Oceans: Myths

In Greek myth the Seirenes were sea witches who lured sailors to their deaths. The sailors, hearing the Sirens’ enchanting song, would land their ship and go ashore, where the Sirens would kill them.

The Sirens are first mentioned in book 12 of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey (written down around 750 BCE). There they are two in number; their appearance is never described. The seafaring hero Odysseus defies the Sirens by plugging his crewmen's ears with beeswax beforehand. However, wishing to hear the song himself, he has his men bind him to the ship's mast. As they row past the Sirens’ island, Odysseus is bewitched by the song and pleads to be untied. His crew pays him no heed, however, and eventually the ship passes out of earshot. The Sirens, whose name may mean “Scorchers” or “Binders,” are among several female threats that Odysseus encounters on his voyage home.

Later generations of Greeks named 11 Sirens and pictured them as half woman, half bird. These Sirens resemble other winged, malevolent, female creatures of Greek myth—the harpies and the Furies.

The ocean environment offers tremendous potential for monstrosity: more unfathomable and mysterious than outer space, even to modern science, the deep sea is an alien world cradling unknown life, sometimes hostile, sometimes profound, sometimes enlightening. Literary sea monsters originate in mythology and folklore, which themselves derive from anecdotal sightings of sea serpents, dragons, and kraken, arguably accounted for by the scientifically confirmed existence of animals such as whales, oar-fish, basking sharks, and giant or colossal squid. In literature and film, sea monsters are often portrayed as aggressive or threatening, represented as reptiles, amphibians, mollusks, or mammals, and sometimes an amalgamation of multiple categories. Thus, the fictional sea monster often possesses biologically plausible origins, blended with fantastical representation and a symbolic narrative purpose. These features exist on a spectrum, with some monsters used purely for horror, for example, and others represented with close attention to known science.

Sea monsters have a lot in common with other freshwater-dwelling monsters such as the Loch Ness monster, the Ogopogo, the kappa, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon in terms of their general biological classifications, mysterious habits or origins, and ambivalent or hostile attitudes to humans. However, sea monsters tend to be less individualized than these localized monsters (Godzilla, for example, is an exception), instead sharing some broad generic functions and often forming species or categories of monster (krakens, mermaids, serpents) rather than named individuals. Sea monsters (particularly whales, kraken, and serpents) are catalogued early in natural histories, notably by Aristotle (fourth century BCE), Pliny the Elder (23 CE–79 CE), Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), and Bishop Erik Pontoppidan (1698–1764). They also feature in medieval bestiaries and later in innumerable nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspaper reports and scientific accounts.

Sea and water monsters have a strong mythological presence in cultures worldwide, often blamed for tidal waves, earthquakes, or lost ships, although in modern literature and cinema they are often instead disturbed by earthquakes (or by human interference). The Japanese Jish-in-uno is a type of 700-mile cod, and Maori legend tells of the lurking Tipua (a kind of demon or uncanny thing). In Greek mythology, Hercules and Perseus both battle and kill sea monsters. Norse mythology contributes Jörmungandr, the submerged world serpent clasping the globe. Giant cetaceans feature in the Hebrew Talmud; Leviathan and Jonah's whale in the Bible; and Tiamat, dragon-goddess of the sea, in Babylonian creation myth. Millennia of mythology and anecdotal sightings of giant serpents, krakens, or unidentified monsters find their way into early and modern creative literature.