The Ancients - The Sirens

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

The word 'Sirens' conjures up many images, possibly of beautiful mermaid-like creatures luring sailors to their watery deaths. These ancient Greek mythical creatures, linked to the Queen of the Underworld Persephone, feature in well known myths such as Jason and the Argonauts and Homer’s story of Odysseus - The Odyssey. But their popular modern portrayal as 'sexy maidens' does not originate from ancient Greece, that is a much later invention. Sarah Clegg joins Tristan Hughes to discuss the story of the Sirens and how their legacy is intertwined with a number of other mythical creatures such as nymphs, the Mesopotamian demoness Lilith and, of course mermaids.Listen to Tristan and Sarah Clegg's previous episode on Lillith here: https://podfollow.com/the-ancients/episode/83e3167b27baefea4d862da99ce26425ba43e291/viewPresented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.The Ancients is recording our first LIVE SHOW at the London Podcast Festival on Thursday 5th September 2024! Book your tickets now to be in the audience and ask Tristan and his guest your burning questions. Tickets on sale HERE https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients/Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscription

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Sirens. Your mind might immediately think of sexy maidens on an island, their beauty luring sailors to their death. That's the regular image we have of these mythical creatures today, but the original Sirens, well, they were in fact very different. They weren't sexy, they were bird women.

It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're exploring the story of the Sirens, these ancient Greek mythical creatures linked to the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, where they feature in well-known myths such as Jason and the Argonauts and Homer's story of Odysseus, the Odyssey. But their portrayal as sexy maidens does not originate from ancient Greece. That is a much later invention. This episode will start with the story of the Sirens in ancient Greece, but then explore how their appearance and story evolved and changed as time went on. How the late antique and medieval church played a key role in turning these knowledgeable birdwomen into evil seductresses.

And how that demonising portrayal has endured down to the present day, for instance, in TV series such as Red Dwarf. There's even a link to The Little Mermaid. Never thought I'd mention The Little Mermaid on an ancients podcast, but there you go. Now, I should also mention that the story of the Sirens and their legacy is intertwined with a number of other mythical creatures, including a serpent woman called the Lamia, nymphs, the Mesopotamian demoness Lilith, and, of course, mermaids.

So this episode will be about the Sirens, but also much more. Now, to explain this legacy of the Sirens, I was delighted to welcome back to the show the author and ancients' favourite Sarah Clegg. Sarah has written a book called Women's Law, exploring the stories of many female mythical creatures from antiquity and how their images have changed over the millennia, including the Sirens. She was also our guest for the incredibly popular episode about Lilith, which we released just over a year ago. So it was a pleasure to get Sarah back on the show to talk all the things Sirens, Lamia, Mermaids, and more.

Sarah, what a pleasure. It is great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. And we had to have you back after the great success of our last chat all about Lilith. I've never seen so many comments, so many great comments about an episode on the ancients before. So we've got you back on now to talk about another really interesting part of your book, all about women's law, which is the story of the sirens now sarah who were the sirens i mean that depends the eternal weasel answer to anything with legends and folklore on who you're asking and when you're asking them so if you start off in ancient greece

i think one of the things that really surprises most people is that the Sirens aren't sexy. They are bird-bodied. They've not got fish tails. And they don't swim. They don't really live in the water. They live next to the water. There's loads of different sources for them. Obviously, the main one is the Odyssey, where Odysseus is told that he's coming up on the sirens, that any man who listens to them will fling himself into the water or drive their ships onto the rocks. So he has his crew, stuff there is with wax, has himself tied to the mast of the ship so he can pass them by, safe in the knowledge that even though he's hearing them he'll be restrained from doing anything silly and Homer records what their song is Odysseus come here you

are well known from many stories glory of the Greeks now stop your ship and listen to our voices all those who pass this way hear honeyed song poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy and they go on their way with greater knowledge since we know everything that the Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy by the God's will and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth. It is, I mean no offense if it's your taste, but frankly it's very, very deliberately unsexy. They're not promising him anything seductive. They are promising him knowledge. Even the one adjective, honeyed, which I think we might maybe read as a little seductive in modern terms, that's more likely to be linking the sirens to

bees, to animals of poetry and prophecy, than it is to be connecting them to kind of sweetened sincerities. There are other stories about the sirens too, and they all continue in the same vein of really not seductive at all. There's the story that they were the companions of Persephone and begged for wings so that they could search for her after she was taken by Hades. And then the less sweet variant where Demeter curses them with wings because they didn't protect her daughter well enough. There is Plato who links their song to the music of the spheres, so kind of the vibration of the cosmos, which unless he had a different experience of the cosmos was probably not very seductive. They are heavily associated with the underworld.

