The merrow is the mermaid of Irish folklore; the word comes from the Irish murúch. Medieval Irish texts already tell of murdúchann, siren-like sea singers who lulled the legendary ancestors of the Irish to sleep on their voyages, and the Annals of the Four Masters record a giant mermaid cast ashore in Scotland in the year 887.
The best-known tales come from Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends (1828). In 'The Lady of Gollerus', a Kerry man hides a green-haired merrow's magic cap, the cohuleen druith, so she cannot go back under the waves. They marry and have children, but when she finds the cap she returns to the sea. Merrow women are described as beautiful and gentle, with a fine webbing between their fingers, while the rarer mermen are said to be ugly, with green hair and red noses. One family in Bantry was said to descend from a merrow.
Croker's tale of a merman who kept drowned sailors' souls in lobster-pot cages, 'The Soul Cages', was later admitted to be an invention by Thomas Keightley, not a folk tale collected from tradition.
What the stories say
- A strange little cap left on the shore
- Music drifting up from far out at sea
- A green-haired woman combing her hair on the rocks
- Webbed fingers in a family said to have a sea ancestor
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