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LEPRECHAUNS.
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Origins in Irish folklore, animism, background (language, Celtic culture, religion), character traits, meaning of name, disenfranchisement, examples.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Origins in Irish folklore, animism, background (language, Celtic culture, religion), character traits, meaning of name, disenfranchisement, examples.
Paper Introduction:
The leprechaun of Irish folklore is familiar to all who have ever sat among a green-wearing crowd on St. Patrick's Day. According to this modern-day popular telling of fairy tale, the leprechaun came into being something like this:
In the beginning, before there was humankind in the form even of Adam and Eve, God had created the angels to worship Himself. That all did not do so is well known: The Archangel Lucifer thought himself an equal to Himself and fomented a rebellion amongst the angel legions, arch and otherwise. It was touch and go for a while - not because God was ever in doubt of losing, mind you, but because the Almighty Father wanted to see who among his heavenly creations had faith in Himself - and humility in themselves (jealousy, you see, being the root of Lucifer's failings). The Archangels Michael and Gabriel were, of
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He describes the two leprechaun cousins: The Cluricaun makes himself drunk in gentlemen's cellars. Adults - and civilizations- invent elaborate devices for disguising primal responses to the world.Theologies are developed to give "reason" to the primal. A very little fellow, he is always engaged in his trade of shoemaking. It was touch and go for a while - not because God was ever indoubt of losing, mind you, but because the Almighty Father wanted to seewho among his heavenly creations had faith in Himself - and humility inthemselves (jealousy, you see, being the root of Lucifer's failings). Reprinted in The Collected Works of W. B. Crofton. The Far Darring ... They were an Indo-European ethnic group quite prominentin the early affairs of western civilization, a people bringing a rich loadof mythology and cultural identity wherever they settled. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1972.Remnick, David. To the waters and the wild With a faery hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.[xii] The Fairy, or "Fairie," in folk lore (of which the leprechaun are apart) are the expression of an animistic level of human consciousness,wherein all natural objects, animate or inanimate, possess a nature muchlike our own.[xiii] It is a prescientific form of rationalization,attempting to control the surrounding world by understanding it.[xiv]Fairies represent the odd and the ordinary, the beautiful and the dangerousin everyday surroundings. it is a language, if not of a race of poets ...then at least of a race which has 'tired the sun with talking'..."[iii]The language being spoken of is the Irish dialect of Gaelic. Rebellion followed rebellion, to whichthe British Crown responded with confiscation of the lands of each defeatedIrish lord. B. He is clever, escapingconstantly. As a matter of debate, there appear to be three versions of theleprechaun, corresponding with the three Catholic/Gaelic regions of Irelandas it evolved from the time of Cromwell on; they do not seem to haveabandoned the northern quarter, Ulster, which was largely settled by Scots-English Protestants, but "adapted" themselves to British rule, as will beseen below. Yeats: Selected Poems. Yeats, "Irish Writers Ought to Take IrishSubjects," The Boston Pilot (17 May 189 ), reprinted in TheCollected Works of W. Ireland's was never a village culture - farmers lived indwellings built from the material at hand in isolated homes surrounded bytheir fields - the visiting storyteller was the conduit of communicationwith the rest of the country.[xxxvi] The celidh was a gathering where far-flung neighbors would come together and share songs, poetry and stories;every person was a storyteller, and those of full-time storyteller statuswere elevated to the highest levels.[xxxvii] Even today, traditionalculture nearly erased, the Irish have assimilated the English villagecommunal sphere, the pub, and made it a requirement of participation thateach person sharing in a "round" contribute a song, a poem - or a story. On the threshold of identity there is not for Irish people a consideration of place, but of name, and with the name, local history with its monuments, the castles and keeps that mark conquest and resistance, the older earthen mounds in which abide the fairy folk, the places that have sanctity...[xxxv] At the beginning of this paper it was noted that the Irish folkloreof the leprechaun is derived from an oral tradition - a matter of words.As a final observation, even today, the storyteller plays an important rolein Irish culture. Similarly, leprechaun lore describes Irish peasant traits aboutthemselves that they see with rather clear-eyed candor. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1988, 96. These were the prominent figures, but the distancebetween the high and the low was never very great in Ireland, at leastamong those not imported into the country by the British; the storytellerfrom the bog was as conscious of the cultural battle as were theexpatriates making their successful ways through the printing houses ofFleet Street. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1962.Croker, T. - butthat was a success made on Irish terms. Ireland was influenced by the Empire via the successfulintroduction of the Roman Catholic Church in the 5th Century A.D. Yeats: Volume VII - Letters to the New Island, George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, editors. When they imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what another will be like...[x] It is very easy for the contemporary mind to denigrate the"childlike" mindset referred to by observers of folk lore. Religion historian Elaine Pagels points out in The Origin ofSatan that the concept of Satan/ Lucifer as a dissenting figure from withinthe heavenly court is notably a New Testament innovation;[xxi] theleprechaun as "neutral" in the angelic civil war would not predate thatinvention. About to set off on his downward journeyto eternal exile, he turned back to God and taunted: "Sure and You'recasting us away - but what of those who feared to join the fray?" For,indeed, there were those among the heavenly legions who had not joinedsides. "The Stolen Child." Reprinted in W. B. B. That all did notdo so is well known: The Archangel Lucifer thought himself an equal toHimself and fomented a rebellion amongst the angel legions, arch andotherwise. Yeats: Volume VII - Letters to the NewIsland, George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, editors (New York:MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989), 32.MacLeod Yearsley, The Folklore of Fairy-Tale (London: Watts &Company, 1924), 5 -51.Ibid., 1-2. "Irish Writers Ought to Take Irish Subjects," The Boston Pilot (17 May 189 ). Quoted in An Encyclopedia of Faeries, Katherine Briggs, ed. That is not to say thatritual is devoid of meaning; rather, that the meaning of a folk tale as itbecomes myth is stylized by ritual into conformity with the organization.The Iliad as poeticized by Homer is no folk tale: its gods and godlikeheroes are too epically tidy and schematic, organized into categories ofmythic meaning and behavior that play out as ritual reenactment of earlier,anarchic Greek "fairy" and folk tales. and relics of fairy charms were preserved - can [they] continue to exist?[iv] Therefore it is important to note before delving any deeper intoexplorations of the leprechaun folklore that the familiar mode ofexpression - i.e. Children - or at any rate, it is so I remember my own childhood - do not understand large design... B. Irish poet-playwright-cultural figure William Butler Yeats, whowill be much quoted and discussed throughout the pages of this paper, wouldwrite, "Gaelic is my national language but it is not my mother tongue."[v]Meanwhile Padraic Colum, another Irish cultural figure to be much utilizedin these pages, describes an Irish "poet and scholar who, when asked at hisentrance into Dublin University what languages he knew, replied, 'Latin,Greek, Hebrew,' and added, 'but I dream in Irish.'"[vi] It has been the particular tragedy of the Irish people that duringseveral centuries of British occupation, from the time of James I throughto the Irish Rebellion of 1916, there would be a systematicdisenfranchisement of the conquered from their land and, hence, theircultural heritage. The Anglo-Norman presence, while disruptive, wasnot overtly intrusive; the Norman nobles were not terribly interested inpaying more than lip-service to the distant court; and the Hundred YearsWar turned Plantagenet attention east toward France, rather than west. Since, in allrespects it was a leprechaun of the shoemaker type, Colum concludes thatthe name was a local mutation of the Gaelic variants.)[xxxii] The Far Darring version of the leprechaun bears a strikingresemblance to a caricature of a British redcoat and, indeed, leprechaunsbattle one another somewhat along human sectarian lines.[xxxiii] DavidRice McAnally in his 1888 record of Irish folklore Irish Wonders: TheGhosts, Giants, Pookas, Demons, Leprechauns, Banshees, Fairies, Witches,Old Maids and Other Marvels of the Emerald Isle: Popular Tales as told bythe People recounts how trooping red-coated leprechauns from Ulster wereonce seen doing battle with green-jacketed southern leprechauns; all, ofcourse, vanished upon realizing that they were being observed by ahuman.