This post was supposed to go up months ago, but the last half of 2024 was nuts and I haven't had as much time to devote to the blog as I would like. Posts may be slower for a while, but I hope to still get some research done.

But without further ado, let's get into the subject of Duke Magnus Vasa - a historical figure whose story has become entwined with folktales of fairy brides. Thank you to Jeanette Wu, who suggested this topic and a wealth of sources along with giving feedback on an earlier version, and Toovski for help with some of the translations!

In folklore, there are four main things that could happen to someone who encountered the otherworld: death, remaining in the otherworld forever, escape to safety, and escape but with permanent effects, such as madness. This plays out in a family of related Scandinavian ballads.

Death and "Elveskud"
“Elveskud” (“Elf-Shot”) is one of the most popular old Scandinavian ballads, with about seventy known variants and many different names. It tells the story of a knight - usually named Olaf or something similar - who encounters a group of dancing elf maidens. One of them urges him to join her; in many versions, she offers him rich gifts if he’ll do so. He refuses, for he is to be married the next day. In some versions, Olaf continues to hold firm with loyalty to his fiancée; in others he is enticed or forced to dance, accepts a gift, or consents to a kiss. But no matter what he does, all the ballads lead to the same outcome: the Elf-queen kills him. She curses, strikes, or stabs him, and he returns home to die. In turn, his mother and/or fiancee die of grief.

Themes vary by location. Danish versions are more likely to focus on dancing, which Lynda Taylor compares to the danse macabre, the dance of death (Taylor, 2014). Swedish versions are more likely to have Olaf stand firm against the elf maiden’s wooing. In Icelandic versions, the themes of marriage and fidelity may be replaced with Christian faith, with Olaf rejecting the elves as pagan.

The first known written version appears in Karne Brahe’s Folio, c. 1583, and Danish historian Svend Grundtvig places it around 1550. Grundtvig theorized that the ballad family originated in Brittany; in a Breton ballad, "Seigneur Nann,” the supernatural being is a korrigan (here, the spirit of a stream). The closest English equivalent is “Clerk Colvill,” about a young man entranced by a mermaid (although for some variety, this song’s mermaid is apparently a maiden with the ability to shapeshift into a fish, closer to the selkie side of the mermaid family). 
​
Francis James Child compares the story of Peter von Stauffenberg (English and Scottish Ballads, Volume 1, p. 298; The English and Scottish popular ballads, 377). In this medieval legend, Peter is convinced to give up his fairy lover in order to take a human wife, and is promptly executed by the jilted fairy. Child argues that, like Peter of Stauffenberg, Clerk Colvill was originally romantically involved with the mermaid, and that her actions are not just caprice but the revenge of a betrayed lover. I don’t entirely buy this, but the parallels are intriguing. The fairy laying a curse of impending death on Peter at his wedding is the main parallel to the Elveskud narrative; there’s the same choice between living with the fae or dying among humans. 
 
Oblivion and "Sir Bosmer"
The Danish “Herr Bosmer i elvehjem” (Sir Bosmer in Elfland) is an example of a different but similar ballad type. Here, a young knight dreams of a mermaid who asks him to come beneath the river/sea, or an elf who tries to bring him beneath the mountain. In most versions, she offers him a drink that causes him to forget everything about his old life and loved ones, so that he stays with her forever. (If you subscribe to the theory that elves are inspired by the dead, then this is essentially the same ending as Sir Olaf.) A couple of Swedish versions are “Ungersven och Havsfrun” (Young Sven and the Mermaid) and "Herr Olof" (Sir Olof).

Escape, "Elvehøj," and "Herr Mannelig"
These are the neighboring ballads with (usually) triumphant, happy endings. In “Elvehøj” (Elf-hill), a young man falls asleep by an elf-mound, where some elf-maidens try to enthrall him. He has a narrow escape when he’s awoken by a rooster’s crow (or, sometimes, by his sister who was previously enchanted and is now an elf-maiden - so again, shades of the dead and the underworld). Versions of this ballad date to at least the 17th century. One example with the crowing rooster is “Hertig Magnus och elfvorna” (Duke Magnus and the Elves), collected by Geiger and Afzelius.

There is more of an equal dialogue in the Swedish ballad “Herr Mannelig,” where a mountain troll tries to woo a young man with descriptions of the extravagant gifts she’ll give him. Herr Mannelig refuses, saying that he would say yes except that she is a troll and/or a heathen. The song ends with the fleeing troll's sobs that “Had I got the handsome young man / I would have avoided my torment.” This version of the song approaches Type 5050,  "Fairies' Hope for Christian Salvation" - a close relative of the soulless mermaids found in such stories as “Undine” and “The Little Mermaid” (which are descended from the murderous-fairy-bride motif in Peter of Stauffenberg!). In a more violent and less triumphant variant, “Hr. Magnus og Bjærgtrolden” (“Sir Magnus and the Elf-Maid"), Magnus responds to the elf-maiden’s courtship and offer of gifts by reviling her as ugly and chopping her up with his sword; she then transforms into a raging fire (Prior, pp. 343-346).

Names and endings are traded between variants of all these ballads. (For one overlapping example, there’s a version of Herr Mannelig where the troll gives him a drink that causes his heart to burst - (Grundtvig, p. 420). One recurrent name is Magnus, bringing us to the case of Duke Magnus Vasa of Östergötland.

Born in 1542, Magnus was the third son of King Gustav Vasa of Sweden. While his brothers would eventually take the throne (with lots of rebellions and murders and scandals involved), Magnus was affected by mental illness which became apparent in the years following his father’s death in 1560. 
 
One of the royal family’s residences was Vadstena Castle on the shores of Lake Vättern, an area already famous for the religious community founded there by Saint Bridget of Sweden. Construction on the castle began in 1545, and in 1552, it hosted Gustav’s wedding to his third wife, Katarina Stenbock. In creating duchies for his sons around 1560, Gustav named Magnus the Duke of Östergötland. Magnus had taken up residence in Vadstena Castle by 1561. 

There was a certain point where Magnus’s brothers considered him the next in line for the throne; marriage alliances were considered, including the prospect of Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots!!) as a bride. But Magnus’s condition gradually became impossible to ignore. In 1563, his older half-brother, King Erik XIV, mentioned his illness in a letter and sent his own physician to visit Vadstena Castle. 1563 was also the year that another brother, Johan, was imprisoned for treason, and this seems to have taken a heavy toll on Magnus (Roberts, p. 227).

Better periods allowed him to travel and attend royal family events. But at other points, he had to be under constant care and had violent outbursts. Regardless of their disagreements, his siblings’ letters all indicate their concern for him. In February 1566, while Magnus was staying at Vadstena Abbey, Erik gave instructions that he be well-cared for and not allowed to do himself harm. Erik himself would also show signs of mental illness, beginning with paranoia and escalating to stabbing a political opponent during a mental breakdown. Erik was eventually deposed and died in prison (possibly by poison), while Johan took the throne. Magnus apparently had difficulty understanding that Johan was now king. Magnus never married, but had a couple of children out of wedlock. He died in 1595 and was buried in Vadstena Abbey.
 
So where do mermaids come in? There's a short legend that one day, Magnus dove from his window into the Vadstena Castle moat. He was rescued unharmed, but claimed that he had been trying to reach a beautiful mermaid who was calling him from the water. This story has become a classic tourism bit, circulated in many travel books and collections of folklore - Hans Christian Andersen heard it when he visited Sweden (although that was after he wrote “The Little Mermaid”).

I wrote in to Vadstena Castle’s website, and heard back that there is no clear source for the mermaid anecdote. We don’t know where exactly this story stemmed from, only that people have been telling it for quite a while. It’s also gotten garbled along the way; in Hans Christian Andersen’s recollection of the anecdote, the mermaid resembles Mary Stuart, and it ends with the fall into the moat and no mention of survival. There would have been more confusion for people unfamiliar with the tradition; one American author wrote that the mermaid-hallucinating Magnus “threw himself into the moat below, forever making the princely castle a dreary tomb," evidently missing the memo that Magnus didn't drown (Stone, p. 179).

The earliest printed references I know of are from the early 19th century. In  1816, Afzelius and Geijer collected the song "Hertig Magnus och Hafsfrun,"  a version of "Herr Mannelig" from Småland:
Duke Magnus looked out through the castle window,
How the stream ran so rapidly;
And there he saw how upon the stream sat
A woman most fair and lovelie,
"Duke Magnus, Duke Magnus, plight thee to me,
I pray you still so freely;
Say me not nay, but yes, yes!"
She promises him gifts like a ship, a horse, and gold. When he refuses, she threatens him with a curse of madness:
"O gladly would I plight me to thee,
If thou wert of Christian kind;
But now thou art a vile sea-troll,
My love thou canst never win."
"Duke Magnus, Duke Magnus, bethink thee well,
And answer not so haughtily;
For if thou wilt not plight thee to me,
Thou shalt ever crazy be." (Keightley's translation)

This is clearly influenced by Magnus Vasa, and the collectors described the moat anecdote in connection to it. This connection also shows up in the writings of Clas Livijn, a Swedish poet who in 1806 wrote a romantic libretto titled Hafsfrun.  This three-act, Goethe-influenced opera was directly inspired by the story of Duke Magnus and a folk song that Livijn  remembered hearing in Östergötland (as a child?). "It has slipped my memory; only the mermaid's invitation: "Duke Magnus! Duke Magnus! be betrothed to me, For I would have you so gladly," his subsequent answer: "Would you be a Christian woman," and the refrain: "Cold, cold weather is blowing from the lake," have indelibly attached themselves and floated vividly before me" (Arwidson, p. 125). Livijn describes the song as less well-known, and mentions mysteriously that there are "other strange legends" about the Lake Vättern mermaid.

The opera plays out as an extended variant on the song. In the first act, the mermaid Hulda lures Magnus to Lake Vättern and tries to entice him under the water to her father’s castle. However, his servants rescue him. In the second act, Magnus returns to the lake in search of the mermaid, and she rises from the water on a golden ship with her maids. Livijn pulls lines from the folk song here as the mermaid invites him to her realm. Although knowing that he is damning himself, the smitten Magnus agrees to go with her and drinks from the horn she offers (oh, hi, Sir Bosmer!). Just as he is entering her realm of trolls and other magical creatures, a knight saves him. The third act features a nightmarish midnight ballet, where Hulda and her maids invade Magnus's castle and compete against his courtiers for him. Magnus flings himself from the balcony with Hulda, is caught by an angel, and dies in its arms, while Hulda and her maids vanish into a storm (Mortensen, pp. 120-124). Hafsfrun was the first major romantic poem in Swedish; however, it was only published posthumously in 1850 (Livijn, p. 27). (Livijn's choice of name for the mermaid is interesting; not only is there the Germanic goddess-like figure Hulda or Holda, but there's also the water nymph Hulda in the 1798 Viennese play Das Donauweibchen, which probably influenced the novella Undine.)

From these two sources, we can guess that by the early 1800s, the Duke Magnus version of the ballad was pretty well-known. There may also be less fantastical versions of the moat story. I’ve found a couple of websites making vague reference to an incident where Magnus accidentally fell into the castle moat while inspecting a new drawbridge, but I’m having trouble tracking down anything more specific or any concrete sources. (Here's a blog post, in Swedish, with a longer comedic version where Magnus becomes stuck on the drawbridge and is repeatedly dunked into the water.) Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck yet with finding more on potential moat incidents.
 
Duke Magnus in Folk Songs
As mentioned, quite a few versions of “Herr Mannelig” and "Elvehøj" name the hero Magnus. Magnus’s legend also inspired fictional works: besides Livihn's Hafsfrun, there was Ivar Hallstrom and Frans Hedberg’s irreverent comic opera Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun (1867). Unlike Livijn’s supernatural, atmospheric libretto, this is a farce where a fisherman disguises his daughter as  a mermaid to trick a delusional duke into falling in love with her. And in 1909, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius produced a "Hertig Magnus" song more closely inspired by the legend, pulling in some historical context:
Baron Magnus at his window
Of the waves of Vettern dreaming,
Watches them surround his castle,
in the moonlight palely gleaming.
Sorrow hath his soul enfoulded, [sic]
that his father's life is going,
And that blood in brothers' quarrels,
in red rivers should be flowing.
 
But these references begin several centuries after Magnus's death. Svend Grundtvig considered the song corrupted and altered, a later combo of the folksong with the Duke's story: “It is, however, in its form even younger than our Danish recipes and has undergone a noticeable distortion, in order to better agree with a folk legend about a mad Duke Magnus, son of Gustav the First, which has obviously been quite foreign to Visen from the beginning." (Grundtvig, p. 420).
 
It’s easy to see how 16th-century Europeans would have attributed mental illness to the influence of fairies (and I include mermaids as a category of fairy). Folk belief blamed fairies for all kinds of illnesses and deaths. Even the title of “Elveskud,” or Elf-shot, is a reference to this. "Elf-shot" or invisible arrows fired by elves were blamed for mysterious pains, paralyses, and strokes. Other references spoke of fairies “blasting” people or livestock. This is the fate that Sir Olaf meets, with the elf-maiden striking him a painful blow. On a less fatal note, many stories described people escaping abduction by fairies, but never being the same afterwards. In a characteristic tale from Småland, a girl is recovered from her troll captors, but "every now and then her mind seemed to wander, and from that time on she was twisted and bent; the cause of this was that she had had to carry so many heavy loads for the trolls" (Lindow, p. 99).
 
There aren't records of the Elveskud or related ballad traditions until well into Magnus’s life, so there's some chicken-or-the-egg here, but I'm inclined to follow Svend Grundtvig in the idea that  references to Duke Magnus were added onto the original ballad later. But how did Duke Magnus get wound up in the Elveskud song tradition, exactly? Why would his legendary dive after a mermaid be connected to a song about a man who refuses a mermaid or elf-maid? And why would Duke Magnus be adopted into the version of the ballad family that typically has a happier ending?

The fact that he, but not his brother Eric, was adopted into the story - and the fact that his legend isn't that similar to the ballad plot - suggests the theory that it was the name. There were likely already ballads about a man named Magnus meeting an elf-maiden or mermaid, ballads that could end in either escape or a more tragic fate (remember the one where the elf-maiden turns into a raging fire, and the one where his heart bursts). People familiar with stories of fairy-caused madness would have easily connected Duke Magnus.

Even with the many questions, this shows an interesting side to the tradition, with a look at how real people can be drawn into folktale. Via "Peter von Stauffenberg," it's even part of the same story family as the Little Mermaid and related tales.

Bibliography

• Andersen, Hans Christian. Pictures of Travel in Sweden Among the Hartz Mountains : and in Switzerland : with a Visit at Charles Dicken's House. 1871
• Arwidson, Adolf Iwar. Samlade skrifter af Clas Livijn. 1850.
• Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 1898.
• Grimberg, Carl. Svenska folkets underbara öden / II. Äldre Vasatiden 1521-1611). 1924.
• Grundtvig, Sven. Danmarks gamle folkeviser Volume 2. 1856.
• Lager-Kromnow, Birgitta. “Magnus.” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, Volume 24 (1982-1984), p. 669.
• Lindow, John. Swedish Legends and Folktales. 1978, 2023.
• Livijn, Clas. Bref från fälttågen i Tyskland och Norge, 1813 och 1814. 1909.
• Mortensen, Johan. Clas Livijn: ett nyromantisk diktarefragment. 1913.
• Prior, R. C. Alexander. Ancient Danish Ballads, Volume 3. 1860.
• Roberts, Michael. The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden. 1986.
• Stone, Mary Amelia Boomer. A Summer in Scandinavia. 1885.
• Svedberg, Gunnel. “Hertig Magnus lider av livssvaghet.” Psyche, April 2008. 
• Taylor, Lynda. “The Cultural Significance of Elves in Northern European Balladry” (thesis). University of Leeds. 2014.

See Also

• How did Anastasia Romanov become a fairy tale?
• Was Snow White a Real Person? The Maria Sophia von Erthal Theory​
• Were Beauty and the Beast Real People? Petrus and Catherine Gonsalvus

Over the past couple of years, I have been reading every mermaid book I can get my hands on (and watching a few movies and shows). This started because I wanted to write a mermaid story and was interested to see what kind of stuff was already out there. Mermaids are more popular as a subject for novels and movies than ever before, with a boom in YA novels around the early 2010s, and now another push, with Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid spurring interest in the genre. And in reading, there are some plots that stand out as especially popular. This is not an exhaustive list, but kind of some categories.

Human/Merperson Romance: This is everywhere in stories about mermaids. It lends itself to plotlines about starcrossed lovers. Most of the time when I pick up a mermaid book, it involves a romance between a human and a merperson. This has a looong pedigree in folklore.

• Examples: Splash; Between the Sea and Sky by Jaclyn Dolamore
• Legendary examples: every fairy tale about selkie, mermaid and water spirit brides.

The Little Mermaid Retellings: A specific flavor of Human/Merperson Romance. "The Little Mermaid” is deeply tied to modern mermaid mythology; Andersen’s story is the most influential work of the core mermaid canon, eclipsing stories that came before it. This is The Mermaid Story. Typical points: a merperson falls in love with a human they saved from drowning, and makes a Faustian bargain to become human, possibly losing their voice. This can have a tragic Andersen-esque ending where their love is never returned, or a happy Disney conclusion. Disney character references are common.

• Examples: Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon, a fairly faithful retelling that delves into character backgrounds and motivations. There are also more loosely sketched reimaginings; for instance, The Twice-Drowned Prince by L. M. Morrison flips the roles by having the prince become a merman to seek his rescuer, and Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen takes inspiration from Andersen but tells an original story woven with West African mythology. Sea Witch by Sarah Henning functions as both a POV switch to the rival bride and a backstory for the Sea Witch. Several books, like To Kill a Kingdom, Kiss of the Selkie, and From the Mouths of Sirens, turn the mermaid’s dilemma of whether to kill the prince into a whole plot. And then there are sequel-to-the-fairytale stories like The Mer Chronicles by Tobie Easton and Disney's Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea.
• Legendary examples: The Little Mermaid is really a literary short story for children, but at this point it's been retold enough that I think we can class it as a folktale of sorts.

OMG, I'm a Mermaid!: The main character transforms into a mermaid or discovers her previously unknown mermaid identity. This can range from books for young kids to serious adult works. It's nearly always a female protagonist - although, rarely, a boy (see The Vicious Deep by Zoraida Córdova or Disney's The Thirteenth Year). This story type usually features secret identity shenanigans with the mermaid attempting to hide her nature from humans.
There are a few subgenres:

• Type 1: Girl is transformed into a mermaid (i.e. H20: Just Add Water; Lost Voices by Sarah Porter). This is actually one of the rarer types of this trope.
• Type 2: Girl discovers she’s secretly a mermaid (i.e. The Tail of Emily Windsnap; American Mermaid). She may initially think she’s an example of Type 1, only to discover she’s Type 2 instead. She is often the offspring of a human/merperson relationship.
• Type 3: Girl is an undercover mermaid hiding her true nature (i.e. Forgive My Fins by Tera Lynn Childs; Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton).
• Type 4: Girl temporarily becomes a mermaid for a few chapters or a TV episode (i.e. One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire, Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross, or Rise of the Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste).
• Legendary examples: the goddess Atargatis, some versions of the Breton story of Dahut, the Passamaquoddy tale of Ne Hwas, and the Italian fairy tale "The Siren Wife" (Calvino, Italian Folk Tales). For a woman who becomes something like a mermaid and then has to hide her identity among humans, there's the medieval legend of Melusine.

