Month: August 2024

Mermaids: love matches, mothers- or monsters?

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The Scottish story of The Fisher and the Grey Lad is concerned with mermaids which, as we are told at the outset, are well known to be ” sea-monsters, half-woman, half-fish, with long yellow hair which they comb when they sit on the rocks to bask. They are very fond of music, they are very rich, and they are able to do many wonderful things. They often endow men and women with magical powers, and sometimes they fall in love with land people and marry them.” Some of this description may be familiar: we know about their looks and vanity, of course; their liking for music, shared with the wider faery folk, may be new but is readily understandable, as is the case with magical powers and their susceptibility to falling for humans (and vice versa). For men and women, the allure of supernatural lovers has always been the fact that they are uninhibited by many of the moral scruples that afflict humans, so that they can seem like much more exciting and liberated partners. The truth is, though, that these partnerships seldom last. Love across the divide between the supernatural usually proves fragile; whether it is that the mermaid longs for her own kind or one spouse abuses or offends the other (sometimes by unwittingly breaking some taboo that is a condition to marriage, as with the Welsh lake maidens, the gwragedd annwn), even the bonds of maternal love for the pair’s offspring will not be enough to keep her on land.

The description of mermaids as sea-monsters may strike us strange and excessive, but it reflects a distinct strand of British folk belief. They may be humanoid, but they are not like us; as a result, they can be dangerous- if not fatal, for their partners. Dragging lovers to their deaths under the waves is not uncommon, but- as this Scottish account reveals- it can be worse still than that.

The hero of the tale of The Fisher and the Grey Lad, Duncan, had no luck fishing and so promised to a mermaid, in return for her help getting plenty of fish, his youngest son. This promise was broken for, after many adventures, the fisher’s son was instead married to the king’s daughter. One day she wanted dulse and asked the lad to go with her to the strand to seek it. The lad forgot his promise to his father not to go near the sea, and went together to the sea-shore. Whilst they were wandering and gathering dulse amongst reefs and stones on the ebb, the cheated mermaid rose from the waves, saw the lad and made a rush, shouting: “It is many a day since you were promised to me, and now I have you”- and she swallowed him up alive.

[The mermaid as a kind of cannibal lover is a startling new element in this tale- but is not unknown, as the Scottish kelpies and each uisge confirm. Unwary lovers are often chosen purely for the purposes of being able to destroy them and to partly devour their bodies. I have also described in the past the vampire faery beings of the Highlands; the glaistigs and others will prey on young people, seducing them in the guise of attractive partners before drinking their blood. Suffice to say, the faery folk of northern Britain can be far more vicious than anything known in English tradition.]

To return to The Fisher and the Grey Lad, the bride fled, weeping and wailing back to the castle where the counsellor was, to ask his aid. He advised her to go down with all her dresses and jewellery and to spread them out by the sea-shore. Then she was to pick up her harp and play. She did as advised and had not sat long there playing in the dark when the mermaid rose outside the surf, for mermaids are fonder of music than any other creatures, and there she floated, listening ; but when the king’s daughter saw the mermaid, she stopped.

“Play on,” said the mermaid. “No,” said the princess, “not till I see my man again.” So the mermaid opened her great mouth and gaped, and showed the lad’s head, and the king’s daughter knew that he was alive. “What fine things you have there!” said the mermaid, as she swam close to the shore. “Yes,” the princess replied, ‘I would give them for my husband.” “Well, then, play on,” said the mermaid. So the lady sat on the green mound and played, and the mermaid lay in the brown sea-ware and listened, and opened her mouth and gaped, and showed the lad to the waist, and swallowed him down again. Then the lady stopped again, and the mermaid repeated: “What fine things you have there on the rocks !”
“Yes,” said she, “I would give them all for my husband.” “Well, then, play on,” said the mermaid.

So the lady played on, and the mermaid rolled amongst the brown seaweed and opened her mouth once more and took out the lad altogether, and placed him upon her open palm – and he, once he was free, thought of a falcon, and he became a falcon, and flew and darted to shore, and was free. Now, when the mermaid saw that her prey was gone, she made a snatch at the wife and took her away instead. When the lad saw that the mermaid had taken away his wife, he was wild with grief, and mad with rage, but did not know what to do, so he went to the counsellor and asked his aid. “ Well,” said the counsellor, “there is but one way to win your wife, and that is to take the mermaid’s life.” “And how is that to be done ?” said the lad. “The mermaid’s life,” said the counsellor, “is not in her body, and so it is easy to take. It is in an egg, which is in a fish, which is in a duck, which is in a ram, which is in a wood, under a house on an island, in a lake.”

