Mermaids
Half-woman and half-fish, the first known story of mermaids dates from Assyria, c.1000BC. In this tale, the goddess Atargatis falls in love with a mortal man, and accidentally kills him. Distraught, Atargatis leaps into a lake and takes the form of a fish, but she is too beautiful to be contained in such a humble form, and so ends up becoming a mermaid. A Greek legend also tells that Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike, died and became a mermaid. She would periodically ask sailors if her brother was still alive, and would respond to a negative answer by causing storms.
Mermaids are associated with bad-luck and disasters. They appeared to tell sailors of their fate (from which they cannot escape), and a sighting of a mermaid usually foretold that a disaster awaited the ship from which it was spotted. Medieval depictions of mermaids show them with a mirror and a comb, admiring their reflection, signs of the sin of vanity. They are also usually shown immodestly (un)dressed, with exposed breasts, which matches tales of them seducing foolish sailors leading to the latter’s deaths. As such, they likely represent the carnal temptations to which both travellers and ordinary people are subject.
However, we must not forget that people genuinely believed that mermaids were real creatures. An incredible story from 1167 tells of the capture of a merman (a male mermaid) by fishermen in Orford, Suffolk. The merman, according to the chronicler, Ralph Coggeshall, ‘was naked and was like a man in all his members’, but showed a marked preference for raw fish, incredible swimming and diving abilities, and would not talk even under torture or show any reverence for the castle’s chapel. He was eventually released, and swam away never to be seen again. Merman? No, alas, this was a seal.