The Captive Mermaid: This comes with imagery of the mermaid in a tank, perhaps shown off in a zoo or a circus sideshow, or studied by scientists. The main thing is that she is somehow contained on land for human scrutiny, in a place where she doesn't truly belong and where she is essentially vulnerable. However, she's often not the main character. Instead, it's a human bystander who sets out to free her and might even have originally been one of her captors. Even if it doesn't actually happen, the threat of being captured for study or display plays a role in many mermaid works.

• Examples: Fish Girl by Donna Jo Napoli, or The Shape of Water for a "merman" example. There's room for variation: in The Mermaid by Christina Henry, the mermaid is a willing performer. And in Bola Ogun's 2019 short "The Water Phoenix," a mermaid rescues herself from an aquarium, defying the trope of the human savior.
• Legendary examples: The captured mermaid is a very widespread concept, from selkie brides to 19th-century newspaper articles. Irish myth has the mermaid-like being Li Ban, who is brought up in a fisherman's net and carried on land in a tub - not exactly imprisoned, but definitely displayed for humans to observe and fight over. And from the 15th century, there's the Dutch story of the Mermaid of Edam, captured after a flood and taught to act at least somewhat human.

The Deadly Mermaid: In a number of stories, the mermaid character is a powerful antagonist whom the human protagonist must defeat through strength or wits. This is also a very old concept, one of the most ancient recognizable mermaid tropes.

• Examples: A Comb of Wishes; Into the Drowning Deep;  The Mermaid Summer.
• Legendary examples: The Sirens in the Odyssey; Breton folktale "The Groac'h of the Isle of Lok"

All of the examples so far have ancient roots (even "The Little Mermaid," although literary in origin, is firmly based in folklore and myth). So it's not surprising that they would be threaded through modern books as well. But there's one idea I very much like that I have barely seen: the story just about mermaids. This is probably for a few reasons; it’s difficult to imagine a serious underwater world and have it be relatable. Mermaids are the Other, and we are much more interested in mermaids as they relate to us. So you're most likely to find stories about merfolk who enter the human world, or humans who temporarily visit an underwater world. Humans visiting an underwater world is pretty common - and found in such stories as Sadko, or the Catalan story of The Girl-Fish - and sometimes paired with a temporary transformation into a mermaid, as in the October Daye series or L. Frank Baum's The Sea Fairies. But examples that truly focus on just mermaids are pretty rare.

• Examples: The Waterfire Saga by Jennifer Donnelly; Ascension by Kara Dalkey

A few other tropes come to mind, but these are the ones that have stood out to me the most. Have you noticed any popular trends in mermaid books? Share them in the comments.

A few months ago I reviewed The Story of the Little Merman, a gender-swapped retelling of The Little Mermaid from 1909. I've come across a few modern parallels, but by far the best recent example is one from 2023: The Silent Prince, by C. J. Brightley. The delightfully cocky mer prince Kaerius falls for a human princess named Marin whom he saved from drowning, and seeks to become human so that he can officially meet and woo her. He quickly finds himself in the middle of a complicated political situation, all while learning to be a humbler person.

This is part of the Once Upon a Prince series, released by the indie publisher Spring Song Press, which is also run by Brightley. It includes twelve books, each by a different author, which retell popular fairy tales with a focus on the male leads and often a twist to the plot.

The Silent Prince owes a fair amount to Disney. The "sea witch" role is filled by a giant kraken (although not as malevolent as Ursula) and Kaerius gives up his voice, not his tongue. However, there are also some elements from Andersen; Kaerius experiences pain from dancing in tight boots that he's not used to, and the story nods to the original story's themes of self-sacrifice.

I've been on a kick of reading mermaid novels for quite a while now, and found true underwater settings fairly rare, probably because they're difficult to write well. It really requires a different mindset. It's easy for underwater worldbuilding to get cheesy with ocean puns, talking fish friends, and so on. But although the novel takes place 95% on land, Brightley's merfolk feel wild and alien in a way that I've rarely seen. This novel is at its best in the worldbuilding and the scenario of a merman adjusting to land. Plenty of mermaid stories feature the mermaid character being a fish out of water, but Brightley really sinks her teeth into it - for instance, we learn that licking someone's hand is a polite greeting among merfolk, while hugging is considered a show of great vulnerability because it exposes your throat. There's an element of realism in play, as seen by Kaerius experiencing numerous health concerns when he comes ashore after inhaling water.

The way that Kaerius communicates is also refreshing. In a lot of retellings, the mermaid can't communicate with the prince at all. But Kaerius is used to sign language as part of normal merfolk life, so he just naturally signs to the humans he meets, and the princess and her guards gradually start to learn enough to understand him.

There are a couple of letdowns. The ending felt rushed; after such an in-depth and colorful story, this was particularly disappointing. And although we spend a lot of time with Kaerius and his character development, we never really gain a deeper understanding of Princess Marin. Kaerius does realize that his initial impression of Marin was mere infatuation, and that he needs to actually get to know her as a person. This should be a good start! But then he gets to know her fairly easily, she turns out to be a kind and noble person, and... that's it. They have a sweet and straightforward romance. She's surprisingly chill about his strange habits and some reveals that should have been shocking; it feels like we never really get to see beyond the surface with her. We honestly get to see more of Kaerius's relationship with the human guard who hosts him.

Overall, I'd class this as a solid retelling, fun and with a clean romance. It jumped right to the top of my list of favorites, and I'd suggest it to anyone who enjoys retellings and developed worldbuilding.

I'm excited to say that Writing in Margins made it onto Feedspot's Top 45 Fairy Tale Blogs!

A while back, I discovered that an author named Ethel Reader had written a gender-swapped retelling of "The Little Mermaid" all the way back in 1909. Well, actually there are a lot of other elements mixed in.

The story
The novella begins by introducing the undersea kingdom of the Mer-People. In the kingdom is the Garden of the Red Flowers; a flower blooms and an ethereal, triumphant music plays whenever a Mer-Person gains a soul. The Little Merman, the main character, is drawn to the land from a young age. One day he meets a human Princess on the beach, and they quickly become friends. The Princess eventually explains that her kingdom is plagued by two dragons. She is an orphan, and the kingdom is ruled by her uncle, the Regent, until the day when a Prince will come to slay the dragons and marry her. The Little Merman wants increasingly to have legs and a soul like a human; there’s a sequence where he goes into town on crutches and ends up buying some soles (the shoe version).

However, after some years, the Princess tries to take action about the dragons and protect her people. The Regent, who is actually a wicked and power-hungry magician, sends her away to school. The Little Merman asks her to marry him, but she explains that "I can't marry you without a soul, because I might lose mine" (p. 52). The Little Merman plays her a farewell song on the harp.

The Little Merman talks to the Mer-Father, an old merman who explains that he once gained legs and went on land to marry a shepherdess whom he loved. However, when he made the mistake of revealing who he really was, the humans were terrified and drove him out. Unable to find a soul, he returned to the sea. The Mer-Father tells the Little Merman how to get to an underground cave, where he will meet a blacksmith who can give him legs. He gives him a coral token; as long as he keeps it with him, he can return to the sea and become a merman again.

The Little Merman goes to the blacksmith, who happens to be a dwarf living under a mountain. He pays with gems from under the sea, and the blacksmith cuts off the Merman’s tail to replace it with human legs. The Little Merman wakes up on the beach, human and equipped with armor and weapons. The Mer-Father has also sent him a magical horse from the sea. He proceeds to the castle, where people assume he is one of the princes there to fight the dragon and compete for the Princess’s hand. The Princess, now eighteen years old, has just returned from college. The Princess doesn’t acknowledge the Little Merman—who is going by the name “the Sea-Prince”—and he’s afraid to identify himself after the Mer-Father’s story of being cast out.

Every June 21st the Dragon of the Rocks appears and people try to appease it with offerings of treasure; every December 21st the same thing happens with the Dragon of the Lake. The princes go out to fight the Dragon of the Rocks, but it vanishes through a solid wall of the mountain; they all give up in disgust except for the Little Merman, who has been spending time with the Princess and now shares her righteous fury on her people’s behalf. With help from the dwarf blacksmith, he finds a way into the dragon's lair and slays it. The people adore him, while the resentful Regent spreads rumors against him, and the Little Merman is secretly disappointed that he hasn’t earned a soul.

In December, the Little Merman goes out to fight the Dragon of the Lake. It drags him underwater, but he can still breathe underwater, and slays it too. The wedding is announced, but the Little Merman is conflicted; he still doesn’t have a soul, and if the Princess marries him, she will lose hers. He also fends off an assassination attempt from the Regent, but saves the Regent's life. The next morning, the Little Merman announces to the people that he is from the sea and has no soul. The Princess always knew it was him and loves him anyway, but everyone else rejects him and the Regent orders him thrown in prison. After a trial, he will be burned to death.

The Princess gets the trial delayed and begins studying the royal library's law books. The Merman waits in jail, only to hear the Mer-People calling to him. They offer to break him out of jail with a tidal wave, but he refuses, worried about the humans. The Dwarf Blacksmith also offers him an escape, reminding him that he won’t get a soul either way; the Merman refuses again. Then the Little Merman's loyal human Squire visits. He has raised an army from the countryfolk, with the Sea-People and the Dwarfs also offering to fight. It may be bloody, but if they win, the Little Merman will have a chance to earn a soul. The Little Merman vehemently refuses; he will not kill his enemy, and he knows the kind of collateral damage that the Sea-People and the Dwarfs will bring to the kingdom. He gives the Squire his coral token, telling him to take it back to the Mer-Father; he is not returning to the sea. Alone in his cell, waiting for death, he hears the music that means a merperson has won a soul.

The next day is the trial, where the Regent accuses the Little Merman of deception and treason. The Princess speaks up in his defense. The only issue is that the Little Merman doesn’t have a soul, so she reveals that she has found a record of a man from the Sea-People who came on land, was similarly accused of having no soul, and asked how he could get one. A local Wise Man told him that he would only win a soul when the Wise Man’s dry staff blossomed; at that moment, the staff put out flowers. The judge and lawyers decide to try this out, the Regent gleefully offers his staff, and the staff blossoms. The shocked Regent confesses all his crimes, including that he was the one who brought the dragons. The Little Merman intervenes to spare him from execution. The Little Merman and the Princess get married and rule the kingdom well, and there is a new red flower in the underwater garden.

Background and Inspiration
The Story of the Little Merman was initially released in 1907; it was a novella, with the same volume including an additional novella, The Story of the Queen of the Gnomes and the True Prince. Both were illustrated by Frank Cheyne Papé. The Story of the Little Merman was reprinted on its own in 1979. I have been unable to find much information about Ethel Reader, or any books by her other than this. In the dedication, she describes herself as the maiden aunt to a girl named Frances. The story itself has many literary allusions. It’s maybe twee at times but also had a lot of really funny lines. The overall mood made me think of George MacDonald’s writing.

Some quotes that stuck with me:

• "A man who has studied the subject says that a Mermaid can get a soul by marrying a mortal, but a Merman can't; the mortal loses hers, which is rather unfair." (p. 65)
• "He was a man in everything except the soul, by which you will understand that he was equipped with two legs and clothes." (p. 79)
• "Mermen are not beautiful as Mermaids are. They are too uncanny. Nevertheless, there was something about the Little Merman that drew people to him." (p. 84)
• "The Little Merman sat down to write a check for $1,000 and to make his will." (p. 106)

First and most prominently, “The Story of the Little Merman” is an allusion to “The Little Mermaid.” Not only is the title similar, there is the description of the Garden of the Red Flowers, paralleling the Little Mermaid’s garden. There is also the overall plotline of the merman longing for both his human love and an immortal soul, going through a painful ordeal to become human, and winning a soul through self-sacrifice - with a final moral test where his loved ones beg him to save himself by sacrificing everything he's been fighting for. (One distinction: The Little Mermaid just gets the chance at an immortal soul, while the Little Merman actually gets his soul, along with a happily-ever-after with the Princess.) That's about where the similarities end. Reader’s book adds elements of dragon-slayer stories, and - most prominently - it plays on Matthew Arnold’s merman poems.

“The Forsaken Merman” (1849) is one I recognized. Related to the Danish ballad of Agnete and the Merman, it tells of a merman who has taken a human wife and has children with her. The human woman hears the church bells and wishes to go back to land for Easter Mass: “I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.” Once there, she never returns, leaving her husband and children forlorn.

“The Neckan” (1853/1869) was new to me. This poem also deals with a human/sea-creature romance and the question of souls and religion. The Neckan takes a human wife, but she weeps that she does not have a Christian husband. So he goes on land, but when he introduces himself, humans fear and revile him.

This is directly based on a Danish folktale, collected in Benjamin Thorpe's Northern Mythology:
A priest riding one evening over a bridge, heard the most delightful tones of a stringed instrument, and, on looking round, saw a young man, naked to the waist, sitting on the surface of the water, with a red cap and yellow locks… He saw that it was the Neck, and in his zeal addressed him thus : “Why dost thou so joyously strike thy harp ? Sooner shall this dried cane that I hold in my hand grow green and flower, than thou shalt obtain salvation.” Thereupon the unhappy musician cast down his harp, and sat bitterly weeping on the water. The priest then turned his horse, and con tinued his course. But lo ! before he had ridden far, he observed that green shoots and leaves, mingled with most beautiful flowers, had sprung from his old staff. This seemed to him a sign from heaven… He therefore hastened back to the mournful Neck, showed him the green, flowery staff, and said : " Behold ! now my old staff is grown green and flowery like a young branch in a rose garden ; so likewise may hope bloom in the hearts of all created beings ; for their Redeemer liveth ! " Comforted by these words, the Neck again took his harp, the joyous tones of which resounded along the shore the whole livelong night (1851, p. 80)

Arnold edited his poem after its first publication. In his first version, the priest rejects the Neckan and that’s it. In his second version, Arnold reintroduces the theme of the miraculous flowering staff. However, instead of being overjoyed like the Neck in the folktale, Arnold's Neckan continues to weep at the cruelty of human souls. The flowering staff is an old and widespread trope; it appears in the biblical story of Aaron, in a legend about St. Joseph, and most similarly in the medieval legend of Tannhauser, where a knight asks a priest if his soul can still be saved after he dallied in an underground fairy realm. While The Story of the Little Merman is clearly influenced by Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” it is equally or more inspired by “The Neckan,” even directly quoting it in one scene.

I have never been a fan of the motif that merfolk don’t have souls, but it was an accepted idea in medieval legend. I recently read Poul Anderson’s The Merman’s Children, inspired by the story of Agnete and the Merman and thus distantly related to The Story of the Little Merman. In Anderson’s book, receiving souls is a Borg-like assimilation that costs the merfolk their old identities and memories. It’s a bitter take on the conflict between Christianity and paganism. Reader has a much more positive view on merfolk gaining souls. The merfolk are beautiful, but they just kind of exist, doing no harm and no good. They and other supernatural beings are part of nature. The Little Merman comes truly alive through his time on land, learning passion and emotions, and how to care about people other than himself. He learns how to feel anger and hatred, but these can be positive, the story explains—anger on behalf of vulnerable people, hatred of evil and greed. I like how the story raises the question of how the Merman actually acquired his soul. Did he earn a soul in the moment that he selflessly faced death and sent away his last chance of escape, or was his soul developing all along from the moment when he first saw land? The story hints pretty strongly that it’s the second one.

I also really like the play on the Little Mermaid's final choice in Andersen's original. Here, this scene is greatly extended and really delves into the alternatives, raising different possibilities - might the Little Merman return to his old existence, or might he take a moral step back but then continue with his quest for a soul afterwards? He's not willing to do either. Whereas the Little Mermaid has to decide whether to harm her beloved who has hurt her deeply, the Little Merman is urged to kill a mortal enemy who has tried to murder him multiple times. He rejects this partly out of a sense of honor - he has killed dragons but he will not sink to the Regent's level by murdering a human - and partly because he foresees the bloodshed that this kind of war would bring to the whole kingdom. (In the illustrations, the Little Merman wears a crown - possibly of kelp - that looks a little like a crown of thorns.)

It's also interesting to contrast the romance with that in The Little Mermaid. Here, the Merman and the Princess are childhood friends. They reconnect as young adults and their relationship deepens. The Merman is inspired by the Princess’s fierce love for her people. He does not have the Little Mermaid’s quest of marrying in order to get a soul; instead he is trying to get a soul so that he can marry the Princess. It’s his concern for her well-being that causes him to reveal his identity and give the chance for her to back out of their mandated engagement, even though it nearly costs him his life.

The Little Merman has some fun fish-out-of-water moments and reads as a very peaceful, innocent character. There is a touch of realism in the fact that he gets beat up pretty badly in both dragon-battles and needs a lot of time to recover on both occasions. Meanwhile, the Princess is brave, loyal, and intelligent. She may not ride out to fight the dragons herself, but she’s the one who saves the Merman in the end, using her political savvy and education to delay his trial and build a legal defense. This book is chock-full of folkloric and literary references, and I think I might even prefer its take on souls to that of The Little Mermaid.

Bibliography

• Arnold, Matthew. "The Forsaken Merman." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43589/the-forsaken-merman
• Arnold, Matthew. "The Neckan." http://www.telelib.com/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/Poems/neckan.html
• Allott, Kenneth. “Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Neckan’ : The Real Issues.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 2, no. 1, 1964, pp. 60–63. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001248. Accessed 10 Nov. 2023.
• Fulweiler, Howard W. “The Real Issues in Arnold’s ‘The Neckan.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 2, no. 3, 1964, pp. 205–08. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001269. Accessed 10 Nov. 2023.

The story of "The Golden Mermaid" begins with a tree that bears golden apples. This tree grows in the garden of a King who looks forward to the harvest, but the apples begins to go missing just as they ripen. The King, in desperation, orders his two oldest sons to go out and search the world until they find the thief. His third and youngest son begs to be allowed to go too. The King tries to dissuade him, but the prince begs so much that the King relents and sends him off—although with only a lame old horse. On his way through the woods, the prince meets a starved-looking wolf and offers him his horse to eat. The wolf takes him up on the offer, and the prince then asks the wolf to carry him on his back since his horse is gone.

The wolf is actually a powerful, shapeshifting wizard and happens to know who the apple thief is: a golden bird that is the pet of a neighboring emperor and apparently really likes to escape and steal golden apples. He instructs the prince on how to sneak into the palace and steal the bird. However, the prince clumsily slips up and is caught and thrown into the dungeon. The wolf transforms into a king and goes to visit the emperor. He gets the conversation around to the imprisoned prince-thief and tells the emperor that hanging is too good for such a scoundrel; instead he should be sent off on an impossible task to steal a golden horse from the emperor in the next kingdom. At this point, things turn into a chain of fetch quests. The prince sets out weeping bitterly at his misfortune, only to run into the wolf, who encourages him to go in and steal the horse. Everything will be fine!

Everything is not fine, and the prince promptly finds himself beaten up and trapped in Emperor #2’s dungeon after getting caught with the golden horse. The wolf wheels out his same trick, and this time the prince is sent off to capture the golden mermaid. The prince reaches the sea, where the wolf helpfully turns into a boat full of silken merchandise to lure the mermaid in. Turns out she doesn’t really mind being captured once she falls in love with the prince. The Emperors, realizing that the prince has obviously had powerful magical help, quickly give up all claim to the golden mermaid, the golden horse, and the golden bird, and the Prince proceeds home with his whole golden entourage. On their way home, the wolf bids the prince farewell.

