Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Truth About the Little Mermaid About this episode What is a mermaid? Do sirens, selkies and Aquaman fit into this category? And how far back in history do they go?
Kate is joined by Diane Purkiss to discuss the Little Mermaid, both the Disney and Hans Christian Anderson versions, and more!
Professor Diane Purkiss is a Fellow and Tutor of English at Keble College, Oxford. She specialises in Renaissance and women's literature, witchcraft and the English Civil War.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
0:53 Speaker 02 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.
0:57 Speaker 03 If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
1:01 Speaker 01 In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.
1:11 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. Welcome back to Betwix the Sheet, the podcast where we root around in the pants of history for your entertainment. But before we can go any further, dear listener, I do have to tell you once again, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, but adults, thanks, and adulty way, covering adult subjects and used to be an adult's home. We call that the Fair Do's warning, because if you keep listening and your feelings get hurt, fair do's, we did tell you it might get a bit spicy. Right, on with the show.
1:40 Kate Lister? The voyage today has not started well. The Betwix team is feeling, ugh, not their best. Freddie is vomiting over the bow. Stu is on the verge of starting a mutiny, and Sophie has been clinging on to the mast for dear life since before we even left. Tom, Hannah and Tim are doing their best to keep the boat afloat, and I've given up hope altogether. But what's that over there? Let me get out my telescope. Oh, my. It is a beautiful woman with long red hair, smooth despite the saltwater and this crazy breeze. She must be cold in that tiny shell top. I think that we should go over to her. Maybe she's got some tips on how to weather the storm. But what's that? Scales where there should be skin, a tail where you'd expect legs and feet.
2:21 Kate Lister? Oh, I've heard of women like this, or to be more accurate, merwomen like this. She might be a Disney princess. She might be an omen of death.
2:51 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. If I asked you to picture a mermaid, I wouldn't be surprised if we all ended up imagining the same thing. And we've gone with Ariel. Yep, Ariel from the Disney film. She is the Little Mermaid. But where did she come from? How does the Disney portrayal of the mermaid compare with the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen? And how does his understanding of a mermaid compare with historical interpretations? Well, today I'm joined by the marvelous Diane Purkiss from the University of Oxford. Diane specializes in the Renaissance and women's literature, witchcraft and the Civil War.
3:32 Kate Lister? But recently Diane has been touring a talk all about the history of mermaids, sea spirits and women. And she is going to join us today to tell us all about them. Have you got your shell bras on? Then let's do it.
3:52 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Diane Purkiss. How are you doing?
3:59 Speaker 04 I'm doing fantastically well, thank you. Not least because it's not teaching term anymore. She said stretching.
4:06 Kate Lister? Oh, I remember it well. I'm having flashbacks.
4:09 Speaker 04 Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry to revive a trauma memory. I mean, I love teaching, I really do. The part I don't like is the part where I have to go to meetings.
4:17 Kate Lister? That's the one, isn't it? That's the one, is the students are great and you sit and you talk to them. And then every one, and I can say this now because I'm not in it anymore, but every once in a while you have to go to some insane meeting, usually a meeting about a meeting, about another meeting that hasn't happened yet, and do some random set of objectives with a middle manager who knows nothing about what you're teaching. It's very weird.
4:36 Speaker 04 And indeed seems to exist to thwart all your efforts to actually improve your students' experience.
4:42 Kate Lister? Exactly it. Do you think that mermaids would have middle managers? Because that's what we're here to talk about today.
4:50 Speaker 04 No, I think that's why we all want to be mermaids, Kate, to be really honest with you. I think mermaids symbolise a freedom from all those things. And that's why we all long to enter the deeps of the ocean, to get away from middle managers.
5:02 Kate Lister? You can imagine a group of mermaids, just, right, everyone's got to come in for the meeting on Zoom today. Oh, God, Trident, you're on mute, you're on mute.
5:11 Speaker 04 I love Trident, you're on mute. You're muted.
5:15 Kate Lister? Oh, no. Right. Oh, but the reason I'm asking you this is because you're, you are someone of an expert on mermaids, on mermaid folklore and history. And where did this interest of yours come from?
5:27 Speaker 04 Well, I had a very lucky childhood in that I grew up partly on the Sydney beaches. And I wouldn't say I ever identified as a mermaid the way I gather some women do in Minnesota, where they actually go to the swimming pool in Tails. But I did it, yeah, there's a Netflix show about this, if you want to follow up.
5:46 Kate Lister? I didn't know that.
5:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, probably, yeah, probably an extreme position. But I love that you could feel that way in Minnesota. But, I mean, actually, it's that most Sydney kids spend a huge amount of time, or did when I was a child, on the beach. A perfect weekend for me was the weekend where my feet hardly touched the ground. And the interesting thing that follows from that is that quite young, you develop a very good knowledge of seas and tides, waves and winds, weather patterns.
