Sea changes: The fairytale Gothic of mermaids, selkies, and enchanted hybrids of ocean and river

Venue: The British Library, London, UK (and online) 
Date: 5–6 September 2025

Call for Papers page: issued 21 November 2024

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
                                             Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

(The Tempest, I. 2. 400–07)

Fabulous, enchanted beings, hybridly human and other, populate the expanses of water of myth and folklore, whether oceans, rivers, and lakes or their boundaries. Such locations swarm with merfolk, nereids and other water nymphs, nixies, merrows, selkies, finfolk, kelpies, rusalkas. We want also, however, to give attention to and arouse discussion around their non-European counterparts: Mami Wata (West Africa), yawkyawk (Australia), iara (Brazil), ningyo (Japan), mondao (Zimbabwe), siyokoy (Philippines) and many more. All these beings are often alluring, frequently dangerous.

In the West, oceanic beings take the form of merfolk, haunting our seas and luring humans into the depths. Rivers and lakes swim with nymphs, nixies, kelpies, and more. In regions such as the Shetlands and Orkneys selkies – hybrids between seal and human – are found on the shorelines.

The fluidity of water itself mirrors the tendency for such beings to be themselves shifting and protean; their hybridity through metamorphosis is dynamic. It suggests the quality of those who are both terrestrial and aquatic, those conscious beings embodied in a fluid medium, the substance from wherein life itself originates.

Hybridity and genre

The hybrid form of the mermaid, both piscine and mammalian, corresponds to the liminal quality of where these beings are most frequently encountered – the ambivalent border between land and sea of the shoreline. Selkies, metamorphosing between seal and human, are in the traditional tales perhaps even more associated with the shore.

The hybridity of these creatures is easily accommodated by the hybridity of genres that contemporary narratives employ. For example, in Melanie Golding’s The Replacement (2023), selkie folklore encounters the procedural detective genre in an unsettlingly ambiguous way. The commingling of Gothic horror, folklore, and analytical crime thriller subverts the rationalist mode of the latter by generating the mode of the Fantastic. Here, the vulnerability of motherhood, outsider communities, and mental illness come into focus. More generic cross-fertilisation comes with the presence of mermaids in Gothic-tinged Neo-Victorian novels such as Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (2018), and Jess Kidd’s merrow fantasy, Things in Jars (2020).

There are mermaids in science fiction, which are often monstrous (thus involving horror and thriller genres): Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep (2017), for example, results in the scenario of humanity pitted against the aquatic as Otherness, but also revealing a nature wounded by instrumental reason in this climate change thriller, and an ambiguity about the centrality of the human. A recurring theme concerning communication plays against the absoluteness of the Other, too. The collapse of a love affair between two women, one a deep-sea explorer, is figured poignantly as SF with overtones of Cosmic Horror in Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022).

Dangerous seduction

The allure of the mermaid is most often dangerous. It is disruptive of social norms and even the natural coherence of the self and the boundaries between human and animal. This danger may be concealed in comic mode as in H. G. Well’s The Sea-Lady (1902) or the films with the enchanting Glynis Johns, Miranda (1948) and its sequel Mad About Men (1954).  But this may also hold more inviting, enchanting prospects, including the pleasures and pitfalls of romantic fantasy, as from La Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811) to the forlorn heroine of Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837), then present-day paranormal romance. This latter genre frequently reworks Andersen’s tale. Related examples are the more gently innocuous Splash (1984), a Romcom with hints, like many of these works, of utopian freedom, and other romantic variants such as The Shape of Water (2017) (loosely based, like paranormal romance, on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1740). More sinister variants emerge such as Clemence Dane’s The Moon is Feminine (1938), even to overt horror like The Lure (2015). In a more sensational vein, there are many low-budget horror films where the mermaid is simply monstrous, as Mamula [Nymph] (2014).

In the early twentieth century, the darker, Gothic aspect appears in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan narratives. The mermaids represent death and oblivion. In the scene on Marooner’s Rock (a place where sailors were tied up and drowned), Wendy is dragged by her feet into the water by mermaids. For the first time Peter is afraid, a drum is beating within him, and it is saying ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.

