Mermaid Tales (No Pun Intended): Styles Brainstorm

Topic: My storybook will be about different mermaid stories. I would like to try to get stories from different regions of the world to get some different perspectives on these myth that so many cultures posses stories for. I shouldn't have any difficulty in coming across stories to use within the Untextbook and the Sacred Texts archive. One story I would interested in using is The Fisherman of Shetland. I read some of it when trying to find interesting topics. It details the cooperative fishing effort between man and merman until the merman has his magical belt stolen by a witch! I would also like to use The Little Mermaid because it forms the basis of one of my favorite Disney movies. I am well aware it won't be full of Disney magic like the movie is!

Bibliography: The Fisherman of Shetland, from the Welsh Fairy-Tales and Other Stories, by Peter H. Emerson (1894).
The Little Mermaid, from the Fairy Tales and Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, by translated by H. P. Paull (1872).

Possible Styles:

Mermaids as the Storytellers: I think in most stories that I will come across a human or an uninvolved 3rd party will be the storyteller. I think it would be interesting to detail the mermaids point of view in the interactions they have with humans. People view mermaids as beautiful and mystical creatures but I'm sure the mermaids themselves would have much different opinions of us!

Using Modern News/Stories: I'm not sure that this would be an option but I think it would be really cool to take historical events that occurred on the sea or detail the pollution in them from the stand point of a mermaid. I don't think I would find stories like this but I feel it would give an interesting twist to current issues and past events.

Storyteller: I used this style on this weeks storytelling assignment and I really liked it. I retold the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops from the point of view of a grandmother telling her grandchildren a bedtime story. The topic of mermaids would fit really well with this style because mermaids are magical creatures that kids love hearing stories about.

Dialogue: Focusing on dialogue would be a good option for stories that have a good deal of interaction between mermaids and other creatures. Rather than focusing on the story at hand I could focus on the interactions to really illustrate emotions that the characters possess. This isn't something that is usually focused on in old stories so I think it would give stories deeper meaning.

(Not Andersen's Little Mermaid)