This week, we'll be discussing cryptids from an anthropological perspective, looking at them through the lens of folklore.

First, let’s make sure what we know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about folklore. One simple definition of folklore (from the Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg) is the “traditional cultural forms that are communicated between individuals through words or actions." It can include tales, myths, legends, and jokes as well as material culture, like traditional ways to build houses or sew garments. Folklore is knowledge that is not generally learned in school.

There are as many ways to pass on folklore as there are ways to communicate; while we often think of folklore as being passed on through family members and communities, today it might be passed on through television, video, and social media. Because each human being communicates a little bit differently and values change over time, folklore can also change over time.

For example, when I was a child growing up in the early 1980s, I learned the following nursery rhyme:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

No one is quite sure of the origins of the rhyme or what the lesson behind it is meant to be. (Be grateful for what you have, children, because at least you are not one of this woman's poor children? Being too liberal with your fertility can lead to much suffering? Or, at some have suggested, is it a veiled dig at George II, who was nicknamed "old woman"?) However, today the woman in the shoe lives on, in a slightly modified form. As I was cradling my infant son in 2020, I heard this version on the Amazon Music nursery rhyme channel:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth and a big slice of bread,
Kissed them all soundly and sent them to bed.

Presumably, this piece of folklore was altered to better reflect modern values, which include shielding very young children from any type of violence. We are horrified at the idea of a mother starving and whipping her children for the crime of merely existing, and any kind of lesson to be learned or historical satire to be enjoyed tends to be overshadowed by that horror. Better, in the minds of some modern writers, to change the rhyme and therefore change the message: when we don’t know what to do for our children, we do the best we can. It’s also noteworthy that rather than hearing this rhyme from a parent reading the Mother Goose treasury book, as many children in the early 1980s would have done, my son learned the rhyme from his mother singing along with the Amazon Echo. Folklore’s contents as well as its modes of communication change over time. This unit, we’ll look a bit at how that has happened with one folkloric cryptid, the mermaid.

The passage below comes from the website of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association website:

"Are Mermaids Real?

Mermaids — those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea — are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer wrote of them in The Odyssey. In the ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea-dragons, and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and the emperors on land. The aboriginal people of Australia call mermaids yawkyawks – a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs.

The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few.

But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That’s a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists."

(Source: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/mermaids.html)

For this module, we are all going to be anthropologists and dig into the question above: Why do mermaids occupy collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring people?