Readers of Harry Potter will recognise this idea. It is the motif of the ‘separable soul,’ a common element of folklore (and not invented by J K Rowling) and, of course, the fisher boy is able to find the concealed soul, destroy it, recover his wife and live happily ever after. The ‘external soul’ appears mainly in stories from the Highlands, such as that of Green Sleeves in Ancient Scottish Tales. The mermaid of the Fisher and the Gray Lad is doubly remarkable, therefore: she is both a sort of sea-serpent and she is has the kind of magical protection from slaying usually only seen amongst wizards and giants.

Peter Blake- Ruralist & Fairy Artist

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Blake, Titania, 1984, MMA

Some years ago, I wrote a post on the faery paintings of Peter Blake. Further reading on his work inspired me to return briefly to this subject. Blake’s interest in British faery-lore emerged strongly during the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Brotherhood of Ruralists’- a group of artists inspired (in part) by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the landscape tradition of British painting as represented by groups such as Samuel Palmer and the Ancients. Other artists in the Brotherhood who worked on faery and imaginative themes include Graham Ovenden, who had a general interest in Victorian faery art and stories; the pair collaborated together on painting scenes from Carroll’s Alice stories as well. Literature was a significant source for much of the Ruralists’ work: hence Blake’s images of Shakespeare’s faery queen Titania and Puck (see the last post) or their series of paintings of Ophelia. These interests were compounded by the artist’s own experiences of fatherhood (his first daughter was born in November 1968) and his growing appreciation of the powers of the childish imagination and of storytelling and that these could be visual as well as verbal.

Peter Blake, Babe Rainbow

Blake’s background and artistic interests were far more urban and contemporary. Much of his earlier work- often classified as ‘Pop Art’- dealt with popular culture: wrestlers, strippers, rock and roll stars and childhood obsessions such as collecting badges and going to Saturday matinee cinema. After he moved back to London, during the 1980s, Blake visited Los Angeles and painted modern city life there. His pictures of Titania and other faery girls therefore seem to sit rather uncomfortably with these kinds of work.

Blake, Titania (1972-74)

Nonetheless, there are clear links between the faery paintings and Blake’s interests before and after. One is the simple, frontal pose his figures so often adopt: you see it in his pictures of circus performers, film stars and pin-ups just as much as in his early portrait of Titania (1972-74) as well as in nudes like Fairy. The full lips and bog eyes are typical of many of the artist’s portrait studies, but he progressively became more adventurous in his treatment of the faery world.

Peter Blake, Fairy, Falmouth Art Gallery

All these figures share, too, the powerful ingredient of sex. Blake brought to the world of faery an adult knowledge of sexuality and the resultant combination of eroticism and innocence is what makes images like his Titania so effective. Of course, whilst the fairies that may have fascinated his daughters Daisy and Liberty were untroubled by such concerns, regular readers will know that British faery tradition is steeped in sex and desire. Of his adolescent Titania (painted 1976-83), he told the BBC in an interview that “I wanted to feel how the Queen of the Fairies might feel and what she might do. I’m trying to invent a morality. One concept was that she might not cover the important parts that a mortal might cover, so she might well decorate her breasts and her public hair” (with lengths of knotted grass). This later faery queen is an interesting combination of natural innocence and, as Natalie Rudd observed in her Tate Gallery study of Blake’s work, a move away from the “childlike asexuality” of earlier faery studies to something akin to classical nymphs and Blake’s own pictures of strippers and female wrestlers; Titania is “a figment of male fantasy, poised eternally between innocence and desire, childhood and womanhood, apparently available yet essentially out of reach” (Rudd, 2003).

