#nereid

Ty to both @carnivaley (check her post out here) and @perpetualmaladaptivedaydream (and her post here) for the tags!

Nereid

Nereids were a race of aquatic fey related to the tritons. Like the nymphs who lived in the coves and streams, the dryads who lived in the trees, and the oreads who dwelt in the mountains, nereids were fey who were bound to the seas and oceans. (FR wiki)

In Greek mythology nereids were benevolent daughters of the sea associated with beauty, song, and guiding sailors. They represented everything from the sand to seafoam and while they were kind by nature, nereids were known to unleash sea monsters on those who angered them. I cycled through selkies, sirens, mermaids, and finally landed on nereids. Felt very fitting for my lovely bard who is kind and compassionate but also quick to unleash hell upon those who cross her.

"Very funny. But as we all know, nymphs are sticklers when it comes to their bathing routines. You, my friend, haven't been near a fresh spring in a tenday or more. Not that I don't appreciate your musk. I actually rather like it..."

- Gale Dekarios on nymphs and musk (ty to my twinsie @saylofwaterdeep who reminded me of this bit of dialogue and told me I had to add it) Gentle/sorry for the double tags/no pressure tags for @saylofwaterdeep @toomanyfamiliars @asorceresswrites @theendofanerror @riddlerosehearts @gortashsrighthand @cinder-rellish181 @faeriiefire & an open tag for anyone who would like to play along (tag me in it!)

Nereid on the Rocks Pose reference from

While sirens and mermaids are now almost interchangeable, there’s still important distinctions between their imagery and history. To me, one of the most important, and often overlooked, differences is one mermaids likely got from the Roman goddess of Love, Venus: the mirror and comb. Images of mermaids sitting on rocks and combing out their tresses while gazing at their reflections in mirrors are now iconic— but that’s not true for sirens. Sirens are generally shown either attacking or luring sailors, and playing instruments.

I’ve seen some writers try to link the sirens with Venus, because they both have connections to the sea, and to me, that’s very tenuous and not an ancient similarity. In ancient myths, Aphrodite and the sirens didn’t particularly get on. In the ancient Greek story of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, the victim who jumped overboard to hear the siren’s song was saved by Aphrodite, signaling that these two women may not have seen eye to eye on matters of love and sex.

In ancient art, there’s a handful of depictions of Venus holding a mirror and comb:

Statuette of a woman (perhaps Venus) holding a comb and a mirror, 3rd century BCE. Private collection.

Venus, from Thuburbo-Majus, Roman, 3rd century AD (mosaic), Musee National du Bardo, Bardo, Le Bardo, Tunisia.

In ancient times, the mirror was a favorite gift to Aphrodite:

“The association of the mirror with courtesans and with Venus has antique roots. The Dedicatory Epigrams, Book VI, indicates that the mirror was the favoured gift of hetaerae to Aphrodite: ‘doth the amorous Nicias hang in the fane of Cypris her sandals, locks of her uncoiled hair, her bronze mirror that lacketh not accuracy’(no.210), and ‘Calliclea...dedicates in thy porch true Cypris, the silver statuette of Love… her bronze mirror, and the broad box wood comb that gathered in her locks’ (no. 211). Laïs too, offers her mirror to Venus. Three dedicatory epigrams make reference to it. In no. 1, ascribed to Plato, ‘I, Laïs, whose haughty beauty made mock of Greece, I who once had a swarm of young lovers at my doors, dedicate my mirror to Aphrodite, since I wish not to look on myself as I am, and cannot look on myself as I once was.’ (Santore 2008)

Interestingly, nereids are sometimes shown with a mirror and comb in ancient art:

Nereid on a dolphin. Red-figure dish B. 1687 (Inv. No. GR. 4620) from the Laval collection. The State Hermitage Museum.

Nereid on a fish. Apulian red-figure dinos from the workshop of the Darius Painter. c. 330 B.c. App. no. 199. Bloomington, Indiana University Art Museum, Gift of Thomas T. Solley, 80.27.2. (Photographs courtesy of Ken Strothman and Harvey Osterhoudt for the Indiana University Art Museum). 

