Does anyone know about mermaid myths?

Answer 1

First you will come to the Sirens
who enchant all who come near them.
If any one unwarily draws in too close
and hears the singing of the Sirens,
his wife and children
will never welcome him home again,
for they sit in a green field
and warble him to death
with the sweetness of their song.
There is a great heap
of dead men's bones lying all around,
with the flesh still rotting off them.«

from The Odyssey translated by Samuel Butler

Answer 2

There is a greek myth about mermaids:

Alexander the Great had a mermaid sister. Sometimes she was approaching the ships and asking : " Does King Alexander lives ?"
If the answer was negative she was sinking the ship. The correct answer, until today, according to the myth is "He lives and he reigns and he is ruling the world".

I think this myth is not ancient but it's surely old.

Answer 3

Mermaid tales that we have today are largely debased versions of much older myths about Sea Goddesses. Examples of ancient goddesses of the sea depicted as part fish include Tiamat (the early Sumerian sea-goddess who later Babylonian myth reconstructed as a sea-dragon-monster for Marduk to destroy), Thetis (Greek), and Scylla (also Greek, also once a sea-goddess, but later a sea-monster by Olympian-Classical times). There are many others, including some early depictions of the Sea-Love Goddess Aphrodite (who, yes, became the sex-&-love goddess born of the ocean foam & Zeus' magical scattered "seed" by classical times) or Cytherea.

Anyway, the mermaid myth (and also the merman myth, which originates in figures like the Sumerian god Ea) represents the idea of spiritual duality between a humanistic Divine (the upper body of a woman) and a more impersonal, elemental Divine (the lower body of a fish)--of spirit rooted in the oceans of matter.

In this regard, one of the properties of the "song of the sirens" archetypal pattern in mermaid myths (which is quite universal--look at the russalki of Russia, among others) is that it is a later abasement of a primordial myth of the call of the Universal Goddess to the individual spiritual seeker. That call could not lightly be refused, because of the beauty of the song; when it became necessary later in history to abase and demean the older matriarchal religions, that vocational call became the tempting, destroying song of the siren. But both are about the irresistible, compelling call of the spirit of the Sea to the individual, with both emancipatory and destructive dimensions.

Answer 4

There are Sirens in the Odyssey--Odysseus wants to hear them sing, but they always make sailors crash into the rocks with their song. So he makes his men plug their ears and tie him to the mast of his ship and row past so that he can hear the Sirens, and Sirens weren't really mermaids in the classical sense (they aren't half-fish--they're half-bird, but whatever) but they have kind of a similar story.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote the story "The Little Mermaid."

Seems like I read about mermaids in a Mercedes Lackey book. But I don't know which one. I think the "real" mermaids look like the ones in Harry Potter books--kinda greenish and freaky, with long crazy hair and gross teeth. Apparently, there's a mermaid-type woman called a Selkie who is a seal (I think) or she wears a sealskin and if you can take it from her, you can make her into a woman and she has to marry you. That's a British myth, probably Irish. Check Greek and Irish mythology.

Answer 5

I personally don't know any, other than the Little Mermaid -- but, a radio show that I listen to recently had a guest on that is doing current research/writing on Mer People (mermaids & mermen); I have included the link below. If you have the streamlink service, you can listen to a rebroadcast of the show. I understand that they are soon going to have a free weekend of streamlink, & I imagine that info will be posted on the first website listed below. Good Luck!

Answer 6

they say that the myth about mermaids began when drunken sailors would see manateeses, there are times when a manate is feeding and it'll pop up and have seaweed on it's head, hence the long flowing hair, lol. lonely men who missed their whores and wives.

Answer 7

the myth of mermaids can be summed up in this

lonely drunken sailors + months on the sea without any girls = naked fish people

basically, its mans desire that started the great legend

Answer 8

Yah I know about them and I believe there are mermaids out there, cause as humans there are things we aren't susposed to know and who says mermaids aren't one of those things we don't know about?

Answer 9

I do and i like myths like that especially dragons

Answer 10

The ones they tell each other are not recorded.