Blake, Titania’s Birthday, 1975

Blake’s faeries are full of paradox for us. His Fairy with Toadstools, of about 1977, is based on a photo of a busty glamour model- yet the fungi around her show she’s barely a few centimetres tall. The adolescent Titania is about half adult size and the Fairy in Falmouth Art Gallery is similar: she’s scarcely taller than the wild flowers in the meadow where Blake sighted her; what’s more, her exact age is indeterminate- she’s both child and adult (by human standards, anyway). She too is miniscule, so that the luxuriant hair which sweeps the grass behind her is just a few inches in length. Compare her also to the nude figure in the foreground of his large 1969 painting Puck or to the tiny, twisting nude figures that surround his naked Titania: eroticism seems latent in Faery, even if it exists in a dimension beyond our reach. That said, some of his faeries have human dimensions: their reality is mutable, it seems.

Blake, Eglentyne, ?1977

The painter also enjoyed playing with the intersection of human and faery culture. His paintings of Titania (1976-83) and Rossweisse- Fairy Warrior (1977) show these adolescents decorated with the discarded detritus of human daily life. Rossweisse wears a necklace that mixes a screw bottle top with conkers and shells; Titania has done the same with some badges that Blake has lost, walking outside. There is a closeness and sympathy with nature coupled with a familiar ease in the presence of the human world (see Daimler in the previous post). Very often his faeries are naked, although some (such as the queen at the head of this page) look more like models in seventies fashions. Natalie Rudd has described these head and shoulder studies as Blake’s “bread and butter fairies”- figures painted for commercial purposes, but still imbued with all the care and complex fantasy invested in the larger pictures.

Blake, Study for Puck
The Death of a Moth, 1972

Peter Blake’s faery vision is unique amongst all the artists that have tackled faery themes over the last one hundred and fifty years; he has conjured something which shifts back and forth between our reality and theirs- always changing, always shapeshifting. For more on Blake and other faery artists, see my book on Amazon/KDP.

E. M. Forster and the Faery Mythology

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Howard’s End, BBC, 2017

I have recently been re-reading E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, a book that is, to some extent, a meditation upon the spirit of place, both the house that gives the book its title, which is a treasured family home and the scene of key events at the very start and end of the story, but also the genius loci of the British Isles as a whole (although, writing in 1910, Forster instinctively and unconsciously wrote of ‘England’ rather than Britain). Nevertheless, in successive passages he muses through his characters upon ancestry, tradition and the ‘meaning’ of the land.

Part and parcel of these meditations are the remarks he makes in a short paragraph in chapter 33:

“Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature- for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.”

Now, we must recognise that Forster was steeped in the classical tradition through his public school and Oxford education and his own travels in Greece and Italy. Without doubt, he was correct to say that England (Britain) had no single corpus of myth and legend comparable to the stories preserved by Ovid and others, in which divine genealogies, histories, loves, disputes and adventures are all set out. Classical myth is by no means a single, coherent creation story, but it’s still a lot more organised and seemingly systematic than British folklore.

Forster was probably also right to identify the influence of classical myth on British tradition. He doesn’t criticise this, but I would argue that the tendency since the Middle Ages- and particularly after the Renaissance- to find classical equivalents and names for native characters and beings has been unhelpful and damaging. From Chaucer onwards, through Shakespeare and other poets of the period, the readiness to equate Puck with Pan or Mab with Titania, to regard faeries as nymphs and hobgoblins as satyrs, has only eroded and undermined insular lore. Examples include Michael Drayton’s Nimphidia and the ‘Shepherd’s Dream’ in William Warner’s Albion’s England (1612).

Forster downplays and undervalues British folk tradition. The fact that there is no a story to explain every constellation does not seem so serious to me; as for finding faery beings recalled in placenames, as I have recorded in a number of posts, many ‘summer fields’- and lanes and woods and pools and settlements-do recall their names and their presence, and many poets have celebrated them. The author accuses British folklore of “daintiness”- I honestly can’t agree with him on this point; in fact, I’d accuse him of not knowing the subject well enough. I’ve regularly described the violence and cruelty of many faery beings and stories- the enslavement of human children, the murderous and carnivorous tastes of creatures such as kelpies and Redcaps, the mendacious and calculating propensities of Tom Tit Tot and others- all of these contradict Forster’s assertion.

In summary, I’d argue that Britain’s faery mythology does indeed exist. He called for a “thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk,” but my feeling is that we already have those: the many scattered folk tales, and the further works of literature and art founded upon them are, in fact, that corpus- fragmented, perhaps, but extant.

Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology