The Perilous Seas of Faeryland

 'The Little Mermaid', Arthur Rackham

Are 'mermaid books' a genre? There’ve been plenty of mermaid stories published in the last six to eight years – Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ series and Liz Kessler’s lovely ‘Emily Windsnap’ titles spring instantly to mind: but they've been too different to be connected or viewed as a genre – certainly not in the same way that vampire or werewolf stories have. This is no bad thing.  For even though what seems to be a sudden fashion is often no more than a different way of joining up the dots, I’ve got a feeling that mermaids (and their underwater kin the selkies and kelpies) offer more various kinds of opportunity to the writer than the biting of throats and sucking of blood.  Subtler, more lyrical.  A different world.

Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.  In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls, and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care…  Hans Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a soul, she stops being a mermaid.  She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to be, or at least loses her identity... Plus, mermaids and selkies physically inhabit a place we can’t survive in, the world of the sea: so to write a book about mermaids is to take the reader on an imaginative journey into a different world. 

Most mermaid stories are sad.  Some mermaids are actively dangerous. (One legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’  Unless she receives the response, ‘He lives, reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.)  So mermaids are also a metaphor for the beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and take lives. There’s a lot going on in mermaid stories.

For me this sombre illustration by Arthur Rackham suggests the danger of desiring the Other

All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns.  Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian century.  Nowadays, in our multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing about mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and communication between individuals who may look different from one another, who may appear to come from different worlds. What is it to be ‘human’? How do we define it?  How do we recognise similarities and reconcile differences?  In very different ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ and its sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and climate change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still impacts the other. Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human. To which world does she belong?  Is it always necessary to choose?

And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories?  The legends are tremendously inspiring - but you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you.  I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’.  The legend is of a fisherman who sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t escape into the sea.  She has to marry him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the sealskin.  At once she throws it on, returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever. 

For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense, one’s partner is always the Other.  It speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into post-natal depression.  And that was how I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around, based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes back to the land and leaves him forever.  Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily.  But I read the legend, and my spine tingled, and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went looking for her mother…  Would the ending be different?

Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’, has found something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review).  In her book, the seals are used, manipulated, transformed, in a way which denies their nature and damages the wrongdoers. It’s a marvellous book which will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years. The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons live with the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present mild but steadfast grief.

Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully creepy take on the selkie legend.  And Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and man-eating.  Kelpies appear again in Maggie Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island.  Should men take and attempt to tame these otherworldly creatures?  Is it courage or cruelty?  Should they, perhaps, be left to their own world and their own nature?

These are all strong, and wonderfully written books.  If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous seas of fairyland, do try them!

"FORSAKEN"

Mara's mother is missing, her little brother is sick, maybe dying, her father is grieving.  It all seems hopeless - until Mara sets out on a life-or-death journey to bring her mother home.

Please excuse a quick interruption to service (Mystical Voyages will be back tomorrow) so that I can do a little dance and tell you that my mermaid book 'Forsaken' is published today by Franklin Watts/EDGE, along with three other titles by Ali Sparkes, Andy Briggs and Joe Craig in a series called Rivets.

All four in the series are short stories individually published, intended for readers of nine plus who aren't confident about tackling thicker volumes.

'Forsaken' is - along with most of my other books - based on folklore, on a tale which is most famously the inspiration for Matthew Arnold's beautiful 19th century poem 'The Forsaken Merman' - the story of a merman who marries a human woman, Margaret.

 COME, dear children, let us away;
            Down and away below.
    Now my brothers call from the bay;
    Now the great winds shoreward blow;
    Now the salt tides seaward flow;
    Now the wild white horses play,
    Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
        Children dear, let us away.
            This way, this way!

The merman, who speaks the poem, has married a human woman, Margaret.  They lived happily together under the sea till one day she heard church bells ringing in the world above, and felt a sudden longing to go and pray.  The merman agreed to part with her for a short visit but once on land she never returned to the sea, leaving her husband and little mer-children desolate.

Come away, away, children.
    Come children, come down.
    The hoarse wind blows colder;
    Lights shine in the town.
    She will start from her slumber
    When gusts shake the door;
    She will hear the winds howling,
    Will hear the waves roar.
    We shall see, while above us
    The waves roar and whirl,
    A ceiling of amber,
    A pavement of pearl.
    Singing, 'Here came a mortal,
    But faithless was she:
    And alone dwell for ever
    The kings of the sea.'

