkney's position as a cultural crossroads between Scandinavia and Scotland produced a folklore all its own. Norse beliefs carried by Viking settlers blended with older Pictish ideas, and the result is a body of story that explains natural phenomena, marks dangerous places, and quietly enforces the social rules of a small island community. The sea dominates everything — it gives, it drowns, and it fills the imagination with beings who live just beneath its surface.

None of this was written down for a long time. The tales survived orally, told by the fireside through the long dark winters, and were only gathered into books from the 1700s onward — most famously by the folklorists Walter Traill Dennison and, in the 20th century, Ernest Marwick, whose collections remain the standard references, alongside the modern retellings of Orkney storyteller Tom Muir. Everything below is folklore — told here as tradition and legend, not as literal fact.

Selkies: The Seal Folk

Perhaps the most famous figures in Orkney folklore are the selkies, magical beings who live as seals in the sea but can shed their skins to walk on land as beautiful men and women. Their stories carry a distinctive Orcadian melancholy — they are almost always tales of longing, love and loss rather than menace.

• The stolen sealskin: The most common motif has a man finding a discarded sealskin on the shore and hiding it, trapping the selkie woman in human form. She marries him and bears children, but her yearning for the sea never fades. If she ever recovers the hidden skin, she returns to the ocean and her human family is left on the shore — a bittersweet ending echoed all across the North Atlantic.
• The Goodman o' Wastness: One of the best-known Orcadian versions tells of a scornful bachelor from the West Mainland who steals a selkie's skin and takes her as a wife, only to lose her years later when one of their children innocently reveals where the skin was hidden.
• Selkie men: In tradition the males sought out dissatisfied human women, coming ashore to father children — a folk explanation, some said, for the occasional webbed hand or a family "born to the sea."

Selkies are gentle, tragic figures, quite distinct from the more dangerous finfolk below — though both belong to the world beneath the waves. Watch a common or grey seal haul out on the rocks at dusk, its almost-human eyes following you, and it becomes very easy to see how the legend began.

Trows: Mischief from the Mounds

Orkney's answer to fairies or trolls, the trows are supernatural beings said to dwell inside ancient burial mounds — known locally as "howes" or "knowes." They are creatures of the night, fearing the sunlight that could trap them above ground until dawn.

• Appearance and mischief: Usually described as small and grey-clad, trows love to play tricks — leading travellers astray, souring milk, and sometimes stealing livestock or even babies, leaving a sickly "changeling" in the cradle in place of a healthy child.
• A love of music: Trows have an insatiable appetite for fiddle music. Many tales tell of a local musician "taken by the trows" to play at their revels inside a mound, returning years later having aged barely at all — or, in the darker versions, crumbling to dust the moment they step back into human time.
• Hill trows and sea trows: Lore distinguishes the land-dwelling hill trow from the more grotesque, seaweed-draped sea trow, blamed for foul weather and for stealing fish straight from the line.
• Wards: Trows were said to fear iron and fresh running water — so a nail in the pocket or a stream to cross offered protection to anyone abroad after dark.

Respect for the trows and their mounds was woven into everyday life, and it left a mark on the map. The very name of Finstown and the mounds scattered across the surrounding West Mainland sit at the heart of trowie country, where old habit still cautions against disturbing a "knowe" after dark.

The Hogboon: Guardian of the Mound

Not every mound-dweller was to be feared. The hogboon (from the Old Norse haugbúi, "mound-dweller") was a benign guardian spirit believed to live in a howe close to a farmstead, watching over the family and their livestock. In return for his protection, the household left offerings — most often a share of milk or a bannock, sometimes poured over the mound at festivals.

The relationship was a bargain, and it could sour. In the well-known tale of the hogboon of Hellihowe, a family grew careless with their offerings; the spirit turned from helpful to spiteful, plaguing them so relentlessly that they eventually packed up and moved farm altogether — only to find, as they crossed the hill with their belongings, that the hogboon had hidden himself in a butter-kirn and come along with them. The moral was plain to any Orcadian audience: keep faith with the old spirit of the land, or pay for neglecting it.

Finfolk: Masters of Marine Magic

Distinct from the selkies, the finfolk are powerful, amphibious sorcerers said to inhabit a luxurious undersea kingdom called Finfolkaheem. They are wealthy, beautiful and dangerous in equal measure.

• Abduction: Finfolk were feared for snatching humans, rowing with such supernatural speed that legend claimed they could reach Norway in seven strokes, carrying off mortals to serve as spouses or servants.
• The vanishing island: They controlled enchanted, sometimes-disappearing islands — chief among them Hildaland, which a determined farmer is said to have seized from them using salt and iron crosses, after which it became the real, visible island of Eynhallow ("holy isle") in Eynhallow Sound.
• The finwife's fading: A finwife who married a mortal was said to lose her beauty and magic with each passing year, dwindling into a bent, ugly hag — a grim inversion of the selkie's longing for home.

Though sometimes confused with selkies because of their shared sea-home, the finfolk represent a far more potent and malevolent force in Orkney lore.