PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MERMAIDS
CRISTINA BACCHILEGA is a professor and the graduate program director in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her published works include Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies; Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism; and Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chicago Folklore Prize, a Fulbright Teaching/Research Award, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
MARIE ALOHALANI BROWN is an associate professor and the undergraduate chair in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ‘Ī‘ī, won the Palapala Po‘okela Award for the best book on Hawaiian language, culture, and history.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2019
Introduction, notes, and selection copyright © 2019 by Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown
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“A Mermaid’s Story,” “Cola Pesce,” and “The Sailor and the Mermaid of the Sea” translated by Cristina Bacchilega. Translations copyright © 2019 by Cristina Bacchilega.
“The Mermaid of Honokawailani Pond,” “Kalamainu‘u, the Mo‘o who Seduced Puna‘aikoa‘e,” “La Pincoya,” and “Las Sirenas” translated by Marie Alohalani Brown. Translations copyright © 2019 by Marie Alohalani Brown.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bacchilega, Cristina, 1955– editor. | Brown, Marie Alohalani editor.
Title: The Penguin book of mermaids / edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown.
Other titles: Mermaids
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019017633 (print) | LCCN 2019020637 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133728 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505570 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mermaids. | Fairy tales—History and criticism. | Symbolism in fairy tales. | Women—Folklore. | Sex role—Folklore. | Human ecology. | Spirituality in literature.
Classification: LCC GR910 (ebook) | LCC GR910 .P34 2019 (print) | DDC 398.21—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017633
Cover art by akg-images / Boris Asafowitsch Messerer / Moscow, Glinka Museum of Music. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow
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Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by CRISTINA BACCHILEGA and MARIE ALOHALANI BROWN
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MERMAIDS
Water Deities and Sirens from Olden Times
Oannes
Kāliya, the Snake
Odysseus and the Sirens
The Tuna (Eel) of Lake Vaihiria
Mermaids and Other Merbeings in Europe
Merfolk in the Waters of Greenland and Iceland
The Marvels of the Waters About Greenland
The Merman
Two Mermaids and a Selkie from the Scottish Highlands
The Mermaid of Kessock
The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerrie
The Mermaid’s Grave
A Seal Woman or Maiden of the Sea from Ireland
Tom Moore and the Seal Woman
Dangerous Mermaids in Two Child Ballads
Clark Colven, Child 42A
The Mermaid, Child 289B
A Bavarian Freshwater Merman
In the Jaws of the Merman
A Freshwater Mermaid in Grimms’ Fairy Tales
The Nixie in the Pond
Three Estonian Water Spirits
Three Tales (Untitled)
Two Greek Mermaids
New Tunes
The Mermaid
Merfolk from the South of Italy
A Mermaid’s Story
Cola Pesce
The Sailor and the Mermaid of the Sea
Literary Tales
Legend of Melusina
Fortunio and the Siren
The Day after the Wedding, from Undine
The Little Mermaid
The Fisherman and His Soul
The Golden Mermaid
A Mermaid’s Tears
Abyssus Abyssum Invocat
Merfolk and Water Spirits Across Cultures
African Mermaids and Other Water Spirits
Aganju and Yemaja
Merfolk in The Thousand and One Nights
Julnar the Mermaid and Her Son Badar Basim of Persia
A Persian Sea Fairy
The Sea Fairy
Three Khasi Narratives About Water Spirits
About K——, the River Goddess Who Exists in Jaintia Hills
How Water Tied a Covenant with Man and the Divine Nature of Water
About a Puri Enchantment
A Mer-Wife in the Indian Ocean
Shoān, a Nicobar Tale
A Hairy Chinese Mermaid
Mermaids
Mermaids from Japan
The Mermaid
Yao Bikuni
Water Spirits of the Philippines
The Mermaid Queen
The Litao and Serena
The American and the Sirena of Amburayan
A Mermaid in Mabini
The Mermaid
A Mer-Wife in Northern Australia
Karukayn (Mermaids)
A Chamorro Girl Becomes a Mermaid
Sirena
The Feejee Mermaid Hoax
The Mermaid
Mermaids and Mo‘o of Hawai‘i
The Mermaid of Honokawailani Pond
Kalamainu‘u, the Mo‘o Who Seduced Puna‘aikoa‘e
Water Beings of South America
The Fisherman’s Water-Jug and Potato
Oiára, the Water-Maidens
The Pincoya
The Mermaids
African Water Spirits in the Caribbean
Ti Jeanne
Maman Dlo’s Gift
Water Beings of Indigenous North America
The Horned Serpent Runs Away with a Girl Who Is Rescued by the Thunderer
Of the Woman Who Loved a Serpent Who Lived in a Lake
How Two Girls Were Changed to Water-Snakes
Ne Hwas, the Mermaid
Legend of the Fish Women (Mermaids)
The Woman Who Married a Merman
Notes
Index
Introduction
The Stories We Tell About Mermaids and Other Water Spirits
The loveliest maiden is sitting
&n
bsp; High-throned in yon blue air,
Her golden jewels are shining,
She combs her golden hair;
She combs with a comb that is golden,
And sings a weird refrain
That steeps in a deadly enchantment
The list’ner’s ravished brain . . .
