Merrow

Off the coast of Kerry, when the water went glassy and the evening light lay flat along it, fishermen watched for a shape that had no business being there: a woman’s head breaking the surface, hair the colour of wet weed spreading around her, a tune carrying over the swell that no boat crew had ever learned. The merrow had come up to sing. To see her was to feel two things at once, the pull of that beauty and a cold certainty in the gut that the weather was about to turn, because her rising so often ran a little ahead of a storm.

The Irish called her the murúch, from muir, the sea, and the word carried none of the softness later pinned to mermaids on seaside postcards. A merrow belonged to the fairy kind, one of the folk who lived otherwise than people and did not answer to human rules. The females were lovely in the expected way, human from the crown to the hips and fish below, their lower bodies covered in scales tinted faintly green, a slight film of webbing stretched between their fingers as thin and pale as the skin found under an eggshell. Their hair hung green and heavy with brine. They were, on the whole, gentle, and curious about the dry world in a way that would cost a few of them everything.

The males were another matter. On the rare occasions a story let one be seen up close, he was a fright: green hair and green teeth, small red eyes set in a face like a pig’s, a sharp red nose, arms shrunk almost to fins, and a tail that grew between scaled legs. The most famous of them keeps a dry house on the sea floor and pours poteen for a human guest with something close to good manners, so ugliness was not the same as malice. It only meant the females did the courting in the world above, and the males were left to the descriptions of the few men who claimed to have drunk with one.

What let a merrow move from the drowned world into the air was a small red cap called the cohuleen druith, feathered in the older tellings and simply red in the ones that came after. Wearing it, she could dive down through fathoms of cold water to the halls beneath. Lose it, and the road home closed behind her. This one object is the hinge on which nearly every merrow story turns, and it worked exactly as a selkie’s sealskin worked. A man who found a merrow ashore and hid her cap could keep her.

That is the story told of Dick Fitzgerald, a fisherman of the Kerry strand who came on a merrow at dawn, sitting on a rock and combing the sea out of her hair with the cohuleen druith laid down beside her. He took the cap and hid it in the thatch. Without it she could not leave, and so she stayed, and in time she married him and bore his children, and by every account she was a good wife and a contented one. The trap held for years. Then one day, with Dick away, she found the cap where he had walled it up, and the old sea came back into her all at once. She looked at her sleeping children, and she went down to the water, and she did not come back. The tale does not call her cruel. It calls her something that was never going to belong to a hearth, however kind the hearth had been.

The other well-known story runs the opposite way. In it a fisherman named Jack Dogherty strikes up a friendship with a merman called Coomara, whose name means sea-hound, and is brought down to that dry house on the sea floor, where the old creature keeps rows of odd wicker cages. Trapped inside them, Jack learns, are the souls of drowned sailors, and behind his smile he is horrified enough to set them loose by getting his host thoroughly drunk. It is a fine story, and it is not, strictly, a folk one. The man who first printed it, Thomas Keightley, later admitted he had built it himself out of a German tale and passed it off as Irish, though he swore that similar things really were told around Cork and Wicklow. The confession is worth keeping in mind, because a great deal of what people are sure they know about merrows traces back through that one embroidered page.

Where merrows came from, no telling quite says. They are simply there, a people of the water as old as the coastline itself. What the lore is certain of is how they touched the land. They were said to come ashore in the shape of small hornless cattle, slipping in among the real herds, and it was noticed that sea-cows liked to graze the meadows wherever a merrow had settled offshore. And they married in. The O’Flaherty and O’Sullivan families of Kerry and the MacNamaras of Clare all claimed a merrow somewhere far back in the blood, and near Bantry, within living memory of the tale-tellers, there was said to be a woman covered in fish scales who was descended from just such a union. A child of a merrow marriage might carry the sea in its body, in a webbed hand or a patch of scales along a limb.

Her powers are quiet ones. She breathes the deep water and walks its floor as easily as a woman crosses a field. She can hold a listener with a voice that carries impossibly far over open water, and her coming reads the weather before the sky gives any sign. She does not age as people age. Under the red cap she is free of the whole element that drowns men, at home in the one place they most fear to be.

But that freedom hangs entirely on the cap, and the cap can be taken. A merrow parted from her cohuleen druith is stranded as surely as a fish left in a creel, able to live among people and even to love them, yet unable to go home until the thing is found again. She is bound as well by the pull of the sea itself, which no marriage and no fondness ever cancels, only postpones. Return the cap to her, or let her stumble on it, and the ending is never once in doubt. The sea always wins.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a merrow?

A merrow is the mermaid of Irish folklore, a sea fairy with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the scaled lower body of a fish. Merrows live beneath the sea but come ashore, sometimes marrying mortal men, and their appearance to fishermen was often read as a warning of coming storms.

What is the cohuleen druith?

The cohuleen druith is the magical red cap that allows a merrow to travel between the sea floor and the surface. In older tales it is covered in feathers, and in later ones simply red. If a person hides or steals a merrow’s cap, she cannot return to the sea and is forced to remain on land, which is how several tales explain a merrow’s marriage to a human.

Are merrows good or evil?

Merrows are generally gentle rather than evil, especially the females, who are drawn to the land out of curiosity and affection. Even the grotesque males are not necessarily hostile, as in the tale where the merman Coomara hosts a fisherman with rough hospitality. The danger a merrow poses is less about cruelty than about her nature, since she will always return to the sea when she can, abandoning a mortal family to do so.

What is the difference between male and female merrows?

Female merrows are beautiful, with long green hair, pale skin, and lightly webbed fingers, and they are the ones who interact with humans and marry them. Male merrows are described as ugly, with green hair and teeth, pig-like red eyes, a red nose, and stubby scaled arms, and they appear far less often in the stories. This split is drawn largely from the male merman Coomara in the tale “The Soul Cages.”

What happens in the story of the Lady of Gollerus?

In “The Lady of Gollerus,” a Kerry fisherman named Dick Fitzgerald finds a merrow on the shore and hides her cohuleen druith so she cannot leave. She marries him and they have children and live happily for years, until she discovers the hidden cap and returns to the sea, leaving her mortal family behind. The tale presents her departure not as betrayal but as the inevitable pull of her true nature.

Related Entries

Selkie, Ceasg, Kelpie, Fuath, Finfolk, Nuckelavee, Dobhar-chu, Banshee, Leprechaun, Merman, Mermaid, Melusine, Ningyo, Iara