The People of Light and Shadow: The Merrow

“My home is the Tir fo Thoinn, the land beneath the waves.“

—The Ode at Pint’s End, by Lauren N. Fields and Janie Killips

This week, in portrait number ten of The People of Light and Shadow series, we introduce Ireland’s own take on mermaids, entitled “The Merrow,” featuring Lauren Fields.

The Merrow: Lauren Fields

A close friend and collaborator, Birch House Immersive co-creator Lauren Fields has appeared in most Distant Era series. From the beginning, she has contributed her time, talent, and wisdom to help this fledgling effort take flight, so naturally she was among those we enlisted for our first series back after quarantine. Lauren chose to embody a merrow, a red-capped mermaid from Ireland’s fairy lore since (at least) the nineteenth century, a creature that figured prominently in her company’s immersive play, The Ode at Pint’s End. She shares the story behind her choice of the merrow here:

I’ve had the privilege of being part of several Distant Era shoots, so when Steve asked me to join this series after such a long break I wanted to challenge myself to do something I hadn’t done before. In our first conversation, Steve mentioned an interest in exploring mythical characters through expressions, which, as someone who usually brings a lot of prop and costume pieces to these shoots, was very daunting.
I started thinking about how to ‘uncover’ myself and find a character and look with more vulnerability than my previous high collars and full veils. I loved writing for the merrows in The Ode at Pint’s End, and how complicated their feelings and motivations were. I thought stepping into the merrow myself would give me a lot to play with emotionally, and challenge me to steer into the complete opposite direction of my usual aesthetic—with the hair, makeup, and hat as my only costume pieces.
Lauren Fields

Photography

For this session, we were joined by makeup artist Rose Nobs and Quinn Leary, who assisted Lauren in creating her merrow look, and Elizabeth MacDougald assisted in the studio. Rose and I have previously worked on headshot makeup, so this was an opportunity to explore a more dramatic look. At first, the idea was create a drenched look for which we would prepare a warm bath for Lauren and then place a pool or basin in studio to collect the dripping water, but we realized this would quickly wash away any makeup we planned to use, so we abstained from the bath.

Merrow wear a magical red cap called a cohuleen druith that allows them to cross between the sea and land, but without which they could not return to the sea (so their suitors on land would try to steal these hats). Lauren and Quinn created the merrow’s signature cohuleen druith for this session.

The merrow’s “mermaid tail” was never a consideration in the photography because aside from not having a tail, the images in this series tend to be three-quarter shots without legs, feet, or tails. I thought we’d figure out a way to communicate the merrow, though I wasn’t quite sure at the time what that would be.

We began the session with one 3′ x 4′ softbox camera left and a large white umbrella behind camera to diffuse shadows. By the time we came to the end of the shoot and this portrait, we had switched the main light to a beauty dish for some very specific light and shadow. Camera settings were the standard for this series: shot at 85 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/200 sec.

Quinn and Rose creating the merrow look for Lauren. In the foreground, the *cohuleen druith*.

Editing

“The Merrow” has been the most challenging portrait to edit in the series thus far. The first challenge was to figure out how to communicate the creature in the portrait. It involved using the makeup patterns as templates to overlay fish scale textures. I tried many fish scale textures before settling on the one I used. It was only when I enlarged the texture and placed it on the lower half of the merrow that the creature began to emerge from the photograph.

There was also a great deal of color adjustment. Skin is a reddish hue, and I shot an image that was mostly skin on a brown textured background, and brown is also mostly red. It took some time to figure out what wasn’t working in the image and start moving blue and green tones in to complement the red, including the aqua hues of the scales. The cohuleen druith and the hair needed some adjustments to bring out the reds.

The Merrow, Story Inspirations

I knew merrow primarily from Dungeons & Dragons, where they appear as brutish fish-men, though I had recently seen and photographed ethereal, magical female merrow in Birch House Immersive’s show, The Ode at Pint’s End. Having also photographed dark sirens just before The People of Light and Shadow, I didn’t have a solid idea of the mood and tone Lauren described for her merrow, which she said would be less dark in tone, a bit more colorful and high fantasy.

Illustration of male and female merrow Lauren sent as a resource (source unknown).

It’s easy to confuse the tone. Merrow “first appear” in the tales of nineteenth-century Irish writer T. C. Croker, who in his book Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (linked here; “The Lady of Gollerus” and “The Soul Cages” are two stories featuring merrow) remixed folklore with literature, inventing his own stories from traditional sources. In his stories, the female merrow are enchanting sea maidens, whereas the male merrow are brutish monsters. Quotes around “first appear” because Croker was putting his own spin on traditional tales that go back in Irish history at least as far back as the The Book of Invasions (mermaids also appear on twelfth-century Irish cathedrals), and before that probably to Homer.

But merrow are the crude monsters portrayed in D&D and they are also the beautiful female mermaids with the red caps, and while they have enchanting voices, they are also not man-eating sirens. The cohuleen-druith-wearing merrow is a distinct creature from literature and folklore understandably confused with similar creatures from which they are likely descended in folklore (like sirens), as well as with the male creatures of their own species.

As ever, learning the lore and backgrounds of these creatures of fairytale and folklore is an immensely fulfilling part of this series, and I’m grateful to Lauren for the challenge of making a portrait of this enchanting being.