The Sirens: From Bird Monsters to Mermaids

Natalie Lawrence
Jul 27
5 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Part 3 of my Odyssey Monsters: Afterlives series, tracking their evolutions across art and literature.

Previous posts: Polyphemus, The Laestrygonians | Next up: Scylla and Charybdis

Ask someone to picture a siren and they’ll probably imagine a beautiful mermaid perched on a rock, combing her long tresses as she lures sailors to their doom.

The Sirens of the Odyssey were something rather different, however. Homer didn’t actually describe the Sirens’ appearance at all, only that their irresistible songs lured passing sailors to their deaths. But later Classical artists pictured as creatures with the bodies of birds and the heads (and sometimes torsos) of women.

Over two thousand years, the Sirens underwent extraordinary physical and symbolic transformations. By the late Middle Ages, the feathered monsters of ancient Greece had largely become the fish-tailed seductresses who still dominate our imagination today.

So, how did this happen?

Herbert James Draper, 'Ulysses and the Sirens' (1909)

Singers of forbidden knowledge

The Sirens first appear in Book 12 of the Odyssey, when Circe warns Odysseus of the dangers awaiting him on his voyage home. Their island is littered with the bones of previous victims, whose bodies have rotted where they fell after abandoning their ships.

What makes Homer’s Sirens remarkable is not simply their beautiful singing but what they promise:

“…we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.”

This is no ordinary temptation. The Sirens do not lure Odysseus with love, wealth or pleasure: they offer knowledge beyond the reach of any mortal.

Forewarned by Circe, Odysseus orders his crew to plug their ears with beeswax while they bind him tightly to the mast. As the ship passes, he begs to be released, desperate to reach them, but his companions only tighten the ropes until the voices fade into the distance.

John William Waterhouse, 'Odysseus and the Sirens' (1891) - the feathered siren made an appearance in later 19th Century depictions such as this.

Bird-bodies

Homer never actually describes what the Sirens look like. It was later Greek artists who gave them bodies: not of fishes, but of birds. Vase paintings, funerary monuments and sculptures consistently depict Sirens as feathered hybrids, with a woman’s head or torso joined to the body and wings of a bird.

Bird imagery also appears in later literature. In Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (3rd C BC), Jason’s crew encounter Sirens explicitly described as “in part like birds and in part like maidens.” They escape only because Orpheus drowns out their fatal song with the music of his lyre, dooming the Sirens to perish, as mortal men had resisted their songs. On occasion some fishy elements made their way into visual depictions, but this was very mixed and inconsistent.

Writers offered several competing accounts of how the Sirens came to be.* In one tradition, they had once been companions of Persephone. When Hades abducted her, Demeter granted them wings so they could search the earth and sea for their lost mistress. Other versions are less sympathetic. Some claimed they were transformed into birds as punishment for failing to prevent Persephone’s abduction. Like many figures in Greek mythology, the Sirens never possessed a single, authoritative origin story.

The choice of avian hybridity was no accident.** To the ancient Greeks, birds were closely associated with song, prophecy and the boundary between the human and divine worlds. Sirens frequently appear on funerary monuments, where their music may have represented mourning or the soul’s journey into the afterlife. Their feathered bodies reinforced their role as liminal creatures, inhabiting the dangerous space between life and death.

For more on the histories and meanings of monsters,

see my latest book:

Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings

Archaic perfume vase in the shape of a siren, c. 540 BC

From feathers to fish tails

So when did the fish tail appear? The answer is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Rather than a single moment of invention, the transformation unfolded gradually during late antiquity and the medieval period.

Classical bird-sirens became entangled with other hybrid sea creatures, including nereids and Scylla, while artists experimented with increasingly varied forms. Transitional images survive showing creatures with wings and fish tails, suggesting there was no clean break between the two traditions. In the Liber Monstrorum from the 8^th Century, for example, the sirens were clearly described as mermaid-like for the first time:

“Sea maidens who deceive sailors with their beautiful appearance and tempt them with their song; and from head to navel they have the body of a virgin…but they have scaly fish tails which they always hide in the whirlpools”

As the sirens’ bodies changed, so too did their meaning. The Sirens of Homer tempted travellers with impossible knowledge through sound. Medieval sirens, by contrast, embodied sexual temptation and the sins that vision could incite. They appeared throughout bestiaries, theological manuscripts and church carvings as warnings against lust and vanity, their fish tails becoming visual symbols of moral danger.

Modern Sirens

Today, the ancient bird-woman has receded into the background, surviving largely in Classical art and scholarship. Thanks to the shifts initiated by the medieval church, the Sirens have been absorbed into the global phenomenon of the European mermaid and her enticing singing which matches her alluring beauty.

The power of desire wielded by the mermaid has largely eclipsed the Sirens’ original power, which was not erotic attraction, but the irresistible promise of forbidden knowledge. This says something about both changing societal values and attitudes to women, but that is a matter for a much longer post of it's own.

*(They also had mixed parentage options - their father was sometimes Phorcys the primordial sea god, Acheolus an ancient river god. Their mother ranged from a Muse to the Titan Gaia.)

**(The plumage does get them mixed up with the bird-hybrid Harpies, however. These hag-like creatures were storm winds personified. Their name translates to "the snatchers"; they violently stole food, defiled what was left, and dragged wrongdoers down to the Underworld)

References:

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler. London: OMNIKA Foundation, 1900.
Apollonius Rhodius. Argonautica. Edited and translated by R. C. Seaton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912. Book IV.
Bain, Frederika (2023). “The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other.” In Melusine’s Footprint. Chapter 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hyginus. Fabulae. In The Myths of Hyginus. Edited and translated by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies, no. 34. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.
Medeiros, Juliana Santos Dinoá. “The Iconographical Diversity of the Sirens’ Physical Forms in Medieval Bestiaries.” Anastasis: Research in Medieval Culture and Art 8, no. 1 (2021): 51–64.
Müller, Axel, Christopher Halls, and Ben Williamson. Mermaids: Art, Symbolism and Mythology. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2022. Ch 1.