6:15 Speaker 04 Sydney kids can tell when there's a dominant weather system called a southerly buster, which comes up from Antarctica, so a bit like a northerly in northern Europe. It's a huge dark cloud and the temperature instantly drops by about fifteen degrees. And, you know, when I was eight, I could spot a southerly buster cloud coming up and could spot riptides and gutters and could tell you all about the difference in onshore or offshore wind made to wave breaks.
6:40 Kate Lister? Proper water baby.
6:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. It just gave me a lifelong feeling that I was more at home in water than on land. And I think that is still something that I identify with and relate to in Tales of Mermaids. Where characteristically, the mermaids are really dumb and want to be human. And I think the reason we're all fascinated is that we'd quite like to be them.
7:04 Kate Lister? I think you're probably right, aren't you? I suppose most people's immediate image, and I must say most people, I just mean if you went around the streets and asked people, what do you think of when I say the word mermaid? They'd probably think Disney, wouldn't they?
7:18 Speaker 04 They would think of the nineteen eighty nine Disney film. And in a way, that's where we have to start from, because as you rightly say, it's where we all start. And the interesting thing about that film, I always argue, is that it's not as boring as it seems.
7:29 Kate Lister? Oh, okay.
7:30 Speaker 04 On the face of it, it's this drearily commercial, ends in a wedding, she gets to Prince Yorn, kind of a movie, but actually there's some hidden factors. Not least the fact that there's another watery woman in the film, and that's Ursula the sea witch.
7:45 Kate Lister? Love Ursula, love Ursula.
7:47 Speaker 04 Exactly. Ursula, who's so super strong and powerful and who doesn't have girly goals. She pretends she wants to marry the prince, but it's just a ploy. She actually wants to rule the ocean. She wants to replace King Neptune.
7:59 Kate Lister? I think she was actually, I think she's been done dirty in that film because Ariel signed a contract with her. It's not Ursula's fault. She didn't read the small print there, quite frankly.
8:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's like those things we sign when we update our phones, right? God knows what we're signing.
8:15 Kate Lister? Terms and conditions, Ariel, for goodness sake.
8:18 Speaker 04 But I'm also going to go with, interestingly, the film kind of knew that she was compelling because it based the drawings of her on the very celebrated drag act Divine.
8:29 Kate Lister? Yes.
8:30 Speaker 04 So in many respects, Ursula is a kind of intrinsically very transgressive, interesting figure, even though obviously she's demonized. And then alongside that, Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyrics for all the songs, the one I really want people to hear in their heads is "Part of Your World", was gay and actually, really tragically, knew he was dying of AIDS when he wrote those songs.
8:53 Kate Lister? Oh my god. Oh, I didn't know that.
8:56 Speaker 04 Back in the day, and I remember this because I'm a sad old person, you couldn't tell people you had AIDS because there was such a stigma. So nobody knew that he had it.
9:06 Kate Lister? Oh.
9:07 Speaker 04 But "Part of Your World" is sort of very much a gay torch song, actually. It's all about longing to be part of a bigger, more tolerant, more loving, more accepting, more urban community than your birth family.
9:20 Kate Lister? When you know that, that whole song, just the meaning shifts entirely, doesn't it?
9:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's basically like "Over the Rainbow", sung by Judy Garland.
9:28 Kate Lister? Oh my god, wow.
9:30 Speaker 04 So though it seems like a poor place for people to start, I think I'm going to argue, no, actually, it's got, if you will, hidden currents that give it depth. I'm sorry to keep doing these puns, but it is that. And so it's not quite as sweet and anodyne as it seems. It retains some of Hans Anderson's original. And it's not as straight as it seems either, because Anderson wasn't straight.
9:55 Kate Lister? What do you think was going on there?
9:58 Speaker 04 Definitely. Well, a big part of that was that he grew up in this Danish Puritan family, very poor. His mother, who was super ambitious for him, made sure he got a reasonably good education, but there was nothing much he could obviously do with it. And interestingly, what happened first of all to him is he fell in love with the idea of being an actor. So he footslogged to Copenhagen to become an actor. But it was a bit hopeless because he wasn't that pretty and he wasn't even that confident on stage. Eventually, he picked up some other patrons who got him to start writing. But all his life, he fell in love with people of both sexes in a really passionate way.
10:40 Kate Lister? Obsessive, really, we would probably say.
10:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think became a creepy stalker in many respects.
10:45 Kate Lister? Yes, I'm glad you said that.
10:48 Speaker 04 Stalked poor Jenny Lind, the opera singer, and she was like, I don't know what to do with this. But at the time he wrote The Little Mermaid in particular, he was deeply in love with another man, a man called Edvard Collin. And before Anderson had finished the story, Edvard Collin announced his engagement to a woman, obviously, because that was the only kind of engagement you could have. So The Little Mermaid is really a story of thwarted love and hope. In Anderson's story, the mermaid does not get to marry the prince, unlike in the Disney film.
11:17 Kate Lister? No, she doesn't, does she? It's much darker.
11:20 Speaker 04 And it's all about her suffering and perpetual loyalty and perpetual love for this individual who, in many respects, at best thinks of her as like a pet animal.
