#agnete and the merman

[marine-indie-gal]

Inktober 2024 Day 30: Agnete and The Merman

A Danish Folktale Ballad found in "The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad" about a Sea King who fell in love with a Woman from Land.

Agnete was already a Married Woman & had children but when she meets a Merman one day, A Sad and Lonely Sea King who he falls deeply in love, asks her to join him under the sea to be his own Queen. So Agnete left the land & her First Family behind as she married a New Husband & bore him his Children. However, their Marriage would be very short lived when she hears the loud bells of Church & leaves her Merfolk Husband behind to return to her Real Family.

In some versions of this Story, she does either return to the Sea (even for a few visits when you have Two Different Families).

Agnete & The Merman (c) Danish Folklore

[puppycheesecake]

Agnete and the Merman.

[thevagueambition]

Agnete og havmanden (Agnete and the Merman) is a pretty fascinating ballad in how unclear it is how the story would have been understood at the time

Is it a story of a woman being seduced into doing something unchristian (marrying the merman and going undersea with him) and returning to a righteous life later (going to church and abandoning her life undersea, including her children)?

Or is it the story of a vain woman leaving her life on land to be a queen undersea only to selfishly abandon her children when she wants to return to land (and subsequently being punished for her actions)?

Interestingly the last few stanzas where Agnete is punished are iirc only present in the earliest written source. Did people like those less? Were they themselves a written addition to something normally sung without them?

Without the punishment, Agnete leaving her life underse in favour of church bells from on land may heighten her piety – she gives up gold and motherhood for god!

Some historians seem to think that the ballad was deliberately sort of playing around with or maybe even satirising common tropes of the time. Iirc with the point that Agnete is an active agent in all of this rather than being kidnapped by the supernatural

(my translation of it here if anyone wants to know what the fuck i'm on about)

[betweenthetimeandsound]

--inspired by "lights under the lake" prompt from @goneahead's Poetober

The church bells start ringing-- first in innocent jingles, and then through long, alto gongs demanding the others to gather to commune with the light. River water still clings onto my legs, yet they dry off and leave the salt behind. Though I walk on the smooth cobblestones of my town, it's as if the salt turns into shards which cut my feet. I cry for a few seconds, and the tears streak my face-- my skirt was just a tail minutes ago, with glistening scales and fine fins following my love across the harbor. I thought I hear my children moan from underneath the bridge-- the foam bubbles there time after time, but they aren't asking for love again, they want an embrace. Then a light hovers at the surface-- a fire underwater; a miracle or a spell? I stand before where we met; where his translucent eyes remained fixated on mine, and where I felt my ribs aching for something more. In the end, it was merely a dying star for a little girl-- we didn't know how it would end, but I sensed it from the air. --Elda Mengisto

[c4n1ne]

[quintusenniusfidelis]

Agneta and the Sea King, by Helena Nyblom (1910)

Illustration by John Bauer

[i12bent]

Vilhelm Kyhn (March 30, 1819 - 1903) was a talented Danish landscape painter, who also ran an important academy for female artists, who could not officially enter the Royal Art Academy. Among Kyhn’s pupils was Anna Ancher who painted a tender portrait of Kyhn in return.

Kyhn occasionally drew on popular ballads and myths, such as the tale of Agnete og Havmanden (Agnete and the Merman) in this canvas from 1862 (oil on canvas, privately owned)

[apenitentialprayer]