The dangerously seductive sexuality of the mermaid is frequently associated with music – they sing with irresistible glamour, dance, or play the harp. In Thomas Moore’s ‘The origin of the harp’ from Irish Melodies (1845), the tragic sea maiden, singing under the sea for her lost lover, is transformed into a harp; there are associations with Irish Nationalism here. The harp as siren or mermaid is also explored in Henry Jones Thaddeus’s painting The Origin of the Harp of Elfin (1890). The harp is prominent in Scandinavian lore as the instrument of the Danish river spirit, the Neck (Nökke). He sits on the water and plays his golden harp, the harmony of which operates on all of nature.

The Lorelei is one famous incarnation of these sinister songstresses. In Kafka’s paradoxical tale, it is the silence of the Sirens that is dangerous. (The Sirens – who were originally birdlike – become identified with mermaids in the early Christian era; the overwhelming glamour of their song is notorious.) The piscine may also overlap with the serpentine as in the legend of Melusine; we are interested not just in mermaids and selkies but less-known creatures, especially the more monstrous such as kelpies, merrows and Jenny Greenteeth.

Avatars and adaptation

Mermaids and their kin are depicted in many ways, from medieval romance and the ballad to Romantic poetry (as in Thomas Moore) and beyond. They flourished in the Victorian period, too, with painting and the poetry of George Darley, Thomas Hood, Tennyson and Arnold. Thus, we are keen to hear from scholars of these periods, which produced some key mermaid narratives.

For example, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ (1891) is a complex working out of the conflicts of the spirit and the flesh, earth and heaven. The fisherman lives happily with the mermaid until his rejected soul returns. Corrupted without heart or conscience, it claims the fisherman’s life in a manner similar to Dorian Gray, written in the same year.

Adaptations, of folklore and of such archetypal tales as ‘The Little Mermaid’ are of especial interest. These might include sympathetic revisions of the monstrous Sea Witch from ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Sarah Henning, Sea Witch (2018)), along with the many reworkings and expansions of that tale itself, often as paranormal romance, usually with a contemporary feminist slant (for example, the YA novel Fathomless (2013) by Jackson Pearce, Christina Henry’s The Mermaid (2018) and Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks (2018)). We would note the rich tradition of folkloric adaptation in Eastern European filmmaking, especially in animation (in particular, with ‘The Little Mermaid’); a gorgeous animated example is the Russian Rusalochka [The Little Mermaid] (1968).

Mermaids in art

The mermaid is an enduring and widespread image in paintings from the classical period to the present. Mermaids appear in the work of Ancient Greek vase painters and medieval miniaturists, and in the paintings of Rubens and Raphael, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (notably Burne-Jones and Waterhouse). They fascinated the symbolists (Moreau, Bocklin, Klimt) and surrealists (Magritte and Delvaux) alike and lurk in the enchanting book illustrations of Rackham’s Undine (1909) and Peter Pan (1906), Dulac’s The Little Mermaid (1911) and Heath-Robinson’s ‘Sultan and the Mer-Kid’ from Bill the Minder (1912).

In the nineteenth century, paintings (mainly by men) of sirens and mermaids were depicted as sexually alluring and predatory in contrast to the ‘ondines’, who were the cultured pearls of modern passive femininity (as shown in the paintings of Pierre Dupuis). Mermaids at Play is a series of orgiastic marine fantasies painted by Arnold Bocklin in the 1880s.

Mermaids in late Victorian art are murderous, preying on adventurers, fishermen, sailors and poets. Waterhouse showed a doomed sailor drowning under the haughty gaze of his seductress in The Siren (1900) whilst Edvard Munch’s The Lady from the Sea (1896) crawls threateningly towards us. The siren in Gustave Moreau’s The Poet and the Siren (1895) pushes the boy poet, who clamours for mercy, into the primal mud from which she emanates. In Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1885) a mermaid with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth is carrying her male prey downwards into oblivion.