11:30 Kate Lister? The original story, if anyone hasn't, hasn't read it, and I'm sure some people will have done, but can you give us an overview about where it departs from Disney's version? And what the darkness of that story is?
11:42 Speaker 04 It's significantly darker than Disney's version because part of the deal the mermaid makes with the witch from the beginning is that every step she takes with her human feet will be agonizingly painful, like walking on swords. In the Disney film, this is kind of replaced by clumsiness, so the mermaid is clumsy. But in Anderson, it's like walking on the edges of razors or swords. And it's so painful that even though there's no visible wound, her feet actually bleed. So it's quite like, yeah. And we could also think of the symbology of that, that The Little Mermaid is just coming into puberty. And that's sort of bleeding from the lower body and pain.
12:27 Speaker 04 It's kind of fairly obviously symbolic of menstruation and the beginnings of menstruation. So in a way, what she's also wished for is a grown up body to grow up. She'll be visible to the prince. Because she's only fifteen, isn't she? She's only a little slip of a thing. She's just fifteen in Anderson's, but only sixteen in Disney's as well. Which is actually pretty creepy in all versions. And I mean, she is the little mermaid. In some illustrations, if you really want to pull your hair out, she's clearly a more than, barely more than a toddler. So it's very uncomfortable, really. Well, that is. And in all those respects, part of what she's wishing for and wishing to be a human is she's sort of wishing to be a grown up princess.
13:10 Speaker 04 And that, of course, is also what Disney wants to sell to little girls. That, you know, tiny girls buy these little mermaid costumes, which have a bra that in a way is completely unsuitable for a prepubescent body. So it's also about the pain, therefore, of being in the wrong body. And that one of the letters that survives from Hans Anderson to Edvard Colin, he describes himself as, he says, the feelings I have for you are those of a woman. So that sort of sense of what it is that we're longing for, what she's longing for, is the kind of body that would be appealing to the prince. But to get that kind of body is to endure extreme pain. So that's one big difference. Another big difference that's really important is the ending.
13:55 Speaker 04 In Anderson's story, the prince just marries another princess. It's not the sea witch in disguise. She just, she just marries another princess. He marries another girl. It's partly because, as in the Disney film, he deludedly believes that this other princess is the one who has saved him. But it's also, and this maybe is more disturbing, because he never takes her seriously anyhow. He treats her as a pet. She sleeps on a cushion outside his door. Yikes. Oh, no. I'm like, oh, this is so horrible. And I mean, she's kind of also a little bit like a clown or a fool figure. She does dances for them and they all laugh and applaud. The whole time she's in pain.
14:37 Speaker 04 It's sort of very exploitative. So, yeah, he marries this other princess. And then this is a big flip too. Her five sisters, who are much more important in the Anderson story than they are in the Disney movie, make a fresh pact with the sea witch. They cut off their hair. And in exchange, they get a magical dagger from the sea witch. And they bring that to the little mermaid, who's on board a ship with the freshly married prince. And they give her the dagger and they say, if you stab the prince in the heart, when his heart's blood falls on your feet, they'll change back into a tail. And you can then live your full three hundred years. Otherwise, at the very first light of dawn, you'll die and turn to sea foam.
15:18 Kate Lister? Oh.
15:19 Speaker 04 So really, really violent and and very strongly worded fates for the mermaid here. So she takes the dagger and she goes into the royal bedchamber cabin. And she stands over the prince and she can't bring herself to stab him because she still loves him. So instead, she throws the dagger out the window, throws herself out after it. And in Anderson's original ending, she just dissolves into sea foam and it ends there.
15:42 Kate Lister? That's not very happy, is it? So she kills herself to save the man that she loves.
15:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:50 Kate Lister? Who didn't love her back.
15:51 Speaker 04 Exactly. So it it's deeply tragic and kind of awful. It then Anderson felt that himself and felt uncomfortable. And so he wanted maybe to give himself a bit of hope. So he wrote a different ending, which is the one that you will see in published versions. And that is where, as she dissolves into sea foam, she becomes instead a sort of Irish body, a daughter of the air. And this is a category of being that Anderson invents for the story that in her previous existence. But they're they're spirits of the air in the same way that the mermaid is the spirit of the oceans and the waters. But unlike her, they can earn a soul by doing good deeds.
16:32 Speaker 04 So she's then going to spend three hundred years, but she's going to spend them doing good deeds and at the end she'll get a soul.
16:37 Kate Lister? That's still a rough deal. I'd have stabbed him, Diane.
16:40 Speaker 04 Not only is it rancid, but it's really annoying as well because it seems like she was good enough already in that she didn't kill him to save herself. And the fact that she's now got to jump through a bunch of other hoops seems a bit harsh.
16:52 Kate Lister? Well, he's running off with some other tart. That's not a nice story.
16:58 Speaker 04 No, I share your indignation. I don't think anyone likes it. And just to make it a bit worse, it's also one of those awful moralistic things where the Little Mermaid, now a daughter of the air, sees a naughty child, her sentence is extended and she has to work for longer. So you can imagine, you know, your mum or your grandma or someone like that saying, well, Agatha, you've just extended the Little Mermaid's sentence by throwing that food on the floor.