However, the Prince's two older brothers have heard of his success and are bitterly jealous. They ambush and murder their younger brother, and steal the golden horse and bird; however, the brokenhearted mermaid won't go with them and stays weeping over the Prince's dead body. An unspecified amount of time passes, with the mermaid still weeping over the corpse, before the wolf shows up and tells her to cover the body with leaves and flowers. The wolf breathes over the makeshift grave and restores the prince to life. The three return home, the wicked older brothers are banished, and the prince and the golden mermaid get married.

“The Golden Mermaid” is a typical example of the ATU tale type 550, “Bird, Horse and Princess.” Another famous example is the Russian story “Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf.” Tales of other types can overlap; there’s ATU 301, known as “The Three Stolen Princesses,” and there are swan maiden-esque tales where the golden bird and the maiden are the same entity, as in “The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples” (from Serbia).

The prince is the typical fairy-tale Fool: kind of dumb, but kind-hearted and lucky. We also have the memorable and mysterious wolf magician (helpers in other versions can be foxes, bears or snakes, or sometimes humans under a curse). He's a bit manipulative, but still coaching the clueless prince towards his ultimate success. This character does all the heavy lifting. Shapeshifting into people or inanimate objects? Raising the dead? He’s got it covered.

The titular mermaid is probably the most striking thing about this story, but she’s not exactly what modern Western audiences would imagine. She evidently has two legs - see the illustration at the top of this post. This is not so surprising as it might seem; our modern idea of the mermaid with a fish-tail is the result of many years of simplifying and syncretizing and Westernizing. For many cultures around the world, the concept of merpeople - literally, sea-people - could encompass various types of entities and even overlap. And many of those entities would have simply had legs and looked a lot like humans. Think of Greek sea nymphs, the Lady of the Lake and other fairies in Arthurian lore, the Irish tale of the Lady of Gollerus, or "Jullanar of the Sea” in the Thousand and One Nights. Any of these sea people lived in some kind of water realm and could be read as a type of mermaid, yet they don't necessarily have fish tails. This is not the only variant of ATU 550 to include a mermaid; a variant from Slovenia, “Zlata tica” [Golden Bird] features a similar mermaid ("morska deklica") and the trick of catching her attention by selling fine fabric (Janezic, p. 266).

The Golden Mermaid has some siren-like attributes, singing and trying to beckon the prince into the water, but fits a lot of feminine stereotypes such as being easily lured with pretty fabric. Still, bear in mind that she's stronger than she might seem to modern readers. In many versions of ATU 550, the heroines are easily carried off by the evil brothers. They continue to weep and can't be comforted, resisting in their own way, but they are as easily stolen as the horse and bird.  The golden mermaid is unusual in that she manages to stay with the dead prince and watch over his body. We don't hear how exactly she pulls this off, but she withstands two murderers to do so, something that shouldn't be written off.

You may have noticed that in all this, I haven't explained where the story is from. The story appeared in Andrew Lang’s The Green Fairy Book (1892), its most famous and widespread appearance. The Coloured Fairy Book series was published under Andrew Lang's name, but the real minds at work were his wife Nora and a team of mostly female writers and translators. In The Lilac Fairy Book, one of the last few in the long series, Andrew wrote in a preface: "The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages." The problem is that, as sprawling and influential as these books are, the citations are frequently awful. Many sources are cut short or just plain missing. Remember “Hans the Mermaid’s Son,” simply noted as “From the Danish.” And “Prunella,” due to the title change and lack of any source, is cut off from its Italian roots. I had to go hunting to find these stories elsewhere.

For “The Golden Mermaid,” there is a single terse editor's note: "Grimm." But "The Golden Mermaid" isn't in the Grimms' collections. This may be one of the worst errors ever in the Colored Fairy Books. It looks like the editor mixed up “The Golden Mermaid” with the Grimms’ “The Golden Bird,” a different version of ATU 550. In “The Golden Bird,” the hero is not a prince but a gardener's son, although he does win the kingdom by the end. He’s a little feistier than The Golden Mermaid’s weepy prince, although still hapless (instead of getting caught through clumsiness or happenstance, he’s tripped up by greed or by being too sympathetic to his enemies). The love interest is not a golden mermaid, but the princess of a golden castle, and the wolf-wizard’s role is filled by a talking fox who is secretly the princess’s long-lost brother under a curse. Some scholars don't catch this and refer to the Grimms' Golden Mermaid anyway. The Penguin Book of Mermaids, published in 2019, notes the misleading source with some consternation and even suggests that Lang wrote “The Golden Mermaid" as a very loose adaptation of "The Golden Bird," placing the story with other literary fairy tales.

But “The Golden Mermaid” is actually a folktale. I was lucky to stumble across the real source through a tiny note buried in Wikipedia. It's from Wallachia, a historical region of Romania, and was first published in Walachische Maehrchen (1845) by the German brothers Arthur and Albert Schott with the title "das goldene meermädchen" (p. 253). In Romanian, the title translates to “Fata-de-aur-a-mării"; I'm not sure whether this is a back-formation by later scholars, or if the story has been collected in the original language. Arthur collected these stories during a six-year residency in Banat, and considered “The Golden Mermaid” not only the most beautiful story in the collection, but superior to the German “The Golden Bird.”

It’s funny reading both of these stories together, because they occasionally seem to fill in gaps of logic for each other, or you can see spots where a story started to stray from the standard plotline. “The Golden Bird” has a few odd fragments, like a random fourth quest tacked on (moving a mountain in order to win the princess). Overall, "The Golden Mermaid" has some interesting themes and characters to unpack, and I especially enjoyed seeing a mermaid in a tale type where they don't often appear.

References

• The Golden Mermaid
• Gender Dichotomy in Grimms “The Golden Mermaid”. 2011.
• Janezic, Anton. Slovenska Bcela Volume 3. 1852.

Further reading: other fairytales left without sources by Lang

• Hans the Mermaid's Son
• Prezzemolina: Rapunzel Meets Cupid

Hi everyone! I'm delighted to announce that my first academic article has been published in Shima Journal. It explores the history of Starbucks' iconic mermaid logo and why Melusine, a serpent-woman from medieval myth, has been identified in recent years with images of double-tailed mermaids. You can read it at 10.21463/shima.190

In my list of favorite mermaid books I mentioned A Comb of Wishes, a children's novel released in 2022. I was struck by the many less-popular mermaid motifs that the author, Lisa Stringfellow, wove into the story. There is one story in particular that the plot is built around. As Stringfellow explained, “I wanted my main character to have that trope of making a wish on a mermaid's comb.”

The book revolves around a young girl who finds a mermaid's comb and has the chance to make a wish, but discovers that there is a steep price and mermaids are dangerous, vengeful creatures. Around pages 37-39, she hears the story setting up the background:

"The seafolk have been round long before these islands were settled. Coming up out of the water at night, they sit on the rocks and twist their thick hair. Then, they tuck in their combs…
One time, an old fisherman came upon a sea woman sitting on a rock in the moonlight. Quick as a flash, she jumped back into the water. But she dropped her comb and the old man picked it up, because he knew it held powerful magic… The old man called out to the sea woman, ‘Mami Wata! Mami Wata!’ And up she come… 
When the old man showed the sea woman her comb, she asked, ‘What you want from me?’ He said, ‘My wife is sick. I want the power to make her well.’ The sea woman nodded and said, ‘Rake me comb across the water. Then, you throw it back to me. You will have what you want.’
The old man walked into the sea and raked that comb across the water… When he threw it back, the sea woman sank beneath the waves and disappeared. He thought for sure that he had been taken for a fool… But lo and behold!... The old man woke up the next day with his brain full! He knew all types of herbs and healing spells and he was able to make his wife well.”

This story has its spark of inspiration in a well-known Cornish tale. "The Old Man of Cury" appeared in Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England (1865). An old man finds a mermaid trapped in a tidepool, having been distracted by admiring her reflection until the tie went out. She begs him for help and promises him three wishes, so he carries her on his back to the water. He wishes not for wealth, but for the ability to help people by breaking witches' spells, charming away diseases, and the ability to locate stolen goods so he can return them. She agrees and leaves him her comb; from then on, whenever he wants to see her, he can come to the shore and rake it through the water to summon her and she'll teach him the magic and charms he requested. She even offers to take him to her watery realm and make him young again, but he prefers to remain on land. He passes on his magical knowledge to his descendants.

A darker and more elaborate version of the story featured in William Bottrell's Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (1870). Bottrell was Hunt's contemporary and one of his most prolific contributors for Popular Romances, but wrote with a much different style, emulating the drolls or storytellers of Cornwall. Bottrell himself was a droll, and his stories are much longer and more detailed. Quite a few stories appear in both Hunt and Bottrell.

Bottrell begins the story of "The Mermaid and the Man of Cury" by introducing the storyteller, Uncle Anthony James. Bottrell explains that this was a favorite story and it was often altered "by adding to the story whatever struck his fancy at the moment." Bottrell's version has a similar start as Hunt's, and takes place at the same location. The old man is introduced as Lutey, a fisherman and smuggler. Walking on the shore one day, he hears a woman crying out for help, and discovers a mermaid trapped in a tidepool. Her name is Morvena, or sea-woman. She gives him her comb, which has the power to summon her, and begs him to take her to the sea; she needs to get home, since her abusive mer-husband may eat their children. As he carries her in his arms towards the water, she offers him three wishes. She is pleased by his unselfishness when, rather than requesting money, he asks instead for the ability to help others by breaking witches' spells, commanding spirits, and for these gifts to continue in his family. The mermaid gets flirty and entices him to come down into the ocean with her. He is almost under her siren-like spell when the sound of his dog barking distracts him, and he's able to break free. The mermaid swims away, while promising him that she will return in nine years. Returning home, Lutey discovers that he now has the abilities of healing and wisdom he asked for. Nine years later, while Lutey is fishing with a friend, Morvena returns. Lutey, accepting his fate, goes with her and is never seen again. From then on, every ninth year one of his descendants is always lost to the sea.

