The explanation that the siren's "other part" may be "like fish or like bird" is found in Guillaume le clerc's verse bestiary (1210 or 1211). ![]() Alternately, the siren was sometimes drawn as a hybrid with a human torso, a fish-like lower body, and bird-like wings and feet. These changes were thought by some to be the influence of Teutonic myth, later expounded in literary legends of Lorelei and Undine though a dissenting comment is that parallels are not limited to Teutonic culture. This confusion can be seen in a 9th century Physiologus which described the siren in text as bird-like, but supplied an illustration that was mermaid-like. In many medieval bestiaries, the siren was pictorialized as a mermaid and textual descriptions later shifted to match. The "siren" appeared as part-bird in the 6th-century Latin version of the Physiologus and some subsequent versions, but later editions increasingly depicted it as mermaid-like. ![]() This part-fish appearance became increasingly popular during the Middle Ages. In the early Greek period, the sirens were conceived of as human-headed birds, but by the classical period, the Greeks sporadically depicted the siren as part fish in art. Some European languages have assimilated the two concepts entirely for example, the French word for mermaid is sirène, and both the Spanish and Italian use sirena. The siren of Ancient Greek mythology has influenced and overlapped with popular notions of mermaids since medieval times. They are conventionally depicted as beautiful with long flowing hair. The equivalent term in Old English was merewif. The word mermaid is a compound of the Old English mere (sea), and maid (a girl or young woman). The Fisherman and the Syren, by Frederic Leighton, c.
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