17:21 Kate Lister? Oh my god. And the whole thing is like, is it's really a sort of, it's when you look at Anderson's other work, you do get this reoccurring theme of someone's in love and that they weren't loved back. Like The Ugly Duckling is another one of his.
17:36 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. Exactly that. And yeah, I mean, there are lots of instances. The other one is the Constant Chin Soldier, who has this deep love for the the fairy ballerina and they both die.
17:47 Kate Lister? Oh, he was a strange potato. There's those records, isn't there, of him in his diary that he would go to brothels and just pay the women for their time and would just sit there and cry.
17:56 Speaker 04 No, that's awful.
17:58 Kate Lister? And then would go home and write about how well behaved he was and how he tested himself, but he hadn't succumbed. But there was lots of like crosses for masturbation. He seems to have been masturbating furiously, but never actually had sex with anybody.
18:11 Speaker 04 Exactly. But there's something so obvious in that respect in the stories, that these are stories about longing rather than stories about fulfillment. And while I think that, yeah, he was an odd duck, an odd duckling, if you like, an ugly duckling himself, and a very strange man. There's wonderful stories about when he went to stay with the Dickens family and they were just desperate to get rid of him. Like, how can we make him go home? Is there any way? Is there any way we can get him to leave?
18:38 Kate Lister? Get this man out of my house. Oh dear.
18:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, because he was always upset about something. He seems to have had incredibly poor self-control.
18:47 Kate Lister? Dear.
18:47 Speaker 04 But I feel like he nonetheless captures something that's a big part of general human experience and perhaps women's experience and girls' experience above all, which is this sense of being sort of passionately eager but constantly rebuffed.
19:05 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Diane and mermaids after this short break.
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20:29 Kate Lister? When he wrote his Little Mermaid, were mermaids a big part of folklore and mythology at the time? They were? There was many other stories about them?
20:37 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, what his story is really drawing on is two specific previous stories. One is a huge Romantic era bestseller called Undine. If listeners know about this, it might be from the fact that it's briefly referenced in Little Women. It's one of Jo March's Christmas presents. And this is a very similar story to The Little Mermaid, actually. It's the story of a water spirit, an undine, who falls in love with a mortal man. As they do, this is fairly normal for this kind of entity, and initially is unable to attract him, but eventually through redemptive sacrifice is able to acquire a human soul and be christened. So that's the happy ending.
21:18 Speaker 04 And similarly, and the 300 year motif is important here, there's the Irish mermaid saint, Liban.
21:24 Kate Lister? Okay.
21:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's Ireland, so we've got to have an obviously vaguely pagan story that's been tarted up by monks.
21:33 Kate Lister? What's that story? I'm not familiar with that one.
21:36 Speaker 04 This is, this is a liban. She is living on the site of what's going to be Loch Nígh. And suddenly the floodwaters start arising around her. And miraculously, and after a bit of time's gone by, she's changed into a mermaid. And her lapdog is changed into an otter. So the pair are able to continue to live in a cave under the loch. And she surfaces from time to time and people hear her singing. And eventually, one of the interfering people who hears her singing goes and tells Saint Patrick about this strange phenomenon, this beautiful singing female. And he comes down to the loch side. She swims over, asks him for help, and he baptizes her.
22:21 Speaker 04 And she dies immediately. Low the happy ending.
22:23 Kate Lister? Oh, it's rubbish being a mermaid. What's going on here? They're all dying and sad and falling in love. Is that a mermaid's lot? Getting baptized by random saints who are walking around, that no one asked them to do it? And are they always sad?
22:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I mean, what, what this is really about is the fact that mermaids are part animal and part human. So in a kind of Christian cosmology, they are lower than the human because half of them is animal.
22:56 Kate Lister? Okay, okay, that makes sense.
22:57 Speaker 04 So they have to kind of go up a couple of rungs on the ladder to be equal to humans.
23:02 Kate Lister? So I probably should have asked you this right at the beginning, but for your research, how do you even define a mermaid? Is it, is it half human, half fish? Do we count, was Ursula a mermaid? Because she was a sort of an octopus thing going on. Like what, like how much fish, how much person can men be mer-men? I suppose they can be, but what?
23:20 Speaker 04 They can, definitely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a really important question. And the interesting thing I'm going to focus on now is not the mayor, but the maid. And why do we still call them maids? It's deliberately archaic, like ye all the English tea shoppe.
23:33 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? Maid means, yeah.
23:35 Speaker 04 Why don't we call them mer-girls? It's a bit odd that we still use this term.
23:38 Kate Lister? Mer-women.
23:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, mer-women.
23:40 Kate Lister? I'd never even thought of that.
23:42 Speaker 04 Because in fact, the Anglo-Saxon term is mer-vif, which is actually mer-woman.
23:47 Kate Lister? Oh, that's much better. That was like Grendel's mum. She was referred to as as whiff, wasn't she?
23:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, definitely. Absolutely right. I'd love to talk about whether Grendel's mum is adjacent to mermaids in a bit. But yeah, I mean, there's sort of two things here. There's what your body form is, like whether you're part sea creature and part human. And there's also whether you live in water and if so, whether you breathe water. So there's two interesting things. There are many kinds of sea dwelling entities that are sort of partially human, even though they don't initially present that way. And the obvious example here in the British Isles is the silky. Silky seals, when they're, literally when they're on the land, they present just as human.
24:30 Kate Lister? Yep.
24:31 Speaker 04 Um, and you wouldn't necessarily know by looking at them that when they're in the sea, they present as steel. And when you look at the seals, you can't tell that they could be human on land. So that's a different way of being sort of a bit human and a bit sea. Instead of being half one and half the other, it's a question of where you are. But there's a similar concept at work that you are both one thing and another.
24:54 Kate Lister? So would you say silky is a mer people?
24:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd say that they're as near as down there, let's say. I'd say that there's another bunch of watery figures like the lady of the lake.
25:05 Kate Lister? Forgotten about her. Yes, is she a mermaid?
25:07 Speaker 04 I mean, she's also highly female. She lives at the bottom of a lake. Again, a bit like Grendel's mum.
25:12 Kate Lister? Grendel's mum. I'd never thought of her being a mermaid before, but talking to you.
25:16 Speaker 04 She kind of like, these creatures are all very similar and it's interesting that there are so many of them. And all cultures have them all around the world. So there are Japanese ones who are part goldfish. Who are sort of goldfish some of the time and human at other times, a bit like the silkies.
25:31 Kate Lister? Is Aquaman a merman?
25:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, arguably.
25:35 Kate Lister? Yes, arguably.
25:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. So this is where I'm going with the, the point about these entities is less their body shape than the fact that they're both one thing and another. The body shape is just one way of realising that in a story or a picture. A different way of doing it, as with the silky, is the idea that you can be one thing in one place and another thing in another place. And usually there's, it's important in silky myths, and this is very related to a certain kind of mermaid story, that the silky has to have access to their skin. So if you hide the silky skin, they can't go back into the sea.
26:11 Kate Lister? I hadn't heard that part of their folklore.
26:14 Speaker 04 Fantastic, isn't it? So a very standard sort of silky story, and there's mermaid stories that are almost identical, is a bloke captures a beautiful woman he sees dancing on the shore in the moonlight, takes her home, hides her skin, which he finds lying on the sand the next day, has lots of children with her, they're married for ages, it's all fine as long as she doesn't find the skin, but the stories all end the same way, she finds the skin and she's off.
26:42 Kate Lister? Wow, wow. There was a storyteller story, the Jim Henson one about hands my hedgehog, who it was a hedgehog and put a skin on. Are those stories quite common in folklore?
26:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. The standard one that people will also know is the ones about bear skins in The Brothers Grimm, where this is kind of like a boy thing, that princes disguise themselves as bears.
27:03 Kate Lister? Oh.
27:04 Speaker 04 Or we could think about the French fairy tale donkey skin, where it's not that the princess ever presents as a donkey, but skins are really foundational to the tale.
27:14 Kate Lister? Yes. So for your research, a mer person is somebody that there's a sense of changing shape and that they can live in the water and on land, because we never get that kind of information in these stories. Like, how can they breathe the air and breathe underwater as well, when they're like half fish, half person?
27:34 Speaker 04 Well, again, it seems to vary from one figure to another, and because you mentioned Grendel's mum and I mentioned Liban, they actually live in caves under lakes. So Grendel's mum doesn't live in the water, she's more like a pearl diver, she seems able to hold her breath between sort of diving in and reaching her safe space, her cave. But by contrast...
27:55 Kate Lister? She's never given a name, is she, Grendel's mum?
27:57 Speaker 04 No, she's just Grendel's mum. It's like being at the school gate, to be honest, where you're really just, you know, Jane's mum or whatever.
28:04 Kate Lister? Grendel, what are you doing going out? Get back in, it's past your tea time.
28:07 Speaker 04 Absolutely, it seems very much like that, yeah.
28:10 Kate Lister? No, but I'd never thought of being a mer person. So I suppose, why do you think-
28:15 Speaker 04 Well, as you rightly say, what she's called, which is super cool, is aglaca vif, which is mistranslated by Seamus Heaney, horrifyingly. He's not very good at Anglo-Saxon, bless him. As monstrous hell-wife. But actually, aglak, aglaca, doesn't mean that at all. It means awesome, overpowering, impressive, ferocious. And Gerard Tolkien translates it as ferocious warrior in woman's form.
28:45 Kate Lister? Wow, that's a big difference, isn't it, how that's translated?
28:49 Speaker 04 God, yeah.
28:49 Kate Lister? That is a big. Why do you think there are so many of these mer people myths all around the world? Because they do seem to crop up in isolation from one another as well.
29:00 Speaker 04 And in the classical world as well, which we haven't even touched on.
29:02 Kate Lister? Oh, yes.
