Why Might a Human Fear Merpeople?
FROM THE LATIN WORD MARE,
MEANING “sea,” comes the name of these creatures known all over the
world. The merpeople who live in the lake at Hogwarts, like so many
others in literature, have green skin and long green hair. They
have human torsos but silver fish tails instead of legs. (J. K.
Rowling also adds some details that make her merpeople unique.
Their houses are arranged in villages like those in the suburbs on
land, and they make pets of grindylows.)
Legends of merpeople exist in nearly every
culture. For instance, it was once said that the French aristocracy
descended from a mermaid named Melusina.
As Rowling says in Beasts, the Sirens of Greek mythology are similar to
mermaids.
See also: Beasts Grindylows
Kappas
They sing to the sailors of ships that pass by,
enchanting them to their deaths on nearby rocks. In The Odyssey, Odysseus makes his crew plug their ears
when they sail by the sirens, but orders them to tie him to the
ship’s mast so he can listen to the beautiful music without
danger.
When Harry meets the merpeople during the second
task of the Triwizard Tournament, he finds the same danger that
contact with merpeople often symbolizes: the risk that the sea will
prove so alluring that one will never return to land. As a
character in one of the “Twice-Told Tales” of the early American
author Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a young woman, “I fancied you akin
to the race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be to
dwell with you among the quiet coves, in the shadows of the cliffs,
and to roam along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and when our
northern shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely,
far amid summer seas.”