[xxxiv] An Irish person, meeting outside his country one in whom the same nativity is recognized, does not ask, "From what part do you come?" He or she asks, "What name have you?" (In Irish it would be, "What name is on you?") ... New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989, 92.MacCana, Proinsias. . Yeats -to take the English language as their own and come to dominate it in everyliterary category. Reprinted in The Collected Works of W. As part of any discussion of Irish language, myth andculture, it is important to remember that the storytellers themselves havebeen fully aware of what their words mean. Yeats:Selected Poems (New York: Gramercy Books, 1992), 31.Yearsley, 4-5.Ibid., 5 -51.Ibid., 5.Colum, 44-46. New York: Gramercy Books, 1992, 31.-----------------------William Butler Yeats, Irish Fairy & Folk Tales (New York:Barnes & Noble Books, 1933, rev. ed.), 1 . The Book of Irish Verse. London: John Murray, 1825, 14 . It was a process that reached its nadir of "success" inthe 19th Century, when British scholars would denigrate Irish culturebecause it had no written mythic history and, consequently, in the words ofhistorian Justin McCarthy, "leave little impression on contemporaryliterature."[vii] It was, of course, the historical response of the Irishto combat this cultural imperialism with their own appropriation oflanguage. In terms of mythic significance, it is important toemphasize the "speaking" aspects of language: literature is alwaysslightly abstracted, slightly intellectual - the speaking language ofrhythm, shading, volume and pause is the truer reflection of the linguisticpsyche. London: John Murray, 1919 (revised edition), ix-xxiv. Judging from the storytellers' tales recorded by T. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Lady Gregory. According to this modern-day popular telling of fairy tale, the leprechaun came into being somethinglike this: In the beginning, before there was humankind in the form even of Adamand Eve, God had created the angels to worship Himself. It is aspoken language dying out today, but actively thriving until the 184 s,when the Great Famine combined with British land laws to decimate theisland of Eire's land-tilling population through death or starvation-forcedemigration. Commentators on religion havenoted the similarities among folk mythologies throughout the world.[viii]Among those observations is the conclusion that, as mythologies becomeorganized, as theologies are developed from the mythologies, the talesthemselves become ritualized, frozen in form. Water moves - humans move: there is a waterfairy at play on the shimmering surface - who may pull the too-admiringchild to his death if he should fall into the stream trying to touch thejewel-like glimmer. And this endowment has left the fairies of Ireland more tangible and with more of a history than the fairy beings of other countries.[xxiv] The leprechaun, denoted by his name, is a shoemaker to the otherfairies. . Fairy legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Volume I. Reprinted in The Collected Works of W. Leprechaun folklore as it is recounted today, it is obvious, stemsfrom some period in time after the introduction of Christianity intoIreland. As aspoken medium, noted earlier, Gaelic continued the dominant language amongthe Catholic Irish majority until the mid-18 s, when decimation of thatlargely-rural population shifted the demographics in favor of the English-speaking regions, Catholic and Protestant alike. The gold is necessary as ransom, tobuy the leprechaun's freedom in case cleverness cannot free him fromhuman's grasp when captured. B. [promotes] the rapid decay of the Irish vernacular, in which the most of our legends, romantic tales, ballads and bardic annals ... The leprechaun visits the habitatsof humans at night and squirrels away the dropped and misplaced coins - notactual thievery, mind you, since the owners had already somewhat "lost"them - thus building up a pot of gold. Digging deeper into the name "leprechaun," one finds a Celtic root:Lugh, a solar deity, god of all arts and crafts.[xxvii] The devolution ofLugh into the leprechaun is the story of the Irish descent from a proudlymythic Celtic past to the grey medieval reality: Lugh (grandson of Balorof the Evil Eye, another talent of some leprechauns), was the father of thelegendary warrior Cuchulain by the mortal woman Dechtíre. Not to be ignored is the leprechaun's famous "pot o'gold." How, infolk lore, did the wee shoemaker come by his treasure? It is no accident that Sir William Wilde's son, Oscar, joinedthe pantheon of great Irish writers such as Jonathan Swift, WilliamCongreve, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett - W. London: Watts & Company, 1924.Yeats, William Butler. Celtic Mythology. By the fourthcentury B.C., the Celts were accounted one of the four peripheral nationsof the known world, beside the Scythians, the Indians and the Ethiopians.They settled in many places - notably southern Germany, France ("Gaul") andthe British and Irish islands - but as late as the fall of the Roman Empirehad visible communities in Asia Minor.