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Mermaid
In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings. In other folk traditions (or sometimes within the same traditions), they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans. The male equivalent of the mermaid is the merman, also a familiar figure in folklore and heraldry. Although traditions about and sightings of mermen are less common than those of mermaids, they are generally assumed to co-exist with their female counterparts. The male and the female collectively are sometimes referred to as merfolk or merpeople. The Western concept of mermaids as beautiful, seductive singers may have been influenced by the Sirens of Greek mythology, which were originally half-birdlike, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Little Mermaid
"The Little Mermaid" ( da, Den lille havfrue) is a literary fairy tale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The story follows the journey of a young mermaid who is willing to give up her life in the sea as a mermaid to gain a human soul. The tale was first published in 1837 as part of a collection of fairy tales for children. The original story has been a subject of multiple analyses by scholars such as Jacob Bøggild and Pernille Heegaard as well as the folklorist Maria Tatar. These analyses cover various aspects of the story from interpreting the themes to discussing why Andersen chose to write a tragic story with a happy ending. It has been adapted to various media, including musical theatre, anime, ballet, opera, and film. There is also a statue portraying the mermaid in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the story was written and first published. Plot summary The Little Mermaid lives in an underwater kingdom with her widowed father ( Mer-King), her dowager g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen ( , ; 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales, consisting of 156 stories across nine volumes and translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. His most famous fairy tales include " The Emperor's New Clothes", " The Little Mermaid", " The Nightingale", " The Steadfast Tin Soldier", " The Red Shoes", "The Princess and the Pea", " The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Match Girl", and " Thumbelina". His stories have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films. Early life Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark on 2 April 1805. He had a stepsister named Karen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merman
Mermen, the male counterparts of the mythical female mermaids, are legendary creatures, which are male human from the waist up and fish-like from the waist down, but may assume normal human shape. Sometimes they are described as hideous and other times as handsome. Antiquity Perhaps the first recorded merman was the Assyrian-Babylonian sea-god Ea (called Enki by the Sumerians), linked to the figure known to the Greeks as Oannes. However, while some popular writers have equated Oannes of the Greek period to the god Ea (and to Dagon), Oannes was rather one of the ''apkallu'' servants to Ea. The ''apkallu'' have been described as "fish-men" in cuneiform texts, and if Berossus is to be believed, Oannes was indeed a being possessed of a fish head and man's head beneath, and both a fish tail and manlike legs. But Berossus was writing much later during the era of Greek rule, engaging in the "construction" of the past. Thus even though figurines have been unearth to corroborate thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse (6 April 184910 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend. Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Many of his paintings are based on authors such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Keats. Waterhouse's work is displayed in many major art museums and galleries, and the Royal Academy of Art organised a major retrospective of his work in 2009. Biography Early life Waterhouse was born in the city of Rome to English painters William and Isabella W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sea In Culture
The role of the sea in culture has been important for centuries, as people experience the sea in contradictory ways: as powerful but serene, beautiful but dangerous.Stow, p. 10 Human responses to the sea can be found in artforms including literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, and classical music. The earliest art representing boats is 40,000 years old. Since then, artists in different countries and cultures have depicted the sea. Symbolically, the sea has been perceived as a hostile environment populated by fantastic creatures: the Leviathan of the Bible, Isonade in Japanese mythology, and the kraken of late Norse mythology. In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolises the personal and the collective unconscious in dream interpretation. The sea and ships have been depicted in art ranging from simple drawings on the walls of huts in Lamu to seascapes by Joseph Turner and Dutch Golden Age painting. The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created colour ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Siren (mythology)
In Greek mythology, the sirens (Ancient Greek: singular: ; plural: ) were humanlike beings with alluring voices; they appear in a scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus saves his crew's lives. Roman poets placed them on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli. In some later, rationalized traditions, the literal geography of the "flowery" island of Anthemoessa, or Anthemusa, is fixed: sometimes on Cape Pelorum and at others in the islands known as the Sirenuse, near Paestum, or in Capreae. All such locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks. Sirens continued to be used as a symbol for the dangerous temptation embodied by women regularly throughout Christian art of the medieval era. Nomenclature The etymology of the name is contested. Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin. Others connect the name to σειρά (''seirá'', "rope, cord") and εἴρω (''eírō'', "to tie, join, fasten"), resulting in the meaning "binder, entangler", i.e. one who bind ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manatee
Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus ''Trichechus'') are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (''Trichechus inunguis''), the West Indian manatee (''Trichechus manatus''), and the West African manatee (''Trichechus senegalensis''). They measure up to long, weigh as much as , and have paddle-like tails. Manatees are herbivores and eat over 60 different freshwater and saltwater plants. Manatees inhabit the shallow, marshy coastal areas and rivers of the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon basin, and West Africa. The main causes of death for manatees are human-related issues, such as habitat destruction and human objects. Their slow-moving, curious nature has led to violent collisions with propeller-driven boats and ships. Some manatees have been found with over 50 scars on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merfolk
Merfolk or merpeople are legendary water-dwelling human-like beings. They are attested in folklore and mythology throughout the ages in various parts of the world. Female merfolk may be referred to as mermaids, although in a strict sense mermaids are confined to beings who are half-woman and half-fish in appearance. Male merfolk are called mermen. Depending on the story, they can be described as ugly or beautiful. Chinese ''renyu'' () stands for "merfolk", but in ancient geographical or natural historical tracts, this referred to "human-fish" or "man-fish" purported to inhabit rivers or lakes in certain parts of China. Japanese '' ningyo'' () is also "merfolk", and also applied to various human-like fish recorded in writings from medieval times into the Edo Period. China Certain fantastical types of "fish", generically referred to as ''renyu'' (, "human-fish") is alleged to occur in various parts of China according to the ''Shan Hai Jing'' (''Classic of Mountains and Seas'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman (a relative of French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As the Germanic settlers became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Corpus Glossary
The Corpus Glossary is one of many Anglo-Saxon glossaries. Alongside many entries which gloss Latin words with simpler Latin words or explanations, it also includes numerous Old English glosses on Latin words, making it one of the oldest extant texts in the English language. History The manuscript of the Corpus Glossary, Cambridge Corpus Christi College, 144, dates to the 8th century. The manuscript in fact contains two glossaries, the first of which is short, and the second of which (fols. 4–64v, to which the name 'Corpus Glossary' usually refers) is much longer. This latter contains almost the full text of the Épinal-Erfurt glossary The Épinal-Erfurt glossary is a glossary of Old English. It survives in two manuscripts (from Épinal and Erfurt). It has been described as "the earliest body of written English", and is thought to have been compiled at Malmesbury for Aldhelm (c. 6 ... (deriving independently from the same archetype as the Épinal and Erfurt manuscripts), along w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old High German
Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High German is an umbrella term for the group of continental West Germanic dialects which underwent the set of consonantal changes called the Second Sound Shift. At the start of this period, the main dialect areas belonged to largely independent tribal kingdoms, but by 788 the conquests of Charlemagne had brought all OHG dialect areas into a single polity. The period also saw the development of a stable linguistic border between German and Gallo-Romance, later French. The surviving OHG texts were all written in monastic scriptoria and, as a result, the overwhelming majority of them are religious in nature or, when secular, belong to the Latinate literary culture of Christianity. The earliest written texts in Old High German, glosses and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle High German
Middle High German (MHG; german: Mittelhochdeutsch (Mhd.)) is the term for the form of German spoken in the High Middle Ages. It is conventionally dated between 1050 and 1350, developing from Old High German and into Early New High German. High German is defined as those varieties of German which were affected by the Second Sound Shift; the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch languages spoken to the North and North West, which did not participate in this sound change, are not part of MHG. While there is no ''standard'' MHG, the prestige of the Hohenstaufen court gave rise in the late 12th century to a supra-regional literary language (') based on Swabian, an Alemannic dialect. This historical interpretation is complicated by the tendency of modern editions of MHG texts to use ''normalised'' spellings based on this variety (usually called "Classical MHG"), which make the written language appear more consistent than it actually is in the manuscripts. Scholars are uncertain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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