March 25, 2021 15
Splash
Marina Warner
Merpeople: A Human History
by Vaughn Scribner.
Reaktion, 318 pp., $27.
In l819 the French inventor Cagniard
de La Tour gave the name sirène to the
alarm he had devised to help evacu-
ate factories and mines in case of ac-
cident—in those days all too frequent.
The siren, or mermaid, came to his
mind as a portent, a signal of danger,
although it might seem a contradiction,
since the sirens’ song was fatal to mor-
tals: in the famous scene in the Odys-
sey, Odysseus ties himself to the ship’s
mast to hear it, and orders his men to
plug their ears with wax and ignore him
when he pleads to be set free to join the
singers on the shore. Homer does not
describe these irresistible singers’ ap-
pearance—only their flowery meadow,
which is strewn with the rotting corpses
of their victims—but he tells us that
their song promises omniscience: “We
know whatever happens anywhere on
earth.” This prescience inspired Ca-
gniard: he inverted the sirens’ connec-
tion to fatality to name a device that
gives forewarning.
In Greek iconography, the sirens are
bird- bodied, and aren’t instantly seduc-
tive in appearance but rather, accord-
ing to the historian Vaughn Scribner
in Merpeople, “hideous beasts.” A fa-
mous fifth- century- BCE pot in the Brit-
ish Museum shows Odysseus standing
stiffly lashed to the mast, head tilted
skyward, his crew plying the oars while
these bird- women perch around them,
as if stalking their prey: one of them is
dive- bombing the ship like a sea eagle.
An imposing pair of nearly life- size
standing terracotta figures from the
fourth century BCE, in the collection of
the Getty Museum, have birds’ bodies
and tails, legs and claws, and women’s
faces; they too have been identified as
sirens (see illustration on page 16).
Classical myth features many fe-
rocious female monsters, such as gi-
gantic Scylla, girdled by twelve limbs
and snapping dogs’ heads, who is con-
demned to seize and devour passing
sailors. The imagery of sirens overlaps
with that of harpies, foul- smelling rap-
tors whose name means “the snatch-
ers.” By contrast, Poseidon, the god of
the sea, comes with a whole train of de-
lightful nymphs (nereids), tritons, and
merbabies like bathing cupids, many
with fishes’ tails and wreathed in sea-
weed fronds and shells. When these
ancient traditions about watery crea-
tures met more northerly, fish- tailed,
often sweet- voiced seductresses, such
as the freshwater spirits of wells and
rivers—undines, rusalkas, and Lore-
leis—the Greek sirens’ powers became
identified with sexual temptation, and
the two forms became conflated. One
medieval illuminator of Ovid pictured
sirens as flying fishes.
Scribner’s book is compact, richly
referenced, attractively produced, and
wonderfully illustrated with more than
a hundred plates, many unfamiliar (to
me) and in full color. A professor at
the University of Central Arkansas, he
is chiefly curious about shifts in intel-
lectual inquiry as he chronicles beliefs
about mermaids, including reports of
sightings, exhibitions of discovered
specimens, scientists’ views, and popu-
lar cultural artifacts from films to dolls.
In the first of six concise chapters,
Scribner explores the mermaid’s ap-
pearances in medieval documents,
where the authors stigmatize her as a
symbol of fallen humanity, and he then
contrasts this view with the wonder
and curiosity that, in the early mod-
ern period, dominated the motives of
explorers and conquerors—and map-
makers, who studded their gorgeous
artifacts with monsters and prodigies:
“Here Be Mermaids” is a marine car-
tographer’s equivalent of “Here Be
Dragons.” Scribner then attends to sci-
entific attempts in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries—and even into
the twentieth—to ascertain the real-
ity and nature of these mythic figures,
telling the story of the fairs and shows
where ostensibly captured mermaids,
stuffed and mounted, were exhibited.
He concludes with accounts of films,
advertisements, pageants, and theme
parks, demonstrating growing rather
than fading interest with mermaids in
the present day. Yet in its revelations
of the appetite for delusion among so
many, even as they pursued greater un-
derstanding, it’s a tale that is especially
disturbing at this time of deliberate
misinformation.