Agnete and the Merman: A Danish Folktale

The story appealed to Andersen’s imagination. Here was a well-known Romantic narrative and several folktale figures that he could use in order to talk about himself, his moods, and his emotions. So the stage for the drama about the fragmented Agnete was also set inside of Andersen, and that’s why Agnete and the Merman became such a sensational blend of ancient folk poetry and the introspection, refection, and daydreams of a modern young writer. [‘The story is about Agnete, filled with longing, who chooses the powerful merman instead of the weak fiddler and half-brother who has far too much “maiden’s blood” in him.’] We can find the twenty-eight year old Andersen in both Agnete and her half-brother Hemming[...] Hemming is not especially extroverted or energetic, but he does have great insight into his inhibited nature, and at the beginning of the play he acknowledges that he is “too soft as a man.” But if Hemming is very conscious of who he is, Agnete, on the other hand, is bewildered by and unaware of the dual roots of her character. Whereas her half-brother is a man with too much woman in him, she is similarly a woman with too much a man in her. This is a typical conflict for many of Andersen’s protagonists in his plays and novels from the 1830s. [...] Agnete is torn between the sea and the earth, and life in the heavy surf is  the young girl’s inheritance, since she comes into this world at the point where sea and earth meet. Her parents have gone out to fish at low tide when her mother, Gertrud, suddenly goes into labor and has to give birth in a wrecked ship stranded on the sand. And this birth -as her mother hints- has marked the beautiful, good daughter for life. She has the entire raw and wild underwater world in her blood. On the other hand, life on earth, with all its cultivated nature, does not have the same seductive power over her, and soon the elements begin fighting for Agnete’s soul. [... This battle is manifested in the struggle of several suitors hoping to marry her; the earthly suitors are] Hintze the butcher and Hemming her half brother[, while the otherworldly suitor is] the much stronger merman. He has begun to materialize on shore for Agnete in the form of a handsome knight, and he speaks directly to her desire and dreams of love. Agnete surrenders to nature, following her instincts, and allows the merman to take her. The day before she is to marry her half-brother, she disappears into the sea, where the energetic merman immediately builds her an enchanted palace, adorned with “diamonds from Bornholm” and pieces of amber filled with insects and blossoms. Two whales with their tails bound together form the entrance to the palace, while the floors of the halls are made of sparkling fish scales. And from Italy and Greece he has brought back silk fabrics and polished marble gods. Oh yes, they know how to celebrate great love down in the sea, and the results are soon forthcoming: Agnete quickly becomes the mother of three children, and she could have lived happily to the end of her days if it weren’t for the fact that she was an amphibian. She possesses a deeply split nature that houses two possible forms of existence. Agnete cannot stop thinking about what she has renounced. She feels a great sense of longing. So when her children start asking about her family and the unknown grandparents on their mother’s side, there is no avoiding it. Her longing becomes an ever-growing call; Agnete has to return home, go up on land, and see once again her loved ones and the part of herself that she has abandoned. But it’s impossible to build bridges across the deep division inside Agnete. Like so many other tragic heroes and heroines in the works of Hans Christian Andersen, she is condemned to eternal homelessness. The sea and the land inside her do not share the same space and time. Her seven years at the bottom of the sea are now traded for fifty years on land. When her somewhat worried merman allows her to spend a single hour in the earthly element of her childhood and youth, it turns out that her mother, Gertrud, is dead, and Hemming has become an ancient and even more pitiable fiddler, who has devoted his whole life to mourning the loss of his beloved half-sister. Now Agnete understands her long-standing blindness to the family and God that she once deserted, and with a broken and contrite heart asks “Where does compassion reside?” Can she be forgiven? No, in Agnete’s case there is no mercy, because what she is up against is her own nature. She is the way she is. The woman with the man inside -like her brother with the sister inside- is condemned to live and die in the strong surf where she was born. “Forgive me, Lord Jesus! Receive me, deep sea!” Agnete cries, beside herself, as she tries to go back to the water. But she collapses, lifeless, among the rocks and dies at the boundary where she was born, in the territory of mermaids and mermen, amphibians, hermaphrodites, and other androgynous creatures.

- Jens Andersen (Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life, pages 196-198)

[fairiesandlorezine]

Contributor Highlights Part 21

Orriow ( @orriow ) - Agnete and the Merman

Pianobelt ( @pbeltarts ) - The Princess and the Goblin

[puppycheesecake]

hello!!! ive never sent a wcif so im sorry in advanced haha! i am genuinely obsessed w your "agnete and the merman" post!! it's inspiring me to play some more after a bit of a creative slump<3 is it too much to ask where you got basically all of their cc?? if not i can send a new ask!! hope you have a wonderful day, and thank you for sharing your lovely edits!!!

Thank you! Let's see...

Merman: Skintone / Eyes / Hair + Hairline + Ombre Overlay / Brows / Gills / Scale Overlay 1 / Scale Overlay 2 / Scale Overlay 3 / Stripes Overlay / Face Accessory / Crown / Arm Fins / Scales (Bottoms)

Agnete: Eyes / Hair / Brows / Dress / Crown / Earrings / Necklace / Tears

That should be most of it.

[mistydragonflyart]

THE DISTANT SHORE - PART 13

At the end they only found love and comfort in each other. She was his whole world, his universe, he didn’t know any other way of living other than with her. He was the only family left and she loved him deeply for that, she wouldn’t change it for the world. For the rest of their lives, they were inseparable sinking to the bottom of the ocean, where their love only grew stronger with each day.

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[lightsinsidethisdream2]

Agnete and the Merman

Photo credits: lights:inside:this:dream

[bebemoon]

A moodboard for Lilofee and the Wassermann? (This is just A Trick for make you listen to the ballad. I'm thinking of the version by Faun specifically but there a lot of nice ones) (it's like Agnete og Havmanden but German)

i apologise- taking a break from the mbs, but ! i will certainly, certainly look into this particular version<3

[twisted-wonderland-but-gayer]

neat little fact about the original little mermaid story: apparently andersen (the author) may have taken some inspiration for the story from a stage play that he wrote that was not received well by audiences. it was based off of an old ballad called "agnete og havmanden" or "agnete and the merman" in english.

Fuvk yeah mermaid lore