Skip to main content

Friday night folklore: On the origin of Mermaids and Mermen

On the origins of the race of mermaids and mermen Icelandic folklore has is this story:

Once upon a time there was a king and his queen who had one daughter, an only child. When she was born the witches and sorceresses of the land gave her many good blessings, including beauty, riches and the promise of a good husband. But one of the witches was annoyed and jealous because of all the gifts heaped upon the child and cursed her, saying that she would turn into a sea-monster every ninth night after her marriage and she should live like this for three years so that none but her husband could find out and if he did find out, her freedom from the curse would depend upon him not revealing it to anyone, not being angered by it or stop loving her. But if one or more of these stipulations was not fulfilled, she must forever live in the sea and never be freed. But as some consolation she would have a such beautiful singing voice that all creatures who heard it would be soothed into sleep by it.

The princess grew up in her father’s palace, beautiful and happy and beloved by all, and when she was grown she was given in marriage to a fine prince, and then the curse struck. For two years she was able to sneak undetected from their bed every ninth night, but during the third year the prince noticed her frequent disappearances and started keeping a closer eye on her.

One night he followed her down to the sea and into a cave. When he came to the cave he saw her swimming in the water down below, with the tail of a fish from the legs down but completely human above. He then returned to the palace and went back to bed, but when she returned and tried to get into bed with him, he angrily called her a “disgusting worm” and ordered her to leave and never come back. So she returned to the sea, crying and sad and never stepped back on land. But she was pregnant when she left and gave birth to her babies in the sea, and from them all the merpeople are descended.

She is sometimes mentioned in old stories and is said to like putting men to sleep with her singing, and that she can sing any song except the Te Deum. Once she is said to have swum behind a ship, singing so beautifully that all the crew fell asleep, except one man who was an exceptional singer himself and sang all the songs with her. Finally he sang the opening of the Te Deum, but she could not sing it so she dived down and swam away.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...