Vaughn Scribner doesn’t mention my favourite mermaid in Merpeople: A human history, his otherwise comprehensive study of the fabled sea folk. Perhaps that’s because Marina, the web-footed marine biologist of Local Hero, only hints at her fishy origins in Bill Forsyth’s film of 1983 about an American oil company trying to buy a coastal town in Scotland. “She’s got a magnificent pair of lungs”, as one of the locals wryly observes, and is happier in water than on land. Watching seals frolicking on the shore, a company representative, played by a fresh-faced Peter Capaldi, notes how sailors used to mistake them for mermaids. Later, he wades into the water after her, neatly echoing the time-honoured trope of lovestruck men lured into the sea by beguiling sirens.
The trope of dangerously alluring women recurs in different ways through the history of merpeople, as does the habit of mistaking ordinary sea creatures for mythical marvels. It’s a long history, spanning 1000 BC to the present. Merpeople, Scribner explains, are connected to pretty much everything that has ever mattered to the humans who imagined them: religion, science, colonialism and capitalism. This makes his book a determinedly “human history”, as the subtitle insists, since merpeople grant us a “deeper understanding of one of the most mysterious, capricious and dangerous creatures on earth: humans”. It’s a nice gambit, although it makes for a curiously old-fashioned study, at angles to the “animal turn” in the humanities in recent years which has sought to overturn the anthropocentric impulses of scholarship. But for Scribner, the history of how we’ve imagined merpeople exposes precisely this inclination to claim supremacy, not just over animals, but over women and non-European cultures too.
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