Possibly this is because of their connection with Persephone. Possibly this is because they lure people to their deaths. But it's this weirdly positive connection where they function as psychopomps. So they function as creatures who will lead you through the underworld and guide you through. And that they're really positive.

They're things that you want to encounter in the underworld because they're going to help. And they appear on tombstones in that kind of capacity and are spoken of in that capacity. So I would say they are incredibly different from most of our modern interpretations of the sirens. That's a complete myth bust straight away. As you say, they're not that sexualized aspect that you so often associate with the sirens in present day. And my mind immediately goes to Red Dwarf, the comedy where they have a sirens episode, don't they? And it's fascinating. And we'll probably explore that evolution of the portrayal of the sirens. But I mean, kind of going back to the beginning mythical creatures very scary for sailors in the ancient

greek world but i mean what types of sources you you've mentioned how there are lots of different stories of the sirens but what types of sources do we have to learn about them how they're portrayed and also this evolution in how they get dare i say over time? Well, the main thing with how they get sexier over time is if you look at the Greek sirens, sort of sad, prophetic bird women who are connected to the underworld. If you then go to the Middle Ages and you look at the sirens there, and they're appearing primarily in church sources, they appear in bestiaries, kind of these books of beasts that are being produced in monasteries and things like that. And by the time they're there, they are sexy as anything. By the time they're there, they are portrayed normally naked or half naked because

they've got a fish tail. They have their hair loose, which is very much not something that you should be doing as a good chaste medieval woman. They hold a comb, which is kind of the preening of a woman that should be done in private, but also associating them with kind of Venus and that very, very sexualized thing of the goddess of love. And the bestiaries tell us that what they do is they sing seductive songs to men, and when the men get close they will eat them alive and they're in a bit of a kind of identity crisis with how exactly they look there are a number of sources that keep the greek tradition of them being bird bodied but you are also getting them turning up with fish tails often in the sources, there are numerous bestiaries where the picture

of the mermaids is then with fishtails or snake tails, and the text of it describes them as birds. And it's this question of what happens in that period. Why do they morph from sad prophetic bird woman into literal man-eating snake-tailed serpent-tailed sex monster and the main thing is that in ancient Greece even as Homer is rising there is a monster that is very associated with snakes very associated with seduction very associated with seduction, very associated with eating people who come close to her, and is actually described sitting by the sea with her breasts out to lure in sailors. And when the sailors get close, she reveals that she is part snake and eats them alive, which I think is about as mermaid based as you can get. Certainly anyone in the medieval period looking at that would have gone mermaid. And this is a completely separate monster and it's called the Lamia. And a lot of the story of the mermaid is the blending of these two monsters into each other. So they become almost indistinguishable and incredibly,

incredibly entwined. Do we see those original depictions, let's say the sirens with their bird bodies, but also the Lamia. I mean, do we see these depictions on ancient Greek pottery? So you see the bird depictions of the sirens. That's everywhere. There's a really famous attic red figure vase of Odysseus kind of tied to the mast and the siren birds around him. That does appear quite frequently. Lamia less so. There is one image of possibly her on a vase. It is not her with a snake tail. It is her with a phallus. But that kind of plays into a sort of different thing with Lamia,

that she is seductive. She eats men. She also murders mothers and she murders children. And there's this kind of idea running through her that she is the opposite of what a good woman ought to be. A good woman ought to be having children, not eating them. She ought to be obeying men, not seducing them and then eating them. So there is this kind of thing of maybe Lamia has kind of male genitalia and she is portrayed with that in this one image. And then also there's a comedy in which someone is referred to smelling like Lamia's testicles.

The snake edition kind of tends to come in late antiquity. That's where you start to get these representations of Lamia, where she just looks like a mermaid. She has the snake tail and she has her breasts out. There are descriptions of her in ancient Greek sources. This is sort of the textual tradition, which do describe her in the same way, where she moves with a scaly gait and where she has this kind of snake tail. It's just not something that you see kind of appearing in the imagery until you hit the antiquity. But I guess also on a quick tangent to our last

interview, is this also a way that we can also get slightly the influence of Lilith in the story of the sirens and Lamia? They all kind of come together, I guess, don't they? They really, really do. So there is this kind of pile up of demons that happens in kind of our imagery of mermaids. So Lamia is the kind of ancient Greek variant of an ancient Mesopotamian monster who's called Lamashti, who is also very associated with snakes. She will also eat your children. She will also attack pregnant women and babies. And in kind of the later Mesopotamian tradition, Lamashti starts to blend together with another monster called Lelitu. Lelitu is the ghost of a girl who died before she could have sex.

And she spends her nights roaming around looking for sleeping men to have sex with. And she is the cause of wet dreams. And in most Mesopotamian tradition, she's kind of sad. The incantations against her, they are filled with this kind of sympathy that she is this really tragic figure of a girl who just never got to live her life. And it's not just the sex that she's missing.

There's other things as well. There's a thing about that she never got to go to festivals with her friends. She never had children. She never had the clasp of her clothing undone by a nice young man, which is just, it's so sweet and so sad. But she blends together with Lamashtu, who is this much more violent, terrifying monster. And her seduction takes on these kind of violent attributes as well so suddenly it's not kind of a wet dream it's something that she is going after she is violent afterwards as well and she will also kill babies and harm pregnant mothers

and that is what you see in the Lamia of ancient Greece which is her kind of Greek variant and it's also what you see in Lilith who's obviously taking her name from Lilith which is her kind of Greek variant. And it's also what you see in Lilith, who's obviously taking her name from Lilith, which is kind of the Mesopotamian variant that stays in the kind of Jewish tradition and then kind of comes through there to Europe. So Lamia is there in the sirens. What is really fun is in the biblical translations that you get in late antiquity. So sort of the Greek biblical translations, and then also things like the Vulgate. The Vulgate was kind of a very famous translation of the Bible because it was one that went back to the original Hebrew and translated into the Latin. Before then, there have been Latin translations,

but they were working off Greek translations of the Hebrew. So you were getting a lot of errors kind of feeding in. And St. Jerome was the man who made this translation. It's not perfect though. He does make mistakes, but it's so much better than anything anyone had been using before. And he's doing that in the fourth century, 80. And it really kind of changes the game. And eventually it becomes the most commonly used translation. So it is really important and really influential. But he also very wonderfully left a commentary on his translation, which is just incredible because you can see why he translated

things the way he did. I mean, not quite. He doesn't leave it on enough, but you can follow along with what he's saying and why he's doing the things that he's doing. And one of the bits of commentary, he claims that sirens are great dragons. And it is that kind of reptilian bit. I like it because it's got the flying still, but it's bringing over these reptiles, still. But it's bringing over these reptiles, this kind of snaky serpentine thing, and blending it with the sirens in a way that he's spelling it out. This is how he's viewing sirens. There are passages that translate certain bits about the ruin of certain Mesopotamian cities, and they muddle up all of the Lamias and the Sirens and the Liliths. So you have words being translated

in one version in the Vulgate. The same word is translated as both Siren and Lamia. In another occasion, there's a thing in the Hebrew that is actually Lilith. And that is translated as Lamia in the Vulgate. They are all just colliding into each other. They are these snaky women who will seduce you, kill your child, and probably eat you if you get too close. And people are noticing these connections and know about them, and they're

just using these terms almost interchangeably. Nymphs end up being bundled into this collective of sexy water women as well. And they are more sexualized in ancient Greece than the Sirens are. But it's in a very different way from how kind of the mermaids and the Sirens of later periods are sexualized, in that they are portrayed constantly as like sexually attractive and appealing but they are normally not the aggressors most greek myths it is nymphs desperately trying to avoid men most running away from them getting raped by men having passing gods and goddesses turn them into trees or springs so that they don't have to be raped by men or other gods or fauns or whatever else happens to be passing. They are not sexual aggressors. They are the victims just constantly.

There is one story in which nymphs are seductive. seductive. It's the story of Hylus and the nymphs, where Hylus, who's the lover of Hercules, is a very beautiful young man and goes to collect water, and it's pulled down underwater by the nymphs. It is one story out of hundreds where the nymphs are sexual aggressors for the first time. Rather than being objects of desire, they are looking at someone else and saying, no, I want him, Rather than being objects of desire, they are looking at someone else and saying, no, I want him and acting on it violently. It is a story that the medieval period and the Victorians are so into because it's the one that actually is representing what they want to talk about. But it is a single story in the Greek tradition. And in some versions of it as well, Pylos doesn't die.

He lives with the nymphs and he's delighted about the entire situation. So even in that, the nymphs aren't kind of aggressive. And it's again happening in the medieval period and to some extent late antiquity, where suddenly they're being drawn into these myths of sexually aggressive female monsters, which is again not where they'd started from in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. with many greek myths let's say with the gods and goddesses i mean their portrayal evolves as greek history evolves and we've already talked about how the sirens you know becoming more sexualized by late antiquity and so on because i know there are other myths associated with the sirens like it's jason and the argons, you've mentioned that association with the underworld as well. So do we see any sexual

evolution, evolution of the sirens at all as the ancient Greek period progressed? I would say broadly, no. Someone's probably going to write into the podcast with some excellent examples of where it does. But broadly, no, they are kept as something that's sort of apart from this kind of sexualization. The term siren is used as an insult, but it's used as an insult between orators. And the idea is that you're leading someone astray with your words and your knowledge and your wisdom, rather than you're a man eating sexual temptress. So, I mean, there are like, obviously very negative associations with sirens, but that sexual aspect just isn't there, unless you want to take the fact that they're kind of young women. Sometimes the bird representations of them have breasts, but I mean, they look, most representations, pretty asexual and no judgment

if bird women are your thing, but broadly, even the ones with breasts are not kind of depicted in a way that I think anyone would really look at as extremely sexualized. So, I mean, the original Sirens, although they're still dangerous and they're feared by the ancient Greeks, this meshing together their story with Lilith and Lamia as time goes on, do you think this is very much crucial in that transformation of the whole image of the Sirens that we know and we think of today? Absolutely. It's the main driving thing for it. In fact, so there are stories of the Lamia that survive in kind of the Basque region. Then there's a Lamiac who sits by water and draws in men and eats them. What she doesn't do is sing because that's the addition that the sirens bring

to the legend. And that's what she doesn't have. In Greece in the 1980s, there's still legends around of lamias swimming in the sea and people saying, oh, don't go swimming in the sea around midday or midnight because lamias will eat you. And they are, again, these very seductive women who are in the sea, who are associated with snakes, but they haven't blended with the sirens, so they don't have the siren song. But I think fundamentally, if anyone looked at either of these two monsters today and was asked, what would you call them if you couldn't call them a lamia, you would say mermaid. They look identical to our mermaids, except they don't sing. So yeah, it's really in late antiquity that it all kind of comes together.

And you can see it really nicely in the translations of the Bible, where it is just this thing of using the terms interchangeably and happily. In late antiquity, there is this interest in them as seducers. And you do get church scholars talking about it. And obviously, you know, there's no point in the Christian church where everyone's down for a bit of seduction. And obviously, you know, there's no point in the Christian church where everyone's down for a bit of seduction. By the Middle Ages, you have a church that is, in the nicest possible way, very weird about sex. And especially, I think it's weird because we don't tend to think of it in this way, but they're weird about male chastity. So you have things where churchmen aren't allowed to be part of service or give the communion if they've had a wet dream the night before. You get church appointments being made on

the basis that that churchman has been very chaste or is a virgin. There was an archbishop of York, his colleagues were really dubious about his appointment. They were like, he's not, doesn't really know his stuff, doesn't really know what he's doing. And the Pope himself stepped in and was like, no, he's a virgin and virginity alone is enough for us. That's credit enough. And you get priests doing really odd things, saints kind of, there's one story of a man who's touched by a woman and he takes a knife and cuts the bit of his arm that she's touched out because he just can't stand it. There's stories of a man who wouldn't even sit with his own sisters lest he be tempted into something unchaste. Saints flinging themselves

