One of the many mysteries of the sea is the manifestation of mermaids. Hidden beneath the waves, these beautiful feminine creatures with long flowing tresses and the shimmery tale of a fish, have a conflicting reputation. Said to always carry a comb and a mirror with them, they are usually depicted sitting elegantly on rocks grooming themselves, or singing with their irresistibly sweet voices. However, whether they are deemed as amiable or untrustworthy depends entirely on the story being told and its potential origins.

It appears that for the most part, the fate of the mermaid’s character depends on whether the story is a fairy tale, in which they can often be seen as benevolent beings in service to the mortal realm, or whether it is a myth or folktale, which tends portray the mermaids as somewhat chaotic and unkind. This may be a huge generalisation, but it can be observed that many fairy tales, particularly modernised fairy tales, tend to focus on the kindness and compassion of any magical creatures depicted. However, traditional fairy tales tend to favour more tragic endings that their modernised counterparts, which often prefer happy endings (I am looking at you Disney). Conversley, traditional folk tales and myths tend observe many ‘supernatural’ entities as something to be feared, as a way to emphasise the moral or lesson of the story.

How else are you going to stop your children swimming in the dangerous parts of the sea? Or ensure that your children go to bed when their told? Tell them that the evil mermaids will get them, or that The Sandman will come in the middle of the night to steal their eyes and feed them to his children. Cruel as it is, I can imagine it was likely effective once upon a time.

It is important to remember that different countries and cultures have their own traditional mermaid characters that are depicted both positively and negatively. For example, in Chinese folklore, mermaids were seen to symbolise both grace and beauty. It was said that their tears would transform into pearls and that they had the power to craft a valuable frost-white material that could stay eternally dry. Although, these talents were greatly desirable, any fisherman who set out to hunt mermaids were viewed poorly, for the general attitude towards mermaids was that they should remain somewhat untouched and protected. Other European-based anecdotes portray mermaids as possessing a great understanding of healing, herbs, and prophetic powers. There are stories that show mermaids giving out medical advice for the benefit of the sick ('Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song' by R. H. Cromek), and in some rare cases giving their own lives for the survival of someone else.

Unfortunately, in some folk stories where the mermaids have great knowledge to impart and wishes to grant, there are cases where the mermaids are caught and held to ransom for the exploitation of their gifts. Usually within these tales, there is a twist to the bargains that are made and the wishes that are granted. For example, in Lutey & The Mermaid, a fisherman earns three wishes when he saves a stranded mermaid and helps her back to the sea. After granting them to him, she tries to pull him into the water, but he manages to get away. Although he has gained the powers he had wished for, he can only enjoy them for nine years before he is compelled to return to the deep, and as one of his wishes was that the powers would descend through his family line, every nine years one of his descendants is believed to be lost at sea. These kinds of stories speak to a tumultuous relationship between humans and mermaids, with one always trying to exploit the other. I would say, anyone who had captured a mermaid for the exploitation of her powers deserved the twisted wishes they received, but Lutey had saved the mermaid, so did he really deserve the ‘curse’ that he had unwittingly helped to place upon his family? Or is it simply the desire for more than is necessary that was the sin?

Sadly many folk stories do not place mermaids in the spotlight of kindness and goodwill, instead many traditional beliefs reveal a far darker perspective. Mermaids were seen as ominous characters, associated not only with death, but misfortune, storms, and disasters. Not only did they come to represent unfortunate events, but were known to provoke them, seeking out human lives to drown or devour for their own pleasure. Aside from exploiting their enchanting singing voices to capture the unwitting sailors, they would also falsify their own troubles, pretending that they themselves are drowning or are entangled within underwater plants and desperately in need of a ‘brave white knight’ to save them. Then at the last minute, they would pounce, pulling them beneath the surface to their demise. The Scottish tale called ‘The Laird of Lorntie’, presents a mermaid in this way, however fortunately Lorntie is saved by his manservant before she has a chance to attack, much to her annoyance. In Germany, there is a myth relating to The Lorelai, a steep slate rock on the river Rhine, about a beautiful woman who threw herself off of this rock after being betrayed by her lover. Transformed into a siren, she would haunt sailors with her beautiful song, leading them to the their deaths. These depictions are far more common in myths and legends than they are in the carefully composed stories, which makes them all the more fascinating to me.

