The Fairy Tale Magazine JUNE ISSUE 2023

Legends are stories rooted in real locations and settings, and their superpower is revealing the anxieties of the society that creates them. And mermaids, even as they move into fairy tales, have a lot to say about our fears surrounding romance. What happens when you love someone unattainable or out of your reach? What happens when the one you love cannot stay? Mermaids have their own answers for us.

The heart of most stories of mermaids is longing. Longing for land, longing for understanding, and, of course, longing for love. The mermaid represents the call of the sea and the dangers there, but she also represents the beautiful, the uncanny, and everything that seems just out of reach. These are tales of what Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown in their wonderful book The Penguin Book of Mermaids call “human experiences with the mysterious, nonhuman, aquatic other”—creatures that are us, but are not us, at the same time. Because of this, mermaids become canvases onto which we paint our deepest desires and most terrifying anxieties of loss and disconnection.

Child ballad #289, “The Mermaid,” shows us how anxieties about the ocean were associated with mermaids. A sea shanty, or work song, “The Mermaid”' includes a scene where the crew of a ship sees a mermaid and interprets her as a sign of an impending wreck, a prediction that ultimately comes true. As folklorist Stephen Winick argues, “[i]t’s pretty obvious from ‘The Mermaid’ that mermaids weren’t considered good luck. good luck. On the contrary, seeing one almost always spelled disaster [...] One explanation considered sometimes given for mermaids being unlucky is that they are female, and that sailors considered it bad luck to have a woman aboard most ships. Many explanations have been given for this belief. One is the possibility of jealousies arising among sailors who fall for the same girl (which seems plausible).”

Here, the mermaid represents a deadly threat to the survival of the ship’s crew, but even this danger is tinged with the threat of romantic competition, jealousy, and loss.

Bacchilega and Brown remind us that “[o]ur anxieties about water beings are magnified by our attraction to them, which in many stories results in the human’s loss of control, self, and even life.

Embracing a water spirit can prove lethal.” While mermaids may frequently resemble beautiful humans from the ch of the action of the story is based around 46