Mermaid Legends — Oldways

The mermaid is the most famous of the water beings, and the most widely distributed. She is Atargatis of the ancient Near East, the Siren of the Greek, the Lorelei of the Rhine, the Rusalka of the Slavic river, Mami Wata of the West African coast, the Ningyo of Japan, the Melusine of the French, the Selkie of the Hebrides, the title figure of Hans Christian Andersen’s Den lille havfrue, the Disney adaptation, and the Fiji Mermaid of P. T. Barnum.

The following pages collect the wider setting of the mermaid: the Kelpie of the Scottish lochs, the Rusalka water spirits, and the Mami Wata water spirits.

Atargatis and the ancient Near East

The earliest known mermaid is the Syrian Atargatis of Hierapolis Bambyce (modern Manbij, in northern Syria), the great mother goddess whose cult combined the worship of a fish, a dove, and a woman. The cult of Atargatis is described in the De Dea Syria of Lucian of Samosata (c. 150 AD), and the image of the fish-tailed goddess is preserved in the coinage of the Seleucid, the Roman, and the Parthian empires. Atargatis fell in love with a mortal shepherd, accidentally killed him, and was so ashamed that she threw herself into a lake and took the form of half a woman, half a fish. Her cult was wide: it reached Phoenicia, Palestine, and the coast of Asia Minor, and her image was carried into the Greek world as the goddess Aphrodite Ourania and into the Roman world as Venus.

The Babylonian apkallu — the seven sages of the deep water — are the wise men of the Babylonian tradition, half-fish, half-human, who taught the arts of civilisation to humanity. Adapa, the sage of the city of Eridu, was the apkallu who broke the wing of the south wind, who was summoned to the heavens by the god Anu, and who was offered the bread of eternal life but refused. The apkallu are the figure of the merman before the merman had a name.

The Greek Sirens and the Lorelei

The Greek Sirens are the first mermaids of the European tradition, and the most dangerous. The Sirens were, in the Odyssey of Homer (c. 800 BC), two women of the meadow of flowers between the rocks, who sang sailors to their deaths. The Sirens of the Odyssey are half-woman, half-bird, not half-fish — but the iconography of the Siren was later combined with the iconography of the fish-tailed Atargatis, and the Sirens of the medieval bestiary are half-woman, half-fish, with a comb and a mirror, sitting on the rocks and singing.

The Lorelei of the Rhine is the German equivalent of the Siren, and the most famous of the German water-beings. The Lorelei sat on the rock of Loreley on the right bank of the Rhine near St Goarshausen, combed her long golden hair, sang a song, and the boatmen on the Rhine looked up and were wrecked on the rocks. The Lorelei legend is recorded in the ballad Die Lorelei of Heinrich Heine (1824) and in the Rheinsagen of Vincenz von Zuccalmaglio. The Lorelei is a figure of the in-between: she is the river, and she is the danger, and she is the beauty that the boatman should not trust.

The Slavic Rusalka

The Slavic Rusalka is the most mournful of the European mermaids. She is, in the older Russian tradition, a young woman who died before her wedding and who returns to the riverbank in early summer to dance and to mourn. She is fair-skinned, green-eyed, with long wet hair, and she sits in the willows and sings, and she lures young men into the water. She is the figure of the in-between: not alive, not dead, and not divine. She is the figure of Rusalka Week, the week after Pentecost, when the rusalki leave the water and dance in the fields, and when the villagers leave the fields unwatered and the women leave the washing unwatered, in case the rusalki should drown them. The Rusalka appears in the opera Rusalka of Antonín Dvořák (1901), in Pushkin’s “Rusalka” (1832), and in the Slavic folklore of the modern rural tradition.

The Caribbean Mami Wata

Mami Wata of the West African coast is the half-fish, half-woman of the Mami Wata tradition, the bringer of wealth, of foreign goods, of sexuality, and of the danger of the river. The Mami Wata tradition is documented across the coastal regions of the Gulf of Guinea, the Niger Delta, the Cameroon coast, the Congo, and Angola, and it is exported into the syncretic Vodou of Haiti, the Candomblé of Brazil, the Espiritismo of Cuba, the Obeah of Jamaica, and the Hoodoo of the American South. The Mami Wata paintings of the Ijo, the Igbo, and the Bamileke have been collected and exhibited by the Smithsonian and the British Museum, and the figure is the most visible of the water beings, and the most travelled.

The Selkie of the Hebrides

The Selkie of the Hebrides and the Faroe Islands is the seal-woman of the Celtic fringe, and she is the mermaid of the North Atlantic. The Selkie is a seal in the water, and a woman on the land, and she can take either form. The Selkie legend is recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga (c. 1230) and in the modern oral tradition of the Hebrides, and the figure is closely related to the Kelpie of the lochs and the Merrow of the Irish coast. The Selkie is a figure of the in-between: she is the seal and the woman, the water and the land, the wild and the domestic. The Selkie is also the figure of the tragic marriage: a fisherman steals the Selkie’s seal-skin, the Selkie is forced to be his wife, and one day she finds the skin and returns to the water.

The Melusine of French legend

The Melusine of French legend is the fée of the fountain of Lusignan, who married Raymond of Lusignan, the founder of the House of Lusignan, and who was condemned to take the serpent form on Saturdays. The Melusine tradition is recorded in the Roman de Mélusine of Jean d’Arras (1393), and the figure was carried into the heraldry of the House of Lusignan, into the courts of Cyprus and Armenia, and into the Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian legends of the Meluzyna. The Melusine is a figure of the impossible marriage, the marriage of a knight and a faery, the marriage of the new and the older world.

Andersen and Disney

Hans Christian Andersen’s story Den lille havfrue (1837), known in English as The Little Mermaid, is the modern European fairy-tale version of the mermaid, and the most influential. Andersen’s mermaid is a young woman of the sea, the daughter of the sea-king, who falls in love with a human prince, who trades her tongue to a sea-witch for legs, who walks on her new legs in pain at every step, who is unable to speak, and who is condemned to become the foam of the sea, until she is rescued by the daughters of the air. The Disney version of The Little Mermaid (1989) is a reframing of the Andersen, with a happy ending: the mermaid Ariel trades her voice to a sea-witch for legs, marries the prince Eric, and lives happily ever after.

The Fiji Mermaid and Barnum

The Fiji Mermaid of P. T. Barnum (1842) was a fabricated creature: the dried upper body of a monkey sewn to the dried lower body of a fish, displayed at the American Museum in New York in 1842, exhibited under the title Fejee Mermaid, and shown to great popular success. The Fiji Mermaid is the figure of the modern mermaid, the fabricated mermaid, the commercial mermaid, the figure of the American water tradition of the nineteenth century.

The mermaid as seductress and warning

The mermaid is a figure of two meanings. She is the seductress of the Lorelei, the Siren, the Rusalka, the Mami Wata, the Atargatis who drowns. She is also the warning of the danger of the water, of the foreign woman, of the beautiful stranger. The mermaid is the bringer of the new: the Andersen mermaid, the Disney mermaid, the Melusine mermaid, the Selkie mermaid, who brings the love, the child, the house, the kingdom. She is the figure of the in-between, the figure of the water, the figure of the danger and the gift. The mermaid is the most persistent of the water beings, and the most beautiful.

Sources and Further Reading

Ben-Ari, Nitsa. “Mermaids and Sirens in Jewish and Arabic Lore” (in Folklore 110).
Werness, Hope B. The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art. Continuum, 2006.
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. Yale University Press, 1987.
Mathieu, Corin, and Sayers, Will. The Mermaids of Lake Champlain (in Mythical Lake Creatures).