Merpeople

A Human History

Vaughn Scribner

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781789149388, 9781789143140
• eBook ISBN: 9781789143133
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

A wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated history of mermaids and mermen from the classics to cosplay. People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer's Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times "mermaiding" has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world. In Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and using 117 striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are—and always have been—everywhere.

References

Introduction

1 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), p. 27. See also Alison Luchs, The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (London, 2010), pp. 32–5.

2 Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana, IL, 2002), pp. 2–3; Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. xii. See also Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

3 Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, The Mermaid in the Thought and Art of Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Brussels, 1997; reprint 2002), pp. vii–40; Beatrice Phillpotts, Mermaids (New York, 1980), pp. 9–10.

4 Katharine Shepard, The Fish-tailed Monster in Greek and Etruscan Art (New York, 1940); Leclercq-Marx, The Mermaid in the Thought and Art, pp. vii–40; Meri Lao, Sirens: Symbols of Seduction, trans. John Oliphant (Rochester, VT, 1998), pp. 1–57.

5 Leclercq-Marx, The Mermaid in the Thought and Art, pp. vii–40; Luchs, Mermaids of Venice, pp. 25–35; Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and her Kin (New York, 1965), p. 61.

6 Luchs, Mermaids of Venice, p. 28. For ideas of nudity in the early Christian era and the Middle Ages, see Sherry C. M. Lindquist, ed., The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Farnham, 2012); Jean Sorabella, ‘The Nude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, The Met: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, www.metmuseum.org, 29 August 2018.

7 Historian Barbara G. Walker argued that the spread-tailed mermaid was connected to the ancient medieval symbol of the ‘Sheela-na-gig’, who posed with spread legs and revealed an exaggerated vulva. See Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (New York, 1988), p. 16.

8 As Beatrice Phillpotts noted, ‘the mermaid’s comb, also a popular feature from scenes of Venus’ toilette, carried additional sexual connotations which would have been immediately apparent to the Greeks and Romans, whose words for comb, kteis and pectin, also mean the female pudenda.’ Phillpotts, Mermaids, p. 10. See also Arthur Waugh, who argued, ‘It is the Bestiaries which gave the mermaid all the attributes associated with her from early Christian days – her vanity, constantly with comb and mirror, her alluring appearance and voice, and her danger to the human soul. Early on in the Christian Era, a fish was a symbol of the soul.’ Arthur Waugh, ‘The Folklore of the Merfolk’, Folklore, LXXI/2 (1960), p. 77. Lao argued, ‘the mirror is also illusion and lends itself easily to illusionism. It represents the double, the shadow: the soul outside the body.’ Lao, Sirens, p. 109.

9 As Alison Luchs argued, ‘Fish-tailed lovers appear only occasionally in ancient art.’ She continues, ‘Fish-tailed women, relatively scarce in the ancient visual arts, went on to outnumber their male counterparts in medieval art, where they assumed a portentous new role. Sea-dwelling females emerge from the waves to blow triton-like horns in nautical scenes in Carolingian psalters. But by that period, around 800, a new and fruitful identification had become attached to the mermaid: that of the ancient Greek siren.’ Luchs, The Mermaids of Venice, pp. 19, 21.

10 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 127–81.

11 As Alison Luchs argued, such representations in Renaissance art, text and physical objects ‘reveal striking evidence of peoples’ readiness to see mermaids and mermen’. Luchs, Mermaids of Venice, p. 184.

12 As Leclercq-Marx contended, ‘Being double, unnatural and symbolic by tradition, the Mermaid had no place, in fact, in the art of thought of an elite committed to a new humanism, who sacrificed more to the fantastic and the bizarre than to the monstrous, and who preferred allegory to the symbol.’ At least in church decoration, Leclercq-Marx argues that such grotesques were largely intended to ‘amuse the eye’. She also notes that, beyond the church, ‘the Sirens appear at the end of the eleventh century at the latest, as real beings, compassionate and full of solicitude for sailors in distress.’ Leclercq-Marx, The Mermaid in Thought and Art, p. 231.

13 Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (London, 2013).

14 Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 36–63; Ritvo, Platypus and the Mermaid, pp. 131–87.

15 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 73–118.

16 Heather Brink-Roby, ‘Siren Canora: The Mermaid and the Mythical in Late Nineteenth-century Science’, Archives of Natural History, 35/1 (2014), pp. 1–14; Béatrice Laurent, ‘Monster or Missing Link?: The Mermaid and the Victorian Imagination’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens (Victorian and Edwardian Notebooks) LXXXV (Spring 2017), http://journals.openedition.org, 31 October 2018; Ritvo, Platypus and the Mermaid, pp. 50–60.

17 Philip Hayward, ed., Scaled for Success: The Internationalisation of the Mermaid (Bloomington, IN, 2018).

18 As Alison Luchs argued, ‘Among mythical hybrids, sirens stood out for their connection with learning. The knowledge with which they tempted Odysseus, in the words Homer gives to their song, was not carnal. It was wisdom, a vast new understanding of the world and all that transpires in it.’ Luchs, Mermaids of Venice, p. 32.

ONE Medieval Monsters

1 Although we cannot know whether a deacon ever actually experienced this exact interaction with a mermaid sculpture, myriad primary sources reveal medieval churchmen’s complicated attitudes towards these lustful icons. Exeter Cathedral, moreover, boasts such a mermaid carving. Each of the following six chapters will begin with a piece of historical anecdote (a ‘faction’, or combination of fact and fiction), based upon primary source evidence yet also taking certain liberties in order to demonstrate – and contemplate – contemporary interactions with merpeople.

2 Quoted in H. Clay Trumbull, ‘Jonah in Ninevah’, Journal of Biblical Literatures, vol. XI–XII (Boston, MA, 1892), pp. 55–6; Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and her Kin (New York, 1965), pp. 23–30.

3 Henry Lee, Sea Fables Explained (London, 1884); Alison Luchs, Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (London, 2010), pp. 8–9; Juliette Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore: From Medieval Times to the Present Day (London, 2018), pp. 49–92.

4 Homer, The Odyssey, XII, ll. 85–100, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, MA, 1938), pp. 438–9; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, IV, trans. R. C. Seaton (London, 1930), lines 890–921. This paragraph owes muc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• ONE: Medieval Monsters
• TWO: New Worlds, New Wonders
• THREE: Enlightened Experiments
• FOUR: Freakshows and Fantasies
• FIVE: Modern Mermaids
• SIX: Into Global Waters
• Conclusion: Tail-ending
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX