by Tim Entwisle

Created on: February 28, 2009

The sirens had a song so powerful and so beautiful that it would lure sailors to their deaths. The song promised knowledge of all the future of the world. While we know much about the sirens we know little about their song.

The Sirens were birdlike creatures with the faces of maidens.The three, Parthenope, Leucosia and Ligeia, she of the maiden face, she the white being, and the shrill one, sat amongst the bones of dead sailors singing their temptation across the still waters of the Mediterranean. But although the Sirens have been portrayed as evil, some reassessing of their story suggests they took no pleasure from the gathering corpses around them. They certainly did not consume the bodies. Their pleasure was their singing.

The first to survive them and hence tell the tale were the Argonauts. Jason had been forewarned to take Orpheus on their journey. When the Siren song broke out Orpheus drowned them out with his beautiful lyre playing. And so the Argonauts sailed past.

This was not the first time that the Sirens had been beaten in a musical contest. The Muses had won a previous challenge and taken the siren's wings as a prize and wore the feathers in their hair.

The last to encounter the Sirens was Odysseus on his way back from Troy. He plugged his sailor's ears with wax and had them tie him to the mast of the boat. The song was so beautiful and bewitching that he ordered his men to untie him, but they were wise enough not to.

Odysseus was the only mortal man to have heard the Sirens' song and survived. We are left to wonder what it sounded like.

One modern song that perhaps gives a hint is Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren from 1970. This song was given an ethereal treatment by the band the Cocteau Twins during a collaboration known as This Mortal Coil in the 1980s.

Tim Buckley's co-writer on the song was Larry Becket and it is his literary style that creates the poetry of the sirens.

Now my foolish boat is leaning

Broken love lost on your rocks

However, the two saw this song as the perfect match of their lyrics and music.

The song has woven together its singers in a tragic siren-like story. First the song's writer, Tim Buckley, dies young in 1975, leaving a son who will never know him. Elizabeth Fraser, of the Cocteau Twins, has an intense relationship and musical collaboration with Tim Buckley's son, Jeff Buckley. Jeff Buckley drowns in 1997.

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