This is the face of the waters which the interpretatio ugaritica hath presented to us. Prince Yamm, Judge Nahar, the sea, the rivers, the god of the waters of the earth, is a beast and a tyrant, who would slay Prince Hadad, the rider upon the clouds, who directs the rain and the dew. Among those who he sent forth from the depths of the seas to torment Hadad, Hadad’s sworn sister Anat, and their friend Athtartu was a great serpent with many heads, Lotan, the river and its delta made horribly manifest.
Aarne-Thompson-Uther index type 934K speaks of a folktale that has spread across certain parts of Europe, mostly in the broad Germanic-speaking areas of diffusion and their immediate contact. It tells us of the waters, a lake or a stream, which are hungry for human life. Once per year, perhaps, or perhaps less consistently. They set forth a hue and cry, “The hour cometh but not the man!” until their chosen victim runs into the water to be taken and devoured. Or perhaps they simply strike their victim dead if they take a drink, or even if they never touch the water at all.
Mermaids are ancient as far as folklore go, and they are polyphyletic, emerging from several different story traditions. For our purposes, those that descend from the piscine interpretation of the originally birdlike Sirens of antiquity, dating to the early Middle Ages, are the most relevant. (It is worth noting that a similar confusion between fish-maid and bird-maid occurs in the Nibelungenlied, where the Danube-maidens follow the tradition of the swan-maiden motif, or the selkie motif from elsewhere, but are apparently piscine.) These are, in their British incarnation, seducers and destroyers, weird sisters who come to tell sailors of their inevitable doom. To see them is a sign of approaching bad weather. Sometimes, of course, they are kinder, and teach mere land-people their knowledge of cures and medicine. But for the most part, they seek to drag people into the waters and the deeps.
Why? That’s a silly question. Fear of the water is understandable. The ways of rip currents, eddies, and sudden drop-offs from wading depth are enough to make one wary even as a reasonably accomplished swimmer. Let alone the frightful-looking creatures of its depths, or the dangers of seaborne travel. It is understandable that many people have understood the ocean as cruel, indifferent, or even malevolent. That for Christian Europeans, perhaps even a place entirely separate from God’s domain, where the dead might rise from the surf to harass living people.
But for people who have lived closer to the water, the seas are more benevolent. Even on the Isle of Man, still in proximity to the stormy Atlantic and cruel North Sea, the mermaids who come to visit are kinder, more humanlike. If a mermaid child steals a human child’s doll, her mother tells her to return it with an apologetic gift of pearls. If a human fisherman aids a mermaid in peril, then she will give him a due reward. And of course, across the broad Pasifikan world, the sea is complex, with a full social world of many figures. Sharks can be patrons and protectors of human fishers.
So in Glorantha, when we see that the oceans are defined as a hostile, indifferent place, which sees the whole world as “food” or “not food”, and the people of the seas, the merfolk, are mostly hostile to humans (except for the merfolk that live close by to the speaker, of course) and they are working, so it is whispered, on flooding the world and devouring everything they can to sate their incessant hunger- well, we must start from the understanding that this is a product of their relationship to the sea. It is always hypocritical. The sea gives as well as takes away, and it takes only the most refined evil to truly reject the welcoming arms of the waters. But the fear and the suspicion, they are all on the human side.
What do the people of the sea think? What is life like for these “Malasp” and “Ysabbau” and “Gnydron”? Is it Magasta the gaping, devouring whirlpool-maw who rules over the seas, or is this just what people tell themselves to justify the time they saw a mermaid and threw rocks at her? Depending on the angle of incidence, water can be a mirror, but if we simply shift our perspective a bit, we can look through, to the depths, and what we find might be- well, whatever it is, it will be itself.
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