Reflections

The Multiplicity of Mermaids

by Robert Silverberg

One of the funniest science-fantasy stories ever written was L. Sprague de Camp’s “Nothing in the Rules,” which first appeared in the July 1939 issue of the once highly cherished fantasy magazine, Unknown, and has been reprinted many times since. The story concerns a minor-league swimming meet, for which Herbert Laird, the coach of one team, exasperated by the series of victories that his rival, Louis Connaught, has achieved by using a swimmer who happens to have webbed fingers, has brought in a ringer of his own: a woman who enters the pool area in a wheelchair. The lower half of her body is concealed by a blanket, which at Laird’s instruction she pulls aside to reveal a pair of horizontal flukes, like those of a porpoise. Laird has recruited a mermaid for his swimming team. The referee, pointing at the tail, cries out in astonishment, “Laird, is this a joke?” No joke at all. The mermaid—she is Greek, coming from Cyprus—is entered in the backstroke and several other races, and it seems there is nothing in the rules about adding a mermaid to the team (though there is a brief dispute about her bathing suit, which leaves her tail exposed). Mrs. Santalucia, the web-fingered swimmer, finishes her first race in the creditable time of 29.8 seconds, but the powerful flukes of Laird’s mermaid enable her to complete the course in a mere eight seconds, a fraction of the existing world record. And so it goes, one clever twist following another as the strange swimming meet unfolds.

I consider the story fantasy because De Camp never explains where Laird found his mermaid, and, so far as we know, mermaids do not actually exist, but are mere creatures of myth. But rereading the story recently, in the light of recent heated disputes over the presence of transgender people in women’s athletic competitions, another and very contemporary “Nothing in the Rules” situation, got me thinking about the mermaid myth in general.

References to creatures that are part human and part fish can be found deep back in antiquity. The Babylonians of four thousand years ago worshipped a fish-tailed god called Ea, sometimes known by the Greek form of his name, Oannes—a culture-god who brought the knowledge of mathematics, agriculture, and writing to his people. A useful deity, but not much like the mermaids of later fable.

The earliest one of those of whom we have any knowledge is Derceto, a goddess of the Semitic peoples of the Near East. The Roman writer Lucian tells of seeing a Phoenician drawing of her in which “in the upper half she is a woman, but from the waist to the lower extremities runs in the tail of a fish.” The very image of a mermaid! As Atargatis she was worshipped in Syria, Egypt, Crete, and even among the Israelites, until they began to obey the stern command of Yahweh to have no other gods before Him.

The ancient Greeks had a fish-god, Triton, son of Poseidon—no mermaid he, but he did, at least, have a splendid fishtail. For actual Greek mermaids we must look to the Oceanids, daughters of the gods Oceanus and Tethys—three thousand of them. They were graceful and seductive (though some of them made trouble for Odysseus on his way home from Troy), but they were nowhere near as troublesome as the sirens, which began as bird-women but somehow morphed into mermaids with lovely fishtails, who sang sweet songs to passing mariners, but devoured those who came too close. The sirens exist only in the pages of Homer’s poem, but Pliny the Elder, whose huge one-man encyclopedia of the first century A.D. summed up all of knowledge as of his time, insisted that mermaids were “no fabulous tale,” telling of one that was “seen and beheld plainly” along the Mediterranean coast, “their bodies rough and scaled all over.” Perhaps so, although Pliny, great scholar that he was, was not altogether a reliable witness, and many a fable made its way into his magnificent book.

But mermaids persisted across the centuries. In early Ireland, we are told, one Rath saw them, beautiful girls, “the fairest of shape and make, with yellow hair and white skins,” but, alas, “hairy-clawed bestial parts” below the water. They lulled poor Rath to sleep with their singing and tore him to bits.

