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Author
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Comment
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deathcookie
Registered User
(12/16/03 8:53 pm)
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mermaids as villains??
Has anyone read or heard of stories where the mermaids are evil? I am curious if this angle has ever been done?
Thanks,
Callie
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Helen
Registered User
(12/16/03 10:59 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
Dear Callie:
It depends on how specific you want to be in your definition of "mermaid." For example, the Russian rusalka and the Western European water-nixie, who are both water spirits, if not mermaids per se, are all credited with any manner of nefarious deeds. More specifically, mermaids are often thought to lure sailors to the watery depths in the interests of "keeping" them, dead or alive (there's a delightfully evil painting of a mermaid in possession of a drowned sailor by Edward Burne-Jones on this theme). These are more often found in folklore than in literary fairy tales ... Are you looking for any one particular tale type?
Best,
Helen
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deathcookie
Registered User
(12/16/03 11:36 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
Thanks for the reply, actually I am looking more for a literary tale or even a novel or short story that depicts the mermaids as the villains. But the folklore information is very helpful, thank you.
Thanks,
Callie
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Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(12/17/03 2:10 am)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
You might try Mary Pope Osborne's "Haunted Waters" which uses the Undine story. And you can read the Undine on SurLaLune at:
www.surlalunefairytales.c...ndine.html
Heidi
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Meurglys
Registered User
(12/17/03 11:44 am)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
I'm not sure I'd say they were evil, but Kristine
Kathryn Rusch's latest novel, Fantasy Life, features
selkies - some of whom are definitely not happy...
(If you see the book, don't believe the cover! Technically, it may not be wrong, but it is misleading)
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Valkith
Registered User
(12/17/03 3:43 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
Weren't the sirens evil? Luring ships and men to Scyalla and Charybdis.
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Helen
Registered User
(12/17/03 6:43 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
The sirens are *definitely* less than benevolent figures, but they're most typically figured as being half-woman and half-bird (implying an interesting relationship with the Furies, to my mind). Nereids are probably the figures from classical myth who most closely resemble mermaids, but there's a curious lack of tales concerning them specifically ...
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atrayu
Registered User
(12/17/03 8:45 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
As long as we're talking Greek myth...
The water nymphs drug down Hylas to keep him with them, they thought him so beautiful. I agree with Helen, it depends on how you define "mermaid". I don't think the water nymphs have fishtales...
good luck!
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Jessica
Unregistered User
(12/18/03 4:27 am)
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You could try...
A novel which features a mermaid as villain: "The Mermaid Summer" by Mollie Hunter. Hunter embroiders on the folkloric fisher-folk take on mermaids, without the cap; she does the same for "A Stranger Came Ashore," except the subject (or 'villain') is a selkie.
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Terri
Registered User
(12/18/03 8:52 am)
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Re: You could try...
The people of the sea in Patricia McKillip's novel "Something Rich and Strange" are fairly sinister. It's a lovely book -- but out of print, so one needs to find it through a used book search.
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Niniane
Sunyata
Registered User
(12/18/03 7:23 pm)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
A rather eerie short story I read some time back was "The Women Of Whale Rock" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Sirens rather than mermaids, but they're definitely the villains of the piece here. Link below leads to more info about the publication it can be found in:
review
of the issue it appeared in featured in Tangent Online
Anita Harris.
Terra Mythogene
www.mythopoetica.com
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darkphoenix
Unregistered User
(12/29/03 10:12 am)
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Re:mermaids as villains??
Simplest of all, the mermaids in Peter Pan were evil, and tried to drown Wendy. They didn't have a very big part in the story, but if you want evil mermaids, there you have it. Peter even comments on them, if I remember correctly.
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ARTSFAN
Registered User
(12/29/03 3:58 pm)
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Re: Re:mermaids as villains??
Peter Pan is a great example of mermaids being used as villians in a tale. If you've seen the new movie(AN EXCELLENT MOVIE BY THE WAY) not only do they have obviously malicious intentions but they also look very ferral with webbed fingers and fangs, reminds me of a shark more than the beautiful creatures that they are most often pictured as.
