A long time ago there was an Indian, with his wife and two daughters. They lived by a great lake, or the sea, and the mother told her girls never to go into the water there, for that, if they did, something would happen to them.
They, however, deceived her repeatedly. When swimming is prohibited it becomes delightful. The shore of this lake sands away out or slopes to an island. One day they went to it, leaving their clothes on the beach. The parents missed them.
The father went to seek them. He saw them swimming far out, and called to them. The girls swam up to the sand, but could get no further. Their father asked them why they could not. They cried that they had grown to be so heavy that it was impossible. They were all slimy; they grew to be snakes from below the waist. After sinking a few times in this strange slime they became very handsome, with long black hair and large, bright black eyes, with silver bands on their neck and arms.
When their father went to get their clothes, they began to sing in the most exquisite tones: —
“Leave them there!
Do not touch them!
Leave them there!”
Hearing this, their mother began to weep, but the girls kept on: —
“It is all our own fault,
But do not blame us;
’T will be none the worse for you.
When you go in your canoe,
Then you need not paddle;
We shall carry it along!”
And so it was: when their parents went in the canoe, the girls carried it safely on everywhere.
One day some Indians saw the girls’ clothes on the beach, and so looked out for the wearers. They found them in the water, and pursued them, and tried to capture them, but they were so slimy that it was impossible to take them, till one, catching hold of a mermaid by her long black hair, cut it off.
Then the girl began to rock the canoe, and threatened to upset it unless her hair was given to her again. The fellow who had played the trick at first refused, but as the mermaids, or snake-maids, promised that they should all be drowned unless this was done, the locks were restored. And the next day they were heard singing and were seen, and on her who had lost her hair it was all growing as long as ever.
Legend of the Fish Women (Mermaids)1
This legend belongs to the Ahwahnechee people,2 whose traditional territory is Ahwahnee,3 the area known today as Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Although the mermaids of Ahwahnechee folklore are beautiful, the Ahwahnechee do not find them desirable. Like sirens, these “fish-women” use their voices and beauty to lead men to their death by enticing them close enough to drown them, and for this reason, the Ahwahnechee consider them malevolent spirits.4
Long ago when the Ah-wah-nee-chees were a young nation the Merced River was the home of the Fish-women (Mermaids). These were beautiful creatures, having the tails of fish and the upper bodies of women. They could not leave the water, but would often sit on the rocks in the shallows, or around the edges of the deep pools, combing their long black hair, and chanting luring songs to the warriors of Ah-wah-nee. But, charming as they were, the warriors would have nothing to do with them.
One day while two braves were fishing in the deep pools of the river, with a net made of milkweed thread, the net became tangled with the rocks on the bottom of the pool. One of the braves dived down to loosen it, and the Fish-women, darting out from their hiding places under the rocks, tied the threads of the net to his toes, and held him under the water until he was drowned. Then they carried the brave away to their land beneath the river, and neither he nor the Fish-women have ever been seen since.
The Woman Who Married the Merman1
This story, from the Coos people of coastal Oregon, is about a young woman who discovers she is inexplicably pregnant after having gone swimming in the ocean. She gives birth to a boy. Not long after, a water spirit (whether of the fish or serpent variety remains unexplained) who appears in human shape reveals that he is the father of her child. He convinces her to live in the water with him. As the woman’s child grows, he asks for arrows, and she shares that his uncles have many arrows. (Arrows carry a symbolic meaning in this account, and their use in hunting prey is important.) When she asks her brothers for arrows, she gifts them with otter skins and promises to send a whale, thus becoming their provider. By this time, the storyteller notes, her shoulders were changing into tsaLtsiL (blubber) and turning black, which suggests that she was transforming into a whale. The woman, her husband, and her child eventually cease to visit her brothers, presumably because they are afraid of being killed by arrows.2
There was a village (called) Takimiya. There lived five young men, and they had one younger sister. They lived in Takimiya. She was the head (of the family). From everywhere they wanted to buy her. But she did not want a husband. She would always swim in the water, and (one day) she became pregnant. Every one asked her, “Who made you pregnant?” She did not know it. “Nobody touched me.” So a young boy was born, and he would always cry. No matter who took care of it, the child would still cry. Thus spoke to her her elder brother: “Put the child outside. Who is it? You are just holding it.”
So the next day she put the child out again. It did not cry any longer. She had it there for a long time, and then went to see it. It is said that her child must have been eating something fat. It had a mouth (full of) grease. The child was eating seal-meat strung on a stick. She examined the mouth. She saw no one anywhere. Then again she brought the child in. The child again began to cry. The child did not (let) anybody sleep. It cried one (whole) night. So thus said her elder brother: “Take the child outside. (See) what it will do there. You shall watch it there.” The child was growing very (fast). So again she left it (outside). Now she was watching it there. She was leaning sidewise alongside of her child. So she left it there a whole day.
