A beautiful woman sits on a rock at sea, combing her long hair and gazing into a mirror. Below the waist, she has the tail of a fish. Sailors who hear her singing may be drawn to their deaths; those who see her may know a storm is coming; and a lucky few may win her love, or her gifts. She is the mermaid — from the Old English mere, “sea,” and maid — one of the most enduring figures of folklore anywhere in the world.
Mermaid legends are told on every coast: in the ancient Near East, in Greece, in the British Isles and Scandinavia, in West Africa and the Caribbean, in China and Japan. They reflect humanity’s fascination and fear of the sea — its beauty, its bounty, its danger, and the mysteries beneath its surface.
Atargatis: The First Mermaid
The earliest known mermaid figure may be Atargatis (Derketo), a Syrian goddess of fertility and the sea, worshipped at Ascalon and Hierapolis Bambyce in the first millennium BCE. According to the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE), Atargatis fell in love with a mortal shepherd and bore him a daughter, Semiramis, who later became a legendary queen of Assyria. In shame, Atargatis threw herself into a lake to become a fish, but her beauty was too great to be hidden entirely, and she became a woman above the waist and a fish below. Fish were sacred to her, and her worshippers did not eat them.
Even older, the Babylonian god Oannes (Adapa) was described as a fish-man who emerged from the sea to teach humanity writing, agriculture, and the arts.
Sirens and Tritons
In Greek myth, the Sirens were not originally fish-women but bird-women, whose singing lured sailors to their deaths. Only in the Middle Ages did the siren become a fish-tailed creature, and the two traditions merged. (See Sirens: The Deadly Singers of Greek Myth.)
The Greeks did have fish-tailed sea gods: Triton, the son of Poseidon, who blew a conch shell to calm or raise the waves, and his followers, the tritons and Nereids — though the Nereids, the fifty daughters of Nereus, were usually shown as beautiful women riding on dolphins and sea-creatures.
A Greek folk legend tells that Thessalonike, the half-sister of Alexander the Great, became a mermaid after her death. She would rise from the sea and ask sailors: “Is King Alexander alive?” The correct answer was: “He lives and reigns and conquers the world.” Any other answer brought a storm that sank the ship.
Mermaids in Medieval Europe
In medieval Europe, mermaids became common in church decoration and bestiaries. They were often symbols of temptation and vanity, shown with a mirror and a comb. Carvings of mermaids appear on hundreds of churches, from the famous Mermaid of Zennor bench-end in Cornwall to Romanesque capitals in France and Spain.
The Mermaid of Zennor
In the Cornish village of Zennor, a beautiful stranger used to attend church, sitting at the back and listening to the singing of a young chorister, Mathey Trewella, who had the finest voice in the parish. One day, she lured him away, and he followed her down to the sea at Pendour Cove and was never seen again. Later, a ship’s captain anchored in the cove was asked by a mermaid to raise his anchor, because it was blocking the door of her house, where her husband Mathey and their children waited. On summer evenings, the villagers said, Mathey could be heard singing under the waves. A carving of the mermaid, perhaps 500 years old, can still be seen on a bench end in Zennor church.
Mermaids and Storms
In British and Scandinavian folklore, a mermaid sighting was often a bad omen, foretelling storms and shipwreck. The ballad of The Mermaid (Child Ballad 289) tells of a ship’s crew who see a mermaid with a comb and glass in her hand, and know they are doomed; each sailor laments his family as the ship sinks.
Selkies and Merrows
In the British Isles and Ireland, mermaid legends overlap with those of the selkies, seals who can shed their skins to become human (see Selkies). In Ireland, the merrow (murúch) was a mermaid who wore a red cap, the cohuleen druith, which allowed her to travel through the water. If a man stole the cap, she would be unable to return to the sea and would marry him; but if she found it again, she would return to the waves.
Rusalka and Nixies
In Slavic folklore, the rusalka was a water spirit, often the ghost of a young woman who had drowned, who lured men into rivers and lakes and drowned them. She was not fish-tailed but a pale, beautiful woman with long green hair. In German folklore, the Nixe was a water spirit, and the Lorelei of the Rhine was a siren who sat on a high rock above the river combing her golden hair, and whose singing lured boatmen to their deaths on the rocks below, as told in Heinrich Heine’s famous poem (1824).
Mami Wata
In West and Central Africa and the African diaspora, Mami Wata (“Mother Water”) is a powerful water spirit, often depicted as a mermaid or a snake charmer. She brings wealth, beauty, and healing, but can also be dangerous and demanding. Her cult spread across the Atlantic with enslaved Africans, and related figures appear in the Caribbean and Brazil, such as Yemanjá, the goddess of the sea.
Ningyo: The Japanese Mermaid
In Japan, the ningyo (人魚, “human fish”) was a creature with a fish’s body and a monkey-like or human face. Eating its flesh was believed to grant extraordinary longevity. In a famous legend, a girl from Wakasa province named Yao Bikuni ate ningyo flesh without knowing it and lived for eight hundred years without ageing, outliving everyone she loved, before she became a Buddhist nun.
Columbus’s Mermaids
On 9 January 1493, Christopher Columbus, sailing off the coast of Hispaniola, recorded in his log that he saw three mermaids rising high out of the sea, “but they were not as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face like a man.” He had almost certainly seen manatees. Manatees and dugongs, gentle aquatic mammals that can raise their heads above the water and hold their young to their breasts, may have inspired many mermaid sightings. They belong to the scientific order Sirenia, named after the sirens.
Fake Mermaids
In the nineteenth century, “mermaids” became popular exhibits. The showman P. T. Barnum displayed the Fiji Mermaid in 1842 — actually the upper body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish. Such objects were made in Japan and Southeast Asia for sale to Western collectors.
The Little Mermaid
The most famous mermaid story of all is The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen (1837). A young mermaid falls in love with a human prince and gives up her voice to the sea witch in exchange for legs, though every step feels like walking on knives. If the prince marries another, she will die and turn into sea foam. Mermaids, in Andersen’s story, live for three hundred years but have no immortal soul; only through a human’s love can she gain one. When the prince marries another, she refuses to kill him to save herself, and becomes a daughter of the air, with the chance of earning a soul.
A bronze statue of the Little Mermaid by Edvard Eriksen (1913) sits on a rock in Copenhagen harbour. Disney’s animated film The Little Mermaid (1989), with its happy ending, made the story famous worldwide.
Legacy
Mermaids today appear everywhere: in films, television, fashion, and brand logos (the Starbucks siren is a twin-tailed mermaid, based on a sixteenth-century Norse woodcut). The mermaid has become a symbol of beauty, freedom, and the mysteries of the ocean — and still carries the ancient warning that the sea’s beauty can be deadly.
Last reviewed: September 2026.