Mermaid Figurines

	Mermaids have figured in legend and folk tales for more than 2,000 years. In fact, their origins go back to Ancient mythology. The Louvre museum exhibits a section of wall, depicting the god Oannes, a half man-half fish, worshipped by the ancient Babylonians. The art and ancient literature of Syria celebrates Atargatis, a mermaid moon goddess, which seems a logical association considering their early knowledge of how the moon affected tides. Classical Greek and Roman mythology, where Poseidon and Neptune were shown as half-man and half-fish, contains the first literature that fully describes a mermaid. But often times the mermaid and the Siren were confused. Both creatures were imbued with beautiful singing voices and musical talents, that entranced listeners. The difference is only evident where there was a full description, because a Siren was half-human and half-bird.

Zale Mermaid Figurine

Wonderfully Detailed
Handpainted Resin
5 3/4 Inches Tall

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Mermaid Figurines

Mermaids appear in more “modern” mythologies as well, including Japan, where only the head is human, and the rest of the body is a fish. Russians believed them to be the daughters of the Water-King. Even the British Isles celebrate mermaids in tales, particularly Ireland, where the women were beautiful and the male merman had piggy eyes, green hair and teeth and a taste for brandy, which might also explain their red noses.

The advent of Christianity seems to have missed repressing the mermaid as a deity/spirit, when it was busy erasing all other signs of pagan beliefs. And so the mermaid continued to flourish in fantasy, if not in fact. A popular image of the mermaid in the early days of the Church, depicted her as holding a mirror and comb, and was assumed to be an admonishment against vanity.

Reports and sightings continued to be recorded in England, over the centuries. In 1403, a mermaid was supposedly found stranded on a beach at Friesland. According to tales from the time, she was kept captive for as long as 15 years, forced to kneel before a crucifix, and eat various kinds of food, but she never spoke. Equally silent, was the treatment meted out by a man-shaped fish captured in Suffolk, during the reign of Henry II. He was fed fish raw and cooked, but he continued to struggle to escape, and succeeded after two months, during which time, he never made a sound.

Oddly enough, the period of time with the most sightings, is also the era in which science had advanced to the degree where it would simply shrug its academic shoulders at the notion. The 1800s, were unusually blessed with very detailed and exact reports, some by well-known and respected citizens. This is also the time when mermaid legend too on one of its most haunting features: that mermaids wished to become human. Thanks to Hans Christian Andersen, whose 1836 story started a fashion in children’s literature, not only was the mermaid beautiful, and talented, she was also sad, and children were touched by the image of her longing to be just like them.

Of course, where there is public fascination in anything unusual, there are also frauds. Japanese “freak” shows, often featured mermaid corpses, which were the upper half of a monkey, sewn onto a fish. Never one to miss an opportunity, showman P.T. Barnum then hired a confederate of his in 1842, to pose as a lecturer in Natural History, who just happened to stop in New York, with some exhibits for the Museum of Natural History in England. Among them were a duck-billed platypus (the real thing), and the body of a mermaid, which was greatly hyped by sketches of a beautiful woman in newspaper ads. It was in fact, one of the Japanese-inspired hoaxes. It’s thought that the “FeeJee Mermaid” as it was known, was lost in a fire at Barnum’s Museum in the 1860s. But there is one preserved hoax mermaid owned by Harvard University, and kept in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Thankfully, it is the beauty and magic of the original mermaid tales that have survived. The whimsical, and highly detailed mermaid figurines available today, are not only wonderful gifts for collectors of character figures, but also entrancing decorations that add a touch of the mysterious to your office or home.