There are also some Celtic writings that record mermaids as being terribly large in size (c. 160 feet in length, The Annals of the Four Masters), portraying the mermaid more as a monster of the deep than a misunderstood mythical creature. However, their size, in most folk and fairy tales does not seem to be depicted in this way, thankfully, for that is when it starts to become more nightmarish than magical, so I’ll just leave this here for now.

Virtuous or villainous, these charming aquatic beings bridge our mortal realm with the unparalleled mystique of the deep blue oceans. Perhaps they are merely metaphors of the sea, beautiful yet dangerous, calm or choppy, gentle or rough. Changeable and inconsistent, perhaps the fate of a meeting with a mermaid would depend on the day, the location, the weather, and maybe even how you would treat them. I guess, to me, it makes sense that they are hard to pin down, hard to definitively describe, and difficult to understand, just like the sea itself, which is something we should always respect and never take for granted. Perhaps nothing is all good or all bad, and it is just our humanness that tries to categorise everything in this way for our own peace of mind, when really, in most cases, it could all just be a matter of perspective.

The Quest for an Immortal Soul

In some fairy tales, such as The Little Mermaid and Undine, it is maintained that although mermaids tend to live much longer than a human does, they don’t have eternal souls. In The Little Mermaid, it is disclosed that when a mermaid dies, she returns completely to the sea as seafoam, thus ceasing to exist. For both The Little Mermaid and Undine, it is their longing for an immortal soul, that will live on in heaven, that causes them to seek out a relationship with mortal men. The Little Mermaid suffers far more greatly in this pursuit, visiting a Sea Witch who gives her a potion that causes her to lose her gorgeous voice, suffer great pain while walking on her new legs, and still require the prince to fall in love and marry her in order to obtain part of his soul. Whereas, Undine needs no special potion to take on a human form, instead her focus is to earn a soul by finding a man who will marry her. However, in Undine, mermaids are said to be without any morals because they are without an eternal soul, and they only gain morals through this mortal marriage. Therefore, the arc of her story is very influenced by her own chaos and erratic behaviour, which makes achieving her goal that little bit harder. The Little Mermaid seems to be without this tendency to wreak havoc around her, and instead her plight is very much to do with the lack of her voice more than anything else. Nevertheless, neither mermaid in either story obtains the cherished human soul they so desired. Surprisingly, it is The Little Mermaid who has the more fortunate yet bittersweet end. For Undine, it is far more tragic in comparison.

Contrastingly, the notion of a mermaid having no soul seeps into another story titled The Fisherman & His Soul. However, it is not the mermaid who falls in love with the fisherman in order to gain a soul, it is the fisherman who falls in love with the mermaid, but in order to be with her he has to lose his soul. First, he asks a Priest how he may do this, but the Priest is so horrified by the whole situation he turns him away. Then, he asks a Witch, who reluctantly agrees to help him. Although he is ultimately successful in losing his soul, the mermaid never seems to respond to his calls and he is continuously haunted by his absent soul who speaks to him from afar. As can be expected, the end of the story is not a happy one, nevertheless it does show the extent one might go for love, even if it is unrequited. It also further cements the unusual relationship between mermaids and humans, creatures bound to very different worlds, and the hopelessness of an impossible love. And I suppose, it isn’t always the mermaid who desires a soul at all, many are happy to remain at sea where they belong.

Mermaids vs. Sirens

Moving on, the beliefs surrounding the similarities and differences of Mermaids and Sirens are varied and sometimes at odds with each other. However, I’ll try to unravel what I have learnt here…

Sirens seem to originate from Ancient Greece and were initially depicted as ‘human-headed birds’ with a beautiful singing voice that would lead sailors to their deaths on perilous rocks. It wasn’t until later on, that there were some, albeit few and far between, instances where sirens were shown to be part fish within various artworks.

In the Middle Ages, the depiction of ‘Sirens’ being the torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, became increasingly popular. They are said to captivate seafarers with their undeniable beauty and enchanting singing voice. Various texts throughout the period state that sirens could both be part bird or part fish and in some instances indicate that ‘Sirens are mermaids’ (Old German Physiologus, 11th century). In this case, it seems that the development of the kind of mermaids we know and love today grew out of the original Siren myths, overtime, accumulating their traits of having a beautiful singing voice, carrying and comb and mirror, and sitting on rocks with the potential to lure sailors to their deaths.

