There's something in the water: personified dangers of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic

• Main Author: Copedo, Jennifer
• Other Authors: Allan, Arlene
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Otago 2022
• Subjects: Norse; Greek; Mythology; Ocean; NorthAtlantic; Mediterranean; Siren; Scylla; Hafgufa; WaveMaidens; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/12780

Given the importance of the sea to the peoples of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it is argued that the dangers the Norse and the Greeks encountered while sailing through open waters and various other types of waterways were named, characterized and mythologised as female based on their perceptions of the two dominant types of ‘natures’ exhibited by human females. Thus, while the dangers each culture’s sailors encountered were decidedly different, there was a correlation between the Greek and Norse people’s experiences with oceanographic and meteorological phenomena in the Oceans and their development of mythological beings to explain the unknown.