Odysseus has been at war for ten years and now he has spent ten years trying to get home. The journey has been long and full of trials, tribulations and obstacles. If a mermaid were angered by a specific human or group if humans, she might use her beauty to lure them into the depths were they would drown.
In Greek mythology, the sirens kill people by luring them towards the treacherous rocks where the sirens make their home. Mermaids are half-fish women, but sirens the ones with the hypnotic singing voices are half-bird women from Greek mythology. These were usually men, like the god Ea, but fish-tailed women sometimes appeared. Then in medieval times, sirens stopped being bird-ladies and became fish-ladies.
One of them played the lyre, another sang, and another played the flute, and by these means they were fain to persuade passing mariners to linger; [19] and from the thighs they had the forms of birds.
And being persuaded by the Sirens to linger, he begged to be released, but they bound him the more, and so he [p. Now it was predicted of the Sirens that they should themselves die when a ship should pass them; so die they did. Aelian tells us Ael. Ovid says that the Sirens had the feet and feathers of birds, but the faces of virgins; and he asks why these daughters of Achelous, as he calls them, had this hybrid form.
Perhaps, he thinks, it was because they had been playing with Persephone when gloomy Dis carried her off, and they had begged the gods to grant them wings, that they might search for their lost playmate over seas as well as land.
See Ov. In like manner Hyginus describes the Sirens as women above and fowls below, but he says that their wings and feathers were a punishment inflicted on them by Demeter for not rescuing Persephone from the clutches of Pluto. See Hyginus, Fab. Another story was that they were maidens whom Aphrodite turned into birds because they chose to remain unmarried.
See Eustathius on Hom. In ancient art, as in literature, the Sirens are commonly represented as women above and birds below. See Miss J. Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey London, , pp. Homer says nothing as to the semi-bird shape of the Sirens, thus leaving us to infer that they were purely human.
Others said that the Sirens cast themselves into the sea and were drowned from sheer vexation at the escape of Ulysses. Some believe that the Sirens are cannibals who consume the sailors that they lure over. The original sirens were actually bird-women on a remote Greek island, sometimes named as Anthemoessa.
In some depictions, they had clawed feet, and in others, they had wings. A search of the sea floor around their island would turn up entire ships, wrecked as they tried to get to the Sirens. Yet, the Sirens may not have been evil by nature. They were cursed by both Demeter and the Muses and exiled to a small island, where they were forced to live alone. Siren Head is a fictional humanoid monster created in by the Canadian artist respectfully known as Trevor Henderson.
Famed and renowned for their musical voices and instrument skills, the Sirens would lure sailors off their course, drawn by the music and enchanting voices, the sailors would be so distracted, they would often crash their ships and boats on rocky coastlines. If we got much closer the Sirens would have us in the palm of their hands, or claws, legend had been told they were a mix of bird and woman, but at the same time incredibly alluring.
Today would not be the day our ship would fall to the Sirens of the sea, we must find somewhere else to stop. While the Sirens have both been cited as being part women and part fish, and also part woman and part bird, neither can truly be confirmed, as near all who have seen the Sirens have perished as their musical prowess. The word Siren is many languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian is incredibly similar to mermaid is not a coincidence.
However the tales of the sirens never allude to their mermaid qualities, and were considered to be land bearing women whose goal was to entice men to their island.
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