Meghan Markle and myths around mermaids

Disney’s latest remake of The Little Mermaid, out this week, has, it seems, a message for the royal family. When the prince wants to know the name of the mermaid, played by Halle Bailey, he tries to guess. ‘Diana?’ Nope. ‘Catherine?’ She pulls a face. Cue royal watchers identifying a snub of Kate, the Princess of Wales.

Disney’s 1990 take on The Little Mermaid wasn’t quite the story that Hans Christian Andersen wrote – not having much to say about the mermaid’s quest for an immortal soul – but it did find one fan. As Meghan Markle observed in her interview with Oprah Winfrey: ‘Who as an adult really watches The Little Mermaid? But it came on… and I went “Oh my God, she falls in love with the prince and because of that loses her voice.”’ If only.

Let’s abandon the spurious parallels between the royals and mermaids then and observe that when it comes to the early version of this girl-fish hybrid, it’s actually quite difficult to distinguish mermaids from sirens, those creatures that enchant gullible young men with their sex appeal before dragging them underwater to drown. In one medieval bestiary at the British Library, a 13th-century French manuscript shows what looks like a mermaid but is labelled a siren, pulling one unfortunate oarsman by the hair into the sea. Nearby a male centaur gallops off, a reminder that the human-animal hybrid takes several forms.

Early mermaids are often depicted holding a comb or looking glass, suggesting vanity, like the splendid creature in the Luttrell Psalter. In a Bestiaire d’Amour at the Morgan Library, the mermaid has two tails, more like fishy legs. Which, funnily enough, is how the original merman, Poseidon’s son Triton, is sometimes shown.