Before reading this article, please click "Follow", which will not only facilitate your discussion and sharing, but also give you a different sense of participation. Thank you for your support.
When it comes to mermaids, everyone is definitely familiar with them, whether they are folk tales told by elders when they were children, Andersen's fairy tales learned in textbooks during school days, or various images in movies and TV series.
In aquariums around the world, you can often see staff sneaking into fish tanks to act as mermaids to attract tourists.
Have you ever seen a real mermaid? Why are there so many legends about mermaids?
Classic Chinese and foreign legends about mermaids
Folklore and mythological stories about mermaids have a long history.
For example, the siren in Greek mythology. She is the daughter of the river god and has a charming voice.
Siren often attracts passing sailors with her charming singing on the seashore. The sailors only listen to Siren 's natural singing voice, and then they will hit the rocks and sink, and these poor sailors will be eaten by her.
It wasn’t until another Greek hero behind him led the crew to sail that they all blocked their ears, and then they passed safely.
Japan also has the myth of a mermaid with fangs. The 13th century "Collection of Ancient and Modern Works" records a mermaid monster named Jiji. It is twenty to thirty meters long and has deer-like antlers. It hides in the wind and waves, waiting for opportunities to move. It is one of the most terrifying sea monsters in East Asian mythology that twists off people's heads at every opportunity.
Why do you want to create so many scary "mermaid" images?
Because both Greece and Japan at that time lived along the coast and lived by the sea, and their navigation technology was not advanced, the sea was full of dangers and shipwrecks occurred frequently.
People revere nature, are afraid of the sea, and lack scientific knowledge. They are unable to summarize the laws of nature. They often think that there are other terrible creatures causing trouble, so they imagine the image of a siren that wants to take human lives and hopes that mortals will be drowned.
This is common to both China and the West. For example, some churches in England will be engraved with the story of Lorelie, an evil mermaid who abducted people to live underwater with her and was buried in the sea.
For a long time, sailors sailing out to sea and encountering "mermaids" was not a romantic love story, it foreshadowed a shipwreck.
When navigation technology developed, and the living standards and exploration levels of the sea in European dock countries improved significantly, this phenomenon was alleviated, and the image of mermaids in literary works gradually became gentler.
The most famous one is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Daughter of the Sea", which tells the story of a kind and beautiful mermaid princess who endured heartache and transformed into a human being in order to pursue beautiful love, and then turned into a bubble in order to fulfill the one she loved.
has high appreciation value both artistically and philosophically. It has been selected as a textbook in many countries and is a must-read story for teenagers. It has also been shown on the big screen countless times.
The sculpture of the Mermaid Princess is still in the Danish capital and has become a national symbol.
China's earliest record of mermaids is also very early, coming from "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", which is called the mermaid. The name
has also been repeatedly used by later generations, because China has been more of a small farmer economy since ancient times and is not very dependent on the sea. Therefore, from the "Book of Mountains and Seas" period, mermaids appeared relatively mildly, and the tears of sharks were believed to be pearls.
The modern poet Guo Moruo also has a poem: Afraid that there will be sharks on the shore, I will shed my beads to the moon, which is also about the sharks whose tears are pearls. The sharks often appear together with the bright moonlight, and their images are mysterious and beautiful.
even wrote in " Taiping Guangji " that at that time, there would be men who would catch mackerels and keep them in their own ponds. They were no different from ordinary women. It was also a kind of yearning for love.
In Chinese mythology, most mermaids can get along well with humans.
Do mermaids really exist?
exists even if it does not exist.
What does not exist is the beauties playing in the sea with teeth in their mouths and gazing affectionately. What does not exist are the princesses who possess magic and fall in love with people or the man-eating sea monsters in early mythological stories.
The "mermaids" currently recognized by the academic mainstream are marine creatures called dugong and manatee .
Dugong is a large marine mammal, more than three meters long, with short and fine body hair. It mainly lives in the tropics and feeds on aquatic plants. Dugongs also live in groups in the southern seas with a warm climate in my country.
Dugongs have breasts and are often exposed to the water to breathe. They have poor eyesight and sometimes rely on sea rocks to breathe.
So in the past, when there were no telescopes, it was not surprising to be thought of as a mermaid in the dead of night or when the sea was covered with fog.
Today's dugongs are nationally protected animals . They are very rare in number and live in the sea all year round. Most people have never seen them.
Manatees are also large marine mammals, slightly smaller than dugongs. They have no body hair and also feed on seaweed . They live in warm shallow waters. When the sea water temperature becomes lower, manatees will migrate to other warm waters on a large scale.
Manatees have very poor hearing and cannot hear the sound of engines. It moves very slowly and cannot tell the direction, so it often collides with ships. And because it is often two or three meters in size, it is reasonable for it to become a shipwreck if it encounters a hand-operated sailboat in the past.
Manatees have larger breasts, so it is normal for them to be misunderstood under the bright moonlight when they surface to feed.
Columbus's voyage diary also records that the manatee, a large sea mammal, is not as cute as in the fable, but actually looks ugly.
So, can this put an end to the idea that manatees and dugongs are the legendary mermaids?
The answer is no. In fact, reports from various countries and fossils unearthed successively seem to indicate that things are not that simple.
htmlIn the 1990s, near the Black Sea, construction workers discovered a mermaid fossil in a mausoleum. It was more than 1.7 meters long. It was no different from a human being from the waist up, except for the tail of an elder fish.
According to analysis by archaeologists, this fossil is at least 12,000 years old.
At the same time, two fishermen in the United States also found a complete mermaid skeleton in its belly after catching a whale.
Even in 2013, there were dozens of mermaid sightings in the UK.
Some American oceanographers currently believe that mermaids may also be a type of ape . When they evolved, they lived in the deep sea all year round, just like we live on land.
This statement also has many followers. After all, apart from various versions of urban legends, we do know too little about the world deep in the sea, and we still need to continue to explore it.
