Mermaid

I remember when a was a little i watch a sad love story movie from Hans Cristian Andersen. A lovely mermaid, youngest doughter of The Sea King, sacrificed her beautiful voice to a wicked witch to have a pair of  leg becouse she’s in love with a human prince. She should win the prince love or in other way she will turn to foam. But the prince didn’t know about her secret, he didn’t know the young beauty mermaid has saved his life from drowning cause she can’t talk. The prince proposed another woman, the neighbourhood princess who just walk by the shore near the unconscious prince after saved by the young mermaid, and about to marry the princess in a sailingship.

The hopeless young mermaid sisters sacrifice their hair to the witch to help her. They give her a sharp knife and before the sun rises she must plunge it into the heart of the prince, when the warm blood falls upon her feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail,  and she will be once more a mermaid.  And return to her family to live out her  three hundred years before she die and change into the salt sea foam.

The sun is about to rise, but the young mermaid love the prince so much, she bent down and kisses his fair brow. She flung the knife a way to the sea  then threw herself from the ship into the sea and turn to the salt sea foam or sea bubbles.

I was realy fond to the story,  every time i go to the sea n play with sea bubbles,  i always think it’s the young beauty mermaid.
Afterwards i watch Disney’s Little Mermaid with a happy ending story.  It tickles me to find more about mermaid.

The word of mermaid is a compound of mere, the Old English word for “sea,” and maid, in its usual sense. The male equivalent is a merman.

The idea of mermaids and merman, could be based on creatures from Greek and Babylonian mythology:  Sirens and Tritons of the Greeks, and the fish gods, who were half human and half fish, from the Babylonians. 

The first known mermaid stories appeared in Assyria, ca. 1000 BC. Atargatis, the mother of Assyrian queen Semiramis, was a goddess who loved a mortal shepherd and in the process to killed him.  Ashamed, she jumped into a lake to take the form of a fish, but the waters would not conceal her divine beauty.  Thereafter, she took the form of a mermaid.

Tales of mermaids are nearly universal.
Various cultures throughout the world have similar figures, but there are tales from all over the world. In India, for instance, there are the Apsara, beautiful water nymphs. However, most of those tales were told by sailors who “saw” them on their long journeys.  This marine creature with the head and upper body of a beautiful young maiden and with the lower body of a fish. Can be found in seas and lakes, or lying on a rock and combing her hair with one hand while holding a mirror in the other.

Mermaids sometimes foretell the future and are often accompanied by seals. According to myth, they lure sailors by singing and with lovely music. They live in a kingdom on the bottom of the sea,  and it is here they take their prisoners to.