I’ve found some images of fish-tailed nereids as attendants of Venus in later Roman art, as well as Byzantine art:

Mosaic with Venus. Halicarnassus, Greek city in Turkey. Late Roman. Production date 4th century CE. British Museum. Note the nereids with her have fish tails.

Even when they weren’t attending Venus, nereids continued to be depicted with the mirror and comb in Byzantine art:

Tapestry fragment with Nereids riding sea monsters. 5th-6th century CE, Egypt. Dumbarton Oaks.

The sirens and Venus aren’t linked together until 600 CE. In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, he states that the sirens “are said to have lived among the waves because the waves gave birth to Venus.” In the 12th century, the bishop Eustathius retells an ancient story that was originally about Scylla, but he says that it was sirens cursed by Venus to have bird bodies.

In the middle ages, fish-tailed women and mirror and combs were combined, and mermaids were often shown holding a mirror and comb, particularly in medieval manuscripts:

Book of Hours France, Paris, ca. 1420-1425. MS M.1004 fol. 166r. The Morgan Library and Museum.

Book of Hours. Use of Paris. Shelfmark: Bodleian Library MS. Douce 62.

Book of Hours France, Provence, ca. 1440-1450. MS M.358 fol. 207r. The Morgan Library and Museum.

British Library, MS 42130, Folio 70v.

Mermaids with a mirror and comb were also found in later church art, such as misericords:

Misericord, Ludlow, England. Via Great English Churches.

Misericord. Stalls of the Basilica of Saint-Materne (16th century)  Walcourt (Belgium). Photo from Jean-Pol GRANDMONT.

It’s important to remember what the comb and mirror symbolised in the middle ages: vanity, frivolity, and in particular, women’s vanity. In a series of tapestries about the apocalypse, the Whore of Babylon is given Venus’ comb and mirror, and is sitting on flowing water:

Scene 64: The Great of Babylon Whore that sits upon many waters. Apocalypse Tapestry, Angers Type: Tapestries Date: ca. 1377 to 1382.

While a few twin-tailed sirens have held mirrors over the centuries, these sirens are the exception, not the rule. Nearly all twin-tailed sirens hold instruments, the ends of their own tails, or their hair. I’ve found four two-tailed sirens holding comb and mirrors, which to me, signal that two-tailed sirens are different than single tailed mermaids. Especially as sirens don’t have combs in Romanesque church art, where sirens with two tails were popular. The only sirens in church art that hold mirror and combs aren’t from the 11th or 12th centuries, but from the 1400 and 1500s. To me, the comb and mirror weren’t originally part of the two-tailed siren’s iconography, and were added later, as sirens and mermaids gradually became blurred.

Two tailed siren with mirror and comb. Florentine, about 1460-70.  Part of a set of 24 animal images, likely part of a bestiary design. Image from The British Museum, London.

Twin-tailed siren, Canterbury Cathedral, England. From a boss on the church ceiling.

Twin-tailed siren on misericord, holding a comb and mirror. From the Holy Trinity Church Stratford on Avon, England. 1400s.

I’m going to wrap this up by mentioning the name of one of the more famous sirens, Parthenope, which means “virginal” or “virgin voiced.” In a statue in Naples, Parthenope is portrayed as a mermaid with a single curving fish tail, and she holds neither mirror nor instrument. As sexual as the sirens’ reputation is, it’s a bit  astonishing to realize just how chaste they actually were in ancient art: no man, woman, or enby ever had a romantic encounter with Homer’s sirens and lived to tell the tale. 

Parthenope statue, Naples. My photo.

Further reading:

Rhodes, Apollonius of. "The Argonautica." Trans. Rieu, E. V. The Voyage of Argo: The Argonautica. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. Page 172.

Quotes about mirror as an offering to Aphrodite: Santore, Cathy. “The Tools of Venus.” Renaissance Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 1997, pp. 179–207.