Then she went there when evening came. She was sitting sideways. Nowhere did she see anybody. All at once a man was standing there. “You are my wife. Do you know it? Our (dual) child is my child.” The woman became ashamed. “You get ready, we two will go home.” The woman said nothing, and began to think. “I wonder what my folks will say.”—“You will not get lost. You will again come back. You will see your folks.” Thus she was thinking: “All right!”
Now they went. “We two will go down into the water.”—“Won’t I be out of breath?”—“You will be all right. If we two go down, you will hold on to my belt. You will keep your eyes shut; and when I tell you so, then you shall look.” It seemed as if they went through (some) brush. She knew that they were going in the water. They went through. There was no water in the village. Her husband was a rich man’s son. There were five boys, and he was the youngest.
The boy grew very (rapidly). The boy always wanted to (have) arrows. His mother made him small arrows. Thus she would say to the child: “Your maternal uncles have many arrows.” So thus spoke the boy: “How would it be if we two should go after arrows?” Thus said the husband: “Your mother will go alone for the arrows. You will stay (here). We two will go (some other) time.”
Then the next day she got ready and went. She wore five sea-otter hides. The flood-tide (came) early in the morning. They saw a sea-otter swimming in the river. They hunted the sea-otter in canoes. She was swimming along the beach. They were shooting at her with arrows. It seemed that they hit the sea-otter; but she would come out again, and the arrows were nowhere to be seen. The sea-otter went up the river. They followed her in canoes. Many people were shooting at her. The sea-otter turned back and went (away) again. Still they were shooting at her. No one hit her. Again the sea-otter went out into the ocean. The elder brother kept on following the sea-otter. It is said that she went ashore somewhere. The elder brother went around the ocean beach. Suddenly he saw (what appeared to be) a person. The person was playing on the beach in the water. He went there. He came closer, and, verily, it was a woman.
As he looked at her, he recognized her. Verily, it was his younger sister. Indeed, it was she. “It’s I, my younger brother. I was travelling there. Here are all the arrows. You were shooting them at me.” Many were the arrows. The man was ashamed when he saw all the arrows. “My child sent me here just to get arrows. I came here. My child always wants arrows.” She was drying the sea-otter hides. Then they two went home. “Don’t think about it. I will go home. I give you these sea-otter hides. You can trade some things for them. My husband is a person, he is a chief’s child. We do not live very far from here. His house is close by. You can see in the ocean this stone house whenever it is low tide.” He saw his elder sister as she went down into the water. The water reached to her stomach. She held up both her hands and dove into the water. Thus she said to her younger brother, before she went down into the water: “To-morrow early in the morning you will find a whale at your landing-place.”
The next day he got up a little before daylight. Verily, a whale had been washed ashore. They cut that whale into pieces. They distributed it among their friends. So, indeed, she returned (to) her husband and child. Her shoulders were turning into tsaLtsiL, and (became) black. Again they went back, her husband and child. Afterwards little serpents came in and out to the ocean. And the woman did not come ashore: she was not seen again. The little serpents came after arrows, jumping (over one another). The people shot arrows at them. They were merely giving them arrows. They did not come back again. Afterwards two whales came ashore,—one (in the) summer, and (one) also (in the) winter. They sent two whales ashore. They gave (them) to their relatives by marriage.
Notes
Notes preceded by an asterisk are taken from the original source material.
Oannes
1.E. Richmond Hodges and Isaac Preston Cory, Cory’s Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Other Authors (London: Reeves & Turner, 1876), 56–57.
2.*The Persian Gulf.
Kāliya, the Snake
1.Cornelia Dimmitt, ed., J.A.B. van Buitenen, trans., Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purānas (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978), 114–16.
Odysseus and the Sirens
1.Alexander Pope, trans., The Odyssey of Homer (London: Bernard Lintot, 1725–1726).
2.Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. Sirens became nymphs who, depending on the tradition, acquired their hybrid bodies as punishment or reward, and had names connected with speech and voice.
3.When the words “mermaid” and “siren” appeared in Chaucer, they consolidated the confusion of the two beings: “Though we mermaydens clepe hem here . . . Men clepe hem sereyns in Fraunce” (“Though we call them mermaids here . . . Men call them sirens in France.” From Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Romaunt of the Rose (ca.1366) in the entry for “siren” in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED also reports, “Sur la ripe est vn ceroyne, On the bank is a meremayde” as the earliest use (ca. 1350) of “mermaid.”
The Tuna (Eel) of Lake Vaihiria
1.Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 48 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1928), 615–19.
2.*Received from Madame Butteaud, née Gibson, a descendant of the Hina of the legend.
3.Teuira Henry (1847–1915), a respected scholar of Tahitian literature and culture, found this account among the extensive ethnographic materials that her grandfather, Reverend John Muggridge Orsmond (ca. 1784–1856), compiled and analyzed after his arrival in Mo’orea in 1817 and throughout his life. Henry dedicated her life to transforming these ethnographic materials into a monograph, which includes her own notes and comparative study of Polynesian literatures and cultures.
