Mermaid Romances

laurasimonsdaughter:

Now the story of @thefishermansfavour
is getting good and Flirty TM, I wanted to dive (no) into the folklore
that led me to write a chaotic bi fisherman and a gay merrow: mermaid
romances

Spoiler alert, most of them aren’t really romantic.

They
basically all begin the same way: a young fisherman is out fishing and
finds a mermaid in his net. What he chooses to do next determines what
kind of story it’s going to be:

• In most Dutch and Flemish
  stories the mermaid gets dragged ashore, to be kept as a wife, maid or
  even just a curiosity, sometimes magically acquiring legs in the
  process. But she almost always curses the people who took her from the sea by warning
  them that the waves will roll inland as far as they take her. Soon enough a
  storm comes and the sea rises to reclaim the mermaid, flooding
  the fisherman’s village and destroying the mermaid’s new ‘home’.

• Sometimes
  the man is kinder. One tale tells how a Dutch captain catches a mermaid and
  takes her home, but sees that she wilts on land, so when he sets off on
  his next journey he brings her back to the sea. In return she swims along with his
  ship and calls out to him whenever there is a whale nearby for him to
  catch.

• In many stories of Celtic origin the fisherman bargains with the
  mermaid and she exchanges her freedom for some sort of gift. My
  favourite Scottish story of this kind is one where the mermaid gives the
  fisherman a ring that she promises him will help him “win his true
  love” (The Fisherlad and the Mermaid’s Ring) and it does just that, except not at all how he expected it to.

Then there
are of course all the stories that follow the “siren” theme, where the
mermaid is a beautiful creature that lures a fisherman or sailor into
the waves with her. A nice mix of these themes is “Lutey and the Mermaid”
from Cornwall:

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