The story had some popularity. A version probably derived from Hunt's appeared in Arthur Hamilton Norway's Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall (1898), and a Bottrell-esque version in "The Sea Maid and the Fisherman" showed up in The Dublin University Magazine in 1871.

A version titled "Lutey and the Mermaid" appeared in Mabel Quiller Couch's Cornwall's Wonderland. Couch was specifically retelling Cornish folktales that she'd read, in a simpler style more appropriate for children. Although Couch's version is extremely close to Bottrell's to the point of near-identical descriptions, there are a few lines that make me think she also drew on Hunt.
(Hunt: "He thought the girl would drown herself . . . He looked into the water, and, sure enough, he could make out the head and shoulders of a woman, and long hair floating like fine sea-weeds all over the pond, hiding what appeared to him to be a fish's tail."
And Couch: "At first Lutey thought she had drowned herself, but when he looked closely into the pool, and contrived to peer through the cloud of hair which floated like fine seaweed all over the top of it, he managed to distinguish a woman's head and shoulders underneath, and looking closer he saw, he was sure, a fish's tail!")

In Hunt's version, there's a logic to the mermaid's comb that isn't quite as apparent in Bottrell's version. Hunt's fisherman uses the comb in the act of fulfilling his wish and keeps it as proof. In Bottrell's version, the comb is shown as proof after the encounter but otherwise isn't all that important. It's not clear if Lutey ever uses it to see the mermaid.

But all of this is very interwoven. Bottrell may have been the one who gave Hunt “The Old Man of Cury.” Not only do both of their collections feature the story type, but Bottrell notes that he heard many versions of the story from Uncle Anthony. Hunt, in his collection, quotes a letter about Uncle Anthony which may have been from Bottrell. The differences are easily explained by Bottrell’s mention of the way the story changed from telling to telling.
(Incidentally, Hunt’s other major contributor was Thomas Quiller-Couch - Mabel Quiller-Couch’s father.)

Stringfellow’s reimagining keeps the basics and the ominous sense surrounding mermaids, while weaving it with Caribbean folklore to make a new story. She makes the comb a main focus. The fisherman doesn't just want to help people in general, but has a specific goal of healing his wife - paralleling the main plot, where the protagonist Kela is trying to get her dead mother back.

Bibliography

• Bottrell, William. Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (1870). pp. 60-68.
• Hunt, Robert. Popular Romances of the West of England (1865). pages 26-27, 31, 152-155.
• Kole, Mary. "Magic, Mythology and Monsters with Lisa Stringfellow." Good Story Company. November 8, 2022.
• Philip, Neil. The Penguin Book of English Folktales (1992). p. 345.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been on the hunt for mermaid fiction. I’ve been through a lot of lists, and here's my own list of some favorites so far. There are many, many, MANY books on mermaids out there. The books here are ones that particularly stood out as both enjoyable and memorable for me this year.

Brine and Bone by Kate Stradling (2018): a retelling of The Little Mermaid. Stradling does something I've seen in a few other places by telling the story from the perspective of the other maiden - the human girl who steals the prince's heart. In this version, Magdalena is the prince's childhood friend and the girl he always really loved.

What this book does a little differently is that it treats mermaids as fae. This connection often gets lost in modern fiction, but old stories of mermaids and fairies really do overlap a lot. The "little mermaid" is eerie and alien, and the human characters are rightfully fearful of her. But Magdalena surprisingly finds some common ground with the mermaid. My only complaint is that it's pretty short and and I would have liked to see it go even more in depth.

Mermaid’s Song by Alida van Gores (1989): In an underwater society torn between two races, the mogs and the oppressed merra, a merra-maid named Elan learns to use her magic and competes for the coveted post of guardian to the Sea-Dragons. The competition will decide the fate of the entire ocean.

If you want to read an adult fantasy with a committed treatment of an underwater mermaid world, this is for you. Magic is kept fairly low-key, so the oceanic society feels refreshingly practical, with little details reinforcing that this is not our world - for instance, nobody sleeps in beds, and instead they essentially tie themselves to things. The entire story takes place underwater, which is surprisingly rare for a mermaid book! That said, there were a few uncomfortable themes that kept me from completely enjoying it. For instance, rather than the characters fighting for true equality, the merra are the rightful ruling class and the mogs need to get back to being subservient laborers.

All the Murmuring Bones by A. G. Slatter (2021): Mirin O’Malley is one of the last descendants of a formerly prosperous family, whose wealth came from regular human sacrifices to the merfolk. When Mirin’s grandmother plots to marry her off to her creepy cousin and start up the sacrifices again, she runs away to search for her missing parents.

Mermaids, rusalki, selkies and other mythical water creatures are more of a backdrop here, ominous figures who haunt Mirin. However, the main plot is interspersed with short, folktale-esque stories that I really enjoyed. I also liked the themes of healing and making amends, and was thoroughly rooting for Mirin by the end.

Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (2017): A marine research ship heads out into the ocean to investigate a mysterious disaster and prove whether or not it was caused by mermaids, as rumor has claimed. Turns out the mermaids are all too real - and the research expedition is about to turn into a bloodbath.

Despite an underwhelming ending, this B-movie horror in book form is compulsively readable. I just really loved the plot of scientists discovering mermaids. Grant’s faux-scientific patter about mermaids with mimicking abilities and bioluminescent tentacle-hair feels believable, at least to me as someone who knows nothing about marine biology. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, then this and its prequel, Rolling in the Deep, are both worth a read.

The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre (1997): A dark, dense, intricate historical fantasy where a captured mermaid is brought to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV. (The mermaids or sea people here have two leg-like tails.) Naive young noblewoman Marie-Josephe learns to understand the "sea monster's" musical speech, sparking an ethical dilemma and a mission to free the imprisoned sea woman.

The novel is very much about personhood, touching on misogyny, slavery and treatment of people with disabilities, extending through the image of the sea woman whom authorities are ready to discount as a mindless animal that can be killed and eaten. There’s some good “mermaid” worldbuilding sprinkled in, too; the novel is an expansion of McIntyre's short story, “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea.” It can be hard to follow at times; there's a huge cast and everyone in the French court has multiple names and titles.

(This book got an absolute travesty of a film adaptation, and I’m still mad about it. JUSTICE FOR COUNT LUCIEN!)

Emerge by Tobie Easton (2016): Another Little Mermaid retelling - sort of. In this universe, unbeknownst to humans, The Little Mermaid was based on a true story and the heroine’s actions left the undersea world of merfolk in turmoil. In modern times, a mermaid named Lia Nautilus lives in disguise as a human, shielded from the war going on in the deep. When she learns that her human crush is in danger, she turns to forbidden siren magic to save him. 

This cheesy, fluffy teen romance, the first of a series, was a surprise favorite for me. I was initially put off by the cartoony worldbuilding and puns (in one early eyerolly moment, a hot guy is called a “total foxfish”). But Easton commits to it and clearly put a lot of thought into a world with shapeshifting mermaids, underwater architecture, and magic. Lia’s plight is compelling, and I found myself enjoying the trilogy even more as it went on.

A Comb of Wishes by Lisa Stringfellow (2022): Kela, a young girl grieving her mother’s death, finds a mermaid’s comb. The mermaid offers her a wish in exchange for its return, and there’s only one real option for Kela: for her mother to be alive again. But there’s a steep price for wishes, and when the comb is stolen before Kela can return it, things quickly start to go wrong.

This middle-grade novel was a joy to read. Stringfellow blends the Caribbean setting with touches of mermaid stories from around the world (from "The Little Mermaid" to "The Old Man of Cury" and "The Soul Cages"). Mermaids are more of a mystical force here than in most of the other books on this list, but this book is firing on all cylinders with lyrical writing and a compelling, emotional plot.

Some of these books I honestly didn't expect to like so much - I originally ignored Emerge because of the punniness, A Comb of Wishes because it was a kids' book, All the Murmuring Bones because it sounded like the mermaids were barely in it. It was exciting to be able to add them to the list. Looking at this list, I realize that most of them are set primarily on land or have human main characters; this is a common theme. Writing an underwater setting can be a challenge because it rules out so much of society and technology that we take for granted.

I'll continue to read mermaid books as I find them - because I like mermaids, but it's also fun to observe the popular image of these beings from folk and fairy tales. The Little Mermaid is a very popular subject for retellings.

If you have a favorite mermaid book, drop it in the comments!

Today I want to talk about a little corner of overlapping folktales. These stories follow a young woman who, out of lust or greed or maybe just foolhardiness, is enticed to open a gate and allow enemy forces into her home. Her home is destroyed and she meets an ironic death. Also, there's a connection to myths of mermaids and flooded cities.

A basic traitorous-daughter story, without the floods and mermaids, is the legend of Tarpeia, the daughter of the Roman commander at a time when Rome was under siege by the Sabines. Tarpeia secretly offered the Sabine leader a deal - she'd let his soldiers inside in exchange for what they bore on their left arms. She thought she was making a deal for their precious golden bracelets. However, when she opened the gate and waited eagerly for her reward, the Sabine soldiers instead threw their left-handed shields onto her and she was crushed to death.

Arthur A. Wachsler made a connection from this and similar tales to Aarne-Thompson type 313, "The Girl as Helper in the Hero's Flight." In both cases we have a female character who betrays her father for the sake of a male outsider whom she helps on a mission. However, this doesn't quite work. The fairytale - and even mythical parallels such as Medea and Ariadne - are focused on the adventures of the hero, and the girl is at least initially a heroic figure who winds up abandoned and forgotten for her troubles. (The fairytale version gets her man back.) Tarpeia-style tales are harsher parables in which the girl is both villainous and foolish, and promptly gets herself killed.