Venus and nereids' connections:

Freedman, Luba. "A nereid from the back: on a motif in the Italian Renaissance art." Storia dell’Arte 70 (1990): 323-36.

Source for one of the images of a nereid with a comb and mirror: Barringer, Judith M. Divine Escorts : Nereids in Archaic and Classical Greek Art. 4. ed, University of Michigan Press, 1998.

For the quote about sirens and Venus, see page  245: Seville, Isidore of. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Trans. Barney, Stephen A.; Lewis, W. J; Beach, J.A.; Berghof, Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

De Sirenibus: An Inquiry into Sirens from Homer to Shakespeare. by Siegfried de Rachewiltz, 1987. Chapter II: Some Notes on Post-Homeric Sirens. Eustathius, Commentarii in Homeri Iliadem et Odysseam, ed. G. Stallbaum (Hildesheim: Olms rpt., 1960), 1709, 42. Eustathius also relates the legend according to which the Sirens were turned into birds for having spurned the gifts of Aphrodite, i.e., love.

What’s weird is the ancient story wasn’t about the sirens, but about Scylla. Here’s the original ancient story:

“... or whether, as ‘tis said, seeing that she excelled all women in beauty, and in avarice made wanton havoc of her eager lovers, she of a sudden became fenced about with dreadful fishes and dogs, because she, a woman, dared to defraud the powers divine, and to withhold from Venus the vow-appointed price, even the payment which a base harlot, surrounded by a thronging crowd of youths, and stirred with a wild and savage spirit, had imposed upon her lovers— that by this report she was with reason defamed, Pachynus has learned and so bears witness, speaking by the lips of Venus, queen of Old Paphos12…”

Virgil(?). (2000). Ciris (H. R. Fairclough, Trans.). In Aeneid VII-XII: Appendix Vergiliana (pp. 442-483). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Page 449.

On mermaids and sirens with combs and mirrors in Romanesque church art: Woodcock, Alex. "Sirens." Liminal Images: Aspects of Medieval Architectural Sculpture in the South of England from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries. Bar British Series 386. Oxford: John and Erica Hedges Ltd., 2005. 89-108. Page 106 in particular.

Relief with centaur and nymph, 1st century CE. Roman. Terme Diocleziano (National Roman Museum,) Rome. My photo.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in researching the Scythian snake-legged goddess and the two-tailed siren is their lack of a proper, consistent name. So today, I’m going to get nitpicky about what we called different characters and images in ancient art, and we’re going to look at nereids and naiads in ancient art.

First, let’s define who naiads & nereids were in ancient art:

“…ancient authors differentiate between the nereids (fifty daughters of Nereus, water spirits of the Mediterranean), naiads (nymphs dwelling in or near fresh water)…”

Both of these groups of women were consistently shown without fish tails in ancient art. They were generally depicted as regular women, usually riding on the back of a hippocampus, a sea horse or sea monster. Giving nereids fish tails, or imagining them to look like mermaids, is a more modern invention. Some artists gave them fish tails in Baroque painting, and by the 1800s, it was common to show naiads and nereids as fish tailed— but this was a change from how these women were traditionally imagined in ancient art.

Let’s take a look.

Nereid on a sea goat, bronze relief. Late Classical or Early Hellenistic. Date: 4th century BCE. Greek. MET.

Nereid on a hippocampus. About 350 BCE. Attica (Greece). British Museum.

Nereid on a hippocampus, red figure pottery. 2nd quarter of the 4th century BCE (375-350) Louvre.

Nereids and Triton, First half of the 1st century AD. Roman, imperial. Louvre.

Nereid figurine. About 300 -275 (1st quarter of the 3rd century AD). Louvre.

Pic from Tram 2018.

I posted about Coptic nereids here.

Further reading

Davis, Tracy C. “How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One? How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One?” Theatre Journal, vol. 71, no. 3, 2019, pp. 257–88.

Tran, Han. “When the Nereid Became Mermaid: Arnold Böcklin’s Paradigm Shift.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, vol. 12, no. 2, 2018, https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.12.2.09.