At the back of harbors, in the damp corners of fish markets, in certain forgotten stalls along the quays of Bruges, Lisbon, or Antwerp, in the shadowy recesses of old provincial museums or, better still, behind the creaking glass of genuine cabinets of curiosities, one sometimes finds strange creatures, halfway between a sea devil and a Gothic gargoyle. These are the Jenny Hanivers.
Neither entirely natural nor entirely artificial, they seem to have escaped from a baroque nightmare. From the esotericism of alchemists to the fledgling science of naturalists, they have fascinated, frightened, and more than once deceived.
Jenny Haniver on relics.es
A chimera between sea and myth
Jenny Hanivers are “objects” made from ray carcasses (sometimes other cartilaginous fish), skillfully dried, cut, sculpted, reshaped, then hardened in the sun or by other processes. Their final form most often evokes humanoid creatures, sea demons, skeletal dragons, damned mermaids, or monstrous fetuses. One’s gaze wavers when contemplating them. Is it a beast? Is it an artifact? A fossilized being? A horror risen from the abyss?
The first accounts of Jenny Hanivers date back to the 16th century, an era when the known world widened each day under the sails of caravels, and creatures brought back from the ocean’s edges took their place in the imagination as much as in chests. The ports of the North Sea, such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, or Bruges, were the first stages of their appearance. There, in the back rooms of taxidermists, at the bottom of reeking markets, in fishermen’s shacks and dubious inns, the first specimens were fashioned—sometimes in play, sometimes out of mischief, sometimes in a sincere surge of naturalist wonder.
Their popularity reached its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries, at the very moment when cultivated Europe entered the golden age of cabinets of curiosities, those true baroque microcosms designed to contain all the mystery of creation. The Jenny Haniver, in its grotesque and ambiguous form, found there a setting perfectly fitted to its strangeness. It embodied at once the fear of emptiness (horror vacui), the fascination with the monstrous, and the era’s typical obsession with classifying the ungraspable.
It was a time of knowledge still steeped in wonder, when the boundaries between nascent science, figurative art, occult traditions, and admitted trickery were of a disconcerting permeability. The same scholar might compile a treatise on mineralogy, study malformed fetuses, and ponder the veracity of a mermaid preserved in formalin. In this murky intellectual climate, the Jenny Haniver became at once an object of study, an anatomical stage piece, and a supernatural icon.
In the overloaded display cases of these chambers of the world, it often sat between fossils still poorly interpreted (such as ammonites or ichthyosaurs taken for petrified snakes), exotic skulls from Africa or America, unicorn horns (in reality carefully polished narwhal tusks), bezoar stones torn from ruminants’ intestines, artifacts of unknown or supposed civilizations, and monstrous fetuses kept in jars of alcohol that fascinated as much as they repulsed.
But the Jenny Haniver did not content itself with being a simple object among others. It resisted explanation, even for the most rigorous naturalists. Unlike stones or artifacts, it seemed inhabited, sometimes staring at the visitor with a strange fixity. Some believed it a demon, others a chimera escaped from a medieval bestiary, still others saw in it a tangible proof that the ocean depths teemed with species still unknown—or accursed.
Thus, in cabinets of curiosities, the Jenny Haniver was more than an artifact: it was a door left ajar onto the impossible. Its very ambiguity—neither totally natural nor completely crafted—made it the perfect symbol of the baroque era, hungry for marvels, contradictions, and secrets.
Jenny Haniver on relics.es
The origin of the name: from English to quayside patter
The mysterious name Jenny Haniver does not escape the ambiguity surrounding the creature itself. It seems, according to the most plausible sources, to be the product of a gradual linguistic distortion, born on docks, in taverns, and fish halls, where tongues collide and words are born as quickly as they are forgotten. The most frequently accepted explanation is that of a phonetic corruption of “Jeune d’Anvers”—in approximate English or Cockney slang, “Jenny Haniver” thus becomes a distorted echo of “young of Antwerp” or of “Anversienne”, in reference to the many specimens sold in that port city at the crossroads of the Nordic, Iberian, and colonial worlds.
