100 Fun Facts About Sirens

In which ancient Greek epic do the sirens make their first appearance?

Homer gave no physical description of them at all, leaving their looks to the imagination.

What did Odysseus' crew plug their ears with to avoid hearing the sirens?

Odysseus alone left his ears open so he could hear the song and live to tell of it.

How did Odysseus manage to hear the sirens' song without being lured to his death?

He ordered his men to ignore his pleas, and when he signalled with frowns to be released they bound him tighter.

Which sorceress advised Odysseus on how to survive the sirens?

She had earlier turned his men into pigs on her island of Aeaea.

How were sirens usually depicted in early Greek art?

They may have been influenced by the ba-bird of Egyptian religion, and were often shown playing the lyre or aulos.

How many sirens does Homer say there were?

Later writers raised the number to as many as eight and gave them names.

Which musician saved the Argonauts from the sirens by out-playing them on his lyre?

Chiron had warned Jason that Orpheus would be necessary on the voyage.

Which Argonaut still heard the sirens and leapt overboard, only to be rescued by Aphrodite?

Aphrodite carried him to Lilybaeum in Sicily, where he became her lover and fathered Eryx.

The sirens are most often named as daughters of which river god?

Their mother is variously given as Terpsichore, Melpomene, Calliope, or Sterope of Calydon.

Per Ovid, the sirens were companions of which goddess, and gained wings to search for her when she was abducted?

Hyginus tells it the other way round: the goddess of the harvest cursed them for failing to prevent the kidnapping.

The sirens lost a singing contest against which group, who then plucked their feathers to make crowns?

Hera had persuaded the sirens to issue the challenge in the first place.

A Cretan city was named Aptera, meaning "featherless", after which event?

Nearby islands became the Leukai, the white ones, because the sirens turned white and threw themselves into the sea.

According to some post-Homeric authors, what happened to the sirens after Odysseus sailed safely past?

They were fated to die if anyone heard their song and escaped.

What does the name of the siren Parthenope, whose body washed ashore at Naples, mean?

Settlers from Cumae named their city after her, and she drowned herself when her songs failed to entice Odysseus.

On which small Naples island, site of Castel dell'Ovo, did the siren Parthenope wash ashore?

Her tomb there was called the construction of sirens.

In a Roman version of the Parthenope myth, a lovesick centaur was turned into which volcano by Jupiter?

His frustrated rage is said to explain the volcano's violent eruptions.

Whose opera about Parthenope premiered in 2025 for Naples's 2,500th anniversary, thirty years after he wrote it?

Handel and Vivaldi were among the 18th-century composers who had already written Parthenope operas.

Which Roman poet wrote in the Georgics that he had been nurtured by "sweet Parthenope"?

Parthenope stood for Naples, where the poet lived and worked.

The Sirenusas, islands off the Amalfi Coast said to be the sirens' home, are also known by what name?

The name means the Cocks, a nod to the bird-like form of the ancient sirens.

What was the name of the "flowery" island where some traditions placed the sirens?

Various accounts identify it with Ischia or Capri in the Gulf of Naples.

Roman poets placed the sirens on three rocky islands called what?

Joseph Addison confidently identified them with rocks a stone's throw off the south side of Capri.

The male siren, once shown in Greek art alongside female ones, disappeared around which century?

Originally sirens were shown as either sex.

The first written description of a siren as a fish-tailed "mermaid" is in which 8th-century work?

It called them sea-girls with a maiden's body and scaly fishes' tails.

Medieval bestiaries gave the vain siren which two accessories, now emblematic of mermaids across Europe?

Some bestiary sirens were also shown holding an eel-like fish.

Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologiae, rationalised the sirens as what?

He said they had wings and claws because Love flies and wounds.

In Isaiah 13:22, Jerome used the Latin for sirens to translate a Hebrew word meaning what?

In Jeremiah 50:39 he used the same word to translate a term for owls.

In which canticle of the Divine Comedy does Dante dream of a siren who claims to have diverted Ulysses?

Dante had no access to Homer's poem, so the siren's boast is false: Homer's sirens never turned Ulysses aside.

Which Renaissance polymath's notebooks say the siren lulls mariners to sleep, then kills them?

Renaissance female court singers came to be associated with the siren, a creature that could overthrow a man's reason.

Which 17th-century Jesuit scholar argued Noah must have built compartments for sirens on the Ark?

Several Jesuit writers of the period asserted that sirens really existed.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, which legendary founder of Britain nearly capsizes at the Pillars of Hercules?

He escapes into the Tyrrhenian Sea on his way to fulfil a prophecy of empire.

Which Roman naturalist dismissed sirens as fable while noting a claim they lived in India?

The claim he reported came from Dinon, father of the writer Clearchus.

Which city's national archaeological museum holds the bird-footed terracotta Siren of Canosa?

She seems to have acted as a psychopomp, guiding the dead on the journey to the afterlife.

Which Franz Kafka short story imagines that the singers fell silent as Ulysses passed?

In Kafka's version Ulysses puts wax in his own ears, so he never notices that they are not singing.

What is a freely made decision designed to bind your future self, like an advance directive, called?

Odysseus ordered his men to keep their swords on him and attack if he broke free of his bonds.

William Etty's huge 1837 painting The Sirens and Ulysses shocked viewers by showing the sirens how?

An experimental technique caused the canvas to deteriorate almost as soon as it was finished, and it was restored only in 2003-2010.

Waterhouse's 1891 Ulysses and the Sirens surprised Victorians by depicting the sirens as what?

A critic defended the choice by pointing to similar sirens on classical Greek vases.

Which city's National Gallery of Victoria bought Waterhouse's Ulysses and the Sirens in 1891?

Sir Hubert von Herkomer bought it for the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in June 1891, where it still hangs.

Herbert James Draper's 1909 Ulysses and the Sirens hangs in which English city?

The Ferens Art Gallery bought it from Draper for 600 pounds in 1910; a smaller replica is in Leeds.

Which order of aquatic mammals, including manatees and dugongs, is named after the sirens?

Sailors' sightings of these sea cows are often blamed for mermaid legends.

Which Scottish natural philosopher invented the siren before 1799 to power organ pipes?

Charles Cagniard de la Tour improved it in 1819 and gave it the name siren.

Which coffee chain's logo shows a twin-tailed siren?

The first version of the logo was topless with a fully visible double fish tail.

What extra force does Debussy's Sirènes, the third of his Nocturnes, call for?

The first two movements premiered in December 1900; the complete work followed in October 1901.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what does Delmar believe the three singing washerwomen did to Pete?

The sirens' singing voices were dubbed by Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.

Freeform's Siren (2018-2020) follows Ryn, a siren who arrives in which fictional coastal town?

Ryn comes ashore searching for her abducted older sister Donna.

Netflix's 2025 miniseries Sirens was adapted by Molly Smith Metzler from her own play titled what?

The story plays out over one weekend at a lavish beach estate.

Which Norwegian theorist titled his 1979 book on rationality Ulysses and the Sirens, after Draper's painting?

The book treats Odysseus' self-binding as the model of a rational agent restraining a future self.

One proposed etymology links the name "siren" to Greek words meaning what?

The link to binding recalls Odysseus lashed to the mast to resist their song.

Which 10th-century Byzantine dictionary called sirens sparrows from the chest up and women below?

The same source names them Thelxiepea, Peisinoe and Ligeia.

In Euripides' Helen, the sirens are winged daughters of which primordial figure?

Epimenides instead made them children of Oceanus and Ge.

Which musical instruments were sirens most often shown playing in Greek art?

Isidore of Seville later wrote that one sang, one played the flute and one the lyre.

According to the ancient Book of Enoch, which women will be turned into sirens?

It is one of the earliest non-Greek references to the creatures.

Later writers implied the sirens ate victims because their meadow was strewn with what?

Scholars note that flesh rotting away suggests it had not been eaten, and one theory is that entranced sailors simply starved.

In Second World War Britain, what did a single steady tone from civil defence sirens signify?

A series of tones, by contrast, warned that an air raid was coming.

Engineers of which company invented the first electronic siren mimicking a mechanical one, in 1965?

Ronald H. Chapman and Charles W. Stephens built it; emergency vehicles moved from bells to airhorns in the 1970s and electronic wails in the 1980s.

Who named the siren in 1819, after noticing his device could produce sound under water?

The underwater trick suggested the sirens of Greek myth; John Robison's earlier version had powered organ pipes.

Two-tone sirens are usually designed to sound which musical interval, considered a 'sad' sound?

The upper rotor has an opening count divisible by six and the lower by five; police sirens, by contrast, often use a tritone.

The first slotted-cylinder siren was installed in 1887 at which Scottish lighthouse?

James Douglass and George Slight developed the design between 1877 and 1880 for the granite island in the Firth of Clyde.

In Hyginus' Fabulae, why did Demeter curse the sirens?

Ovid tells it more kindly: Demeter gave them wings to search for the missing Persephone.

In Jeremiah 50:39, Jerome's Vulgate used 'sirens' to translate a Hebrew word for which creatures?

In Isaiah 13:22 he used the same Latin word for jackals, helping cement the siren as a creature of desolate places.

In the preaching of Clement of Alexandria, the siren was the symbolic vice of what?

Ambrose repeated the idea two centuries later: the siren as an allegory of worldly temptation, not an endorsement of the Greek myth.

A fragment of Sophocles makes which sea god the father of the sirens?

Phorcys is better known as the father of the Gorgons, which would make the sirens their sisters in this version.

The sirens were sometimes called the Muses of what?

Their song was said to be as sad as it was sweet, lulling body and soul into a fatal lethargy.

Scholar Jane Ellen Harrison compared the all-knowing sirens to which other monster?

She noted that their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm, and that its end is death.

Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide gave woman a siren's voice and the glance of which creature?

He was one of several 17th-century Jesuits who insisted that sirens were real creatures rather than fables.

Which French composer wrote 'Les sirènes' for mezzo-soprano, choir and piano in 1911?

Two years later she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition.

The 9th-century Physiologus that first drew the siren as a mermaid is named for which city?

The picture contradicted its own text, which still described the siren as a bird.

In the Physiologus, the siren shares a single chapter with which other hybrid?

The two are paired because they appear side by side in the Greek Septuagint's version of Isaiah.

In Plato's Myth of Er, sirens attend which object representing the cosmos?

The Fates keep its rims revolving; the scene closes the final book of the Republic.

The 'Sirens' episode of Joyce's Ulysses unfolds at which Dublin hotel?

Bloom dines there while Blazes Boylan heads to his rendezvous with Molly, and the barmaids play the sirens.

Margaret Atwood's poem 'Siren Song' appears in which 1974 collection?

It sits in a sequence called Songs of the Transformed, beside songs for a pig, a rat, a crow and a corpse.

Which rock guitarist bought the film rights to Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan?

Garcia worked on a screenplay with Tom Davis and finished a first draft in January 1985.

The 1994 film Sirens, with Hugh Grant, is based on the life of which Australian artist?

Most of it was shot at Lindsay's real home and studio in Faulconbridge, New South Wales.

Denis Leary's 2014 USA Network comedy Sirens follows EMTs in which city?

It was a remake of a British series and was cancelled after two seasons in 2015.

Channel 4's 2011 paramedic comedy-drama Sirens was based on which memoir?

Richard Madden, soon to be Game of Thrones' Robb Stark, played paramedic Ashley Greenwick.

Who plays Michaela 'Kiki' Kell, the billionaire's wife, in Netflix's 2025 Sirens?

Kevin Bacon plays her husband Peter, and Milly Alcock her personal assistant Simone.

Who played Ryn Fisher, the title creature of Freeform's Siren?

The show ran three seasons from 2018 before being cancelled in August 2020.

The 2003 PlayStation 2 horror game Siren was directed by the creator of which series?

