Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Merfolk are complex beings. After introducing Reidar Christiansen's exposition of the motifs of the Nordic merpeople legends, I will present some of the different kinds of merpersons that may be encountered and add a few ponderings on how they are communicated and what their messages signify.

Paper long abstract

If you have an encounter with a merperson, who or what have you in fact met? It is obvious that merfolk are composite creatures. Their physical appearance is famously split somewhere below the navel, with a humanoid top and a fishlike bottom. But more profoundly, stories of meeting merpeople always contain multiple layers of historical experience and imagination. In his monograph, Scribner (2020) exposed several of these layers, but from a folklorist perspective, he backed of precisely when he should not have.

After explaining how the medieval church visualized of the mermaid, both to discredit female sexuality and to warn against associating with pre-Christian water-creatures, Scribner notes that an entire book could have been written about the blending between the mermaids of medieval theology and the water-beings of vernacular folklore – before he leaves this interesting trail untouched. Then, it is good that we have folklorists. Allready in 1935, Reidar Th. Christiansen wrote an article on the motifs of the Nordic merfolk legends, noting how they in the Middle Ages blended with legends about sea trolls (margygre), and later became closely integrated in the Nordic fairy complex.

In the presentation, I will show some of the main lines of Christiansen’s argument, illustrated with stories of encounter. Afterwards, I will even present a few varieties of waterpeople that Christiansen did not take into account and add some ponderings on how they are communicated and what their messages signify.