29:03 Speaker 04 But, you know, you've got your Nereids, you've got your watery goddesses like Cetus, the mother of Achilles, who's the sea goddess. You've got the idea of Aphrodite being born from sea foam rather than dying into becoming sea foam. All those kinds of people. I have a theory, I'm happy to say.
29:20 Kate Lister? Please.
29:21 Speaker 04 It really only applies to places influenced by Greek and Roman culture. But my theory is that this is based on the idea that women's bodies are colder and wetter than men's bodies.
29:34 Kate Lister? Ah, that one. Can you just explain that?
29:36 Speaker 04 In fact, I know you know this.
29:38 Kate Lister? Can you explain it to the listeners, though?
29:41 Speaker 04 Sure, I sure can. So you can chip in whenever you want with additional horrifying and misleading details from this worldview. But yeah, the idea is that women's bodies are less perfect than men's bodies. And the way this manifests is that they're colder and damper than men's bodies.
29:57 Kate Lister? Yep.
29:58 Speaker 04 So the body of woman seeks out male bodies because their warmth and dryness will help to perfect the defective female body. And even the uterus roams around the woman's body.
30:13 Speaker 04 Searching specifically for warm, dry male seed to perfect it.
30:19 Kate Lister? Hashtag.
30:19 Speaker 04 I'm sure listeners can see how close this is to the narrative of mermaid stories in which mermaids also seek heat and dryness from human males.
30:30 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah.
30:31 Speaker 04 And this is some kind of quest towards spiritual advancement or becoming a better category of being. So I think the reason that there are so many stories like this is that they are grounded in what once passed for science.
30:46 Kate Lister? Wow, I'd never even thought of that, but that's that's absolutely right, isn't it? And obviously, if the the humoral understanding is that women are cold and wet, well, you don't get much colder and wetter than the ocean. Do you? That's it's very cold and wet over there.
31:02 Speaker 04 Exactly. Another thing just to bear in mind, because I haven't had a chance to say it, but I I think it's really important for me is how few people could swim back in the day when most of these stories were told.
31:13 Kate Lister? Yes.
31:13 Speaker 04 And I I started by talking about my own experience, my sort of mermaid like experience in the Sydney surf. Where sea foam was to me the loveliest thing in the world. But I only say that because I could swim from when I was three.
31:27 Kate Lister? Very true, yeah.
31:28 Speaker 04 If I hadn't been able to swim, I my my mother, despite growing up in Australia, couldn't swim very well. And for her, the beach was always something of a place of terror. Because she it was hot and she didn't feel confident going into the the sea to cool off. And she could really only swim a few strokes. She wouldn't have been able to save herself if she'd fallen into the village pond. And I mean, once that was everybody's situation. People would go off to sea in sailing ships and cross the Pacific Ocean without being able to swim a stroke.
31:57 Kate Lister? Which is mad when you actually think about it.
32:00 Speaker 04 And horrifying too, because it meant that travel on rivers or lakes or oceans was much like air travel for us, where you know if something goes wrong with the plane, you're not going to be able to fly to safety.
32:11 Kate Lister? That's it, isn't it? I suppose, but there's something very human in, I mean, even today with all our benefit of science and rational logic and we know what's what. If you're swimming in the ocean and you get out far enough so your feet don't touch the ground. I there are many people who don't panic, but I'm definitely in in the camp of like, oh, my God, I can't just let it underneath me. And then I want to get back as quickly as possible. It's just this huge unknown of like, what is down there? I don't know.
32:38 Speaker 04 Interesting. So you don't like not being able to touch the bottom?
32:41 Kate Lister? It panics me a little bit. Like, I'm okay.
32:43 Speaker 04 Interesting, because when I was small, that was what I was wanted most from my experience. And the thing that that most Australian kids learn to do nowadays, they mostly learn with a small surfboard. But in my day, you just did it all by yourself is body surfing, where you throw yourself into the wave and let the wave fling you to the shore.
33:03 Kate Lister? See, that, I'm all right at swimming, but it's when when you don't know what's underneath you. And I wonder if it's like the same psychological thing as like, because the other place that you get a lot of monsters and mythical creatures turning up in folklore is the forest, which is also dark and unknown. And the ocean is dark and unknown.
33:22 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Diane and mermaids after this short break.
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34:45 Kate Lister? What about something like sirens? Now, they're very famous in Greek mythology. Would we classify them as merpeople? And I like them because they're not hanging around waiting for a man to upset them, are they?
34:58 Speaker 04 Far from it, actually. They're actually looking to have blokes for their dinner. And yeah, I think that they absolutely do count. I wouldn't say they're the same as mermaids. You'll find some Victorian era paintings of sirens with Odysseus. More on Odysseus in a sec, that actually show them as mermaids. But in fact, if you look at Greek vase paintings, what they actually were was half woman and half bird. So they're portrayed as like big scary birds of prey, maybe like a big herring girl.
35:28 Kate Lister? Right.
35:29 Speaker 04 They're scary, herring girls are scary.
35:30 Kate Lister? That's quite scary.
35:31 Speaker 04 So they're also mostly characterized by singing is why they're so close to mermaids. You can only find them on the sea, they live on a particular island.