with gay abandon into rivers and blackberry bushes to try and stop their memories of seeing a woman that one time and that's so likely to lead them into unchastity that they will fling themselves into a bramble patch. It is this obsession with it that they're banning clerical marriage. There's suggestions as well that you should maybe flail yourself or lock yourself away if you engage in any of this stuff. Broadly, there is an idea that men who give in to the temptation, like, you know, you're heroically pushing back against it and you're only human and it's best if you don't, but if you're trying not to, that's fine. Women, if you inspire lustful thoughts in a man, it's because you're terrible, you're a seducer, you're awful. And suddenly the stories of the siren as siren slash mermaid slash lamia, siren slash mermaid slash lamia as this creature who will tempt you with sex into death,

into cannibalism, into something absolutely awful becomes incredibly prominent. It works extremely well with what the conversations in the medieval church were at that point. And they start appearing in best series, these books of beasts that describe the behaviour of mermaids and sirens, that they appear there all through medieval church buildings. Constantly, you'll see kind of siren mermaids popping up. that these things were distracting his brothers, which is a fair point. If you're really concerned about topless snake women, then distracting everyone and drawing you into sin, then stop carving them in all your buildings, filling your books with pictures of them. And yet it becomes this whole thing. And they are in this kind of identity crisis where they still look a bit like the sirens of ancient Greece. And they're still telling the stories of Odysseus, still saying, you know, Odysseus sailed past them and heard their song but wasn't tempted or managed to avoid it.

So that's still appearing, but they appear as much more like lamias. It's also where the word mermaid comes from. The word mermaid is a 7th century term. It's first attested in bestiaries. And it seems to be almost invented to kind of say, I mean, it just means water woman, sea woman. And it just sits in that kind of, we're not quite sure what to call these. Are they sirens? Are they lamias? Mermaids. And that's fine. I mean, I would say the other really interesting thing that goes on

is lamias kind of come back out of this. So obviously our mermaids now look like lamias, but I don't think most of our listeners, I might be saying horrible things here. You might all be very familiar with lamias, but I would say the bulk of our listeners may not have heard of lamias and probably wouldn't associate them with mermaids. I think if you say sirens, a lot of people, their thoughts go straight to mermaids. But lamias are just not well known at all. And once you have these best theories that are playing with kind of, is this a mermaid? Is this a siren? They never mention the word lamia. Once you hit the medieval period and you're out of late antiquity, the word Lamia stops being used in this way where they all muddle together.

And there's a couple of reasons for that. The first one is that Lamias, because they also harm pregnant mothers and their children, they are women's myths. Women are telling these stories, practicing kind of incantations against Lammy as a way of protecting themselves and their children. And that is something that is very frowned upon. Frustratingly enough, infuriatingly enough, it's frowned upon by exactly the same churchmen who are being like, well, but sexy lamias are a problem. I'm really worried I'm going to be tempted into sex by a snake woman. But could you stop complaining about like infant mortality? That's not an issue.

But there's a specific thing they say that, oh, it's only believed by foolish old woman, literally kind of saying that old wives tales tales they're not something people should believe in they talk about ridiculous women coming up with like spells and amulets to protect them from this monster and it means that Lamia doesn't quite have the kind of church cred that a siren does coming from the very well-respected kind of classical sources so some extent, there's a bit of embarrassment with the idea of Lamias as something that the church is believing in, which kind of helps push them a bit further down and they're not as spoken of. But there is also an absolutely wonderful translation error in an encyclopedia of natural history that was written in the Middle Ages by a very well-respected authority. And in it, he describes the Lamia as a large, cruel animal which comes out of the woods at night, enters gardens, and with its strong front legs, breaks trees, scattering the branches

all around. When men try to stop it, it fights with them and bites them. Aristotle reports a remarkable thing about its bite. A man wounded by the teeth of the lamia will not be healed until he hears the beast roar. What has happened here through a delightful series of translation errors? I mean, the first thing to say actually is Aristotle didn't say anything like that about a lamia. He once glossed lamia as a shock, kind of bringing in that kind of terrifying, we'll eat you sea element. He didn't say this. What has happened is that the person who is translating that is translating Aristotle out of the Arabic. And he didn't know Arabic terribly well. And he has mixed up lamias and beavers. That is what Aristotle said about beavers, not what he said about lamias.

