Merman

A merman is the male counterpart of the mermaid, a water-dwelling being who belongs to nearly every coast and river that has men beside it. He surfaces in the carved seals of ancient Mesopotamia, in the conch-blowing tritons of Greece, in the bearded havmænd of the Scandinavian seas, and in the river-spirits of the Amazon and the Arctic ice. Human from the waist up and most often fish-tailed below, the merman is by turns teacher and thief, prophet and abductor — the man who refused to come ashore, or the man the shore refused — and his shape and his mood shift with every culture that tells of him.

The Wild Man of Orford

Off the headland at Orford in Suffolk, in the early thirteenth century, fishermen hauled up a man in their nets. He was naked, bearded, his hair shaggy at the chest. He ate raw fish, would not or could not speak, and after weeks of captivity he slipped past his keepers and returned to the sea. Ralph of Coggeshall wrote it down because the story had already been told a hundred times around fires that smelled of pine smoke and salt, and it would be told a hundred times more. Whatever the men of Orford caught that day, the catching of it was old before they were born.

The Many Shapes of the Merman

Mermen are the male half of the world’s water people, and they belong to nearly every coast and river that has men in it. The form most familiar, a human upper body fused to a long fish tail, is only one version. In some traditions the lower half is sealskin. In others the figure is wholly manlike but takes its food from the water with a hunger that gives him away. In the oldest images, from the carved bricks and seals of Mesopotamia, the figure is something stranger still: a man inside the open mouth of a great fish, a fish-mantle thrown over a priestly body, ankles bare beneath the dripping hem.

The Oldest Fish-Men: Mesopotamia

That older shape belongs to the apkallu, the seven sages of the cuneiform texts, and to Oannes, whose name the Greek priest Berossus preserved when most else had been forgotten. By Berossus’s telling, Oannes rose every morning from the Persian Gulf and walked the shoreline among the people of Sumer, teaching them letters and the measure of fields and the proper times for sowing and reaping, then sank back beneath the salt water at sundown. He had the head of a man under the head of a fish and the legs of a man under a fish’s tail, which is to say he wore the sea around him without becoming it. Through later confusion the figure of Dagon, originally a grain god of the Northwest Semites, was bent toward this shape, though the fish-tailed Dagon of medieval imagining is a misreading by scribes long after the fact.

Tritons and the Greek Sea

Greek imagination took the merman in a different direction. Triton, the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, blew a great conch trumpet to raise or settle the swell of the sea, his shoulders crusted with shellwork, his skin the colour Ovid called cerulean and his hair green as kelp held to the light. He could be one figure or many. The tritons multiplied as the artists drew them, until the sculpted rims of fountains everywhere in the Roman world thrashed with their split tails. Glaucus came up another path. He was an ordinary fisherman who ate a strange herb beside his catch and felt his legs lengthen and braid into scale; he flung himself into the water and the gods of the deep washed the mortal off him and made him one of their own. His body grew rough with mussels and weed, his beard fell to his chest, and he became a prophet that sailors learned to listen for in the spray.

The Mermen of the Northern Seas

The northern seas keep their own mermen. The Danish havmand is a bearded handsome figure in green or black, friend more than threat, sometimes glimpsed when the water is so still it shows the keel of the boat in its dark mirror. The Icelandic marbendill, according to Jón lærði Guðmundsson in the seventeenth century, is seal-like from the waist down, a man pulled up on a fishing line who could be made to laugh by the right sort of question. The Finnish vetehinen is a more ambiguous neighbour: bearded and full of strange knowledge, willing to cure and to curse on the same afternoon. In Norway the havmænd were said to be dusky-skinned, long-bearded, dark-haired, and fish-tailed from the waist; off the Hebrides and the Faroes any seal watched too long might shrug off its skin and stand up a man.

Beyond Europe: River and Ice

Beyond Europe the form keeps its shape and lets the climate change its mood. The boto of the Amazon, a pink river dolphin in the water, walks onto the bank at night as a tall, handsome man in a white suit and a wide hat to hide the breathing-hole on the crown of his head; he attends the dances of the river towns and the women he favours pay a long price. The Inuit Auvekoejak of Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic is furred from waist to fin, a watchful presence at the edge of the ice. The Nommo of the Dogon of Mali, ancestral and many, are human above and fish below, and the river they entered at the beginning of things has not finished telling their story.

One Shape, One Bargain

What runs through all of this is one shape and one bargain. The merman is the man who refused to come ashore, or the man the shore refused, or a being who never had any business being mistaken for a man at all. He is older than the iconography that finally settled around him in the medieval bestiary. His powers are simple and serious. He can cross between the breathing air and the water that drowns it. He reads weather in a way drowning men learn too late, calls fish into a net or out of it, and in some traditions speaks prophecy to anyone who can hold him long enough to listen. He is often a teacher and as often a thief, carrying a woman down into a kingdom of stone and pale light from which the children he fathers may or may not be allowed to return. The things that hold him are old and small. He can be caught in nets, bound by iron, made gentle by music, slowed by salt cast on his shoulders, kept talking past the tide by a question that interests him enough. Cut off from the water for too long he weakens, and dried completely he dies, which is why every story of his capture ends with the captors fed and warned and the merman gone again into the dark country whose unknowable shape lies just under the surface of ours.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a merman?

A merman is the male counterpart of the mermaid: a water-dwelling being, usually depicted with a human upper body and a fish tail, found across global folklore from Mesopotamia and Greece to Scandinavia, the Amazon, and the Arctic. Mermen appear in fishing nets, on quiet shorelines, and in stories of sea-deities, and they are generally understood to live alongside but apart from human society.

What is the oldest known merman in mythology?

The earliest fish-man figures appear in Mesopotamian art and text, where the apkallu sages and the Babylonian figure Oannes are shown as men cloaked in great fish, or as humans with fish heads and tails. The Greek priest Berossus, writing in the third century BCE, preserved the tradition that Oannes rose from the Persian Gulf each day to teach the Sumerians writing, agriculture, and law before returning to the water at sundown.

Are mermen good or evil?

Mermen are neither uniformly good nor uniformly evil; their character varies sharply by culture. The Danish havmand and the Scottish marbendill are often friendly or harmless, the Greek Glaucus is a benign prophet, while the Amazonian boto and the more capricious northern water-men are known to seduce and abduct human women, and many traditions treat the merman as a powerful and unpredictable neighbour rather than a friend or foe.

How is a merman different from a mermaid?

Mermen are the male versions of merfolk and tend to be less central in surviving folklore than mermaids, who dominate the popular imagination. Mermen are also more often described as rough, bearded, weather-beaten, or even ugly, especially in British and Norse traditions, where mermaids by contrast are usually portrayed as beautiful and alluring. The two are generally assumed to share the same waters, the same kingdoms, and sometimes the same myths.

What weaknesses do mermen have?

In folklore, mermen can be caught in fishing nets, bound by iron, soothed or stopped by music, and slowed by salt cast on their shoulders. They are also vulnerable to being kept out of the water; cut off from the sea or river for too long, a merman weakens and eventually dies, which is why most stories of his capture end with his release.