A specific strand of these more moralizing tales include a theme of water and transformation. I have found three examples so far: Scylla of Megara, Dahut, and Lí Ban.

Scylla of Megara: from Ovid's Metamorphoses
The guarded city: The city of Alcathous, ruled by King Nisus, is under attack by King Minos. However, Nisus has a lock of purple hair that makes him invincible. 
Opening the gate: Nisus's daughter, Scylla, sees Minos from afar and falls madly in love with him. That night, she sneaks into her father's bedroom and cuts off the purple lock, destroying his gift of invulnerability. She then sneaks out of the city and goes to Minos's war camp, where she presents him with the hair (and maybe even her father's head). Disturbed, Minos immediately leaves in his ship.
Immersion and transformation: Scylla leaps into the sea after Minos and tries to climb onto the ship. Her father, who has transformed into an eagle, attacks her. As she falls from the ship, she is transformed into a sea bird or ciris.

It's important that Scylla's flight and transformation take place on the sea. Also, although there's no direct connection between the characters, note that the most famous Scylla of classical mythology was a sea monster.

Dahut of Ys: from Brittany
The guarded city: King Gradlon rules the city of Ys. The city is shielded from floods by a dike, and Gradlon alone holds the key to the sluice gate.
Opening the gate: Gradlon’s daughter, Dahut or Ahes, is a wicked, unchaste young woman. One night, while meeting with her lover (who in some versions is the actual Devil), she steals her father's key and opens the sluice gate.
Immersion and transformation: Gradlon wakes up to find the city flooding. He and Dahut flee on his horse, but the waves are about to overtake them. Gradlon throws Dahut off his horse, and as soon as she falls into the water, the flood stops. The city of Ys is lost but can sometimes still be seen beneath the waves, and Dahut becomes a Mari-Morgan (Breton for mermaid) and people often hear her singing.
(Jean-Michel Le Bot points out that "mari-morgan" is also a term for monkfish (Lophius piscatorius) in some areas of Brittany.)

The earliest accounts of Ys do not mention Dahut, whose first known appearance was in 17th-century monk Albert Le Grand's Vies des Saints de la Bretagne Armorique. This first mention is pretty brief, with Dahut dying. Subsequent versions fleshed out more details, and the modern version of the tale is highly literary. Matthieu Boyd has a good rundown of the evolution of the story, including recent retellings which make Dahut a heroic figure. Amy Varin makes a shaky argument that Dahut was originally a sovereign goddess who bestowed kingship on her chosen consort (most of her evidence is unrelated legends of mermaids or otherworldly maidens who married humans).

Lí Ban: from Ireland
The guarded city: A man named Eochaid comes to a place with a spring well. He builds a house there, and sets a woman to tend the well so it doesn't overflow.
Opening the gate: One day, the woman fails to cover the well.
Immersion and transformation: This causes a flood which creates the lake known as Lough Neagh, drowning Eochaid and all of his children except for two sons and Lí Ban. Lí Ban survives in her chamber underwater and is transformed into a salmon or, in some versions, a mermaid. Centuries later, she encounters monks and tells them her story. She receives the name Muirghein.

The parallels from Lí Ban to Dahut are fainter, but there are indications that these stories share some root. The cognate name Morgan/Muirghein is particularly striking. Amy Varin suggests that - based on the parallels in story structure - Lí Ban herself is the woman who fails to cover the well.

Compare another variant of Lough Neagh's origin, recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis in the Topography of Ireland.
“Now there was a common proverb . . . in the mouths of the tribe, that whenever the well-spring of that country was left uncovered (for out of reverence shown to it, from a barbarous superstition, the spring was kept covered and sealed), it would immediately overflow and inundate the whole province, drowning and destroying the whole population. It happened, however, on some occasion that a young woman, who had come to the spring to draw water, after filling her pitcher, but before she had closed the well, ran in great haste to her little boy, whom she had heard crying at a spot not far from the spring where she had left him. But the voice of the people is the voice of God; and on her way back she met such a flood of water from the spring that it swept off her and the boy, and the inundation was so violent that they both, and the whole tribe, with their cattle, were drowned in an hour in this partial and local deluge. The waters, having covered the whole surface of that fertile district, were converted into a permanent lake. A not improbable confirmation of this occurrence is found in the fact that the fishermen in that lake see distinctly under the water, in calm weather, ecclesiastical towers . . . and they frequently point them out to strangers travelling through these parts, who wonder what could have caused such a catastrophe.” (Spence, p. 188)

This type of flood myth is common and a few Celtic variants stand out as caused by a woman. In a Scottish story, the ancient witch known as the Cailleach had a well in Inverness which needed to be kept covered at night. She tasked her maid, Nessa, with caring for the well. But one evening, Nessa was late to cover it, and by the time she got there, water was flooding from the well. Nessa ran away, but the Cailleach - watching from a mountain - cursed her never to leave the water, and Nessa was transformed into the River Ness (connected to the Loch Ness). Every year on the anniversary, Nessa briefly appears in human form to sing sadly. (There is a similar tale of the River Boyne, where the flood is caused by an "attendant nymph" who foolishly walks withershins three times around the well.) (Hull, 249-250).

Sir John Rhys collected some stories of Glasfryn Lake, which he identifies as a Welsh "Undine or Liban story". A woman named Grassi, or Grace, committed the same misstep of leaving a well uncovered and causing a flood. Grassi either became a weeping ghost haunting the field by the newly made lake, or was transformed into a swan by fairies. Rhys also noted that the Glasfryn family had a mermaid on their coat of arms, and theorized that the well maiden was originally named Morgen or Morien, to fit with the Lí Ban model.
 
One of the oldest parallels is the Welsh story of the drowned city Cantre'r Gwaelod, dating to the 13th-century Black Book of Camarthen . . . maybe. The problem here is that the original poem has been translated in many contradictory ways. Some translations place the blame on Mererid, a well maiden who neglected her duties. Other translations state that the culprit was Seithennin, a male drunkard who failed to close the sluices. Or it was both Mererid and Seithennin. Or maybe neither of these are characters in the first place, and we’re looking at generic nouns which have been misread as names. We don't know! (Celtic Review, pp. 338-340)

Overall, in general there are two distinct stories.

• Story 1: A treacherous princess, out of lust or greed, betrays her country and opens the gate to an enemy. She meets an immediate karmic death. These stories tend to be more realistic in tone, and the examples I’ve read are from Greek and Roman myth. 
• Story 2: A "well maiden" carelessly forgets her duty and causes a flood that submerges her whole town. She is either drowned or transformed into some kind of water-dwelling being (a fish, water bird, or mermaid). These more fantastical stories are frequently found in Celtic areas.

Scylla’s and Dahut’s stories meet in the middle. These tales have both the villainous princess who betrays her father and destroys her city, and the transformation into a creature of the water. If Lí Ban is the woman tasked with tending the well, then she fits this model too. (Her parallels to Dahut, Nessa and Grassi would support this; in all of these stories, the woman who fails in her duty is also the one transformed into a watery being.)

You might even go back as far as the Assyrian myth of Derceto or Atargatis. In Diodorus Siculus’s rendition of the story, the goddess Derceto offended Aphrodite, who retaliated by making her fall for a certain young man. Derceto had sex with him and gave birth to a child, but was ashamed. To hide what she’d done, she murdered her lover and abandoned the baby. Finally, she flung herself into a lake, where she was transformed into a fish with a human head.
It doesn’t map onto the story exactly, but here we do have a woman who falls into lust (like Scylla and Dahut), commits a betrayal, and instead of drowning meets a watery transformation.

Dahut is a particularly interesting case. She may not have originally been part of the story of Ys. Was the well maiden motif added later to the story of King Gradlon and his flooded city? And could John Rhys be right that the original name of this figure was something like Morgan, "sea-born"?

Sources

• Boyd, Matthieu. "What’s New in Ker-Is: ATU 675 in Brittany."  Fabula, Volume 54, Issue 3-4. 2013.
• The Celtic Review, Volume 3. 1907.
• Hull, Eleanor. "Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare." Folklore, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep. 30, 1927), p. 249-250.
• Imhoff, Helen. "The Themes and Structure of Aided Echach Maic Maireda."  Ériu, vol. 58, 2008, pp. 107–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20696364. Accessed 20 Sep. 2022.
• Le Bot, Jean-Michel. Les différentes versions de la légende de la ville d’Is (ou Ys) : présentation synthétique. 2021. ffhalshs-03169097f
• O'Grady, Standish. Sylva Gadelica: A Collection of Tales in Irish. 1892. pp. 265-269.
• Spence, Lewis. Legends & Romances of Brittany. 1917.
• Varin, Amy. “Dahut and Gradlon.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 2, 1982, pp. 19–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557116. Accessed 27 Aug. 2022.
• Wachsler, Arthur A. “Parricide and Treason for Love: The Study of a Motif-Complex in Legend and Folktale.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 24, no. 1, 1987, pp. 57–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814377. Accessed 27 Aug. 2022.

“Ondine’s Curse” is the name of a rare form of apnea, a condition in which people stop breathing. According to various medical texts, it's based on an old Germanic legend - the story of Undine or Ondine, who cursed her faithless lover to stop breathing. Except . . . this doesn't sound anything like the story of Undine, which isn't even exactly a legend.  What's going on here?

The Backstory
As I've described before on this blog, "undines" originally came from the writings of 16th-century philosopher Paracelsus. The word was evidently his original creation, referring to water elementals or nymphs. Combining the medieval legends of "Melusine," "Peter von Stauffenberg," and various folktales about fairy wives, Paracelsus wrote that undines could gain a soul by marrying a human. However, such relationships were fraught with danger; these water-wives could all too easily be lost to the realm they'd come from, and if the mortal husband took another wife, the water-wife would come back to murder him. This story was passed around and adapted by various authors.

