Mermaids Ahoy!

I’m on Tybee Island this week, off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. The Mermaid Cottages are running their first annual writers’ retreat, during which they’ve given a free week’s stay during the winter to qualifying writers. The Southern Indiana Writers Group, of which I am a part, came together and we have a cottage together.

Because of that, and because the top search term for my blog is “mermaids in peril”, I had to go look up the history of mermaids.

I’ve always heard that sailors mistook manatees, sea cows, seals and walruses for mermaids. I’ve always been, “Really? Seriously? I mean, even if these guys haven’t seen a woman for five years, they’ve seen, killed, skinned and eaten enough sea critters to know the difference. And, no matter how long it’s been, how much grog you’ve quaffed and how close to closing time it is, a manatee doesn’t look like a woman. It just doesn’t.”

So I was intrigued and delighted today to stumble upon a site called Woman Thou Art God and an excerpt from William Bond’s book MERMAIDS, WITCHES & AMAZONS, in which he puts forward another and much more believable explanation.

I just bought the ebook with color illustrations, but you can read the mermaid bits on a blog page Mr. Bond put up a few years ago called Mermaids Are Real. In a nutshell, he believes — and he has convinced me — that the “mermaids” sighted were naked female divers. Women can dive deeper, stay down longer and tolerate colder water temperatures than men. Men from or in a culture that considered women “the weaker sex” would be likely to attribute supernatural explanations for strong women. If they healed, they must be witches. If they excelled in the water, they must be mermaids.

This is especially compelling when you know that mermaids have been depicted and described as looking just like human women, or like fish with human arms and legs, or like human women with two fish-tails, or as women whose fish tails become legs when they come out on land.

His argument is fascinating and, as I say, it’s convinced me. I love it!

Oh, and the search term? It probably has to do with an excerpt I posted from my eBook EEL’S REVERENCE, in which an elderly woman puts her life on the line to save The Eel’s mermayds from the bigotry of a brutal false priest.

Marian Allen
Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes

Advertisement