35:40 Kate Lister? Yep.
35:41 Speaker 04 But their main power is expressed through song, which is also true of mermaids. Who can enchant and deceive by the beauty of their song. So the sirens also do this. And what they offer, we learn from Homer's Odyssey, roughly 8th century BCE. What their main attraction was, was universal knowledge. So the reason that Odysseus wants to listen to them, even though he's a great hero, is that he's endlessly curious. And what they offer is a kind of uber Wikipedia answer to everything.
36:15 Kate Lister? Wow.
36:16 Speaker 04 The kind of knowledge that they present in their song is all knowledge of everything everywhere that has ever happened and ever will happen.
36:23 Kate Lister? Oh wow, I didn't know that about them.
36:26 Speaker 04 That's cool, isn't it?
36:26 Kate Lister? That is cool, actually. Is that maybe where, like, this idea, because I've read that mermaids are sometimes their, their symbols of doom, or sailors viewed them as symbols of doom. Does that come from the sirens or somewhere else?
36:38 Speaker 04 Definitely, because it's fatal if you actually jump in the water and go and interact with them, because they will in fact eat you. When Odysseus has himself tied to the mast, he's advised by the witch Cersei to do that, so he can listen to their song and get all that knowledge.
36:54 Kate Lister? Hmm.
36:54 Speaker 04 But won't be tempted to join them in the water. His men have their ears stuffed with wax, so they won't be tempted either, and they also don't hear the song. As they sail past the island, sensibly not jumping off, they see all these bones scattered around. So it's fairly clear what these sort of herring gull shaped creatures might really be looking for. But they nonetheless have this extraordinary and not very girly superpower.
37:17 Kate Lister? Yeah. Well, I did sailors, I mean, they really believed in mermaids and merpeople, didn't they, for a very long, long time?
37:24 Speaker 04 Oh, definitely. Yeah, absolutely right. And, and what you're thinking of when you're talking about mermaids as an omen of shipwreck is, yeah, there are lots and lots of ballads and songs about this. Typically, you just see them as soon as you leave the harbour. So, you know, you just leave port and suddenly you see a mermaid and immediately you go, well, that's it, the ship's going to sink then. And so everyone on board starts saying goodbye to their families. I have a father and mother in fair Portsmouth town and tonight they'll weep for me. And, I mean, this illustrates two surprising things about the age of sail. One, getting trapped by a storm as soon as you leave port is pretty common. Actually, storms tend to haunt the land. And two, also importantly, near shore is much more dangerous than the deep ocean in
38:07 Speaker 04 certain ways, in that you can be pushed by the wrong sort of wind back onto the shore and your ship can break up. So that's why they tend to be coastal, I guess.
38:17 Kate Lister? What were they looking at when they were looking at mermaids? Do you think?
38:20 Speaker 04 No idea. And my own theory for what it's worth is that one reason that people thought that was that they were probably suffering from horrendous vitamin deficiencies.
38:29 Kate Lister? Oh, God, wow.
38:30 Speaker 04 If we need a scientific explanation for why sailors are so rich in myths and superstitions, they were probably borderline hallucinating with scurvy and pellagra. Um, especially pellagra, which will give you massive, massive altered states of consciousness.
38:47 Kate Lister? Really?
38:47 Speaker 04 Yeah. Um, and the, the reason that we know so much about this, very unfortunately, but it probably affects sailors as well, is a thing called Korsakoff syndrome. Which is mostly associated with late stage alcoholism, where the substance abuse means that you never eat properly. And so you develop a walloping vitamin B deficiency. And that's why then to bring pirates into it, you know, you're like the pirates in Treasure Island, where you see old Flint, plain as as I see you now.
39:13 Kate Lister? Wow.
39:14 Speaker 04 And it's actually not even alcohol or alcohol withdrawal. It's a subset of the result of being alcoholic, which is your massive vitamin deficiency. So you'd be cured by a bit of tostamarmite.
39:25 Kate Lister? So really, when Eric was on the bow of that ship in The Little Mermaid, he was just hallucinating due to lack of vitamin B.
39:33 Speaker 04 Doubtless, doubtless, without a doubt. Absolutely. Though he seems kind of too wimpy to go to sea for that long.
39:40 Kate Lister? Yes, he does, doesn't he? Quite frankly. I mean.
39:43 Speaker 04 Oh, he's definitely a Ken doll, right? I mean, that's the trouble with Disney princess. They have all the attraction of Ken in the Barbie movie.
39:49 Kate Lister? That's very true. So so far, the mermaids have sounded kind of, they're often very sad, or perhaps that they're quite angry and they're trying to get after humans and human men. But there are other examples from around the world that are a bit more positive. What's the, is it the one from, I can't remember which African country, but Mamawata?
