Back to Fantasy

26JAN2020

I'm ready to get back to fantasy! I've been working the last few months on a crime short with fantasy elements, but I am itching to get back to full-on fantasy story writing. 

Picture to the left was taken at the Mythical Creatures exhibit at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Great place, and even greater exhibit. I learned so much! There were griffins there, dragons, Haitian mermaids, crazy sea stories (one of which I will detail later) and all other sorts of wonderful things. I went with family, which made it all the better.

Figurehead: A classic ship's mermaid

Sedna

Sedna was a strange tale. Not sure if I would classify it as a mermaid tale, but it is a tale of the ocean, and Sedna is pictured sometimes with webbed fingers, or no fingers, depending. 

The story concerns a goddess that, depending on which version of the tale, is involved in various things, like getting married to a bird, or a dog, or not wanting to get married at all. At some point in all of the stories, Sedna travels by kayak with her father (or sometimes other beings). During the voyage, Sedna somehow ends up hanging over the side of the kayak, gripping onto it for dear life. But her father, caring person that he is, chops at her hands (in the tales, this is usually because the pair are caught in the middle of a storm and he is trying to save himself by getting rid of Sedna, or she has done something bad and this is her punishment). Sedna's plump fingers are chopped off one by one. Hack hack hack. Thanks Dad! 

But the strangeness doesn't end there. Her bits of fingers, now bleeding and floating free in the ocean, turn into seals, walruses and whales. Bereft of her fingers, Sedna cannot hold onto the kayak and sinks to the ocean depths. She becomes a goddess of the sea and the Inuit underworld. Inuit hunters pray to her for a successful hunt of her 'fingers'. Inuit women perform a ritual of combing Sedna's hair in order to placate the angry goddess so she will release the seals and whales for the hunt.

Also, though I have no idea why, the name Sedna has been given to a planetoid that wanders around our solar system, further out than Pluto. Go figure.