Before the Edam mermaid had a tail

In Edam they say she was called Minne.⁹ None of the five older accounts we read gives her a name.⁷ In the Latin chronicle her captors are “girls”, and in the Dutch Divisiekroniek “women and girls”.¹⁰ None of the five gives her a tail.³

What Edam can point to

Edam’s version has plenty of physical marks. Oud Edam lists her on a stained-glass window in the Grote Kerk and on the weathervane of Haarlem’s town hall.⁹ The Edams Museum describes a small statue at a town gate with three lines of verse.¹¹

The Volksverhalenbank prints those lines in a retelling from Sinninghe (1975), where they stood on the Purmerpoort, a gate pulled down in 1835.¹² The same retelling has her living in Haarlem in the “Gat van de Grote Houtstraat”.¹²

Theo Meder, in a comment on that item, puts the first carved stone with her, on the Purmerpoort, about two centuries after the supposed event.¹³ We could not trace the name Minne or the two milkmaids to any older text, and the Houtstraat only to Sinninghe’s retelling.

The tail is a print

The earliest tail we found is in a printed plate. Casparus Wachtendorp wrote a rhymed history of Holland,¹⁴ and the Rijksmuseum holds a plate from its 1645 edition: a woman with a fish’s tail sits at a spindle while boats crowd the water behind her.⁴

The verse beside the plate does not match it. In the 1648 printing she comes in through “the new Texel gap”, sings, howls like a dog at midnight and catches fish with her hands.¹⁴ At the markets people talk of a devil in the lake, and the farmers who go out to fight it drag her out of the water instead.¹⁴ And her body is human:

The Edams Museum, too, points to Wachtendorp’s book of 1645, “illustrated by a spinning woman with a fish tail”.⁴

Edam had a picture of its own. A print of 1784 to 1786 in the Rijksmuseum copies a painting that then hung in the Prinsenhof at Edam, and calls her “Groenne Wyf”, the green woman.⁵ Here she stands on two legs with long hair, holding a spindle and a reel.⁵

So the painting as copied in 1786⁵ and the plate of 1645⁴ disagree about her legs. We found no source that dates the painting.

From mute to monster

Three writers, in 1567, 1588 and 1628, added to her.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ Lodovico Guicciardini, describing Haarlem in his Description of the Low Countries, is the first of the texts we read to call her mute, and the first to print the year, 1403.¹⁸¹⁵ His Dutch translation of 1612 calls her a “Meerminne oft Zeewijf” and names her mistress as a widow.¹⁵

Hadrianus Junius, in his Batavia of 1588, says the story seemed hard to believe.¹⁶ His sea-monster is “viridi musco turpe”, foul with green moss, and it makes a strange sighing sound instead of speech.¹⁶ He doubts one detail, that she spun thread, because she would have needed hands with separate fingers, as humans have.¹⁶ He then counts her among the Nereids, to whom, he says, Pliny gives bodies bristling with scales.¹⁶

Samuel Ampzing’s verse history of Haarlem, in 1628, retells her in rhyme¹⁷ and gives her no tail:

Ampzing then prints the Divisiekroniek, Junius and Guicciardini one after another, so that three of the older texts sit together in one book.¹⁷

A wild woman in 1517

The chronicle that Ampzing reprints is the Divisiekroniek, printed in Leiden on 18 August 1517.¹⁹ Its author is not named; the Leiden University Libraries say it must be Cornelius Aurelius.¹⁹

Its chapter is titled “Van een wilde vrouwe dye in dye zee gevangen worde”, of a wild woman caught in the sea.¹ The text calls her “een wilt ende ongetammet wijf”.¹ She is naked and covered in watery matter, which the Dutch names as moss, slime and muck.²

The women and girls who milked their cows across the lake pulled her out and took her to Edam, where nobody understood her speech.¹⁰ The people of Haarlem pressed Edam hard for her, and she learned to spin there and died there.²⁰ She was buried in the churchyard because she often honoured the Holy Cross.²⁰

The chronicle says where it got this.²¹ Old and trustworthy men who had seen her in Haarlem vouched for it, and that is why, in the chronicle’s words, it is set down “as a novelty”.²¹ The chapter opens “Omtrent dese tijt”, about this time, and sits between chapters for 1403 and 1404.⁶

The Latin chapter

A Latin version tells the same events.¹⁰²⁰ It sits in a chronicle that Sweertius printed at Frankfurt in 1620 under the name of Joannes Geerbrandi of Leiden, a Carmelite.⁸

Here too she is naked, her body covered with “watery matter clinging to it”.² The girls of Edam who went for the cows’ milk are in this version too.¹⁰ The chapter closes on the respectable men of Haarlem who said they had often seen her.²¹ The chapter has no year.⁶

Oud Edam says a monk named Joannes Gerbrandis van Leyden wrote it down in 1470.⁹ Meder, without naming the chronicle, says the first chronicle account came almost 70 years after 1403, so no eyewitness could have told it.¹³ Both point at about 1470. The Latin chronicle may or may not be the work they mean: Sweertius dates nothing in the chapter.⁶

Meder adds a version in which a fisherman pulls her from the lake, raises her and marries her, printed as true in later almanacs.¹³

The telling beside the record