40:08 Speaker 04 Oh, Mamawata, yeah, she's very cool. And she is in fact a mermaid. What she really is, is a creolization, one of my favorite words in folklore, of an Aresha, a river Aresha, and a western mermaid. We don't typically find pure folklore forms that go back to, you know, for thousands of years without change. They have to kind of keep being updated. So Mamawata is a river Aresha that's now depicted generally like a western mermaid, and has some of the same characteristics of a western mermaid, but remains, yeah, quite assertive as her love of red things signifies. I don't know if you know this, but she always collected red flowers before, and now she collects Coke cans.
40:47 Kate Lister? I know, I didn't know that. I'd read a legend about Mamawata's that she would seduce mortals by the river. I read that about her.
40:55 Speaker 04 That's right, yeah.
40:55 Kate Lister? So she's another, another sexy one, but that's who she is.
40:59 Speaker 04 And I'm gonna do a shout out for Grendel's mother as well, if we do stay in England. And this is a very. Cool lady. When Beowulf eventually dives down into the mere to kill her off, the sword bounces off her skin. And so he finds another sword, which is, I think, fairly evidently her sword.
41:17 Kate Lister? Her sword, and he steals it. And he breaks into her house. So again, again, she's in the right.
41:23 Speaker 04 It's her awesome swords. So there's, and, and also her vengeance quest. To an Anglo-Saxon audience, that would have been fairly sympathetic. Anglo-Saxon society had to go to endless amounts of trouble to prevent people from prosecuting blood feuds. So, I mean, though she's monstrous, she's kind of a cool, relatable monster.
41:41 Kate Lister? I couldn't agree more. I used to teach Beowulf and my students, we always got to Grendel's mum and we'd always, and nobody was ever on the side of Beowulf. Cause they were like, no, look, he's killed her son. He's, um, all she's trying to do is just go and get her, her son's body back or his, his arm back. That's all she wants. Yes, she kills a few soldiers while she's doing it, but that's not her fault. And then he follows her and he breaks into her underwater lair and he steals her things and then he stabs her. So very much like Ursula, uh, no, she's, she is the one in the right here, quite frankly.
42:13 Speaker 04 Absolutely right. And, and again, with a much larger agenda than just finding a prince to marry.
42:19 Kate Lister? Yes, exactly.
42:20 Speaker 04 In the light of recent events, and I've said this and got a good laugh at recent talks, I think the Little Mermaid maybe needs to rethink her life goals.
42:29 Kate Lister? Yes, she does. Think bigger, Ariel. Think bigger.
42:33 Speaker 04 Bigger. Uh, what about a career as an opera singer? That would also have been very appealing to Hans Christian Andersen.
42:38 Kate Lister? Right. And I made a joke about Trident at the beginning, but who is he exactly?
42:43 Speaker 04 Nobody. The, the problem with these father figures that get dotted around in these texts is that they didn't seem to have much purpose. I'm going to do a shout out to one of the Little Mermaid's sisters in Hans Andersen. This is the fifth sister. And they all have to go up to the surface on their 16th birthday at some kind of puberty rite of passage. And this one, it's winter time for her birthday and she sits on an iceberg, combing her hair and singing. That sounds like a pretty good life to me.
43:11 Kate Lister? Yes, it does, doesn't it? Actually, that's, I think that she's nailed that one. So as a final question then. Do you have a favourite mermaid in all of your research, the ones that you think, yeah, that's what I would do if I was going to be a mermaid?
43:26 Speaker 04 Oh, wow, it's so hard to choose. I mean, if I have a favourite story, it's probably the story, one kind of story told about the Rizalca in Eastern Europe. And again, this is kind of an interesting assertiveness story. Rizalca, potentially, women who are abandoned when pregnant by their lovers. So a bit like Les Mis, you know, the lover is posh and he knocks you up and he leaves town.
43:52 Kate Lister? Yeah.
43:52 Speaker 04 And Rizalcas have killed themselves by drowning, but they rise from that to be a vengeful monster. Again, a little bit like Grendel's mum. What they're doing is hunting down other bad men who are on the point of betraying other girls. So they've actually got kind of a vigilante role. And, you know, any promising young man who's being a bit rapey or a bit prone to break hearts is the kind that the Rizalcas, Dalila, enter ponds and drown. So I think that's kind of cool.
44:25 Kate Lister? Oh, that's very cool. Yes, that's the job if we're going to be mer people. That's the one punishing footboys.
44:32 Speaker 04 Although I'd actually just be perfectly happy to swim around.
44:34 Kate Lister? Yeah, I think that'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it? Oh, Diane, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much.
44:40 Speaker 04 Thank you, Kate. It's such a pleasure to meet someone whose work I so admire.
44:44 Kate Lister? Oh, thank you. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
44:48 Speaker 04 My most recent book is called The Museum of Witchcraft, published by Hachette. The book before that was English Food. And if you want to contact me personally, at Oxford, we don't turn our email addresses into code because we're not afraid that we're spies, really. So it's easy just to search for my contact details. Feel free to do that if you have questions.
45:09 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. You've been marvellous.
45:11 Speaker 04 Pleasure.
45:14 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Diane for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, we'll be travelling from New Orleans to the Moulin Rouge to Imperial Russia to meet the brothel madams, sex workers and the punters of history. And if you want us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstle and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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