And it's at this point that you start to get all of these representations of lamia as this kind of four-legged beast that has nothing at all to do with the sea, with snake tails, with serpents. She still has her breasts out because obviously. But yeah, it's something entirely different. And once that comes into the tradition, it helps pull it back even further from the idea that Lamias are like mermaids or like sirens. It's interesting because I, you know, when we started this chat, I had no idea that the Lamia

was so entwined and actually to talk a lot about the legacy of the sirens, you always have to talk about the Lamia and how the church treats them as time goes on. It's very, very interesting. And of course, I mean, by the Victorian and Georgian times, the word Siren, it has connotations of a harlot and prostitute. It's almost kind of that evolution of that church desire to resist temptation from the Siren's idea, that mythical name, completely different from the original portrayal in the ancient Greek, then becomes associated with this?

Absolutely. Definitely, yes. One of the interesting things about the Victorian era, I've just said that Lamias go out of the tradition. The Victorians pull them right back in. So the Pre-Raphaelites, they love a painting of a watery, seductive woman. There is a point where a critic called Burlington House, where the Royal Academy sort of kept all of its paintings, where it was exhibiting, a critic called it the cavern of the mermaids, because the Pre-Raphaelites just would not stop painting watery, dangerous women. And obviously a lot of these are mermaids. A lot of them are sirens. A lot of them are lamias and a lot of them are Liliths. And it's just pushing

them all back together again in a way that I really love. It's like going back to the Vulgates. So they are all kind of rejoined and you get, there's a painter called Waterhouse. If you look at one of his paintings without looking at the caption, you are not going to be able to tell if it's a lamia, a mermaid, a siren, or a nymph. But he does all of them continuously. He loves painting them. And as you say, a lot of it has this underlying unpleasant idea of women will seduce you, women are harlotons. Women will tempt you and you must resist that. And there is also, for the Victorian era at least, this idea of like the changeability of women, that Lammy is one of the things that Lammy can do is hide their serpentine nature. They can appear as someone who's just beautiful, just a beautiful woman. And then it's only when it's too late that

they'll reveal that they're actually a snake monster and they'll eat you. And obviously mermaids can hide their tails kind of beneath the waves. Lilith likewise isn't always serpent-tailed but eventually shifts into that. And sirens as well because they're kind of shifting into basically mermaid form. Then they don't always look like the danger that the Victorians they are. And this is something the Victorians are really, really interested in and really drive home. How have sirens been portrayed? How have they been depicted in more recent times? I've already mentioned red dwarf.

If you'd like to explore that, we can. Is there a clear distinction from sirens let's say mermaids i mean if i think mermaids i think actually you know helpful or good like um water creatures and sirens you still kind of get the negative connotations so how has that the whole story of the sirens almost developed in in more recent history i like that if i said for bread dwarf as well though again she's good in that it is something that actually wants love and wants affection and wants to be accepted for who she is and actually to be fair to the victorians they had that idea as well this idea of the mermaid longing to be on shore and longing for love but of course the most famous thing of this is the little mermaid is hans Christian Andersen. There is so much of interest in the story.

Fundamentally, The Mermaid and The Little Mermaid in the original story, it's not a very fun or enjoyable story, if I'm honest. She sees her prince, as she does in the film, which I assume is where most of us are familiar with the story from Disney. She falls in love. She talks to the sea witch and agrees to give up her voice for legs. Her legs will hurt her horrifyingly every time she takes a step as an additional fun treat. But the prince doesn't fall in love with the mermaid. He actually falls in love with another woman. And they have their happily ever after while somewhere in the background a mermaid gets very sad about it all and she is given the choice by the sea witch that she will be saved if she murders the prince and the prince's lover and she is good and wonderful and perfect and says no

and god is so impressed with this that even though mermaids don't have souls, he decides that if she does a hundred years of good work, then she will be able to get to heaven. And it is such a misogynistic story. It is infuriating to read. It is about a woman who sits and suffers in silence and then is told that if she can sit and suffer in silence for a bit longer while also doing kind of emotional drudge work, then she can go to heaven. And that kind of idea of like this pathetic mermaid, this mermaid who just wants to be loved but can't be because of her form, kind of comes through from that and really helps. And like I say, does get into the Victorian legends, though, with this kind of nasty twist that if she looks pathetic, then probably that's just hiding even better the nasty side to her. But then that's kind of picked up again.