I read this poem many times as a child and always loved its lilting, changing rhythms and the beauty of its descriptions, as well as feeling sorry for the poor, heartbroken merman.  It's the opposite of the Selkie story which I use in 'West of the Moon': about the fisherman who takes a selkie bride, and the message of both tales seems to be about the attraction of the Other, as well as the difficulty of living with it.  Of course the old belief about merfolk - as for all faerie folk - was that unlike human beings, they had no souls.  Margaret fears she too will lose her immortal soul and her chance of heaven if she stays with the merman.  This fear leads her to abandon her husband and children.  And here is an eternal question, one still being asked and played out today in many a family: was she right to follow her beliefs?  Or wrong to cause her family so much unhappiness?

In the original Danish ballad, which I think Arnold must have read, 'Agnete and the Merman', the woman lives eight years with the Merman under the sea until one day she 'hears the clocks of England chime' and asks permisson to go to church.  She meets her mother at the church door. 'Where hast thou been?'  'I have been at the bottom of the sea, and have seven sons by the Merman'.  The Merman comes to find her, but when he peeps into the church, all the little stone images turn their backs on him.

When I read this, a shiver ran down my spine and I knew I had to tell the story again - but this time I wondered, what would have happened if, instead of the merman, one of Margaret's own daughters came to find her...?



'Forsaken' is available from today as a 'proper' book and as an e-book on Amazon.

Exciting Things!

Two exciting things, actually.  The first is the lovely cover of the new book I’ve written. ‘Forsaken’ will be published in November by Franklin Watts EDGE, and is one of a series, commissioned from several different well-known children’s authors (*modest cough*), of quick reads for children aged nine and over – children who are competent readers but might feel daunted by a thick, 350 page novel.

This is as sophisticated a story as I’ve ever written, so I hope some of you adults will like it too.  You can fit a lot into a little room. 

Last week I was thinking about waterspirits – naiads and undines and kelpies – the denizens of fresh water, rivers, lakes and tarns.  But the salt sea has always been the province of mermaids.  And rather as fairies were downgraded to flowery little creatures with butterfly wings and sparkly wands, so mermaids – ever since Disney’s Ariel, perhaps – have gone sparkly too.  Long blonde hair, mirrors and combs: perhaps the accessories don’t help – and don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind this at all, any more than I mind little girls poring over the Flower Fairy books, as my own daughters used to do.  Sweet little mermaids are safe and happy reading for little girls.  But what about older children?

I’m not even going down the route of the siren, the mermaid as death omen, precursor of shipwrecks.  No, where I started from in this little book was the original legend behind Matthew Arnold’s classic poem ‘The Forsaken Merman’.  It’s called ‘Agnete and the Merman’ and I found it in an old book of Scandinavian poetry.  In it, as in Arnold’s poem, a mortal woman marries a Merman and has seven children by him.  One day, as she sits singing under the blue water she ‘hears the clocks of England clang’ and seeks leave to revisit land and go to church once more. 

Once back on shore, however, she refuses to return to the sea.  In Arnold’s poem, which I really love, the Merman and his children call wildly and vainly for their lost wife and mother from the bay, until at last they accept that she will never return.

But children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low:
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starr’d with broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanch’d sands a gloom,
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over beds of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry:
We will gaze, from the sand-hills
At the white, sleeping town,
At the church on the hillside –
And then come back down,
Singing, ‘There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she.
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.

There seems to me a great tragic tension in this poem and in the older ballad – the same tension that is found in the Orkney stories of the selkie wife who leaves her fisherman husband to return to the sea.  (Which is the same story in reverse, and an important element of my book Troll Mill, the second part of West of the Moon). These stories are about an unbridgeable strangeness between husband and wife, perhaps more specifically the terrible strangeness caused by post-natal depression.  They’re about seeing someone – even someone as close to you as your partner – as alien. In the Merman story, and with Andersen’s story of The Little Mermaid, despite the little mermaid’s bargain with the sea-witch – it’s not really the physical fact that the mer-people have tails and the humans have legs that causes the trouble.  It’s the perceived ‘fact’ that mer-people don’t have souls.  This will cause the eventual eternal separation of any mer/human marriage anyway; so no wonder the Merman husband, though he calls so desperately, and even climbs on the gravestones in the churchyard to peep through the church windows, will never win his Margaret back. 

Then I thought, but what if one of the children went after her mother to try and bring her back?  And with that idea, which totally grabbed me, this book just flowed.





And my second Very Exciting Thing is that a new series of  Fairytale Reflections will begin on this blog next Friday, and the opening essay will be from the amazing Terri Windling, author of  'The Wood Wife'  - which won the Mythopoeic Award for Novel of the Year in 1996 - and fantasy editor extraordinaire.

I'm posting a little early this week, as I'm going away for a few days.  Have a good weekend, everyone!