Other hypotheses mention a contraction of “Geneva and Antwerp,” combining two hubs of maritime trade, or else a generic female nickname—Jenny—used as the English equivalent of our “Nana” or “Mimi,” tacked onto anything strange or exotic with vaguely anthropomorphic traits. In this context, “Jenny Haniver” may well have begun as a mocking sobriquet, given by sailors to a creature that, from afar, resembled a woman twisted, deformed, or damned.
But where etymology blurs, symbolism clarifies. The very imprecision of the name carries meaning: as if this creature refused to be clearly named, as if it belonged to that category of things language grasps only halfway. The fact that its name was born in the rough mouths of sailors, amid curses, coarse laughter, and sea superstitions, helps to veil it in a thick linguistic mystery, almost mythological.
Museum of the Weird, Texas
It is no accident either that its name sounds both familiar and unsettling. “Jenny,” a common female first name, evokes something human, close, almost endearing; but “Haniver,” rough, dry, almost Germanic or Flemish, suggests otherness, elsewhere, phonetic dislocation. It is a name that wavers between tenderness and strangeness, between harbor and abyss. One might almost believe it to be the name of a banished mermaid, a creature men brought ashore but which, in revenge, corrupted even its own name.
This resistance to classification, perceptible from the etymology onward, is moreover emblematic of the Jenny Haniver itself. It fits into no clear taxonomy. Neither wholly natural nor wholly artificial. Neither entirely human nor strictly animal. And its name, like its form, slips through the usual grids of knowledge. It eludes vocabulary as it eludes science, like other marvels displayed in cabinets of curiosities, where the incomprehensible is a selling point and the indefinite the seal of fascination.
Jenny Hanivers: between hoax and macabre art
At first glance, it would be easy—almost reassuring—to relegate Jenny Hanivers to the rank of maritime hoaxes, to file them among those many dubious artifacts that proliferated in merchant ports and village fairs: mermaids sewn from monkey heads and fish tails, tinsel dragons, counterfeit fetuses, unicorns carved from walrus ivory. Their strange appearance, hybrid composition, artisanal method of fabrication, and popular diffusion all argue for a fraudulent interpretation. It is true that many curiosophiles—whether nobles, clerics, or bourgeois collectors—let themselves be seduced (or duped) by these desiccated chimeras. They were sold as authentic relics of fabulous creatures, unique pieces from the abyss or miraculous trophies from a world still unknown.
But reducing Jenny Hanivers to a simple swindle would be a mistake in perspective. It would be to forget that Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries moved in an intellectual and aesthetic climate where the false, the doubtful, the magical, the natural, the scientific, and the grotesque were not mutually exclusive, but often interconnected. What we now call “fraud” was at times perceived then as a theatricalization of reality, or as a symbolic attempt to order the chaos of the living.
In this sense, Jenny Hanivers are not merely fraudulent objects: they are material manifestations of a baroque imagination, free interpretations of natural forms pushed to their paroxysm. They belong to that tradition in which humankind, faced with the immensity of the sea and its unknown creatures, chooses to fashion the monsters it cannot capture—so as to give shape to mystery, or to dread.
We must remember that in that era, knowledge was not separate from wonder, nor truth from appearance. The world was a vast coded book in which each seashell, each bone, each malformed fetus, each enigmatic fossil constituted a ciphered letter. The scholar, as much as the poet or the theologian, was a reader of signs. And in this reading of the world, the Jenny Haniver acts as an ideogram of the monstrous, a calligraphy of the invisible.
By its vaguely human form—shrunk wings, shrunken head, retracted trunk—it hearkens back to the demonic figures of medieval margins, those half-man, half-beast dragons illuminated in Apocalypse manuscripts. By its cartilaginous texture and vacant stare, it recalls the infernal creatures of alchemical dreams, or the sea beasts drawn by cartographers who had heard tell of monsters but had never seen them. It summons a whole swath of the iconography of the terrifying marvelous, between Dante’s mermaids and the visions of Hieronymus Bosch.
