Possibly from Germanic 'selma' meaning divine helmet, or popularized by the Ossian poems.
Selma carries a dual heritage, drawing from both the Old Norse name Anselma — meaning "divine protection" — and the Arabic word salima, signifying "peace" or "safety." Its Scandinavian variant gained particular traction through the medieval Germanic tradition of strong, protective feminine names, and it spread across northern Europe as a standalone given name during the Romantic era, when writers and poets were captivated by Norse mythology and saga. The name is perhaps most famously associated with Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish author who in 1909 became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils brought her worldwide renown and cemented the name's literary prestige across Scandinavia and beyond. In America, the name gained a different kind of cultural weight through Selma, Alabama — the city that became a landmark of the civil rights movement and is forever tied to the 1965 voting rights marches on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In popular culture, Selma has enjoyed gentle waves of revival.
The animated series The Simpsons introduced generations to Selma Bouvier, giving the name a wry comedic familiarity. More recently, Ava DuVernay's 2014 film Selma reintroduced the name's serious, historic gravity to a new generation. Today the name sits at a comfortable intersection of the vintage and the meaningful — cherished in Scandinavia as a classic, and appreciated elsewhere for its soft sounds and layered story.