Siren to mermaid, from bird to fish
Bird siren and fish-tailed sirens, or a proto-mermaid. Queen Mary Psalter. 1310-1320. The British Library.
If you read about about mermaid imagery, you’ve probably read theories about where mermaids came from— and a lot of authors like to try to give mermaids ancient origins. Dagan, the Syrian god, or Atargatis. While it’s interesting to look at other fish-tailed beings in art, it also drives me a little crazy. Not everyone with a fish tail is automatically a mermaid. Think of it this way: both Batman and Dracula wear capes, but it’d be a wild stretch to say they must be related somehow. Still, it's an interesting question: where did mermaids come from, exactly, and how much of their imagery is from the Homeric sirens?
This is a random pic of Dagon from a seal. This is not a mermaid.
So today we’re going to look at the most likely origins of the mermaid from European folklore. She likely developed out of ideas about Homer’s sirens, and the fish tail was a gradual part of mermaid imagery. An easy way to think about the siren shift from half bird to half fish is in terms of evolution. Like the biological process, the change was very gradual. There are even a few “missing link” sirens, female creatures who have a mixture of bird tails and fish fins.
To start, sirens from antiquity weren’t described by Homer at all, but artists imagined them as bird women:
Containers shaped like sirens; siren paintings on a bowl. My photos.
In ancient art, Triton, the Greek god of the sea, was the one usually shown with a fish tail:
Triton vases, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. My photos.
There were a handful of women with fish tails in ancient art, but they were almost always shown as counterparts to fish tailed men:
Scylla, the vengeful monster from the Odyssey, is also shown with a fish tail... and dog heads around her waist. But it'd take an extremely desperate sailor to call her a mermaid:
Scylla on red-figure vases, from the Louvre and pic by Sailko.
To me, one possibility of the fish-tail origin is from Coptic art. Nereids, the water nymphs who lived in salt water, were sometimes shown not as human looking women, but as women with fish tails:
Birth of Venus, with fish-tailed nereids in attendance. Herakleopolis Magna, Egypt. Limestone relief. 395 - 641 CE. Byzantine. Louvre.
Aphrodite Anadyomene, tapestry. 395 - 641 CE, Byzantine period. Findspot: Antinoé (?) Louvre.
However, a more likely source is where artists got their ideas from. An important source of inspiration for church artists in the middle ages were bestiaries. Bestiaries, which are illustrated books of creatures, both real and imaginary—such as unicorns, manticores, and lions—were very popular in the middle ages. Over time, Christian morals were added to the animals’ original stories. All the bestiaries were based on the above-mentioned book called the Physiologus, first published in the second century CE. To quote academic William Travis on the Physiologus: “Schoolboys learned its contents, priests used it in sermons, and monks put it in hymns.” As time went on, the morals got more and more stringent—and they almost always included entries about the sirens. Its popularity ensured that everyone, from laypeople to clergy, were familiar with the sirens and their story.
In the various translations and editions of these books, however, some errors cropped up. The seventh century Book of Monsters (or Liber monstrorum) described the sirens as creatures of the sea: “Sirens are sea-girls, who deceive sailors with the outstanding beauty of their appearance and the sweetness of their song, and are most like human beings from the head to the navel, with the body of a maiden, but have scaly fishes’ tails, with which they always lurk in the sea.”
Oops. Maybe the writer wasn’t that familiar with the old Greek stories. And when we look at Scylla’s entry in this book, there's another possibility to explain how sirens' got fish fails: blurring with Scylla. This passage from the Liber Monstorum emphasizes reads:
...Scylla has been the monster most hostile to sailors in that channel which washes between Italy and Sicily, having indeed the head and chest of a maiden (like the sirens) but the belly of a wolf and the tails of dolphins. And what distinguishes the nature of sirens from Scylla is that they deceive seamen by their deadly song, whilst she with the strength of her force, girt about with sea-dogs, is said to have mangled the wrecks of the unfortunate.
Now the siren/Scylla confusion becomes obvious, as this book makes them sound very similar. They’re compared in the above entry twice. And when church artists were making their carvings, they were likely going from memory, not referencing a copy of the Liber as they worked.