Thus, the Jenny Haniver becomes a hieroglyph of the abyss: it does not claim to faithfully reproduce a real being, but to evoke, symbolize, provoke. It serves as a support for projection: the viewer’s gaze sees in it what it wants to see—demon, mermaid, fetus, dragon, damned soul, nightmare monster, or residue of original sin.
In this way, it surpasses the status of hoax: it becomes a work of macabre art, a poem of petrified flesh, a totem of a world where certainties wobble. It does not teach zoology, but vertigo, that strange emotion born of doubt between the natural and the supernatural, between animal and human, between the true and the invented.
It is precisely in cabinets of curiosities that these objects find their fullest symbolic function. There, surrounded by bones, improbable shells, unusual plants, and miniature automatons, Jenny Hanivers become mirrors of cosmic disorder, figures of mastered chaos, placed in a display case as one bottles a fever.
So no, the Jenny Haniver is not a mere fake. It is far more: a votive offering to doubt, a talisman of uncertainty, a grotesque answer to the terror inspired by the unknown.
A place of honor in cabinets of curiosities
The success of Jenny Hanivers in European cabinets of curiosities owes nothing to chance or to mere attraction to the grotesque. It is rooted in an aesthetic, symbolic, and ontological logic specific to the spirit of the Renaissance and the Baroque, where understanding the world did not rely on cold, segmented analysis but on the fervent collection of marvels. These cabinets—whether princely, ecclesiastical, or bourgeois—were true theaters of the world, condensations of the cosmos where humankind sought to reconstitute the order or disorder of creation within a closed space.
At their 17th-century peak, cabinets of curiosities gathered in one place what were called mirabilia (extraordinary objects), naturalia (products of nature), artificialia (objects created or transformed by humans), scientifica (instruments of observation), and exotica (artifacts brought from colonies or distant lands). Jenny Hanivers, creatures neither entirely natural nor entirely artificial, slipped with disconcerting ease into several of these categories at once.
They embodied above all a singular form of diverted naturalia: products arising from nature but altered so as to reveal the latent strangeness of the living. In so doing, they were not merely biological curiosities but objects of thought. Like Gothic reliquaries that magnify bone by plating it with gold, Jenny Hanivers transform a carcass into an enigma, a corpse into a coded message.
In a display case, between an Amerindian mummy, a two-headed fetus preserved in spirit of wine, a saint’s arm in its monstrance, a celestial globe, and an engraved ostrich egg, the Jenny Haniver invariably drew the visitor’s eye. Its semi-human form, its withered wings, its muzzle contracted into a grimace of damnation, provoked fascination as much as unease. One looked at it for a long time, unsure of what one was seeing. Was it a monster, a fallen angel, the devil’s fetus? Was it born thus, or shaped by a perverse human hand?
This disturbance of perception was precisely its power. Unlike a mere shell or a precious stone, the Jenny Haniver threw the categories of knowledge into crisis. It asked: what is life? Where does the natural end? Who has the right to name? It shifted the viewer from mere contemplation to perplexity. It disoriented the scholar as much as the layperson, making it a highly prized piece in the symbolic economy of curious collections.
But the Jenny Haniver did not stop at shaking zoological certainties: it also provoked ritual emotions, religious or demonological echoes. For some, it was a talisman against dark forces, a sea creature trapped, fixed, and neutralized by salt and light. For others, it represented the tangible manifestation of evil, the trace of a forbidden form of life, of a pact made with the abyss.
Several accounts of exorcism campaigns are thus reported, notably in certain regions of Brittany, Sicily, or Bohemia, where a Jenny Haniver was allegedly found hidden in an attic, hung like a dried bat, suspected of having caused illnesses, misfortune, or even demonic possession. It was said to have been hidden there by a fisherman, a sorcerer, or a healer, as a reliquary of a captive spirit.
