“Here be sirens” — two tailed sirens on world maps
Sirens and mermaids represented unknown waters and dangers on medieval and Renaissance maps. While most of those sirens were the common single-tailed mermaid, there are a few maps with two tailed sirens. Let’s take a look.
Siren, Catalan Atlas, 1375. Image Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Our first two tailed siren is from the Catalan Atlas, a medieval map or mappa mundi, usually dated to about 1375. She’s located in the Indian Ocean, the section of the map that is based on Marc Polo’s travels in the Far East. She has long blonde hair, and two different coloured tails that she holds apart.
Detail of a siren in the Madrid Ptolemy, BNE MS Res. 255, f 58v, c. 1455-1460. In the ocean near the British Isles, south of Ireland. Image from this website.
The second map has several two tailed sirens. These sirens are a little more modest, as they appear to wear a dress over their upper bodies. She also has long hair and holds her two tails apart. These siren are in “Ptolemy's Geography which was made in Florence in approximately 1455 1460, namely Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255.” Researcher Chet van Duzer wrote that this map has a large variety of sea monsters, and appear to be drawn by the same artist, with the “same greenish-brown color as the rivers and the wide wavy lines used to indicate seawater on the maps, but generally with darker and finer lines.” Also, unlike the Catalan Atlas siren, the sea monsters appear to be placed at random, not necessarily representing dangerous or unknown seas.
“The upper half of f 77r of the Madrid Ptolemy.” She has spots or scales on her tail, and also is wearing a dress.
This map also has a rare example of a two tailed merman:
Two tailed merman aren’t common, but there are other examples of them.
Our third siren I was uncertain about, as the website I found it on doesn’t work, and I can’t find other images of it online. However, I’m including it, because van Duzer references what I believe to be the same map:
From the old website: Twin-tailed siren on a map of Ptolemaic Arabia, 1548. Published in Gastaldi's 'Geografia di Claudio Ptolemeo Alexandrino', Venice. www.antique-maps.co.ik/asian
From van Duzer’s article:
“The edition of Ptolemy published in Venice by Giovanni Baptista Pedrezano in 1548, titled La geografía di Claudio Ptolemeo, was the first complete edition in Italian (Francesco Berlinghieri had paraphrased Ptolemy into verse in 1482)…Map Asia 6 has a two-tailed siren and a finely drawn swan…”
Our final two tailed siren is also swimming in the Indian Ocean:
Sebastian Munster, about 1544-1500, “Tabula Orientalis Regionis, Asiae Scilicet Extremas Complectens Terras & Regna”
This siren has wild, windblown, long brown hair, two tails that end in unusual red fins, and unlike the other sirens, is shown floating on the waves, as opposed to submerged in the water.
The color version is from Wikipedia; there’s also a black and white version on Princeton University Library’s website.
Update: I found this image of a two tailed siren on a map in the Edward Worth Library. By the same mapmaker as the previous one, interestingly. She has long, windblown hair; scales past her hips; and is holding her two curling tails:
Image of a mermaid on the Typus Cosmographicus Universalis by Sebastian Münster in Simon Grynäus, Novvs orbis regionvm ac insvlarum veteribvs incognitarvm (Basel, 1555), foldout plate
From the post “Mythical Creatures at the Edward Worth Library.”
This list is not exhaustive— there hasn’t been a lot of research done on the monsters on world maps, and these are just the two tailed sirens I happened across while researching this image. If you know of other two tailed sirens on maps, let me know!
Sources
Baumgärtner, Ingrid. Biblical, Mythical, and Foreign Women in the Texts and Pictures on Medieval World Maps. Univ.-Bibliothek, 2007, https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-2007010416511.
Also available on this link.
Edson, Evelyn. The World Map, 1300—1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007. Fig. 3.4
Duzer, Chet Van. The Sea Monsters in the Madrid Manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography (Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255).
There’s another version of the Catalan Atlas siren on Shutterstock, but I can’t find where the image is originally from.
