European Mermaid Stories

European Mermaids Stories from Rusalka to Nix. Mermaids have been a prominent part of European folklore for centuries, appearing in various forms and stories across different countries. From the ethereal Rusalka of Slavic mythology to the mischievous Nix of Germanic legends. In Slavic folklore, Rusalka is a water nymph or spirit who haunts rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. They are often depicted as beautiful young women with long green hair and pale skin. In Germanic folklore, Nix is a water spirit or mermaid known for their mischievous and malevolent nature. Nix often appears as a beautiful woman or a half-human, half-fish creature. They are said to lure sailors to their doom by singing enchanting songs or playing mesmerizing music.

Transcript

Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid appeared in 1836.

It's actually very similar to the myth of Atarcaatis,

Because Atarcaatis falls in love with the human,

Marina in the fairy tale and Ariel in the movie also falls in love with the human.

We come across this instant connection in storytelling,

Where this same plot repeats itself in these mermaid fairy tales.

Hans Christian Andersen,

He was known as Denmark's fairy tale godfather.

Little Mermaid is probably his most famous creation.

And think about all these things that we wouldn't have without his impact.

We wouldn't have Little Mermaid,

We wouldn't have Frozen because he wrote Snow Queen.

I saw the Little Mermaid statue in Denmark in 2007.

I was traveling back then in Copenhagen and I was 17 years old.

But it is a beautiful statue,

The little Havruet,

She's sitting there looking at the sea.

Each year more than one million tourists visit the statue of Little Mermaid.

The bronze statue,

It was put there in 1913 and that's when the city of Copenhagen decided that it's going to celebrate its most famous cultural figures with these statues that represent the legacy and the history and mythology of Denmark.

And she has both legs and a tail,

So it's actually quite interesting.

The statue was sculpted by a man called Edvard Eriksen and she was modeled by a dancer called Ellen Price who played Little Mermaid in the Little Mermaid play,

The Royal Theatre.

So Price was the model for the mermaid's head and Eriksen's wife modeled her nude body.

One very famous mermaid story comes from Germany and it is the story of Lorelei.

Lorelei was this very beautiful woman who lived in this village in Germany and men found her irresistible and then she had affairs with these men and then the townspeople started to look down upon her because whenever this story was told it was not okay for a woman to be openly sexual.

Lorelei lived in the town of Bagarak,

Which is located next to the river Rhine,

And the town folks thought that Lorelei was bewitched,

So they sent her to the town bishop and the bishop felt sorry for her.

He thought that she was innocent and announced that she was free from sin,

But Lorelei started crying and said that all the men found her irresistible,

But then she has only one man in her life and he disappeared to the sea.

Lorelei said that she would agree on a death penalty,

But the bishop did not want to kill her and he suggested that she would move into the monastery and become a nun.

On their way to the monastery,

Lorelei asked if she could go to the rocks and have a last glimpse at the river Rhine and her wish was granted.

Lorelei climbed to the top and then she pointed out a distant ship at the sea and then she said to her companions that that is the ship where my lover is and then she jumped out from the cliff and drowned.

In some versions of the story,

Her companions were so shocked that they decided to jump as well.

Nowadays,

Near the city of Saint-Kottshauen,

Near the river Rhine,

There is a large rock which is also known as Lorelei rock.

It's very high,

It's like 120 meters high and it's a very rocky area and the river flows very fast there.

There has been lots of accidents in that area and according to the folklore that is where Lorelei sings her haunting song and causes the accidents.

So it is a very similar story to the story of Sirens from Greek mythology.

Lorelei also lives in culture.

In a very famous film,

Gentlemen prefer blondes.

Marilyn Monroe plays the blonde and her name is Lorelei and some people might say that Marilyn Monroe was rather Sirensque.

French folklore has its own mermaid and her name is Melusine and this story originates from the Middle Ages.

The story is not a very happy one.

It begins from a count called Remond.

He was a son of a bankrupt count and he was adopted by a nobleman called Emerick who loved Remond like his own son.

Remond accidentally killed Emerick in a hunting incident.

Filled with self-blame he goes into the woods and he came across a beautiful fountain and that is where he met Melusine who was this gorgeous woman and Remond fell in love with her.

Remond asked her to marry him and she said yes in one condition.

He could never see her on Saturdays.

And after the couple wed,

Melusine gave birth to several deformed children which made Remond quite suspicious and one night he was spying on her when she was taking a bath and then he saw that Melusine was half woman and her lower body was a body of a snake.

And then he blamed her for defaulting his family line and asked her to leave and Melusine leaves him because he broke his vow.

And according to the legend Melusine hunts the French woods and if you hear her scream and cry it means that some kind of accident is going to happen.

In Poland,

The capital Warsaw has a protector mermaid.

The residents loved the mermaid so much that she became the protector of the city in the 17th century.

Her bronze statue is in the Old Market Square.

She is in the coat of arms of Warsaw with her shield and her sword.

You can find her in the architecture of Warsaw.

I guess we could say that Warsaw is a mermaid city,

A city guarded by a mermaid.

In Polish she is known as Warszawska Syrenka.

There are lots of legends surrounding the story how the mermaid is connected to Warsaw.

According to one legend,

A mermaid led a man called War to the spot in the river where the city was eventually founded.

Another legend says that a mermaid called Sava swam from the Baltic Sea,

From Gansk to Vistula river and then she stopped where Warsaw is currently and had a rest there.

But she liked the place so much that she decided to stay and then she was captivated by the merchants.

A man called Wars heard her crying and saved her and she managed to escape.