We also know that, at certain times, itinerant preachers displayed them in their sermons as proof of God’s punishment: “Behold what lust, corruption, the abandonment of natural laws produces.” At other times, charlatans presented them as mermaid or dragon fetuses, sold as magical remedies or alchemical ingredients. Some alchemists claimed that, when immersed in a solution of mercury and salt, a Jenny Haniver could attract the spirit of the sea or reveal hidden secrets.
Thus, its function in cabinets of curiosities went far beyond mere ornamentation. It was a catalyst for stories, a vector of myths, a point of convergence between the natural sciences and occult narratives. In this place where fragments of meteorite were kept alongside giants’ teeth or alchemical manuscripts, it forged a link between the visible and the invisible, between sea and spirit, between body and symbol.
In short, the Jenny Haniver was not an object frozen in a display case. It was a silent ritual, an embodied enigma, a relic without a religion. That is why it remains today a hallmark piece of any cabinet of curiosities worthy of the name.
Cryptid or artifact? A blurred frontier
One of the most troubling—and most fascinating—aspects of Jenny Hanivers lies in their elusive ontological status. Are they natural creatures altered by the hand of humans? Artistic artifacts? Maritime pranks? Or true cryptozoological specimens that slipped from folklore to incarnate in the dried flesh of an unknown fish? This uncertainty, this deliberately maintained blur between the real and the fabricated, constitutes precisely the beating heart of their fascination.
In modern taxonomy, a cryptid is a creature whose existence is presumed but not scientifically demonstrated: the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, the Chupacabra, or the Mokélé-Mbembé. They are born on the margins of knowledge, in popular tales, in oral traditions. But Jenny Hanivers very much exist physically. They are tangible, visible, marketable. This paradox makes them inverted cryptids: not creatures we desperately seek to find, but forms already present, whose birth or manufacture we do not know.
In some parts of the world, this ambiguity is not dispelled—on the contrary, it is actively cultivated. In the Gulf of Mexico, for example, Jenny Hanivers are known as “sea devils” (sea devils or diablillos marinos). Many fishermen still sincerely believe in them. There are reports where the discovery of such a specimen in a net was enough to trigger panic on board: some refused to go on fishing, others threw them back with prayers or offerings. It is even said that certain boats were abandoned after a Jenny Haniver was found on board, so baleful was its presence judged.
In Japan, where maritime folklore is of unmatched richness, Jenny Hanivers have at times been assimilated to yōkai, those polymorphous and often mischievous supernatural spirits. Some see them as ningyo mummies—the famous Japanese “mermaids,” creatures half woman, half fish, said to bring either eternal blessing or absolute ruin depending on how one treats them. In some families, mysterious dried creatures have been venerated as relics, then passed down from generation to generation, locked in boxes, covered with cabalistic inscriptions.
Even in the old European world, Jenny Hanivers long continued to be seen as real fragments of the invisible world. Specimens were exhibited as baby dragons in German Wunderkammern, as captured mermaids in the private museums of the Italian nobility, or as fossilized demons in rural churches where they served to edify the faithful on the dangers of sin. Exotic origins were ascribed to them: Abyssinia, Amazonia, Greenland, or even the depths of the Styx.
The naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, in his 16th-century treatises, documents creatures very similar to what we recognize today as Jenny Hanivers. He drew them, described them, tried to understand their nature. But even he—a man of science, an obsessive classifier—never quite comes down firmly. He lets doubt linger. He notes, he observes, he names… but he does not condemn. It is precisely this doubt that gives these objects their symbolic and intellectual power.
In the end, this is where the venomous charm—and the refined horror—of Jenny Hanivers lies: they have just enough structure, symmetry, and resemblance to the living to make the viewer hesitate. Is it a malformed fetus? A petrified little demon? A possessed fish? Or simply a ray carved by a skilled hand? One oscillates constantly between wonderstruck naivety and horrified suspicion.
In a cabinet of curiosities, this uncertainty is not a weakness: it is a fundamental asset. Such places do not seek to provide answers, but to provoke questions, to unsettle categories, to interrogate the nature of the world. A Jenny Haniver there is not merely a thing to look at: it is a materialized question, a sphinx without an explicit riddle, whose mere presence undermines our classificatory instincts.
