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Paper short abstract

Mermaiding reimagines waterscapes as enchanted intangible heritage. This paper explores how individuals identifying as mermaids, sirens, and selkies forge intimacy with lakes through embodied practice, renewing connections between folklore, identity, and wellbeing.

Paper long abstract

Based on ongoing ethnographic research, this paper explores how individuals in the contemporary Scandinavian mermaiding community, bring encounters with lakes and sea shores into sites of reimagining the landscape. Swimming, free diving and dancing in monofins while holding their breath beneath the surface , practitioners describe how local waters become familiar companions, sites of belonging, and personal transformation.

These creative practices emerge not only as engagements with folklore through playful visual means, but as serious responses to the pressures of late modern life. Many begin mermaid swimming in response to burnout or distress, discovering in the waterworld a way to imagine alternative ways of being and to reconnect with nature, with themselves, and with others—human as well as more-than-human.

Mermaiding reveals water not as an anonymous landscape but as a participant in heritage and identity, reshaping how humans imagine and enact belonging within more-than-human worlds. These embodied practices show how heritage is continually remade in water, generating new identities and intimacies that challenge modern disenchantment and sustain the presence of folklore in everyday life.