Song of the Sea

Ireland’s story

At the beginning of the film, Song of the Sea we are introduced to Conor, a lighthouse keeper, Bronagh his wife and their only child Ben. They are a very loving and happy family until Bronagh dies giving birth to their daughter Saoirse. Early on in the film we learn that the girl, who is unable to speak, may be one of the seal-like quasi-humans known to tradition as selkies. Things change for everyone when their very bossy Granny arrives and declares that the lighthouse is no place for Saoirse and her brother Ben to be reared. So she bundles them into her car and takes them to the town where she lives. This is portrayed as a dark and grimy place compared to the natural beauty of all that surrounds their home.

The journey home to Tir na nOg
In the emotional and physical absence of their parents, the children grow sullen and reserved. Ben sees Saoirse as a nuisance and is aggressive towards her because he associates the death of his mother with her. When Ben plans his escape with the intention of returning to his father, Saoirse is determined to come with him and so they begin their journey home.

It is a long journey the children are invited to undertake because underlying it is one that takes us into Irish mythology and its quest for Tir na nOg. As Ben and Saoirse begin their journey, they encounter three faeries who hope that Saoirse will sing the song of the sea for them so that hearing it they and all their fellow faeries may be transported to Tír na nÓg. When Ben and Saoirse take a bus into the country we experience the delights of nature after the grim world of the city. It is in this connection that the film quotes the words of W B Yeats’s poem, The Stolen Child.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild”
As well as being reunited with the beauty of nature the children are also reunited with their dog Cu who was not allowed to go with them when they went to live in town. Thereafter he becomes their unfailing companion for the rest of their journey representing all that is best in the animal world in the way he cares for the children and relates with them in such a sensitive and harmonious way. For example, he helps to carry Saoirse when without the seal coat she inherited from her mother she becomes increasingly ill.

When Saoirse falls into a sacred well, Ben follows her and meets the Great Seanachai who tells Ben his sister has been kidnapped by the owls of Macha the witch. He gives the boy one of his hairs which he says will lead him to the witch’s house. In his concern to find Saoirse Ben realises how unfair he has been to her all these years, especially when he remembers what his father said to him when Saoirse was born, “Ben, you must look after your sister”.

Life’s sufferings can turn our hearts to stone…
Ben then meets Macha, who is not the villain he imagined as she explains to him why she turns people into stone. She tells Ben that when her own son, the giant Mac Lir, suffered from a broken heart after his wife died she, in order to prevent his feelings from destroying him, took them away by turning him into stone or into the rock jutting up out of the sea near Ben’s home. Macha says she is determined to do the same for everyone, even herself if it will save them from the feelings their sufferings arouse.

… or take us to Tir na nOg
Ben manages to rescue Saoirse and they fly back home with the spirits of Mac Lir’s dogs. When they arrive home in the middle of a storm Conor attempts to take them back to the mainland to get Saoirse to a hospital. Meanwhile, Ben realising that his sister will not get well unless he retrieves her seal coat he dives into the sea and recovers the coat helped by the seals and his father. The reunited family are then washed up on Mac Lir’s island, where Saoirse, reunited with her coat, is restored to health and sings her song. Hearing it the faeries from across Ireland gather and together travel to Mac Lir’s island, and Mac Lir himself emerges with Macha and his dogs and they head off to Tír na nÓg.

Bronagh then appears and announces the sad news that she and Saoirse must depart as well. However, since Saoirse is part human, Bronagh is able to take her coat and leave her behind to live as a human. After a tearful goodbye the Faeries depart across the sea and Ben and his family happily return home to their island and when Granny arrives she decides that the children are probably best left with their father.

The interpretive key to all stories
Song of the Sea tells afresh the story of the inner journey we all go on if we are to realise our dream that Tir na nOg stands for. This is the deep dream innate to everything and it is of the joy that we get from the love and the relationships that are at the core of life. This inner journey we are all invited to undertake is the interpretive key to all our stories and songs.

Stories are medicine. … They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything – we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. C P Estes

The purpose of every story
The story told in Song of the Sea begins and ends with an idyllic portrayal of where we all get our first taste of our dream. This is depicted in the beautiful picture we are given in the opening scene of the film of the loving environment that Conor and Bronagh provide for their son Ben. Similarly, the film ends in the warm glow of a family happily heading home having been given the recipe for realising their dream. This came in the words of Bronagh inviting them to remember her love by telling stories and singing songs.

A three-tiered world
What happens on the journey towards the realisation of this dream is set in the context of Irish mythology with its three tiered world of human beings struggling with good and bad spirits to realise their dream. These spirits can help or hinder this human quest. The culture that dominates the environment in which we live today tends to see this world of good and bad spirits as unreal and irrelevant. Song of the Sea highlights this reality in the ways it suggests that we are slowly losing our ability to recognise the magic of the spirit world that always surrounds; we are losing touch with the fact that as human beings we are spirit as well as body. The purpose of stories like that told in Song of the Sea is to keep resurrecting the dream innate to all things. However this spiritual quest for our dream that is symbolised by Tir na nOg will not go away no matter how much it is neglected and repressed.