Keiichiro Toyama set the game in the village of Hanuda, where players 'sightjack' to see through enemies' eyes.

The zombie-like 'shibito' of the Siren video games have a name that literally means what?

Europe and Australia knew the game as Forbidden Siren; a remake, Siren: Blood Curse, followed in 2008.

Which model poses on the rocks of Anglesey on the cover of Roxy Music's 1975 album Siren?

The album gave the band 'Love Is the Drug', their highest-charting single in the United States.

Pearl Jam's 2013 single 'Sirens' was inspired by a concert on whose tour?

Mike McCready wanted something with a Pink Floyd feel; Eddie Vedder's lyrics turned to mortality.

Who played the sirens on the 1930s first recording of Ionisation?

Slonimsky conducted, Cowell played piano, and Schuman operated the lion's roar.

When tested, electronic sirens often play which familiar tune instead of a wail?

Mechanical sirens self-test by 'growling' at low speed so as not to frighten anyone.

Avraamov's 1922 Symphony of Sirens, conducted by rooftop flag-waving, premiered where?

The score called for factory sirens, the foghorns of the Caspian flotilla, cannons and machine guns.

The Chrysler Air Raid Siren, the world's loudest, was powered by what?

It produced 138 decibels at 100 feet and was built to warn of a Soviet attack.

The Netherlands tests its air-raid sirens at noon on which day every month?

About 4,200 sirens are spread across the country to keep the public aware of the system.

Besides Holocaust memorial day, when do Israel's sirens halt the nation for a minute?

The all-clear tone is used, sounding twice on that day for the country's fallen soldiers.

In 1886, Gustave Trouvé built a siren to announce the silent arrival of what?

Fire brigades of the era still summoned volunteers with bells; the first fire sirens came with electricity.

Which wartime leader devised the one-piece 'siren suit' as leisurewear in the 1930s?

He wore his to meet Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Stalin; a bottle-green velvet version came from Turnbull & Asser.

Sirens, the eel-like salamanders of family Sirenidae, lack which body parts entirely?

They keep feathery external gills throughout life yet also have well-developed lungs.

Siren salamanders are the only salamanders ever observed doing what?

Worms, snails and shrimp still make up most of the menu; filamentous algae is the vegetarian side.

The reticulated siren, a salamander described in 2018, goes by what nickname?

The genus also includes the greater siren, described by Linnaeus in 1766, and the western siren.

Steller's sea cow, the largest sirenian ever, was hunted to extinction in which year?

It could reach 10 metres and weigh up to 10 tonnes, dwarfing today's manatees and dugongs.

Surrentum, site of the Greek world's only temple of the sirens, is which modern town?

Legend says the sanctuary was founded by Ulysses and gave the town its name.

Licosa, named after the siren Leucosia, shares its Greek root with which capital city?

The name comes from the Greek for 'white'; the hamlet near Salerno had just 82 residents in 2009.

The Syrena, a two-stroke car nicknamed 'little siren', was built from 1957 to 1983 where?

Over 521,000 were made, and the mermaid-like siren on Warsaw's coat of arms inspired the name.

The 'Siren Order' mobile app, named for a coffee chain's logo, debuted in 2014 where?

A similar system, Mobile Order & Pay, debuted in Portland, Oregon that December.

The anonymous 'Siren Painter' is named for a stamnos of Odysseus held in which city?

The British Museum owns it; he worked in Athens around 480–470 BC, and a vase of his showing Herakles and Apollo is in the Louvre.

The Ulysses mosaic at Dougga, Tunisia, with bird-legged sirens, dates to roughly when?

One siren holds a flute, another a lyre, and the third, empty-handed, is thought to be the singer.

Who released the first recording of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren', in 1969?

This Mortal Coil's 1983 cover, sung by Elizabeth Fraser, spent 101 weeks on the UK indie chart.

Siren Head, the 40-foot monster with megaphones for a head, was created by which artist?

Manga horror master Junji Ito, shown a lineup of internet monsters, judged it the best of the bunch.