The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend

David Thomson, raised among Scottish fishermen and storytellers, was obsessed from childhood by the Celtic seal legend - the body of tales and songs about the "selchie, " or gray Atlantic seal.
In the early 1950s he took a journey to seek the legend out, in the Hebrides, on the east coast of Scotland, on the west coast of Ireland, in the Shetlands and the Orkney Islands - places where magic co-exists with reality and where pe-Christian traditions and beliefs somehow endure.
He gives us here the fruit of his search as he found it - in the pub, on the beach, at a country dance - and he tells us something of the men, women, and children from whom he heard the stories. He also tells of his own encounters with seals, and of the dreamlike hold that these have had on him. The result is, in the words of his friend Seamus Heaney, a poetic achievement - a work of "intuitive understanding, perfect grace, and perfect pitch."