Introduction

For my storybook project, I will be writing about mermaids. Most people on this Earth have heard of mermaids and have some idea of what they are, but very few actually know information about their backgrounds and the stories they come from.

For many, the image of a mermaid that comes to mind is Ariel from Disney's blockbuster movie "The Little Mermaid." While this is a great image and is definitely appropriate for kids, this is not an accurate image of what mermaids were like in classic mythological tales. Mermaids have been pictured in hundreds of different ways throughout the years, and there have been hundreds of different stories told about them. Most stories about mermaids from more modern years show them as nice, caring, helpful, and loving. But if we take a step back and look at stories from hundreds of years ago, we will discover that mermaids were written as mean, manipulative, cunning, and sometimes, even evil.

In some stories, mermaids are called sirens. They earned this name from the songs they would sing to lure fishermen and pirates to their deaths in older stories. The sirens would sing these songs that would put the men into a sort of trance, and then the men would automatically be extremely attracted to the creature. They would go towards the siren, and would face an untimely death. Now, this story is not something that most parents would want to read to their children at bedtime, so other, nicer stories were written about these enchanting creatures.

Some of these tales involve mermaids swimming in the ocean with their fish friends, or trying to learn about what life is like on land. Some of them even involve a mermaid falling in love with a human. Whether you have grown up reading more modern and current stories of mermaids, or you have been interested in their history and the darker side of these creatures, it is obvious that mermaids are a topic that will forever be enticing.

Since no one is really, absolutely sure that mermaids or sirens even exist, these stories are automatically seen as even more interesting. There is more than three quarters of the ocean that has yet to be explored, so we have no way of knowing if the creatures we grew up reading about are even real. TV shows like Nickelodeon's "H2O, Just Add Water" have given viewers the idea that mermaids could even be hiding among us as humans, hiding their powers from the world. Children, especially little girls, have dreams about being a mermaid, and will pretend to be one while swimming in a pool, but, unfortunately, they grow up and never learn the actual background of the creatures they loved.

The reason I have chosen mermaids for my storybook project topic is because I have always been intrigued by the idea of them. I pretended to be one as a child, I watched shows and movies about them, I read books about them, and now, at twenty-one years old, I still find myself wondering if I will ever know if these wonderful creatures exist on this planet. Maybe the way we think of mermaids is completely wrong. Maybe, they are hiding something... something powerful that we are not yet ready for.