Merfolk in the Waters of Greenland and Iceland
1.Courtesy of Terry Gunnell’s translation: “In the autumn, Grímr went fishing with his farmhands and the boy Þórir lay in the prow and was in a sealskin bag which was tied up at the neck. Grímr caught a marmennill, and when he got him up, Grímr asked, ‘What can you tell us about our fates? Where in Iceland ought we to settle?’” In Landnámabok [The Book of Settlements], ed. Jakob Benediktsson (Reykjavík, Iceland: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1968), 97.
2.Some folklorists classify this story as a folktale belonging to tale type ATU 670, in which a human protagonist understands the language of animals and uses this to his advantage. Others (see Michael Chesnutt, “The Three Laughs: A Celtic-Norse Tale in Oral Tradition and Medieval Literature,” in Islanders and Water-Dwellers. Proceedings of the Celtic-Nordic-Baltic Folklore Symposium held at University College Dublin [16–19 June 1996], eds. Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin [Dublin: DBA Publications Ltd., 1999], 37–49) group it under the umbrella title of “The Three Laughs,” with widespread versions going back to the Middle Ages. Only in the Icelandic and other Norse traditions of “The Three Laughs” is the seer not a human or a leprechaun, but a hybrid sea being. See note 1, “A Freshwater Mermaid in Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” for an explanation of folktale classification.
The Marvels of the Waters About Greenland
1.The King’s Mirror (Speculum regale-Konungs skuggsjá), Scandinavian Monographs 3, trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson, 135–37 (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1917).
2.*The belief that mermaids lived in the Arctic waters was one that was long held by European navigators. Henry Hudson reports that on his voyage into the Arctic in 1608 (June 15) some of his men saw a mermaid. “This morning one of our companie looking over boord saw a mermaid, and calling up some of the companie to see her, one more came up and by that time shee was come close to the ships side, looking earnestly on the men: a little after a sea came and overturned her: from the navill upward her backe and breasts were like a womans, as they say that saw her; her body as big as one of us; her skin very white, and long haire hanging downe behind of colour blacke: in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse and speckled like a macrell.” Asher, Henry Hudson, 28.
The Merman
1.Jón Árnason, ed. Icelandic Legends, trans. George E. J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon, (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), 103–106.
Two Mermaids and a Selkie from the Scottish Highlands
1.In the first half of the twentieth century, Ronald Macdonald Robertson collected tales from Scottish fishermen and peasants in places that, he wrote in his preface to Selected Highland Folktales, “possessed a charming old-time atmosphere, in an alluring land of wilderness and wonder.”
The Mermaid of Kessock
1.Ronald Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Folktales (Isle of Colonsay, Scotland: House of Lochar, 1961), 156–57.
The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerrie
1.Ronald Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Folktales (Isle of Colonsay, Scotland: House of Lochar, 1961), 166–67.
The Mermaid’s Grave
1.Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Norman McLeod, 1900), 305.
A Seal Woman or Maiden of the Sea from Ireland
1.It is classified as ML 4080 in Reidar Th. Christiansen’s The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1958).
2.In other versions, her sealskin is taken from her; and when she is not a seal woman but a merrow (mermaid), it is her magic cap (see Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland [London: Murray, 1828].)
Tom Moore and the Seal Woman
1.Jeremiah Curtin, Tales of Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1895), 150–54.
Dangerous Mermaids in Two Child Ballads
1.Child was the first American folklorist to be named professor of English at Harvard, and his ten volumes gathered over three hundred ballads. The o
nes we selected are classified as Child 42A and Child 289B respectively. “Clark Colven” has variant spellings, as in “Clerk Colven” (Child 42B). Child presented several versions of each ballad and also compares “Clark Colven” to a number of Scandinavian, Icelandic, French, and Italian ballads that either replace the mermaid with an elf or feature no mermaid at all in the death of the man. Another version of “The Mermaid” introduces some humor, as the cook compares the other men’s sadness about leaving their wives to his being “sorry for my pots and pans.”
2.In another version of “Clark Colven,” the mermaid comes to Clark Colven’s deathbed and asks him to choose between dying and living with her in the water.
Clark Colven, Child 42A
1.Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 1, part 2 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884), 387–88.
The Mermaid, Child 289B
1.Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 5, part 9, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894), 150.
A Bavarian Freshwater Merman
1.Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a government official, admired the Brothers Grimm and published books about Bavarian folk customs. This tale was untitled in the archives and did not see print until the twenty-first century, when researcher Erika Eichenseer compiled hundreds of stories, mostly tales of magic, from Schönwerth’s papers, and scholar Maria Tatar published a selection of them in 2015.
In the Jaws of the Merman
1.Franz Xaver von Schonwerth, The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales, ed. Erica Eichenseer, trans. Maria Tatar (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 140.
The Penguin Book of Mermaids Page 28