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janeyolen
Registered User
(12/30/03 6:40 am)
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Re: Re:mermaids as villains??
Debra Doyle and Jim MacDonald wrote some narsty mermaids in their novel KNIGHT'S WYRD.
Jane
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(12/31/03 12:22 am)
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Xanth
Xanth has Mela Merwoman who tries to lure a boy out of his boat and pull him below the water. She keeps him captive, giving him power to breathe water.
The Siren of Xanth seems also to be physically a merwoman, with a fishy tail.
Neither of these is evil: Mela is selfish but treats the boy well; the Siren didn't know her singing was luring men to their deaths.
R.
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janeyolen
Registered User
(1/3/04 11:13 am)
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Re: Xanth
I have a couple of nasty sea women (mermaids, sea witches) in my colection NEPTUNE RISING as well as a sea witch (not nice) in my novel THE MAGIC THREE OF SOLATIA which is being reissued by Tor next year.
Jane
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Niniane
Sunyata
Registered User
(1/15/04 12:40 am)
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Re: mermaids as villains??
Just watched "Sinbad" (the Dreamworks cartoon) recently
and thought the way they portrayed the sirens was rather nifty.
As water beings, and they're definitely *not* nice!
Anita Harris.
Terra Mythogene
www.mythopoetica.com
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Mark
Unregistered User
(1/15/04 9:15 pm)
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Mermaids not always "evil,"
I don't think human motives can be ascribed to them. They do what they do. The ones in Peter Pan do their job of luring people to their deaths while also helping Peter with information. Kind of a dual function. Guess you have to know them or have some kind of magical interelation - the one thing I really enjoyed in the new Pan film is his relationship to Neverland in general - sort of like the earth king of his world. His moods disturb the weather, his absense causes Winter, return into Spring. "He's back!" snarls Hook when the sun and greenery re-emerge from rainclouds when Peter brings Wendy and her brothers to Neverland.
Rusch's novel Fantasy Life and the short story someone mentioned in the thread above take place in the same universe. I am reading the novel now, and mermaids and water spirits predominate. It is an excellent novel and her writing skills are definitely up there with some of the best of the writers of urban fantasy. It was a pleasant suprise. And the poster is right - the cover is the usual horrible attempt to capture the attention of those the publisher believes are a part of the demographic. Don't let it decieve you!
There was a movie, I forget the title, about a mermaid who is captured by the crew of a fishing boat. They plan to make money off of it but it gets loose and starts killing them off by seduction and (I think) eating them. She eventually leads them back to her pack, who finish off the rest of them. The creature starts off as a girl and by the end she is a rather nicely done mer-monster. It's not big budget, but interesting for what it is.
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Rupetta
Unregistered User
(1/21/04 1:28 am)
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Mermaids - Melusine
the instance of ambivalently ethical mermaid that springs to my mind most quickly springs from the French traditional tale of Melusine. Melusine married Raymond, count of Poitou (a human) but layed on him the condition that he never disturb her in her sacred castle (Lusinia) where she retired one day a week. One this one day of the week she bathed in an enormous tub and became her 'other' self - a mermaid. Eventually, of course, he succumbed to curiosity and peeped. She instantly fled from him - rising into the air on instantly-sprouted wings. According to legend she returned on the full moon each month to suckle her children and mourn over her husband's sleeping body, weeping acrid tears onto his body. Another version insists that WHEN she returns to wail over Lusinia the king will die.
There is a fairly contemporary retelling of this story contained in Manual Mujica Lainez's 'The Wandering Unicorn'. From the reading I did in this area (a few years ago now - so I'm relying on my feeble memory!) mermaids are rarely if ever benevolent, let alone good. They are more often queerly inhuman - lacking in human moral or ethical dimension. Not evil exactly, just amoral in the extreme, much like many early tales about faerie folk.
According to many feminist interpretations of the mermaid genre, the fishy/perverted nether regions of mermaids metonymically represent the unspeakable horror of actually 'seeing' a woman's vagina(!)
my favourite little bit of inconsequential info about mermaids is that well into the nineteenth century an english law officially claimed for the crown "all mermaids found in British waters" ...
n
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