Freudian thought exposed the fish-tailed seductress as the personification of hidden desires of the sexually subconscious; the legacy of this is shown in the twentieth century, when the mermaid abandoned her marine habitat to re-emerge in the irrational dream settings of the surrealist imagination. Magritte’s stranded inverted mermaid, The Collective Invention (1934) humorously undermines the perverse eroticism of her original.

The global mermaid

Not all of these beings originate in Europe and our colloquy will be much enriched by fishing off further shores. We seek to include explorations of global sea people in folklore and contemporary reworkings, such as Japanese ningyo, Mami Wata and Afro-Caribbean mermaids (Natasha Bowen, Skin of the Sea (2021) and Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story (2020)). Many of these facilitate a postcolonial reading of the mermaid and kindred beings.

Ningyō, 人魚 [human fish], have been part of Japanese myth since the year 619 ce (when they appeared in Nihonshoki in Osaka). Whilst the term Ningyō is often translated as mermaid, this is misleading as the Japanese term is not gendered and Ningyō are more varied in shape and often monstrous in appearance. When caught, these piscine-humanoid beings are treated as sacred objects, thought to bring good fortune and immortality. Ningyō fakes or grotesque caricatures appeared from the 1860s onwards. In his 1876 account, Nichols Belfield Denny recounts seeing the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum’s celebrated purchase (allegedly from Japanese sailors) which became known as the Fiji Mermaid.

Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ was translated into Japanese in the 1910s. Its popularity contributed to what Philip Hayward has termed the ‘mermaidisation of the Ningyō’ (evolving into western-like mermaids). In the twentieth century, Kurahashi Yumiko’s parodic rewriting of ‘The Little Mermaid’, translated as ‘A Mermaid’s Tears’, has led to comparisons with Angela Carter.

This global approach includes recent novels reworking ‘The Little Mermaid’ from a non-Western perspective, such as Rosa Guy, My Love, My Love: Or The Peasant Girl (1985), made into a Broadway musical. Thus, other media are of interest too – Dvorák’s opera Rusalka, drawing on Slavic folklore, stands out.

Selkies

Selkie narratives tend to be more purely romantic and frequently tragic as are the original tales and ballads themselves. One early transformation of selkie folklore into novel is The Secret of Ron-Mor-Skerry by Rosalin K. Fry, filmed as The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), which draws on the selkie to explore feral children and animal parent narratives. Selkie novels often address feminist concerns as in Margo Lanagan’s Margo, The Brides of Rollrock Island (2013).

Both selkies and mermaids have been enlisted to dramatise the fluidity of the self, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender. Examples are Betsy Cornwell’s excellent YA selkie novel, Tides (2014) and Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea (2020). They have been taken up as a metaphor for transgender teens: ‘the secret me is a boy; he takes his girliness off like a sealskin’ (Rachael Plummer, ‘Selkie’ (2019)).

Many of these narratives place the love element foremost, allowing a space for female-centred erotic and gay romance; these forms flourish especially in the recent explosion of self-publishing and on-line texts.

These creatures facilitate the interaction between humanity and nature (both inner and outer). In their Gothic aspect and engagement with darkness, they may adumbrate a re-enchantment of the disenchanted world (following Weber and Adorno); reconciliation with Otherness; and new relationships with the natural world. We are looking for presentations that look at narratives of merfolk and their kin in the light of their Gothic aspects and that highlight their connection with folklore, dwelling on the enchantment of their strange fluidity. We invite contributors to create a dialogue amidst these sea changes into something rich and strange.

Keynote speakers

Prof. Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University; on mermaid ambiguity in new creative fiction

Dr Monique Roffey Novelist, Manchester Metropolitan University; as author of The Mermaid of Black Conch on Caribbean mermaids

Dr Sam George Associate Professor, University of Hertfordshire, Co-Convenor of the OGOM Project; on Japanese Ningyo: human-fish hybrids and the rise of the fake museum mermaid

Dr Katie Garner, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of St Andrews; on ‘Forging the Mermaid’ – Scottish mermaid project