The Mermaids of Staithes: Sea, Superstition, Egg-Broth and Loss in a Yorkshire Legend
Join mermaid expert Sarah Peverley for an illustrated talk about the vengeful tale of the mermaids of Staithes. Well-known locally along the north-east coast of Yorkshire, England, the legend concerns the capture and escape of two mermaids, who speak enigmatically about egg-broth and curse the community that hurts them. The tale has notable parallels with other mermaid stories from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, all of which were recorded in print from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, except the Staithes story.
Through deductive source analysis, this talk identifies the oldest verbal and published versions of the legend on record and explores analogues to the egg-broth superstition, which attest to the story’s emergence much earlier in the eighteenth century and connect it to popular superstitions about the sea. By situating the tale’s publication in context, it is also possible to connect its first occurrence in print to recurrent losses from inundations, coastal erosion and the economic decline of Staithes’s fishing industry in the early twentieth century. Featuring the sea, superstitions, mermaids, witches and folklore, there is something for everyone in the history of this charming tale.
Professor Sarah Peverley is an academic, writer and broadcaster who divides her time between being immersed in the depths of mermaid history and lost in the medieval world. As professor of medieval literature and culture at the University of Liverpool she teaches across English and History and regularly speaks at festivals and heritage events. She has consulted for organisations like Guinness World Records, and has written, presented or appeared in over eighty TV, radio and press features. She is currently writing a cultural history of the mermaid. For more information see www.sarahpeverley.com.
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. He recently edited Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen (2024) for the British Library's Tales of the Weird series. For further info see:
https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can't make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