These stanzas of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Die Lore-Ley” (1823), rendered here in Mark Twain’s translation, “The Lorelei,” encapsulate some of the most salient and lasting features of the mermaid as a beautiful and dangerous being who attracts men to their watery deaths. Evoking popular Western iconography, Lorelei, bejeweled and combing her golden hair with her golden comb, appears to sailors and sings them a tune, the sweetness of which is irresistible and fatally entrances them. By the end, “Lorelei’s grewsome work” is done, and the water has engulfed “sailor and bark.”1
Historically, Lorelei’s tale emerged in the early nineteenth century as a local legend and cautionary tale connected with the dangerous waters and the echo heard in the vicinity of the tall cliff Loreley along the river Rhine in Germany. In a version that predates Heine’s, the beautiful maiden, betrayed by her loved one and accused of witchcraft, throws herself down from the cliff into the mirrorlike waters of the Rhine, where the echo of her name continues to be heard.2 Faced with the prospect of living without the one she loves, Lorelei desires to end her life, or eventually to be reunited with him in the water. But her backstory and act of romantic loyalty are forgotten in later musical and poetic compositions,3 in which she becomes emblematic of a widespread trope of femininity: a mermaid of alluring beauty who uses her sirenlike song to draw men to her and to water.
Mermaids: What and who are they? What do they look like? How are they different from sirens? How are they related to other water beings around the world? What are the cultural, religious, and popular beliefs that sustain specific plots of human-merfolk encounters? Why do we continue to tell stories about eerie mermaids and other water spirits in the twenty-first century?
The Penguin Book of Mermaids does not pretend to provide a definitive answer to any of these questions, but its more than sixty tales from a wide range of cultures and time periods illuminate our fascination with mermaids today. Our choices aim to broaden readers’ knowledge of European mermaids; to encourage considering today’s popular-culture mermaid in relation to her merfolk kin in belief tales across the globe, past and present; and to foster appreciation of the cultural significance of the tales, since mermaids and other water spirits raise issues of gender, voice, and sexuality, as well as knowledge, ecology, and spirituality—especially but not only in Indigenous contexts. Our interest, in other words, is to provide an opportunity to enjoy and reflect on the diversity across place and time of human experiences with the mysterious, nonhuman, aquatic other.
The tales in The Penguin Book of Mermaids are of folkloric or literary provenance, and our short introductions help to situate them historically and culturally, as well as to underscore that those circulating in oral tradition are not necessarily confined to the past. The multiplicity of languages in which mermaid and other water-spirit narratives are found and the variety of modes in which they are experienced present a huge challenge for a print anthology in the English language. It goes without saying that such a collection cannot represent all cultures or do justice to the nuances of the innumerable stories, so we have chosen to take on the challenge in ways that expand our expectations of what mermaids are and what they mean across languages and cultures. Notably, twenty tales appear here for the first time in English—translated from Estonian, Greek, Hawaiian, Ilocano, Italian, Japanese, Khasi, Persian, and Spanish. Furthermore, since mermaid tales are often repurposed for specific audiences and contexts, we have included two contemporary literary adaptations of “The Little Mermaid,” one from Japan and one from the United States.
Their Bodies, Our Anxieties
There is something deeply unsettling about a being whose form merges the human with the nonhuman. Whether they dwell in fresh or salt water, aquatic humanoids raise questions about what it is to be human and what lies beyond a human-centered world. Physically, they are both like and unlike us. They eat, sleep, and breathe in a realm that we can access only temporarily, but they can live among us, as they are often able to shed the nonhuman portion of their bodies and infiltrate the human world. And the shores and banks where we come across them, like the vessels on which we cross their waters, are thresholds between our world and theirs. We humans do not deal well with betwixt and between—liminality makes us anxious. We prefer our world organized into well-ordered and sharply defined categories, and we prefer to be in charge of it. Nonetheless, we are strangely drawn to the other who is in part a mirror image of us and appears within reach, even if mentally ungraspable.