Most famously, it found form in the 19th-century novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Undine is a nymph who marries the knight Huldbrand and gains a soul as a result. However, he ditches her for a human lover - which, by the rules of spirits and the otherworld, means he must die. Although Undine still loves him, she is forced to kill him on the night of his second wedding. She appears and embraces him, weeping.
"Tears rushed into the knight's eyes, and seemed to surge through his heaving breast, till at length his breathing ceased, and he fell softly back from the beautiful arms of Undine, upon the pillows of his couch—a corpse."
Undine then states mournfully, "I have wept him to death."

So where did things go off track?

This novella became extremely popular, inspiring many adaptations. There were plays, operas, ballets. Even Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid took inspiration from it.
One play adaptation, Ondine, by Jean Giraudoux, came out in 1938. In this version, the characters are named Ondine and Hans. Although Hans betrays Ondine with another woman, she still loves him and attempts to stop her people from executing him by running away. However, her efforts are of no avail, and Hans is condemned to death by the king of the water spirits.
The former lovers get the chance to say goodbye. The tormented Hans tells Ondine, “Since you went away, I've had to force my body to do things it should do automatically. I no longer see unless I order my eyes to see... I have to control five senses, thirty muscles, even my bones; it's an exhausting stewardship. A moment of inattention, and I will forget to hear, to breathe... He died, they will say, because he got tired of breathing..."
As the two share a final kiss, Hans dies and Ondine's memories of him are erased.

Losing the Way
In 1962, a California-based doctor named John Severinghaus and his colleague Robert Mitchell worked with three patients who all shared similar symptoms. After operations on the brain stem, these patients could not breathe automatically. They had to consciously decide to breathe, and they needed artificial respiration when asleep. Severinghaus and Mitchell wrote a paper about their studies, coining the term "Ondine's Curse" for the phenomenon. They stated briefly:
"The syndrome was first described in German legend. The water nymph, Ondine, having been jilted by her mortal husband, took from him all automatic functions, requiring him to remember to breathe. When he finally fell asleep, he died."

This is a garbled version of Giraudoux's play. They were clearly inspired by Hans's speech, and as pointed out by researcher Fernando Navarro, they use Giraudoux's spelling, "Ondine." But you can see the play being misunderstood and slanted here, misremembered just a little.

Their summary was soon picked up, gaining a life of its own as other medical professionals repeated and mangled it further. Many versions simply repeat some variation on Severinghaus and Mitchell, but we see an emerging image of Ondine as a forceful figure who delivers judgment on her traitorous husband. She,  not the ruler of the water spirits, curses Hans. Across various versions, she is angry, a purveyor of revenge or punishment (Navarro 1997).

Usually the husband or lover is unnamed, but  Hans remains a common moniker (as in Naughton 2006). Some retellings get much more elaborate, with their own mythology. A popular variant explains that if a nymph ever falls in love with a mortal and gives birth to his child, then she will become an ordinary mortal, subject to aging. Nevertheless, the nymph Ondine falls in love with a human, and he with her. One version names him Lawrence (Coren 1997); another calls him Palemon, borrowing from Frederick Ashton's 1958 ballet adaptation Ondine (Mawer 2009).
Lawrence/Palemon/whoever swears to her that “My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you." However, after she bears his son, Ondine begins to age, and her beauty fades. Her shallow husband dallies with other women. When Ondine catches him in bed with a mistress, she is enraged. With the last of her magic, she calls down a curse which mocks her husband's broken vow: as soon as he falls asleep, he'll stop breathing. Her husband inevitably falls asleep from exhaustion and dies.
This variant upends the original worldbuilding. In Fouque’s novel, marriage grants Undine a soul, but she remains otherworldly and powerful. Huldbrand rejects her out of fear and resentment. However, in this variant, marriage transforms Ondine into an ordinary woman, and that's why her husband strays.

Some of the shorter retellings are so clumsily phrased that they mix up vital information. One skips over the husband's infidelity:
"[T]he beautiful water nymph . . . punished her mortal husband by depriving him of the ability to breathe automatically. Without the benefit of tracheostomy, the poor wretch, having forgotten how to breathe, died in his sleep." (Vaisrub 1978)

Another makes Ondine the cheater in the situation!
"Ondine, a German water nymph, invoked a curse upon her jilted husband so that he would forget to breathe (and die) when he fell asleep." (Swift 1976, as cited in Navarro 1997)

Or was Ondine the one who was cursed?
"[T]he water nymph Ondine was punished by the gods after falling in love with a knight by being condemned to stay awake in order to breathe." (BBC 2003)

In some versions, Ondine is a succubus-like serial killer:
"...a water-spirit of German mythology called Ondine who could cause the death of her victims by stopping their respiration." (Taitz et al 1971, as cited in Navarro 1997)
"Ondine was a mythological water nymph who exhausted her human lovers." This author quotes Giraudoux's play, but labels Hans as just "one victim"! (Sege 1992)

And sometimes the nature of the curse itself changes to a perpetual sleep, as in one dictionary where Ondine is "A water nymph who caused a human male who loved her to sleep forever." (Firkin 1996)

The story goes completely off the rails in one article on spine surgery:
"Ondine, a shepherd in Greek mythology, was cursed for his misdeeds by being put into a sleep from which there was no awakening." (Fielding et al, 1975, as cited in Navarro 1997)
Critics were rightfully outraged at this summary, which manages to get every single detail wrong. The writers were following blindly in the footsteps of a very confused 1968 article which evidently mixed up Undine with the Greek myth of Endymion. The mistake is so wildly far off that I'm honestly impressed.

Conclusion
This is what happens when a bunch of people start retelling a story they've never read. The heart of the modern character Undine – carrying through to her spiritual successor, the Little Mermaid – is that she loves her husband. Her love is self-sacrificing and all-forgiving. The medical myth around “Ondine’s Curse” inverts this, making her a vindictive wife, a vampiric seductress, or a sheep-tending Greek man.

One article examines the history but concludes lackadaisically, "Whether Ondine kissed or clasped her husband to death depends on the version of the tale, and one can never know who cursed whom" (Tamarin et al, 1989). That's not true, though! This isn't like traditional oral folktales where there really are multiple unique variants and no one can determine an original. This is more like saying that we can never really know whether Dorothy's slippers were silver or ruby in The Wizard of Oz.

At what point does urban legend or commonly-repeated misconception become folklore? Can Ondine be considered a myth or legend, as it is often called? Perhaps it has become something of an oral folktale in the medical community. But given that it came specifically from literature, I hesitate to call it that.

This is part of a larger issue surrounding the story of Undine. It left its stamp on Western culture, but the work itself has become pretty obscure. For instance, many readers take jabs at Hans Christian Andersen for the theme of souls and salvation in The Little Mermaid, calling it tacked-on or a case of preachy Christian moralizing. But that plotline wasn’t original to Andersen – it was his response to Undine.

Scholars such as Oscar Sugar, Ravindra Nannapaneni, and Fernando Navarro have put significant work into tracing the fragmented and confused medical legend of Ondine's Curse. Many of them have argued against using the name at all, calling it a misnomer. From the other side, psychology professor Stanley Coren complained that the term was losing favor because of political correctness and "language sensitivity, where labeling people as suffering from some form of curse is seen as being insensitive rather than colorful." However, Coren says this right after weaving an elaborate summary which bears almost no resemblance to the real story. He also incorrectly attributes the coining of the term to the 1950s. And the vast majority of critics don't complain that it's mean to call a medical syndrome a curse; instead they focus on the fact that the name is fundamentally a bad fit.

On the literary level, Ondine neither causes the "curse" nor experiences it, and Hans's experience goes way beyond apnea. You could get pedantic and say "Well, it's named after the play, not the character" but clearly it has not been taken that way.

On the medical level, the shifting definitions lead to inconsistency on what the medical condition is. As Nannapaneni et al point out, the name "Ondine's Curse" has come to be used inconsistently for all sorts of conditions related to respiration. Not ideal for a medical term. They suggest that “this wide and nonspecific usage reflects a lack of awareness of the origins of this eponymous term.”

These days, the condition is typically known as Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS); however, the name "Ondine's Curse" is still around in casual language, and is apparently here to stay.
 
References

• Ali, Mohammed. "Ondine’s curse: The story of congenital central hypoventilation syndrome." Oxford Medical School Gazette, Volume 60(2). 2010.
• BBC. "Gene secret of 'mythical curse'." 5 May 2003.
• Coren, Stanley. Sleep Thieves. 1997.
• Demartini, Zeferion, Junior, et al. "Ondine's curse: myth meets reality." Sleep Med X. 2020.
• Firkin, B.G. and Whitworth, J.A. Dictionary of medical eponyms. 1996.
• Mawer, Simon. The Glass Room. 2009. pp. 330-331.
• Nannapaneni, Ravindra, Sanjay Behari, Nicholas V. Todd, and A. David Mendelow. "Retracing 'Ondine's curse.'" Neurosurgery vol. 57(2). 2005. pp. 354-63.
• Naughton, M.T. "SLEEP DISORDERS: Central Apnea (Ondine's Curse)." Encyclopedia of Respiratory Medicine, 2006.
• Navarro, Fernando A. "Dos personajes literarios en el lenguaje de la neurología: Ondina (II)." Revista de Neurología, 1997. p. 1629ff.
• Sege, JC. The dictionary of modern medicine. 1992. p. 672.
• Tamarin, F. M., R. J. Goldberg, and R. D. Brandstetter. "The tale of Ondine: A curse, a kiss, a clasp, and a comment." New York State Journal of Medicine 1989; 89: 196-8
• Vaisrub, S. "Pickwickian syndrome? The Dickens!" JAMA. 1978 Feb 13;239(7):645.
• Weese-Mayer, Debra E. et al. "Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome." GeneReviews. 2004.
  

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