However, there is the belief that what differentiates Sirens from Mermaids is nothing more than their actions and demeanour. Both are half-woman/ half-fish, however, mermaids are gentler and more peaceful, often only aiming to enchant sailors with their voices to kiss them. Whereas sirens are seen as their evil and destructive counterparts that cause storms and use their voices to captivate sailors long enough to kill them. Some believe that the tales that depict mermaids as evil have mistaken a siren for a mermaid, which is why there are so any conflicting stories about them being either good or bad. Whereas, most stories that specifically depict sirens seem to show them all in a negative light.

Nevertheless, I am more inclined to believe the former, that mermaids were borne out of the mythology of sirens, and that ultimately their names are somewhat synonymous. I say this because, in researching mermaid mythology, the list of stories, fairy tales, and folk lore is extensive, from all over the world, portraying mermaids in all kinds of ways, that it is hard to believe that so many would have been ‘mistaken’. The mermaids character being benevolent or evil depends on, as I have said, the story-teller, and the purpose of the story being told, not to mention the traditional beliefs from where the stories originate.

Also, when you translate the word mermaid into many latin-based languages, what do you get? Sirens.

French: ‘sirène’
Italian: ‘sirena’
Spanish: ‘sirena’
———
Irish: ‘mermaid’
Dutch: ‘meermin’
German: ‘meerjungfrau’

And when you look at the origins of the words ‘mermaid’ and ‘siren’, it is evident that they have descended from different languages from different parts of the world and at different times.

“Siren” originates directly from the Greek ‘seirḗn’, meaning ‘a dangerous, half-bird, half-woman creature that lures sailors to their deaths with her enchanting song’. The word travels through the Latin ‘siren’, Late Latin ‘sirena’, and Old French ‘sirene’, before settling as ‘siren’ in Middle English. Sirens first appeared in The Odyssey by Homer, written around 750 BCE.

“Mermaid” originates from the Middle English words ‘mere’, meaning ‘lake, pool, sea’, and ‘mayde’, meaning ‘maid’. Its first known written use is around 1390, in The Nun's Priest's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.

‘Siren’ is a much older word than ‘Mermaid’, so, if the beings are different and both existed throughout the entirety of human history, even if just in fables, would there not have been a separate word to describe mermaids before 1390?

Arguably, there probably was, since the history of mermaid-like creatures dates back further than even the birth of sirens in 750 BCE. There are examples of similar beings depicted in Mesopotamian mythology (Goddess Atargatis, c.5000 BC), Assyrian mythology (The Babylonian God Ea, c.1000 BC), and even an earlier example of mermaids in England, with the first known portrayal carved inside the Norman Chapel of Durham Castle- which was built in 1078, 312 years before Chaucer’s tale. Whatever these part-fish entities were known as at these times and in their various languages, I don’t know. Perhaps they had completely different names for them altogether. Even so, I think this goes to show how both folklore and words evolve overtime as the stories and characters are passed through the generations, making changes based on their own traditions and, perhaps, experiences.

If you have any other knowledge regarding the similarities or differences between mermaids and sirens, feel free to leave a comment down below.

Mermaid Tales

• The Little Mermaid written by Hans Christian Anderson (Danish, 1837)

• Undine written by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (German, 1811)

• The Golden Mermaid collected by Andrew Lang (English?, c.1906)

• The Entangled Mermaid collected by William Elliot Griffis (Dutch, c.1918)

• The Fisherman & His Soul written by Oscar Wilde (Irish, 1891)

• The Mermaid & The Boy collected by Jens Andreas Friis (Sámi, 1856)

• The Girl-Fish collected by Andrew Lang (English, c.1906)

• The Yellow Dwarf written by Madame d'Aulnoy (French, 1698)

• The Mermaid of Zennor collected by William Bottrell (Cornish, 1873)

• The Legend of Padstow Doombar (The Mermaid of Padstow) written by Enys Tregarthen (Nellie Sloggett) (Cornish, 1905/1906)

• Lutey & The Mermaid (Cornish myth)

• The Lorelai (German myth, c.1801)

Sources:

1. ‘A Dictionary of Fairies’ by Katherine Briggs (1977)

2. ‘Sea Enchantress’ by Benwell & Waugh (1961)

3. “Are Mermaids Real? Mermaid Myths & Tales from Around the World” (Scuba.com)

4. Mermaid Carving at Durham Castle (howarthlitchfield.com)