In addition to pictures, there could have been an issue with the words itself, by someone re-copying these texts over again. In Greek, there is one word for “wing” and “fin”: pterughion. In Latin, the difference in wing and fin is also small, with one letter separating them: pennis and pinnis. As one modern scholar noted, when writing about the sirens in the Liber monstrorum: “they thus resemble Scylla except in relying on deceit where she employs brute force...” Isidore of Seville, the Christian writer and thinker, also listed his siren and Scylla descriptions back to back. This blurring of the two characters is echoed in other books. In the University Library Bestiary, Scylla’s entry is right before the sirens—and the image for Scylla is missing.
The shift from bird to fish is finalized in an illustrated version of the Physiologus from the ninth century. The siren’s entry describes a bird woman—but the picture is of a fish lady, in the company of a centaur, the half-man, half-horse of Greek mythology:
Siren and centaur, ninth century. Bern Physiologus, Bern. Folio 13. Photo: Bern, Burgerbibliothek.
She was the first fish tailed woman described as a siren, but the image had been cropping up in other texts, like the Visigoth manuscript from the 800s:
Mermaid in the margins, Sacramentarium of Gellone, Visigoth manuscript, about 780 A.D. Image from National Library of France.
While this woman does have a fish tail, the text doesn’t describe who she is, making it hard to determine where she fits in with the sirens’ evolution.
There’s also the fish-tailed critters from the margins in the Book of Kells, about CA 800. I’ve written about the two-tailed Book of Kells mer-critter, but there’s also one with a single tail:
213v. Book of Kells via Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin.
The medieval fish-tailed sirens developed new traits for the same way real animals do—to ensure their survival. “They choose deliberately to show her as a beautiful, alluring woman, with a graceful fishtail, since a bird-body is hardly seductive in appearance,” remarked the authors of Sea Enchantress, a comprehensive study of mermaids in art and literature. Another writer noticed this when describing the siren’s evolution: “...feathers receded to make way for a greater expanse of (female) human flesh...”
Bird sirens. Bestiary (Dicta Chrysostomi) ca. 1140–50 Austria, Göttweig. mm MS M.832. The Morgan Library & Museum.
The middle ages has sirens aplenty: with bird wings, clawed bird feet, snake’s tails, fish fins, and all combinations in between. Different versions of bestiaries list sirens with the birds, sometimes with the fish. Let's take a look at these "missing link" mermaids:
Worksop bestiary, about 1185. MS M.81, fols. 16v–17r. The Morgan Library and Museum.
The next ones have webbed feet, like a duck, and hold their fish-like tails:
Sirens, about 1250–1260 CE, illuminated Manuscript, England. Ms. 100 (2007.16), fol. 14 Alternate Titles: Northumberland Bestiary (Group Title) Getty Museum. I’m pretty sure the middle one is a merman, as he has a beard and no breasts.
Writing in the late eleventh century, the Vatican Mythographers said that the sirens ate the men who listened to their song. Sirens devoured their victims when they were sexually unsatisfied—so said Bartholomew the Englishman, a member of the Franciscan order in the thirteenth century. This is graphically illustrated in an image from the Queen Mary Psalter, where one of the sirens leans over a man in a ship with an open mouth, ready to tear at his flesh— and one siren is half bird, one half fish.
Queen Mary Psalter. 1310-1320. The British Library.
Some of the "missing link" sirens are just a little weird.
MS. GKS 1633 4° Bestiarius. From the Royal Library in Denmark.
Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8o, Folio 37r .
Bestiary of Pierre Picard, France, 1285.
MS. Douce 88, fol. 021v. Bodelian Library.
Image of three sirens from Brunetto Latini "Li livres dou tresor" playing a citole, a harp and a shawm. About 1300.
The English language has two different words to distinguish these mythical women— siren and mermaid— but not all languages do, particularly Romance languages like French and Spanish. The word in Old English was sirina meremenin, a combination of both, until Chaucer coined the term “mermaydens” in the mid 1300s. Sirene or Sirena has become the standard word for mermaid in Romance languages and are used interchangeably with the English word mermaid.
