Kópakonan: The Mermaid of Vengeance from the Faroe Islands
One day, there will be enough dead to have encircled the island, their drowned arms linked together below. Only then will the humans’ cruelty to Kópakonan be repaid.
This is the story of Kópakonan, the seal-woman, who wraps herself in a skin of gorgeous, fishy fats to float through the icy waters of the halfway. In the Faroe Islands, she drifts between the north of Scotland and the south of Iceland, watching the jagged cliffs of the shore, counting the souls who plunge to their death from the heights.
One day, there will be enough dead to have encircled the island, their drowned arms linked together below. Only then will the humans’ cruelty to Kópakonan be repaid. She is angry, dispossessed of her loved ones, set adrift.
Some years ago, she was one of these souls: a human who takes her own life at sea. The Faroese say that these victims of suicide awaken in the icy waters to find that they now possess magical sealskins. They thrive in the sea in communion with the friendly animals there. Kópakonan found a home in the waters and became deeply beloved by the seal-people, and deeply adored by the beautiful, giant bull seal, the king of his kind.
Soft and wild, found and held, ensconced in a layer of sacred protection, a younger Kópakonan would celebrate her rebirth with the other selkies. Once a year, they would shed their skins and dance on their feet on the shore, declaring their freedom. A local farmer plotted to capture Kópakonan and to make her his wife, to force her to have his children, to keep her captive in domesticity. He stole her skin while she danced, leaving her cold and shivering in the night, now naked in human form.
From the storytelling of Edward Fuglø:
The seal woman … could not find her skin and searched for it whilst she cried in her despair because the night was over and the sun began to rise. Just before the sun rose out of the ocean, she caught the scent of her skin in the hands of the boy from Mikladali and she had to go to him. She begged him to return the skin, but he did not want to hear her words and went to his home; she had to follow because he was carrying her seal-skin.
The farmer locked Kópakonan’s magical power away in a chest, but as years went by, he accidentally left the key at home with their children. Kópakonan reclaimed her magic and returned to sea, warning the farmer not to hunt the great bull seal who was now her loving husband. Again, he treated her with disrespect, as his captive, his animal inferior. He murdered her husband and their two seal children, cut and cooked their flippers and heads, and left them for her to find in the caves. Now, she exacts revenge each time a man of the island leaps from the cliffs to his death.
The Faroese seafarers loved their stories of Kópakonan; they sang her legend to other sailors from Ireland, Britain, Norway and distant islands: Micronesia, the Philippines. Why tales of finfolk are found anywhere water touches land, where women and men choose a life of the sea, or fall in love with travelers. I imagine what it what it feels like, in such a small and static village, to long for escape by skin and fin. These are called “migratory folktales,” a global invention of our collective imagination to account for the wayward and mysterious souls who live amongst us.