Thus the Jenny Haniver escapes the classic duality of true and false. It floats between worlds, like the sea creatures it evokes. It is at once a mythological cryptid and a manufactured object, an atelier artifact and a witness to another natural order, a crafty deception and a poetic revelation. It is the deformed child of dream and matter.
And in the context of the cabinet of curiosities, that space where the boundaries between nature, artifice, and miracle are deliberately blurred, the doubt it generates is worth more than any certainty. For in that learned theater of the bizarre, it is the undecidable that shines, the blur that fascinates, the monster that questions. And in this respect, the Jenny Haniver may be the perfect cryptid: not the one sought in forests or lakes, but the one already before our eyes—without our ever quite daring to believe in it.
Alchemy, witchcraft, and the Jenny Haniver
Beyond their ornamental function, Jenny Hanivers also have an esoteric dimension. In certain grimoires or occult traditions, they were used as protective talismans, objects of divination, even as demonic relics.
Some alchemists thought they could serve as receptacles for elemental spirits, particularly those of water. The fact that they are created from the ray, a fish of little culinary value and often associated with strange forms, heightened their occult reputation.
Other traditions attribute to them cursing powers, or place them among objects that witches hid in their homes to cast the evil eye. Their tortured shapes, their fixed gaze, their leathery wings—everything evokes infernal imagery.
Jenny Hanivers today: between folklore and contemporary art
Although cabinets of curiosities declined with the advent of modern scientific museums, the renewed interest in the strange, the baroque, and the cryptid has breathed new life into these creatures.
Certain contemporary artists (such as Thomas Grunfeld, Mark Dion, or in France the makers of surreal taxidermy) craft their own versions of Jenny Hanivers, sometimes with different materials, sometimes from synthetic remains. They place them in installations where science mingles with horror, irony, and the gothic.
Avant-garde taxidermists, at the crossroads between cabinet of curiosities and morbid art, continue this strange tradition of shaping nature to reveal inner visions.
Jenny Haniver and popular culture: from Lovecraft to Pokémon
It is no accident that the design of many fictional creatures—in video games, horror films, and fantasy literature—echoes the knotted lines and flaccid limbs of Jenny Hanivers. Pokémon like Bouffalant, Relicanth, or Dhelmise recall the spirit of these undead creatures risen from the abyss.
In the universe of H. P. Lovecraft, where sea creatures are often tentacular, formless, semi-human, and endowed with an inverted religious symbolism, one can easily see an aesthetic kinship with the Jenny Haniver.
More than that: certain mock-cryptozoology documentaries have used images of Jenny Hanivers to illustrate “discovered mermaids,” playing on their semi-credible, semi-monstrous appearance.
Collecting a Jenny Haniver: user guide
Far from being merely museum artifacts, Jenny Hanivers are still collected today. Some specialized dealers—often the same who sell human skulls, framed insects, or old medical objects—offer them.
Be careful, however: genuine Jenny Hanivers must be identified with care. A good piece is well dried, without traces of mold, with a troubling symmetry and a vaguely humanoid shape. The most prized are those that clearly evoke a little demon, a gargoyle, or an embryonic creature.
Their price varies according to quality, rarity, and provenance. But in the end, it is not the object itself that creates the value: it is the shiver it provokes, that sensation of opening a door onto the inexplicable.
Conclusion: Why do Jenny Hanivers still fascinate?
In a world where everything is analyzed, classified, explained, Jenny Hanivers represent a gray area, a poetic interstice between the real and the mythological. They capture something essential to the human spirit: that desire to believe in the existence of a beyond the natural, a hidden order, an irreducible mystery.
They are the reflection of a world in which one could still think that mermaids swam beneath hulls, that dragons slumbered in the ocean’s hollows, and that fish could lie.
For aficionados of cabinets of curiosities, they are a symbolic key. Not because they reveal a truth, but because they pose a permanent question: what separates artifice from the real? And what if strangeness, at bottom, were the true essence of nature?
