Ulysses and the Sirens
Stories Behind Works of Art
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Did you know that Sirens were not always seen as half woman and half fish?
Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). John William Waterhouse.
The story of Ulysses and the singing of the Sirens is still a very popular myth and may be it is not necessary to tell it again. But we will. What maybe curious in the work of Waterhouse is that the sirens are not represented as we are used to seeing them.
In the Odyssey —named after its protagonist, Odysseus, the Greek name which in English is Ulysses— Homer tells the adventures Ulysses goes through to return to his kingdom, Ithaca, after the war of Troy. That is why a series of adventures or of events full of adversities is called an odyssey.
He spends a year with his crew in the island of the enchantress Circe, and finally she tells him how to return to Ithaca. They have to go around the island of the Sirens.
The sirens are those mythological creatures —that we know as half fish, half woman— who have a very seductive voice. With their singing they attract sailors in an irresistible and hypnotic way, and the mariners end by crashing their ships against the rocks of the island. A perverse seduction that leads to death.
An interesting detail: the mythical island would be in the Mediterranean, opposite the Sorrento, which would coincide with the Capri Island.
Ulysses has to avoid the situation, but his curiosity tempts him to know that irresistible singing. Thus, as it is well known, he instructs the sailors to fill their ears with wax and have him tied to the mast. This way he is able to listen to the deadly singing without reacting when under the spell.
Ulysses and his sailors get past the island of the sirens without crashing and the odyssey continues.
Why do the sirens of Waterhouse have a bird body?
Greek tradition represented them that way. Before Homer’s work —the first appearance of the Sirens in literature— we can see sirens with a bird body represented in ceramic vases, urns, figurines. Many times they were associated to funerary matters —there is no agreement about the reasons—but they seemed to be related to the world of the dead.
The siren with a fish tail, a representation from other mythologies, started to prevail as from the Middle Age.
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