The outer voice
There is much in the film that represents the forces that make it difficult for people to see visions and to dream dreams. Acts 2:17 The first of these occurs when Bronagh dies and leaves Conor and his children having to deal with the loss of her love. Some years later the children are separated from their father when their Granny decides that they would be better off living with her in town. This is portrayed as dark and grimy compared to the beautiful place in which they had lived with their father. Then the children have to contend with Granny’s authoritarian and moralistic approach to life that boxes them in with her endless regulations. Ben too inherits this attitude in the way he keeps Saoirse and his dog on a leash and in his constant reminding of his sister that he is in charge and that she must do what she is told.

Saoirse can swim with the seals; listens to her inner voice

The inner voice
The whole film portrays the celtic dislike of having our dream restricted by authoritarianism and by the moralism it leads to. There is a spirit at work in us that dislikes being unduly restricted by the law; we have only to compare the German and the Irish attitude to jaywalking to realise this. This free spirit is represented in Song of the Sea by Saoirse and her mother as well as in a strange way by Cu their delightful dog who seems to live in a happy and healthy space. Saoirse like her mother belongs to a part human and part spirit world in that unlike other humans they can enter the sea and share the life of the seals. This is a life that is harmonious, free and a celebration of our being part human, part spirit and part divine. The ocean in mythology is a symbol of the divine world and Carl Jung would say that our outer, material world is like a small island in the vast ocean of the inner world of the spirit. We have come a long way from this view in our tendency to reject a large part of the spirit world and to make the material and the monetary side of life a priority.

Listening to the song of the sea
It is this song of the sea that Saoirse is in touch with and loves to listen to on the large sea shell she carries around with her; one that was originally given to Ben by his mother and that he passed on to Saoirse. It is this song of the sea that the three faeries she meets on her journey want to hear and be thereby transported to the land of their dreams that is symbolised by Tir na nOg. Unfortunately, she has not yet learned to play the song on her sea shell with the result that the faeries are turned into stone.

The dark feelings that deaden us
This being turned into stone by life’s sufferings is a major theme in Song of the Sea. How life’s sufferings can affect us adversely is expressed in the story of Mac Lir who like Conor was so consumed by dark feelings when his wife died that his tears created the sea. After watching what was happening to her son for some time his mother, Macha the owl witch, freed him from his feelings by turning him into a stone figure with a melancholic face. What she did out of compassion for her son is deeply significant as we tend to do the same to save ourselves and those we love from the effects that the dark feelings aroused by life’s sufferings cause. I think it is true to say that if we keep repressing our dark feelings rather than talking them out with ourselves and others we turn our hearts to stone and become emotionally unresponsive.

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezek 36:26

To name the demon is to slay it
In the light of this, it is interesting what Jesus did when he met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were running away from Jerusalem and the community they belonged to, driven by feelings such as fear, sadness and hopelessness. Jesus rather than ignoring these feelings asked them to bring them out into the open and to look at them as a small part of the bigger picture of his love for them. He knew the truth of the saying, To name the demon is to slay it.

That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Lk 24:33-35

Sufferings that enliven or deaden us
Much of the film is about how we handle the hardship that is part of every life as this can enliven and refine as well as deaden and turn our hearts to stone. The inner world that Ben’s many sufferings on his journey invited him into is seen in the way these refined his relationship with his sister. We see how he learns to answer his father’s plea that he should look after her in the way he gradually accepts, appreciates and shows his concern for her. At the end of the film he even risks his life to retrieve from the stormy ocean the seal coat that he knew would make Saoirse well again. This refinement of the way we love and relate is the way to Tir na nOg or to the land where our deepest dream is fulfilled. This is “life” Jesus has prepared for us and which he thus describes as a share in his own life with the Father and their Spirit. It is a life of intimacy and joy that the glory or deep attractiveness of love draws us into. It is the world we are given a glimpse of at the beginning and end of Song of the Sea.

 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent … But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. … The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jn 17:3,13,22-23

Song of the Sea is a wonderful film in the way that it puts us in touch again with the inner world of our deepest dreams. It does this by reminding us that what we dream of is more than material and monitory well being; that the human spirit will never cease reaching out to all that is symbolised by Tir na nOg. In Christian terms this human aspiration is expressed in St Augustine’s well known words, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our hearts will not rest until the rest in you.” The very natural way that Song of the Sea expresses our deepest quest is so human and yet so wondrous that it makes me proud to be Irish.

Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas, they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them. Russell Conwell

Having the sky for your limit