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: