Mermaid Saga: Women of the Deep

A mermaid (from the Middle English mere in the obsolete sense 'sea' (as in maritime, the Latin mare, "sea") + maid(en)) is a legendary aquatic creature with the head and torso of human female and the tail of a fish. The male version of a mermaid is called a merman; the gender-neutral plural is merfolk or merpeople. Various cultures throughout the world have similar figures.
Much like Sirens, mermaids in stories would sometimes sing to sailors and enchant them, distracting them from their work and causing them to walk off the deck or cause shipwrecks. Other stories would have them squeeze the life out of drowning men while trying to rescue them. They are also said to take them down to their underwater kingdoms. In Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid it is said that they forget that humans cannot breathe underwater, while others say they drown men out of spite.

The Sirens of Greek mythology are sometimes portrayed in later folklore as mermaid-like; in fact, some languages use the same word for both creatures. Other related types of mythical or legendary creature are water fairies (e.g. various water nymphs) and selkies, animals that can transform themselves from seals to humans.

Legend and myth

Legends of these half-human, half-fish humanoids have circulated for millennia, even as far back as 5,000 B.C.[1] It has been widely suggested or implied that manatees or dugongs could be behind the myth of the mermaid. An example supporting this theory would be that Christopher Columbus had logged that he had seen mermaids on his journey to the new world, but thought they would be more attractive. These large aquatic mammals are notable for the way in which they carry their young, cradled in their arms much as a human would carry a baby. It is possible that sailors seeing these unfamiliar beasts for the first time, would assume that they had in fact stumbled across some sort of humanoid species, and consequently spread their accounts of the sightings through their homelands on their return from voyages. It has even been posited that the traditional image of a mermaid with long flowing hair could be attributed to manatees breaking the ocean surface underneath patches of seaweed, and giving the unfamiliar observer the impression of having long hair. Sightings from first-hand witnesses generally describe mermaids who do not talk and have green or black hair.

Ancient Near East

Tales of mermaids are nearly universal. The first known mermaid stories appeared in Assyria, ca. 1000 BC. Atargatis, the mother of Assyrian queen Semiramis, was a goddess who loved a mortal shepherd and in the process killed him. Ashamed, she jumped into a lake to take the form of a fish, but the waters would not conceal her divine nature. Thereafter, she took the form of a mermaid — human above the waist, fish below — though the earliest representations of Atargatis showed her as being a fish with a human head and legs, similar to the Babylonian Ea. The Greeks recognized Atargatis under the name Derketo, where she was often conflated with Aphrodite.
Prior to 546 BCE, the Milesian philosopher Anaximander proposed that mankind had sprung from an aquatic species of animal. He thought that humans, with their extended infancy, could not have survived early on. This idea does not appear to have survived Anaximander's death.
A popular Greek legend has Alexander the Great's sister, Thessalonike, turn into a mermaid after her death.[2] She lived, it was said, in the Aegean and when sailors would encounter her, she would ask them only one question: "Is Alexander the king alive?" (Greek: Ζει ο βασιλιάς Αλέξανδρος;), to which the correct answer would be "He lives and still rules" (Greek: Ζει και βασιλεύει). Any other answer would spur her into a rage, where she transformed into a Gorgon and meant doom for the ship and every sailor onboard.
Lucian of Samosata in Syria (2nd century CE) in De Dea Syria ("Concerning the Syrian Goddess") wrote of the Syrian temples he had visited:
"Among them - Now that is the traditional story among them concerning the temple. But other men swear that Semiramis of Babylonia, whose deeds are many in Asia, also founded this site, and not for Hera Atargatis but for her own Mother, whose name was Derketo"
"I saw the likeness of Derketo in Phoenicia, a strange marvel. It is woman for half its length, but the other half, from thighs to feet, stretched out in a fish's tail. But the image in the Holy City is entirely a woman, and the grounds for their account are not very clear. They consider fishes to be sacred, and they never eat them; and though they eat all other fowls, they do not eat the dove, for she is holy so they believe. And these things are done, they believe, because of Derketo and Semiramis, the first because Derketo has the shape of a fish, and the other because ultimately Semiramis turned into a dove. Well, I may grant that the temple was a work of Semiramis perhaps; but that it belongs to Derketo I do not believe in any way. For among the Egyptians, some people do not eat fish, and that is not done to honor Derketo."

Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights include several tales featuring "Sea People". Unlike the depiction in other mythologies, these are anatomically identical to land-bound humans, differing only in their ability to breathe and live underwater. They can (and do) interbreed with land humans, the children of such unions inheriting the ability to live underwater. See The King of Persia and the Princess of The Sea.)

British

The Fisherman and the Syren, by Frederic Leighton, c. 1856–1858
Mermaids were noted in British folklore as both ominous, foretelling disaster, and provoking it.Several variants of the ballad Sir Patrick Spens depict a mermaid speaking to the doomed ships; in some, she tells them they will never see land again, and in others, she claims they are near shore, which they are wise enough to know means the same thing. They can also be a sign of rough weather.
Some mermaids were described as monstrous in size, up to 160 feet.[4]
Mermaids could also swim up rivers to freshwater lakes. One day, in a lake near his house, the Laird of Lorntie saw, as he thought, a woman drowning, and went to aid her; a servant of his pulled him back, warning that it was a mermaid, and the mermaid screamed after that she would have killed him if it were not for his servant.
On occasion, mermaids could be more beneficient, giving humans means of cure.
Some tales raised the question of whether mermaids had immortal souls to answer it in the negative. The figure of Liban appears as a sanctified mermaid, but she was originally a human being transformed into a mermaid; after three centuries, when Christianity had come to Ireland, she came to be baptized.
Mermen were also noted, as wilder and uglier than mermaids, but they were described as having little interest in humans.

Suggested Readings

Story collections

A Treasury of Mermaids: Mermaid Tales from Around the World by Shirley Climo

Mermaid Tales from Around the World by Mary Pope Osborne

Mermaids by Elizabeth Ratisseau.

Coffee-table books with essays

From the Deep Waters: Maidens of Myth and Mystery edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya

Mermaids: Nymphs of the Sea by Theodore Gachot.

A museum book

The Tale of the Mermaid: An Essay on the Folklore and Mythology of the Mermaid, Accompanied by Illustrations of Objects from the Exhibition by Lee Ellen Griffith.

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