It was around 800 CE, Scribner sug-
gests, that classical sirens began to fuse
with the lore of water spirits who radi-
ate dangerous magic in Slavic, Norse,
German, and Celtic myths and fairy
tales. Mermaids, sometimes in the form
of sheela- na- gigs (female figures hold-
ing up their double tails and seemingly
exulting in this self- exposure), were
carved on roof bosses and misericords
in Christendom’s holy sites, often, butnot always, placed clandestinely. Beau-
tiful and monstrous, they embodied
the dangers of sin but also the powers
of enchantment; flaunting their sex
so flagrantly on portals and thresh-
olds, they perform a kind of protective
magic. This equation between beauty,
desire, sex, and sin structures the figure
of the mermaid: bestiaries and incu-
nabula include scores of delightful vi-
gnettes of mermaids and their wicked
seductions—the artists thereby having
it both ways, dwelling on the pleasures
of the temptress while sternly decrying
them. Surprisingly, Scribner doesn’t
mention the classic text on this theme,
Dante’s nasty nightmare in Purgatorio
XIX, in which a dolce sirena (sweet
siren) appears to him, singing; then,
still in the dream, Virgil intervenes and
tears off her clothes, and the stench
from her ventre (belly or innards) over-
comes Dante and he wakes.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote
the most celebrated variation on the
mermaid tradition and took its puni-
tiveness much further, when in “The
Little Mermaid,” his 1837 fairy tale,
the love- smitten protagonist comes to
a tragic end, dissolving into sea foam
while her beloved prince flourishes
unconcerned. (This twist echoes the
Eastern European tradition of water
sprites dwelling in rivers or lakes, as
in Czech fairy tales, such as those col-
lected and written by Božena NČmcová
and Karel Jaromír Erben, and drama-
tized in Dvorák’s magnificent, harrow-
ing 1901 opera Rusalka.) As Andersen
tells the story, the Sea Witch makes a
bargain with the young mermaid—the
witch will give her a human form in re-
turn for her bewitching voice: “Stick
out your little tongue, and let me cut it
off in payment.” The Sea Witch warns
her:Your tail will divide and shrink,
until it becomes what human be-
ings call “pretty legs.” It will hurt;
it will feel as if a sword were going
through your body.... Every time
your foot touches the ground it will
feel as though you were walking on
knives so sharp that your blood
must flow.Such a scene, with its menstrual under-
current, inculcated an understanding
of women’s lot; I regret to say that as
a child I thrilled to this sadism. I was
not alone. Like many fairy-tale hero-
ines, mermaids, as Scribner is aware,
have long acted as a prime tool in the
training of women and the gendering
of culture.
Even as the classical raptor- like por-
tent of death faded from memory, the
siren song remained the irresistible lure
of fish- tailed enchantresses. On maps
and in travelers’ tales of marine won-
ders, solitary mermaids are glimpsed,
often holding a mirror and a comb as
they swim about in the sea. In antiquity,
these were attributes of Aphrodite who,
in the sculptural pose called “Venus
Anadyomene,” has just emerged from
her bath and is wringing out her hair.
She lent these features to Christian in-
terdictions of pleasure, and her groom-
ing came to signify vanity and lust: on
the Angers tapestry of the Apocalypse,
the Whore of Babylon even appears
with long blond hair, comb, and mirror,
and, as Scribner often notes of mer-
maids, a toned midriff. The routines
of self- care that a mermaid performs
indicate that something is in progress:
suggestively, she embodies a moment
of anticipation or repair; as she dresses
her hair and sings, she is filled with the
active, kinetic energy of the erotic and
hints invitingly at pleasures to come or
already enjoyed.
The solitariness of the mermaid per-
sists as a motif from the Middle Ages
onward. On maps she suggests the
lure of the terra incognita that explor-
ers are setting out to encounter; she’s
a symbol of “my new-found-land,” as
John Donne calls his beloved, and of
the knowledge that is available to those
who are brave enough to seek it. Part of
the sirens’ charm lies in their implied
neediness for company—for a play-
mate. The famous sculpture of the Lit-
tle Mermaid in Copenhagen, which has
become the city’s totem and a national
emblem, sits alone, demure and for-
lorn, but even she, almost a child and
the very opposite of a bold temptress, is
positioned expectantly, as a lookout on
her rock at the entrance to the harbor.Merpeople joins a shelfload of books
about mermaids, for these creatures
of myth and folklore have become
a contemporary craze, and not only
with little girls; as Scribner declares in
his opening sentence, “merpeople are
everywhere.” With his interest lying
chiefly in the history of scientific and
popular approaches to his subject, his
literary range doesn’t extend much
beyond Andersen—in a book of this
brevity, it would not have been possible.
But it is a lacuna, and Merpeople will
be much enriched if read alongside an‘Admiring Mermaids’; from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum,
the first modern atlas of the world, 1570Libraryof^ Congress