Tails from the Deep

What image comes to mind when you hear the word ‘mermaid’? For many people, it will be Ariel, the redheaded Disney princess who trades her tail for legs and her voice for a chance to win herself a life on land. For others, the word will conjure the wan heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale who, unlike her Disney counterpart, is rejected by her prince and dissolves into sea foam, losing the chance to gain an immortal soul.

It’s largely thanks to the popularity of Andersen’s fairytale that mermaids have become standardised in the West over the past two centuries. Like Ariel, they are depicted as hybrid creatures, with the torso and head of a beautiful woman and the tail of a fish. They often carry a mirror and a comb, and have the speech and personality of a human woman. However, the history of the mermaid myth, and its many manifestations