The subject of mermaids – and their skin color – raises two issues about traditional European perceptions of the supernatural.

Before those questions, however, it is important to set the stage. The idea of sea people in Northern Europe took two forms: they were either communities of supernatural beings who appeared as seals and could shed their skins to reveal a human form or they were half fish and half human – the most popular modern image of the mermaid. Scandinavia as well as Britain and Ireland exhibited both these motifs: the fishtail was more common in a southern swath that included Denmark, southern Britain and southern Ireland; the seal skin/human was more popular north of those places.

I have written about this in an article on Cornish mermaids, which became a chapter in my book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (2018). In that article, I discuss the overall distribution and history of the mermaid motifs. This includes, importantly, a migratory legend classified as ML 4080, “The Mermaid Wife.” In this widespread story, a human man discovers a mermaid and steals something essential that she needs to transform back into her maritime form: this is either the seal skin, or a magic cap that allows her to shed her fishtail.

The legend (a story generally told to be believed) describes how the man abducts the hapless creature as his wife, and she bears several children. Eventually (sometimes one of her children asks her about an object that he has found hidden), the woman retrieves her stolen object and immediately returns to the sea, sorrowfully abandoning her children – if not her husband.

The point here is that we have a window into how people who told the story – and who listened to it – perceived the skin color of the mermaid (the first issue cited above). I have never seen a variant where the skin color of the mermaid is described as anything but what the community would expect as typical – in other words, people expected the abducted wife of the man to blend into the community without any remarkable feature. She looked like “us” – the members of the community that told and listened to story.

That said, it is important to point out (the second issue) that there was a tradition that sometimes crops up throughout Northern Europe to see supernatural beings as having brown or darker skin color. This isn’t common, but it does occur. When I saw promo shots of the latest mermaid film, I was immediately reminded of that motif, and I was perfectly comfortable with the image because of this second issue. Just sayin’.

Let’s also keep in mind that Hans Christian Andersen’s story of “The Little Mermaid” is not a folk legend; rather it is his artistically conceived story inspired by a folk tradition. It’s just something to remember, but since he stayed within the bounds of the folk tradition when he invented his story, the idea of a darker-skinned mermaid wouldn’t be too surprising.

This doesn’t answer your core question about demography – but I find the grounding of the folk tradition important to establish.

So, what about your question of demography. I don’t have exact figures, and we can hope that someone will address this. We must keep in mind, that people are often on the move, and people from many places have often found themselves in many other places. There was a lot of contact throughout the medieval period with the Middle East and North Africa, and one should never be incredulous about a reference to a dark-skinned individual anywhere in Northern Europe.

At the same time, we must remember that such occurrences were not as common as some modern depictions of the medieval world would imply. I’m not an art critique and I don’t take a position on artistic license, so I am not prepared to comment on that one way or another.

An anecdote can lend us some perspective. My mentor, Sven S. Liljeblad (1899-2000) helped organize the Irish folklore archives in the late 1920s. In 1929, the famous Irish folklorist, James Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga) (1899-1980) took Sven to a village in the far west of Ireland, so Sven could see a traditional, Irish-speaking community. When they arrived, the entire community had turned out in their hundreds to see this newcomer. Delargy introduced Sven as the visiting folklorist from Sweden, at which point they entire village turned away and returned to their business.

When Delargy asked the locals why they had come to see the newcomer and then had abruptly left, they explained that they had heard that the newcomer was from the Sudan, not from Sweden. They had never seen anyone with dark skin and wanted to see such a person. Disappointed, they left. Let me repeat to underscore this: they had never seen anyone with dark skin. But – and this is important – they had heard about people with dark skin.

We must use extreme caution about anecdotes. They are single reference points and can skew our understanding of the whole. Skin color has become something of a red herring in the recent perceptions of and debates about the past. People from diverse places ended up in diverse places. Their scarcity depended on the time and place.

My instinct when it comes to this recent film is to return to the pre-modern “folk” perspective. Would someone, who had heard Migratory Legend 4080 and who was then shown an image of the mermaid with dark skin, have been surprised and rejected that for any reason? I suspect that most wouldn’t because of the second point I made above. It is also important, however, to remember that folklore is fluid. One bearer of the local tradition did not always perceive things the same way as a neighbor. The telling of these stories often inspired debate amongst the folk: “I see it this way”; “Well, that may be, but I have heard … etc.”

The brown mermaid can be justified by what is admittedly anecdotal evidence of diverse people in diverse places throughout Northern Europe, but for me, it is completely justified by the folk perception that would have allowed for brown skin to be associated with the supernatural. Our new mermaid would not necessarily have raised any eyebrows among the folk.