Are Mermaids Fairies? July 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern , trackback
Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in how fairies and mermaids are understood by moderns and, indeed, were understood by the Victorians.
Fairies are not imagined in the modern world as physical creatures. True there was the warbling at the end of the nineteenth century about fairies being a historical, long extinct race. There was also, in the fiction of Buchan and Machen attempts to terrify us with actual pygmy tribes living in the British countryside. But for small limey sasquatches (i.e. living beings) you need wilderness and it just wasn’t that convincing in the mean lanes of Sussex.
Mermaids on the other hand are physical. Why? Whereas fairies got handed off to the theosophists, then the neo-pagans and new agers, mermaids became the purview of cryptozoologists. We see this very clearly already in the 1800s. Note the way that when middle class Britons say that fairies and mermaids exist they meant so in two different ways. Mermaids were an undiscovered species. Fairies were flower essence: Edward Bach on crack; ‘an effusion from the mystic’ etc. etc.
However, if you talked to rural Britons in ‘backward’ coastal areas in the nineteenth century this seems not to have been the case. If they believed in mermaids and fairies they did so in the same way. Mermaids and fairies were both magical beings.
One of the transitions from prior to modern folklore is the spiritualisation of the supernatural. Supernatural beings are generally, in modern imagination, things that can hurt you but that you can put your hand through: the ghost on the stairs not Grendel ripping your head off. We have lost the physicality of the supernatural: consider the slow demise of Britain’s zombies through the middle ages. Mermaids (and Big Foot and co) kept their special status by being annexed by the cryptozoologists. By talking about ‘habitat’, ‘mating populations’ and by slamming fuzzy photographs on the table the cryptos have kept the ancient dignity of the sirens alive.
If you are a supernatural being you better pray to whatever divinity doesn’t approve of you that the cryptos not the spiritually-inclined get you.
Any other thoughts on the physicality of the supernatural: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