In the Middle Ages there was surprising acceptance of these pagan fantasies. The thirteenth-century historian Bartholomew Angelicus declared that the mermaid was “a sea-beast wonderfully shaped, that draws sailors to peril by sweetness of song.” She is, we learn, “a maid from the navel upward and a fish from the navel below.” Among the mariners who claimed to encounter one were two from the crew of Henry Hudson, who in the early seventeenth century ventured into high Arctic waters in search of a maritime passage that would lead directly from the Atlantic to the East Indies. Hudson didn’t find it, but at latitude 75, Hudson wrote, “One of our company looking overboard saw a Mermaid, and calling up some of the company to see her, and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men a little after, a Sea came up and overturned her. From the navel upward her back and breasts were like a woman’s (as they say that saw her), her skin very white. . . . In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a Porpoise, and speckled like a Mackerel.” Hudson was not given to inventing myths, but he does not say he saw the mermaid himself.

Around the same time, though, another famous navigator, Captain John Smith—he of the Pocahontas story—supposedly saw a mermaid while exploring the West Indies. She had large eyes, a finely shaped nose, and long green hair, and “was by no means unattractive.” The susceptible Captain Smith was beginning to experience the first pangs of love when she suddenly turned to reveal that from the waist below she was a fish. Unfortunately, no one has been able to find this tale in the actual writings of John Smith, and recent scholarship indicates it may have been a fabrication by Alexandre Dumas. But this and other stories indicate continued willingness to believe in the existence of mermaids on into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although some more rational critics began to suggest that impressionable sailors had taken manatees or dugongs—bulky aquatic tropical mammals that only the most nearsighted of sailors could mistake for attractive semi-human women—for mermaids. Clever hoaxers like P.T. Barnum assembled stuffed mermaids out of the bodies of various creatures for the amusement of circus-goers.

Still, reports of actual sightings were not uncommon. A Danish royal commission, appointed in 1714 to determine whether such creatures existed, reported having seen not a mermaid but a merman, with a long black beard, in the sea off the Faroe Islands, and another merman was reported in the sea off England, with human-looking eyes, nose, and mouth, and a tail much like that of a salmon. Most convincing of all was the 1783 report of a British farmer named Henry Reynolds, said by all who knew him to have a reputation for truth, who declared that he had seen a creature altogether human in form, except for a powerful tail resembling that of a conger eel. The world has been pretty thoroughly explored by now, and there are no mermaid skeletons in our museums, nor are there any such beings to be seen swimming around in the tanks of our aquariums. (If there were, legal problems of a civil rights nature might arise, because mer-creatures, being half human, surely have at least 50 percent of a claim to being exempt from exhibition as zoological specimens.)

Against all probability, though, there still are reports of mermaid sightings, such as the one in Israel in 2009, when dozens of people said they had seen one cavorting in Haifa Bay. The nearby town of Kiryat Yam offered a million dollar reward for proof of her presence, but at last word there had been no takers. (There’s a film clip of the alleged Kiryat Yam mermaid on YouTube. I have my doubts about it.) And in Zimbabwe in 2012, work on two reservoirs was halted when the construction crew complained that pesky mermaids were interfering with the job. “I do not believe in mermaids,” said water resources minister Samuel Nkomo, “but the community that lives in the area does.” Traditional healers were hired to appease them with rituals that included the slaughter of cattle and the brewing of special beer, and eventually it became possible for work to be resumed.

Mermaids do, however, keep turning up in popular culture. The mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor is one of that city’s most visited attractions. A Korean pop group scored a big hit some years back with a song called “A Mermaid Loved a Shark.” The 1984 Disney film  Splash featured Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks in the story, loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Little Mermaid,” of a mermaid who falls in love with a human. She can assume human form on dry land, but her fishtail returns when she gets wet, which leads to the expected complications. I understand that a remake is now in the works, with a contemporary gender-switch in which the mermaid is now a merman in love with a human woman.

As for the Greek mermaid of Sprague de Camp’s story, who managed to qualify as human for the purpose of that swimming meet, she did not go on to win gold medals in the Olympics. The 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled because of the outbreak of World War II, thus sparing the Olympic judges a difficult decision, but by then she was long back in her native element. One swimming meet was enough for her. De Camp tells how Herbert Laird and a friend carry her to Jones Beach on Long Island on a bleak March day, equip her with a box of cans of sardines and a fish spear, “with which she might be able to pick up lunch along the way,” and watch sadly as “she squirmed down the sand and into the water. Then she was gone. Vining thought he saw her wave back from the crest of a wave, but in that visibility he couldn’t be sure.”