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:
Category: cornwall
laurasimonsdaughter:I am always on the lookout for unusual changeling stories and I found a very…
I am always on the lookout for unusual changeling stories and I found a very delightful one from Cornwall!
It explains how the fae of the area, the piskies, had a habit of seeking protection from humans at times. When this happened one had to help them, because kindness to them would be greatly rewarded, but to anger them would bring terrible bad luck. So when the inhabitant of a farm finds a weak little piskie baby near their home, they immediately adopt the changeling into the family as one of their own.
The changeling soon grew stronger and when they were healthy again they turned out so lively, clever and good-humoured that they became a true favourite of the family. They did have some very strange habits, but nobody paid any mind to that, because they all knew they had piskie blood.
The family was happy and prosperous and nobody ever thought of having to lose their little foundling. But one day the changeling was leaning out the open half-door, looking wistfully out over the fields, when a clear voice suddenly came calling from a distance: “Coleman Gray, Coleman Gray!”
The piskie jumped to attention, laughing and clapping their hands, and exclaimed: “Aha! My daddy is come!”
A moment later they were gone and they were never seen again.
It’s rather sad that the changeling did not say goodbye, but it is delightful to me to see a story where a child is left in a human’s care without taking another in return and the fae come back for their child in the end. So I’ll just choose to believe that the human family will have found little tokens of thanks and affection from their adopted child and their family around the farm often enough to comfort them a bit for their loss.