So You Think You Know What a Mermaid Is...

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don’t even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda). 

What they also teach us is that legends of merfolk and other kinds of water spirits exist pretty much everywhere that people do.

What is so fundamental about these myths of hybrid creatures that bridge the human world and the water world? Why are they so often female and alluring? How to the myths change across cultures? And what do they have to tell us today about our relationship to the natural world and to oceans and water in particular? 

Thanks to my guests, this episode will leave you with a new understanding of what a mermaid is or, rather, can be.

Cristina Bacchilega coedits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. An Anglo-Indian Italian who is non-white settler in Hawaiʻi, Cristina approaches wonder tales and other traditional narratives from a transcultural perspective that privileges the juxtaposition of different cultural narratives to highlight their distinctive worldviews and ways of knowing. Her most recent book with Jennifer Orme (2021), Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, features Maya Kern’s comic How To Be a Mermaid.

Marie Alohalani Brown is an Associate Professor of Religion, specialist in Hawaiian religion, culture, and oral/literary traditions at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a trained translator and works primarily with Hawaiian-language resources. She is the author of Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities (University of Hawaiʻi Press, January 31, 2022). Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (University of Hawaʻi Press, May 2016), won the biennial Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for the categories of Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016 and 2017). She is the co-editor with Cristina Bacchilega of A Penguin Book of Mermaids (Penguin Classics, 2019).