Our anxieties about water beings are magnified by our attraction to them, and, even more so by the mermaid’s seductiveness, which in many stories results in the human’s loss of control, self, and even life. Embracing a water spirit can prove lethal. Will the mermaid drag us beneath the water to drown us or to give us a new life? If we were able, with the help of magic, to survive in the merfolk’s watery world, would we be their prisoners or their partners? And if a mermaid or maiden of the sea marries a human, will the relationship last, or will her otherness prevail?
Our ambivalence toward mermaids and other water spirits finds its representation in their bodies, which are often alluring, but can also be frightening. Perhaps most powerful is the image of the mermaid’s hybrid body—her fish-human, superfeminized, but strange form. Descriptions of the merbeing’s fishy lower half tend to be generic, but there are a few notable exceptions. Water spirits with the lower half of an ocean-dwelling porpoise are found in Oceania; human mixed with freshwater dolphin (or porpoise), dugong, or manatee bodies are found in the Amazon region. Other merbeings and water spirits are partly reptilian—dragons or water snakes. This hybridity may be a sign of superhuman, divine powers, as in the case of the mythic Oannes; or of lack and subhuman bestiality, as exemplified in the “Feejee mermaid” hoax.
Whether it has religious significance or is bestialized, the human-fish or human-snake hybrid is all the more a monster because its element is water, which is both a life source and a mystery that humans are transported by but cannot fully inhabit. Our use of the word “monster” here reaches back to the Latin monstrum, a “portent” or prodigious being that defies what is commonly found in nature and thus elicits both fear and awe. In contemporary cultural theory, we are reminded that “a construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘That which reveals,’ ‘That which warns.’”4 Biform water creatures are signs, then, that often serve both as admonition for humans not to cross borders and as incitement to do so.
Such admonition and incitement come in innumerable permutations across sexual, gendered, racial, species, ontological, and spiritual divides. For instance, reductive definitions of mythological Sirens as real-life “harlots outstanding in both instrumental music and sweetness of voice” who “reduced passers-by to beggary” already circulated in Greek and Roman antiquity;5 and the appellation of prostitutes as “mermaids” in early modern British culture6 likewise attests to how a woman who oversteps the boundaries of gender propriety has, over centuries, risked being defined as monstrous. In contrast, as shown in Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, it is manly, in fact heroic, to engage with their seductive powers, as long as one does not fall prey to them. Stories of merfolk and other water spirits thus provoke us to think about gender and our expectations of differently gendered bodies.
The representation of mermaids’ bodies seems to have a stable history, but when we consider the etymology of “mermaid” we find that, even confining ourselves to the mythologies of northern Europe, “maidens of the sea” come as undines, selkies or seals, nixies, and sea nymphs in many shapes and forms, some of which are not eve
n described. Furthermore, mermaids have been represented as having a single fishtail, marking them as having some control over their bodies,7 or as having two tails, perhaps suggesting sexual availability. In current iconography, the mermaid usually has one tail, a fishtail that in its long and scaly shape is only somewhat reminiscent of the serpent’s tail in some medieval stories.8 Iconically appearing upright and bare breasted with her piscine half hidden in the water, the mermaid’s body is often read as a sign of her mutability and duplicitous nature. The striking reversal in René Magritte’s painting “The Collective Invention” shows a mermaid lying on the beach, on her side, facing viewers; she has a fish’s head and side fins, while her lower body is human and naked. Does Magritte’s rearrangement of the mermaid’s body parts show how dehumanizing a patriarchal “collective invention” of the mermaid can be?
While some mermaids, merfolk, and other water spirits unsettle the human-nonhuman divide by their ability to inhabit different bodies at the same time, others do so by shape-shifting, for instance, from seal or reptile to human. Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid’s transformation into a human is the outcome of her pact with the sea witch. For other merbeings, shape-shifting is a way of life: a seal woman may sun herself in either shape when she pleases. But her hybrid nature is more than skin deep: when access to her nonhuman body is taken away by a man who wishes to hold her on land, she is mutilated. As many tales about marriage between humans and merbeings suggest, interspecies romances are risky.
While some of the mermaids that real-life voyagers and explorers have reported seeing in their travels are not described as beautiful, in most narrative and visual accounts it is the beauty of the mermaid—in contrast to the siren’s knowledge—that attracts men. In misogynist ways, such beauty is often connected with vanity, as the mermaid narcissistically holds a golden mirror while combing her long, flowing hair. Beauty can be a powerful weapon—a lure that draws us nearer, a temptation that we are unable to resist. It beckons us, whispering that it will give us what we want most, whether that be love, sex, or both. But what does our fascination with this dangerous yet desirable other suggest about us?
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