Overview

Merpeople are magical creatures whose habitat is underwater. They can be mysterious, as not much about them is known and they don’t have a stable relationship with wizardkind. They were offered the status of being, but they denied it in favour of the status of beast. While merpeople are able to breathe above water for a certain period of time, it is not clear if they could leave their habitat or just choose not to.

About the creature

Merpeople have their own language called mermish and generally cannot speak the human language, but they are known to understand it. Their love for creating music is a common trait amongst the three sub-species. However beautiful they are, all three sub-species are responsible for luring unknowing sailors in the water and drowning them.

There is evidence that merpeople have a thriving culture and an organised society, with some communities even including different dwellings made of stone and domesticating other magical creatures such as grindylows, hippocampuses and lobalugs. Outside of communities, their intelligence is also known in the form of jewellery, weapon making, producing paintings and sculptures, and the ability to understand some human gestures and language.

Merpeople seemed to have a rocky and unstable relationship with wizardkind. It is not really clear exactly why this is, but it could be for a plethora of reasons. One of them could be that certain wizards saw them as lower than them, which is unfortunately a common occurrence in the wizardkind against sentient creatures that were not human. Despite the unstable relationship, merpeople can be kind to wizards that deserve it, for example at the funeral of Albus Dumbledore when a colony of merpeople that resided in the Great Lake were present.

Different subspecies

There are three known sub-species that can be found all over Europe.

Sirens are the earliest recorded evidence of the existence of merpeople. They were known as exceptionally beautiful and that was a common trait for merpeople that lived in warm water. Their origins lie in Greece, where they still live up until this day. It was believed that sirens used their voices to lure sailors into the water, as is told in a popular muggle legend.

Selkies were the merpeople that lived in Scotland. They lived in cold water and that means that they were considered less beautiful than sirens. A colony of selkies reside in the Great Lake by Hogwarts.

Merrows are the third sub-species of merpeople and can be similar to their counterpart the selkies. Their habitat is in cold water nearby Ireland. Like all merpeople that live in cold water, they were considered less beautiful than sirens.

While the three sub-species have their own characteristics and features, they share one common thing and that is their love for music.

Credits/References

Written by Liane Hawthorne
Base code by Andrew Sutherland, edited by Iselin Merilä and Desmond Gray.