And people really run with it because it is a more interesting side to the myth that gives the mermaid more personality. The other side as well to the portrayals of mermaids in the modern day is this kind of queer LGBTQ plus aspect to them, which is again actually coming from the story of The Little Mermaid. This idea that she's kind of trading, that she is fundamentally changing part of her body to be the person that she wants to be. There is a reason why the trans charity in the UK is called Mermaids. Mermaids are often used as symbols in trans movements. And a lot of trans people have spoken far more articulately and better than I have. So do go seek them out about this kind of connection between mermaids and transness that is phenomenally interesting. So by this time then, Sarah, the sirens and the mermaids today are

basically the same figure, are they? How they're depicted and they're basically the same thing. So I would say they can be the same thing. There are plenty of depictions of sirens where they're depicted and they're basically the same thing? So I would say they can be the same thing. There are plenty of depictions of sirens where they're just mermaids. I think there is also a vague knowledge that sirens perhaps aren't quite mermaids. I am now trying to think of any modern depiction of a siren that is sort of noticeably, pointedly different from a mermaid. And barring something like, say, Red Dwarf, where it's taking kind of the idea of the siren as a shifting seductress. The Victorians really loved it, masking her true form and becoming kind of the object of all the different crew members desires and exactly perfectly who they would want to be with when underneath that's not what she's like

at all i mean that's also not very much like the greek sirens either i think that's someone playing with the concept what is interesting though i think is that they couldn't have used the term mermaid for that episode but i think if you're going to talk mermaids, they're going to have to be wet, probably serpentine. There's sort of trashy series. There's things like the Vampire Diaries, which has sirens in it, and they don't have snake tails. But it's unclear if that's just because this series couldn't be bothered to add CGI snake tails to everyone. I'm not convinced that that was a representation of the Sirens as they truly were in Greek myth. So I think the two have basically collided into each other, but with just this slightly awkward feeling that actually maybe there is something just a little different, just slightly split between a Siren and a mermaid.

It's interesting, isn't it? How, like like i said even though their portrayal was very different in ancient greece they're still kind of something that a sailor would not want to interact with on their their voyages is they're kind of a scary creature of the sea and yeah it's fascinating then to explore how our image of the siren today sir it's so different how the ancient Greeks would have perceived it. Yes, I guess, largely there's more of an infamous side to the story of the siren all the way down to the present day, but very different as to what it had originally been. Absolutely. And there kind of is as well, because they're cursed to sing, because it's not something they wanted to do. It's not in their nature. In most stories, they start off as kind of either stupidly hubristic young women or just nice young women who are hanging out with

their friend Persephone and then end up with this horrible curse on them. They don't want to be there. They're not enjoying murdering all these men who sail past, which, yeah, I think is another side of them being this kind of sad almost tragic story well Sarah we have covered thousands of years of history Lilith, Lamia, the sirens, nymphs all the way down to the present day and of course mermaids I mean Sarah what a blast such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast last but certainly not least I mean your book which features the story of the sirens and all of these other figures you have written, it is called? It's Woman's Law. It's a terrible name because

you have to spell it out. Woman with an A and law, L-O-R-E. Fantastic. And you have also recently written another book, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. Yes, I have. It comes out in October and it's called The Dead of Winter. And it's all about kind of the dark Christmas myths. So things like Krampuses and Christmas witches, the wonderful history behind that folklore. Sarah, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me on.

It's been lovely. Well, there you go. There was Sarah Clegg talking all things Sirens and their really interesting legacy. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. That's all from me, and I will see you in the next episode.