The Mermaid is the fish-tailed sea-maiden of European legend: a beautiful woman from the waist up and a fish below, who dwells in the sea, sings with bewitching voice, and is bound up with the perils and wonders of the ocean — an omen of storm and shipwreck, a luring seductress of sailors, and sometimes a being who longs for a human soul or loves a mortal. She is the sea-maiden, the fish-tailed enchantress of the waters.
The Maid of the Sea
The Mermaid (from “mere,” sea, and “maid”) is the classic European sea-being: a creature with the head and torso of a beautiful woman and the tail of a fish in place of legs, often pictured holding a comb and a mirror and combing her long flowing hair as she sits upon a rock above the waves. She is the female counterpart of the merman, one of the merfolk, and she descends from a long tradition reaching back to the Greek Sirens (originally bird-women, later conflated with fish-women), the sea-nymphs, and ancient fish-deities like Atargatis.
The Song and the Shipwreck
The mermaid is bound up, above all, with the sea’s beauty and its deadly peril. She sings with a voice of irresistible, bewitching sweetness, and her song (like the Siren’s, like the [lorelei]’s) lures sailors to distraction, drawing them to leap into the waves or steer onto the rocks, so that mermaids were blamed for drownings and shipwrecks. To see a mermaid was a dire omen — a sign of coming storm, disaster, and the loss of the ship — and sailors dreaded the sight of one combing her hair, for it foretold the wreck. She might drag men down to her halls beneath the sea, to drown or to dwell with her.
The Longing for a Soul
Yet the mermaid is not only deadly; the lore is tender and tragic as well. Mermaids were said to fall in love with mortal men, to rescue the drowning as well as to drown, and above all to lack and to long for an immortal soul, which (in the Christian-influenced lore) they could gain only through the love of a human and marriage in a church — a theme that flowered in the literary water-maidens like Undine and, most famously, in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” who gives up her voice and her tail and endures agony for the love of a prince and the hope of a soul. Mermaid-brides who wed mortals (with a fatal taboo), and the half-human children of such unions, fill the folklore. Kin to the [nixie], the selkie, and the merrow, the mermaid is the most beloved of all sea-spirits. In the Mermaid, Europe gave form to the sea-maiden — the fish-tailed, hair-combing enchantress of the waters whose song lures sailors to their doom, who longs for a soul and loves mortals, the beautiful and perilous maid of the sea.