Water Spirits opens with the story of man who saved the life of a mermaid who promptly blessed him with the power to heal and to break witchcraft and cursed him so that every generation one man from his family would drown. This was done to illustrate people's fear of the sea as a mysterious and fickle place that could from one moment give life and in the other death. Water was hailed as the source of life; the Hindus worshipped the Ganges under the name of Ganga, Mimir's well gave Odin his wisdom, the Nile and the Jordan River built civilizations, and everywhere people sought the Fountain of Youth. Water Spirits then points out that the creation myths of many cultures imagine the universe coming out of the watery deep and that many cultures recalled a time when the world was washed clean of sinners by the Great Flood.
Humans began taking the initiative in sea quests, however, as seen with Jason and his Argonauts. He was faithful to the gods and led a crew of heroes across the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas. Regardless of his initial faithfulness to the gods, those same gods destroyed Jason but turned the Argo into a constellation. That was a testimony to how fickle the gods could be because sea gods were viewed in relation to their seas. Poseidon, for example, was as arbitrary as the enchanted seas and magic islands he ruled. On the contrary, the kinder Ea came from the calmer Persian Gulf to teach men civilization and agriculture whilst the consistently cruel Rán ruled the volatile North Sea. The gods would lose their strength however.
In Christian times, sailors no longer worshipped the sea gods but still lived in fear of the sea's power. For example, ships were still launched on Woden's Day/Wednesday and not, for example, on Thor's Day for fear of storms and thunder. Figureheads replaced the oculi or eyes of Greek Triremes but the function remained the same; keep a lookout for evil. Anointing a ship with wine replaced the pagan custom on smearing ships with animal and even human blood. There were limits as seen with how Christian priests were rarely let on board for fear of angering the old gods.
Lakes and rivers held their powers too in the form of Nixes and Undines. The Japanese told of Urashima and Europeans of selkies and mermaids; daughters of foam-born Aphrodite, they were carved on churches as warning against lust.
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Wikipedia in English
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The former kind of tale often features a mortal who entered the underwater realm, usually moved either by curiosity or the charm of one of its denizens. This magical place is invariably described as beautiful, but there’s usually a price to be paid for going where no mortal was meant to go. Sometimes a person becomes torn between the two worlds, sometimes he finds that centuries have passed on earth while he spent a few days underwater, sometimes the enchanted world proves more sinister than it appears and wants to hold on to those it has drawn into its net.
The author explains that in the past when seafaring was very dangerous it was difficult for people devoid of wanderlust to understand those who wanted to leave the safe harbor for the perilous sea. Therefore, stories arose of mysterious otherworldly beings and worlds that were hard to forget once one had glimpsed them. Add to that that the sea itself seemed very mysterious to people back then. Unable to understand the reasons behind its changeable winds, storms, or deathlike stillness when the ship couldn’t move, behind the diseases that attacked the men at sea, such as scurvy, or after leaving a foreign place, and other vagaries of seafaring, but driven to find a cause for everything, they imagined the sea ruled by beings who were fickle and incomprehensible to humans. But as the sea remained unchanged, while human civilizations came and went, its masters and mistresses were believed to be immortal and sometimes holding the secret of immortality. Naturally they were also very powerful, and those who dared defy them usually did so to their peril.
The second kind of tales usually involves either drowned seamen, whose spirit was believed to be restless because their bodies hadn’t received a proper burial and were moved to and fro by the currents of the sea, or a ship full of zombies or ghosts of seamen who’d done or suffered some wrong and thus couldn’t rest in peace either. Seeing such ghosts or zombies was nearly always bad luck for the living who generally didn’t live long afterwards.
In short, while the tales in the Fairies and elves book were a mixed bag, the ones in this one almost invariably have unhappy endings. The sea could be a bounty to those who dared venture there – and the sea kingdoms were always portrayed as lands of plenty in legends – but it did extol a very heavy toll from the mariners too. (