May we meet my fairy soul?
Today's topic is the mermaids of the cold waters.
Mermaids in Arctic and in Antarctic.
And as you can imagine,
Mermaids,
Their appearance,
It's always based on their environment.
So mermaids in the southern seas are rather exotic and not so cruel as perhaps these mermaids in the cold waters.
So the mermaids in cold waters,
They usually are masters of camouflage.
Colours,
They vary between blue and grey.
They are more simple for the human eye than the mermaids in more exotic waters.
Their bodies are built to handle cold temperatures.
And when we think about the myths in the Arctic,
The myths of the Inuits,
The Samis,
Even myths of the Finns or the Slavic people or Norse,
They have these quite struggling underlayer people,
Struggles in the harsh weather conditions.
So this is something that also comes out in many of the mermaid myths about the mermaids in the Arctic because their life was about survival in these harsh weather conditions.
This verse myth comes from the Inuits from Canada and it is about Sedna,
Who is one of my favourite sea-slash-mermaid goddesses.
Sedna was not really a mermaid because the Inuits,
They described her to be a human woman.
So the tale was later added there with the whale hunters that had more exposure to other cultures where mermaids were described to have a fish tail.
But originally,
Sedna did not have a fish tail.
Sedna was one of the most powerful Inuit goddesses there was.
She is the goddess of the sea and sea animals and she is the goddess of hunting.
She is like the protector goddess of hunting the sea animals.
So people made sacrifices for Sedna and she was the goddess who provided food for the people who worshipped her.
Sedna was a beautiful Inuit woman who many men fancied,
But she did not want to marry any of them.
So she ended up marrying a trickster spirit who was a sea bird and this trickster spirit,
He promised her a life in this beautiful Iceland and she would have everything that she wanted.
So the trickster spirit tricked her to move into the Iceland,
But the life in the Iceland was really dreadful and she started to long to go away back to her family.
Sedna's father,
He rode into the Iceland and he killed the trickster sea bird guard.
But the friends of the sea bird guard,
They summoned a big storm.
Sedna and his father were in the boat.
Father got scared and he threw the daughter overboard.
Then Sedna tried to hold on the side of the boat.
Her father shut off her fingers and the fingers they sank into the sea and turned into fishes and whales and seals and Sedna sank as well and she was metamorphosed in the water to become a sea goddess.
So in a way this myth tells a story of a rebirth,
How this human woman became a goddess and in a way the sea did not hide her beauty.
So that's why she turned into a goddess and some stories tell that her lower body turned into a tail and she got a tail of a whale or a tail of a fish.
And this is very similar to the myth of Atargatis from Assyria where similar happened to a human woman.
When she drowned the sea could not hide her beauty and she became the sea goddess or mother of all mermaids like some people call Atargatis.
So this myth is sort of a universal how a woman can drown and become a goddess or mermaid or a man can drown and become a merman or mergod.
So it's quite universal myth.
But anyway in among the Inuits Sedna is still very much honored goddess and there's festivals that are told to celebrate her.
I personally love all the stories that are related to Sedna.
I think she's super interesting and fascinating goddess and in the future I will make another video about her.
Let's move from Canada to the Norway and to the coast of Ruja in the Lapland of Norway where there are stories told about the local salamis about Avruvas and Avruvas is another group of mermaids and they only exist in this particular area in this particular part of the world in the coast of Ruja.
So Avruva that literally means sea maiden I think.
Avruvas there were these typical mermaids they were women with tails and they warned sailors about the coming storms.
There's also another mermaid species among the Norwegian salamis and that is Rauka.
The name literally comes from Norwegian and means a drowned person and Rauka was a scary mermaid or a merman.
They usually were described to have their mouth open and the eyes wide open and the hair was all over the place and they would appear to people who were about to drown.
People in the past used to think that Rauka was an actual creature who did appear for people who were about to drown.
There was also another Rauka who was called Kacarauka and that was more imaginable and a character that people used to scare kids not to go near waters because then Kacarauka would snatch them and drown them.
We got back to the world of the Inuits and there was another dangerous species of mermaid called Quallupalik and these were a woman who were very much human like.
They did not have fish tails.
They had green skin and very long green hair and they had very very long fingers.
Quallupalik was another creature that parents and elders used to scare their kids so that they would not go too close to the shore or too close to the sea otherwise they might get into an accident and drown.
It was believed that Quallupalik,
They wore this special parka called Amautik which was worn by the Inuit woman and it had a baby pouch in the back so that they could hold the child against their back.
So when Quallupalik wore this Amautik,
When a child would get lost from their parents and would walk in the shore,
Quallupalik would snatch them and put them into their Amautik and dive back to the sea and would take the child with them.
It was believed that you could hear Quallupalik approaching if you would hear this humming sound near the sea so that's where she is.
So these kind of snatcher mermaid legends they are very common around the world.
They are very universal.