And as a thanks to the fisherman Wars,

The Sava mermaid said that she is going to protect him and the town for the rest of her life.

And that is where the name Warsaw comes from,

The names Wars and Sava.

The mermaids in Russia,

Ukraine and other Slavic countries are known as Rusalka.

Rusalka is more of a succubus or she is more of a ghost or a vampire,

Demon type of character.

Usually Rusalka is a female,

There are no reports of male Rusalkas in Slavic folktales.

Rusalka is described to have upper body of a woman and lower body of a fish.

In Siberia they are actually described to look more like yetis,

To be more like Bigfoot.

So Rusalka is very similar to the Germanic Nix,

It's a character that snatches humans when they are walking near these water areas where the Rusalki lives.

The Rusalkas,

They love to dance and they love to sing and they are very beautiful and they lure men with their beauty and then they drown them.

Usually they live in the bottoms of the rivers and lakes and ponds.

They can turn themselves into humans and walk on shores and lure men.

In the evenings Rusalka can shapeshift into a human and have legs and then they climb on trees and then they swing in the tree branches and sing like nightingales.

Now I think this is actually very similar to lots of forest spirits in Slavic folklore who live in trees,

It's very interesting.

And they are very much connected to this universal mermaid imagery because Rusalkas,

They were often described to sit on stones and rocks,

Combing their long beautiful hair.

Then there is another theory about Rusalka that they are actually spirits of drowned women.

Rusalka haunts that lake or the water gate where they were killed and often in these stories they either committed a suicide or they were murdered and they cannot find rest until they get some justice,

Which usually never happens in the fairy tale.

There is a legend that Rusalkas are spirits of unbaptized babies or children that were born out of wedlock and were murdered by their mothers.

And this usually refers to the stories where Rusalka is a child and not an adult.

These child Rusalkas,

They walk on shore and they are looking for people who could baptize them.

They are little child ghosts.

Rusalka can be violent,

It can be murderous,

But then in the folktales it can also be harmless if you just leave them alone.

In Ukrainian Rusalkas are a bit different.

In the Ukrainian stories Rusalka is usually a blonde woman.

They have this long greenish blonde hair and they are these naked females.

They have this transluent white skin and some people say that their eyes blaze like green fire.

They can transform themselves into people and into animals and they live in these crystal cities and they emerge around Rusalka Easter,

Which happens like eight weeks after the Orthodox Easter and that's when they dance and play on land.

This is known as the Rusalka week or green week and it takes place around early June and this is the time when they are thought to be most dangerous and people don't,

And the people who are very superstitious,

They don't go near the water areas around this time.

This is really a remanence of the pagan times.

It's very possible that Rusalkas and the Rusalka week it's a remanence of pagan fertility rituals.

I don't know how common these beliefs are still in Ukraine,

At least in the old times there were beliefs that Rusalka was very dangerous to men and then their laugh might even destroy a man and to protect them the Ukrainian men kept warm wood or lovage as amulets and then they carried them in a piece of cloth to protect them from Rusalka.

So it is believed that this dance and the singing of Rusalkas during this Rusalka week in Ukraine and other Slavic countries back in the days it was a fertility ritual based on the time when just regular women would go to these fields and then they would dance and sing.

It was a fertility ritual to grow grain.

I found some interesting beliefs about Rusalkas.

One was that their hair was very much connected to their identity.

So if their hair would dry that means that the Rusalka was dying so their hair must always be wet.

The comb of the Rusalka is also a talisman.

If Rusalka would be away from the water too long they would die because they were so connected to the water.

Water was their home but with their comb they could magically create water.

There is a similar character in the Romanian mythology called Iele and Iele is also very much like a Rusalka.

She has a translucent skin,

Long blonde locks.

Ieles are taught to dance in fields during the evenings and early mornings and they only wear these bells in their ankles and they sing and dance and it's mesmerizing.

Iele is thought to be very dangerous and the ground where they dance is thought to be scorched afterwards and nothing grows there.

Maybe mushrooms but nothing else.

And Iele can be very temperamental and angry.

They could make people disappear or fall asleep for a long time,

Put them into a trance and according to one legend if a person would hear Iele sing they would become mute.

And in Romanian mythology and in Romanian culture Iele was being blamed on lots of things.

Sometimes a person might be possessed by a Iele.

They could lose their sight or lose their hearing.

So it's like being possessed by a demon.

They might commit suicide or commit a murder.

They were possessed by evil spirits.

And the only people who could erase this curse of a Iele were the Kalusaari who were a group of healers with magical powers.

The Slavic cultures also have stories about mermen and they are known as Vodjano and they are not that pretty maybe as Rusalka's Vodjano is usually described to look an old man who has a beard and sort of a slimy body covered with scales.

And sometimes in the stories the Vodjano and Rusalka's marry and Vodjano is a spirit of a sailor or a spirit of a person who drowned at the sea and if they marry they live underwater in castles that are built from the parts of sunken ships.

And Vodjano in Slavic culture is usually a malicent sea spirit and it drowns people.

The Slavic mythology also has stories about snake people.

There's a one story where a snake tricks a girl to marry him and he lives with the girl in bottom of the pond and then he transforms into a human being and then they start a family together.

Then the girl starts to miss her mother.

She travels to meet her mom and tells about her husband and the mother believes that the snake person tricked her daughter,

Which he kinda did,

And then the mother kills the snake man.

When the girl is heartbroken she turns herself and her children as birds.

There are lots of stories about these snake marriages.

I have found lots of fairy tales and folk tales that are very similar to this.