A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters, dealing out ruin and
death, and proceeding superbly on to carry its trophies of disaster to the
bosom of the Ocean Mother, very easy is it to see from whence came
those old tales of cruelty, of irresistible strength, of desire.
Many are the tales of sea-maidens who have stolen men's lives from
them and sent their bodies to move up and down amidst the wrack, like
broken toys with which a child has grown tired of playing and cast
away in weariness. In an eighth-century chronicle concerning St.
Fechin, we read of evil powers whose rage is "seen in that watery fury
and their hellish hate and turbulence in the beating of the sea against
the rocks." "The bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon" is the name given to
them by one of the earliest poets of Greece[7] and a poet of our own
time--poet of the sea, of running water, and of lonely places--quotes
from the saying of a fisherman of the isle of Ulva words that show why
simple minds have so many times materialised the restless, devouring
element into the form of a woman who is very beautiful, but whose
tender mercies are very cruel. "She is like a woman of the old tales
whose beauty is dreadful," said Seumas, the islander, "and who breaks
your heart at last whether she smiles or frowns. But she doesn't care
about that, or whether you are hurt or not. It's because she has no heart,
being all a wild water."[8]
Treacherous, beautiful, remorseless, that is how men regard the sea and
the rushing rivers, of whom the sirens and mermaids of old tradition
have come to stand as symbols. Treacherous and pitiless, yet with a
fascination that can draw even the moon and the stars to her breast:
"Once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's
back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea
grew civil at her song; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music."
Shakespeare.
Very many are the stories of the women of the sea and of the rivers, but
that one who must forever hold her own, because Heine has
immortalised her in song, is the river maiden of the Rhine--the Lorelei.