But for women whose appearance wasn’t actually described in ancient stories, does it matter that much? After all, the Odyssey itself never said they were bird women, fish women, or anything else. That siren’s bodies continue to be re-imagined by artists is just part of who they are. Interestingly, some medieval writers and poets, such as Gautier de Metz, tried to explain the ever-changing fashion of medieval sirens: “Others there are with heads and bodies of maidens as far as the breasts, below as fish, and with the wings of birds; and their song is very sweet and beautiful.”
For the first quote, see page 48 in: Benwell, Gwen; Waugh, Arthur. Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and Her Kin. First ed: Citadel Press, 1965.
For the second quote, see page 84 in: Martin, Ruth. "Love at a Distance: Kafka and the Sirens." In Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging, edited by Alejandro and Rumens Cetvanes-Carson, Nick, 81-99. New York: Rodopi, 2007.
For general information about bestiaries and sirens,
Hassig, Debra. "The Harlot: The Siren." In Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, 104-15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
See also pages 59-60: Hassig, Debra. "Sex in the Bestiaries." In The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, edited by Debra Hassig, 71-98. New York: Garland Publisher, 1999.
The change from bird into fish in the Book of Beasts: Travis, William J. "Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-L'etoile." 26 Artibus et Historiae 23, no. 45 (2002): 29-62, page 39. See also Hassig 1995, pages 105-06.
For the University Bestiary, see: Hassig 1995, page 113.
For the Liber Monstrorum translation of the siren passage: Orchard, Andy. "Liber Monstrorum: Translation." In Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript. Cambridge D.S. Brewer, 1995.
For the Liber Monstrorum translation of Scylla’s passage: Orchard 1995, page 267.
For the word similarities with pennis and pinnis, see Lao, Meri. Seduction and the Secret Power of Women: The Lure of Sirens and Mermaids. Translated by John Oliphant. 2nd ed. Rochester: Park Street Press, 2007. Page 93.
The resembling Scylla quote: Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. "Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages." In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 16-51. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Page 29.
For the Isidore quote, see: Seville, Isidore of. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A.; Lewis Barney, W. J; Beach, J.A.; Berghof, Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Page 245, line 31.
For the listing of Scylla before the sirens in the University Bestiary, see Hassig 1995, page 114.
Scylla listed as having two tails in the Book of Beasts, page 7-9: Sachs, Eleanor B. "Some Notes on a Twelfth-Century Bishop’s Mitre in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club 61, no. 1 & 2 (1978): 69.
Siren with a fish tail, see page 242: Woodruff, Helen. "The Physiologus of Bern: A Survival of Alexandrian Style in a Ninth Century Manuscript." The Art Bulletin 12, no. 3 (1930): 226-53.
See also: Travis 2002, page 44.
For the first appearance of “mermaydes” in English, see: Holford-Strevens, pages 30-31.
See also: Berman 1987, page 133.
This topic is also discussed in Chapter 4.
Rachewiltz, Siegfried de. De Sirenibus: An Inquiry into Sirens from Homer to Shakespeare. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987, page 87 suggests that the Visigoth mermaid is the first fish-tailed mermaid in Christian art. However, it is not clear is this figure is identified as a mermaid; also, the Bern Physiologus was more widely distributed and read than the Sacramentarium of Gellone.
For the image, see: Zimmermann, Ernst H. Vorkarolingische Minaturn. 1916. <http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/zimmermann1916ga> hahahah the link doesn’t work
For confusion about where the siren was listed in bestiaries, see: Hassig 1999, page 124.
See also: Hassig 1995, pages 105-108.
For general siren evolution from bird to fish, see pages 166-169: McCulloch, Florence. Mediaevel Latin and French Bestiaries. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1960.
For a scholarly overview of the bird to fish transformation, see Rachewiltz 1987, the section titled “The Birth of the Mermaid: Some Notes on Medieval Siren-Iconography” pages 86-106.
For the thirteenth century poem: Druce 1915, page 176.
For another writer who noticed the many forms of the siren: Guillaume le Clerc wrote in 1211 AD: “Of the siren we shall tell you... Fashioned in the form of a woman. The other part is shaped like a fish or bird.” Sachs 1978, pages 6-7.
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