Musical Mermaid

#what-I-didn’t-see-on-my-way-to-work-this-morning Here is a detail from a 15th-century manuscript showing a mermaid playing music. She’s got two instruments and only two arms, so she is obviously quite the bard. Mermaids were widely believed to be real creatures in the Middle Ages.

In fact, women/sea-creature hybrids have been fabulous legends across many civilizations, but they end up having distinct attributes and origin stories.

The mermaids of the Middle Ages typified the interest in fantastic beasts made up of body parts from various animals. Mermen as well as mermaids appear in the art of the time, but the female version was far more popular.

One account by the Italian Brunetto Lattini (c.a. 1230-1294) gets at what mermaids represented. In his _Book of Treasures_, Lattini writes that mermaids “destructed the life [of] those who passed by, and, as a result, these men felt forced to simulate their shipwreck. Old stories say that they had wings and nails because love flies and hurts; and that they lived in the waves, precisely because waves created Venus and lust was born out from humidity”.

This common stereotype had mermaids almost interchangeable with the Ancient Greek sirens, using their feminity to lure sailors to their death. Other times, Medieval mermaids were depicted in art holding mirrors and combing their hair, which made them symbolic of the feminized sins of vanity.

Other times, though, mermaids were shown in more positive light. They even symbolized (as in the 14th-century Mystery Play “Ordinalia”) the two natures of Christ – divine and human – with their hybrid bodies.