The selkie who dareth not speak

I was musing about the Selkie topos; that it might be a memory of the hunter-gatherers gone fishin'. The most-famed North Sea were-creature legend, from the Danes to us, is Hans Christian Andersen's Den lille havfrue. For Andersen, when the maiden mermaid joins normative (farming) man, it turns out she cannot speak.

I had been assuming that Andersen was pulling from Old Norse legend. On that basis I further interpreted the havfrue's muteness as that she didn't speak the farmers' language.

But... Andersen doesn't say that the havfrue couldn't speak the local language. He says she couldn't speak AT ALL.

As Andersen constructed the story, the havfrue had sacrificed her voice for the ability to interact with normies. There's talk on the internet that Andersen meant this as an analogy of Teh Closet. The havfrue can love... so long as "she", the one who pines to be the other, doesn't speak of it. And I admit: the element of sacrifice points that way.

However I persist that the background elements in the tale share much in common with the selkie motifs, rife through the North Sea. Amphibious para-humans (shamans?) live at sea, adjacent to a land village; and by nature, the twain shall not mix.

So let's consider Andersen's chosen barrier: mermens' inability to speak on land. Might he have got this too from his sources?

The Neanders even before the Western Hunter Gatherers were fishers. More likely they gathered molluscs, from off the Atlantic coast; the Pauper's Protein as Londoners used to call it. We know that because the Neanders got Swimmer's Ear. (UPDATE 3/31: mussels confirmed.) It's cold on the Atlantic fringe. Andersen himself must have met many deaf swimmers on the Danish coast.

I've since noted that in the aftermath of the 6200 BC famine, hunter-gatherers on rivers moved to a fish diet around the world. (Aquaculture, in proto-China.) Gatherers on the Atlantic would have spent more time in a colder Atlantic, by necessity.

If Andersen was working from an old South Scandinavian template, he's heard a story - ultimately - about a maiden brought up by deaf-mutes. I don't know if she is deaf yet herself (the legend doesn't require it) but her genetics, perhaps, had drifted away from hearing and maybe even more so from speaking. Why speak (beyond a loud wail) if none can hear (excepting maybe her mother, back when SHE was young)?

Oh, and some gratuitous genomic nerdery - The main genetic deafener of Eurasians is mutation at connexin 26. Among Europeans the gene (not) there is 35delG. Over the previous decade (2001-2011) ancestral 35delG was pinpointed to the eastern Mediterranean, 12k-8k BC; it then traveled through Europe. That much must have come with the Farmers. But 35delG is just one SNP. Ashkenazim get that too, and 167delT. Chinese get instead 235delC. Who knows what else was rotten in Stone Age Denmark.

None of this means to besmirch Andersen's creativity. That his selkie, the havfrue, sacrificed her voice is a powerful tweak to his sources. It made of an already tragic star-crossed story, a heartbreak for all the ages. The modern marriage-equality movement can (and does) point to this story as a founding text, perhaps on par with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

BACKDATING 11/8