[xvii] Although they settled intoidentifiably communities that became permanently established in the regions- Marseilles, for example - the Celts remained a tribal culture and had astrong tendency to break off into migratory groups. That is, they would liveon the worldly plane, without half so many of their angelic powers, stillable to catch a glimpse of God now and again but, unlike Man and Woman,never quite able to go all the way back into Himself's presence again,either. His haunts are by old castles. One of the earliest written Irish works, in the7th Century A.D., recounts this process: Leabhar Gabhála - The Book ofInvasions.[xviii] Each group had been settled in its previous "home" longenough to develop individualistic tribal traditions and mythologies, yeteach shared in common a dominant Celtic worldview.[xix] The Celtic world outside of Ireland was fixed by Rome. Ireland fared even worse when Puritan Oliver Cromwell came topower during the mid-17th Century; it became official policy to encourageProtestant immigration into Ireland. In the end he will cheat you; he will say or do something that will distract your attention, and when you look again, the leprechaun will have disappeared.[xxvi] The Brothers Grimm in Germany were among the first ethnologists offolklore to note that fairy tales of recent folk development often hadspecific social or political origins. God was in a quandary: for all His almighty powers of foresight,had he not failed to consider that there would be those playing it cleverand remaining neutral? Colum cites other historians who put the firstCeltic migrations into Ireland as late as the Iron Age, withoutdisputing the main thrust of the argument that there is nocultural trace of the earlier inhabitants surviving theincursion.Proinsias MacCana, Celtic Mythology (New York: Peter BedrickBooks, 1983), 6-9.Colum, 43.MacCana, 9-16.Ibid., 132. This was a disaster for the Irish tradition of oral mythology,as noted at the time by Sir William Wilde, an Irish ethnologist: With the depopulation the most terrific which any country has ever experienced on the one hand, and ... Lughdiminished in people's minds, becoming a fairy craftsman named Lugh-chromain - "little stooping Lugh."[xxviii] As noted above, the Irishhistory of belittling occupation and disenfranchisement is played outliterally in the evolution of the leprechaun. New York: Pantheon, 1976, 264.Ellis, Peter Beresford. The Celtshad been pushed out of Eastern Europe in Bronze Age times bySlavic migrations into the territory.Ibid., 396.Peter Beresford Ellis, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 146.Ibid., 147.The cluricane are also called cluricaun, or clobhair-ceann inGaelic, by Yeats in Irish Fairy & Folk Tales, 126.T. The leprechaunworks hard, that is a fine characteristic; but he is also irascible, easilyirritated - not an uncommon human trait. Much like the Irish themselves, leprechauns are a disenfranchisedpeople: However, it seems that the Leprechaun began his career as a member of a community: Lu-chorpan, "The Wee Bodies." The name of his nation became corrupted, and the corruption gave rise to the idea that "brog"[xxv] or shoe made part of the name. B. In all reckonings of Irish pre-history, there was an indigenouspeople inhabiting the island of non-Celtic ethnicity; by the Bronze Age,however, Celtic migrations had overwhelmed them - Ireland's history beginswith a Celtic culture in complete dominance.[xvi] The Celts deservesomething of attention for their accomplishments outside the sphere ofIrish geography. To those angels who hadthought to stay between the sides, he would drop them a tad down from theheavenly field to live between Heaven and Hell. So it was that theCeltic inhabitants of Ireland found themselves invaded repeatedly bysucceeding Celtic tribal groups - from Germany, from Gaul, from Wales,Scotland, and so forth. The Irish more than any other people are aware of the important rolelanguage plays in their character, both as individuals and as a nationalidentity. B. Muhammad's Mecca: History in the Quran. Yeats, "The Stolen Child," reprinted in W. . Then, of course, there was that little affair ofthe heart of creating Man and Woman that had need of being attended to -which presented the Almighty with a solution. Yet, in the end,there is a fear of the dark that remains atavistically personal.[xi] Folklore - and the fairy tales of which leprechauns are a part - is theexpression of those primal, atavistic, "childlike" responses. the English language - is not the proper one. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1983.Montague, John, ed. The Leprechauns then became shoemakers, and like all shoemakers they became irascible and solitary. It is a fine craftsman he is, always worrying about his leather,making sure it is as fine as his weathered, experienced eye can make it.For a weathered old eye it is now: no one can recall ever seeing a youngleprechaun, they are all tiny, stooped beings, constantly at work. B. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993 (rev. Some suppose he is merely the Leprechaun on a spree. London: John Murray, 1919 (revised edition).McAnally, David Rice, Jr., Irish Wonders: The Ghosts, Giants, Pookas, Demons, Leprechauns, Banshees, Fairies, Witches, Old Maids and Other Marvels of the Emerald Isle: Popular Tales as told by the People. Irish Fairy & Folk Tales. Bythe end of the 14 s the Anglo-Norman nobility had evolved viaintermarriage into an Anglo-Gaelic aristocracy often termed "more Irishthan the Irish." Their major contribution to the island's culture was thepeaceful introduction of the English language which, it should be noted,was used as a vernacular substitute for the increasingly anachronisticLatin as a lingua franca among the Irish nobility of different Gaelicdialects. Insist upon his telling; do not let your mind be dissipated by his talk. The leprechaun of Irish folklore is familiar to all who have ever satamong a green-wearing crowd on St. This he does and nothing else.[xxxi] (For good measure, it must be noted that Padraic Colum, making hiscompilation of Irish folklore in the 194 s and 5 s, discovered a CountyKildare version of the leprechaun called the Lurikeen. CroftonCroker in his 1825-8 volumes Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South ofIreland: "Leprecauns and Cluricane[xxix] should be merged together, thedifferences in their names are merely regional - these words are probablyprovincialisms of 'Luacharma'n,' the Irish word for a pygmy."[xxx] Sixtyyears later and not limiting himself to the South of Ireland, Yeatsdiscerned a third version of the leprechaun: the Far Darring (fear deargin Gaelic spelling). Quoted in W. Yeats: Volume VII - Letters to the New Island, George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, editors. . In such an environment the word is part of the meaning of life.There are Great Meanings as recounted in the old myths of their godlikeCeltic ancestors the Tuatha Da Danaan - or the new-born legends of the 1916Rebellion. Lugh himself fades from the scene after helping his son fightin an important war - then returns to help the historical Conn of theHundred Battles (A.D. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989, 31- 35. ... This is a key difference between the Irish folk tale - of which theleprechaun legends are a part - and the mythologies of organizedtraditions, whether religious or cultural. Those clever angels, don't you know, would be the leprechaunsnow.[i] (Speaking of Himself's presence, it is said by some about theleprechauns of Donegal that "It is very pleasant to hear that [they]conduct the souls of the dead as far as the gates of heaven and then returndisconsolate like the poor earth-bound creatures they are.")[ii] Obviously, from this telling, the rhythm of Irish speech is anintegral part of the leprechaun folklore. Eachlanguage carries within it the hidden and not so hidden codes of itsspeakers' worldview. Yeats, "Irish Wonders," Providence SundayJournal (7 July 1989), reprinted in The Collected Works of W. Thiswriter found mention of his work recurring constantly throughoutother reference works.Yeats, Irish Fairy & Folk Tales, 126.Colum, 396.McAnally, 92.Yeats, Irish Fairy & Folk Tales, 125f; the incident is acredited paraphrase of McAnally.Colum, xi.Ibid., xi-xii.Montague, 22.----------------------- 9 Adults and developing civilizationscreate myths and legends - children and primal cultures tell their folk andfairy tales.[ix] One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many incidents, woven into one great event... B. Henry's creation of theChurch of England, which he imposed by fiat, created the first great riftin the Irish cultural fabric: from thenceforth until independence the"official" Church would be an English-speaking establishment at odds withthe indigenous of the population. Montgomery. 177-212), emerging from a magical mist to foretellthe length of Conn's reign and the number of his children. Until independence, the cycle ofdisenfranchisement and dislocation continued - it is not the intention ofthis paper to chronicle that process - but from this point on Gaelic as aliterary medium was stopped cold in Ireland until cultural revivals werepromoted as part of the late 19th Century drive for independence. The wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us... If you are lucky enough to come upon him, draw close to him without making a sound. Much like the slave-lore origins of the "Uncle Remus" stories,the leprechaun's adventures in fooling his captors is a humorous survivalmanual for the oppressed. There are also small meanings to cover the "edges" of history,life, flowing streams, where lost coins get off to, and why sometimes alonely farmer goes crazy from listening to the wind, having "heard theleprechauns playing a song." Endnotes BibliographyColum, Padraic, ed. This is bynot a unique characteristic in the general - certainly the Greeks andRomans were the product of different migrations of people over a longperiod of time - yet in the Irish past there is the rather individualisticaccomplishment of having, until the 12th Century A.D., those separatemigrations all come from variations of the same ethnic group: the Celts. The Celtic culture of Ireland thrived anddeveloped a literature and systematic, albeit oral, mythology. Take him in your grasp. He is almost unknown in Connaught [an Irish county] and the north. Then ask him where his crock of gold is hidden. A Treasury of Irish Folklore. The ascension of the Tudor line was a dark day for Ireland, whosenobility had tended to side with the losing side in the War of the Roses.Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and, finally, James I instituted a series ofreconquering wars designed to bring the Irish nobility in step with astrong, centralized - Protestant - monarchy. [British administered, English- speaking] educational schools on the other ... ed.). What else is the original Red RidingHood tale but a cautionary allegory against sleeping with the enemy, i.e.collaboration? Yeats, "Preface," Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of theTuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and putinto English by Lady Gregory (London: John Murray, 1919,revised edition), xiv.MacLeod, 5.W. Lugh's peoplewere legendary demigods peopling Ireland, the Tuatha De Danaan, or "Peopleof the Goddess Danu," whose tales are told at length in The Book ofInvasions. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989, 91-97. The jinn (genie) of Arabia, indigenous desert demi-demons in both ancient Arabic and Hebrew folk lore, found mention inIslam's Qur'an, a work definitely influenced by the Bible, with a jinn-creation myth remarkably similar to that of the leprechaun.[xxii] The leprechaun is of an even more recent tradition: the word"leprechaun" itself is an Anglicization of the Gaelic leith phrogan, or"the One-shoemaker."[xxiii] Since shoes themselves were not common folkapparel as something deserving a particular craft designation until wellinto the Middle Ages, it can safely be assumed that the modern leprechaunis not so ancient a creation as Pan, Puck and other fairy-folk kin.Indeed, to some degree, the leprechaun is more than a little divorced fromhis folk tale antecedents - at least those kin to the immediate east.Folklorist Padraic Colum notes that: Irish fairy lore is unlike the fairy lore of the rest of Europe in this respect: the fairy powers in Ireland have been endowed with names and personalities - they are not a nameless commonality. With the comingof Saint Patrick, however, the Celtic gods were driven underground. While Yeats is citedas the source here, he himself acknowledges several sources forthe leprechaun legend, including many unpublished oralchroniclers. No, the leprechaun's proclivityfor living near the likes of humankind gives a clue to the origins of histreasure: it is from petty thievery. Gods and Fighting Men: the Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory. "States of Mind: The Devil Problem - the Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels decides to take on a new task: a radical reinterpretation of the biblical creation of Satan." The New Yorker, 3 April 1995, 54-65.Watts, W. In 1171, Norman invasions ordered by Henry II put a third of Irelandunder outside control. Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. It should be noted that the proverbial "potof gold at the end of the rainbow" is an American Irish folk tale - anincorporation of the immigrant tales about largesse in the "land ofopportunity." In no small way it was a tale directly inspired by the 1849California Gold Rush, which came in the middle of the great Irishemigrations induced by the Famine. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and traditions of the South ofIreland, Volume I (London: John Murray, 1825), 14 , quoted inAn Encyclopedia of Faeries, Katherine Briggs, editor (New York:Pantheon, 1976), 264. Montgomery Watts, Muhammad's Mecca: History in the Quran(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 3 -31.Douglas Hyde, cited in Yeats, Irish Fairy & Folk Tales, 125. The vastpower of the Roman Empire inexorably set in place as status quo the ethniccompositions of the lands over which it held sway - even so far west asBritain. As well it must be: Irishlegend is an oral tradition, for "the Irish have remained an oral ratherthan a literate people. In addition, among published sources, this storyof "Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor badenough to be lost" - Yeats quoting an anonymous Irishstoryteller - appears frequently.David Rice McAnally, Jr., Irish Wonders: The Ghosts, Giants,Pookas, Demons, Leprechauns, Banshees, Fairies, Witches, OldMaids and Other Marvels of the Emerald Isle: Popular Tales astold by the People (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1988), 96;quoted in W. Moreover, "Christianized" leprechaun-lore has its counterpartselsewhere in the world. A child's viewof the surrounding world is, of course, unsophisticated and less developedthan an adult's - that is to say, it is primal. MacCana notes, for example, that the Celtic pagancult of Brighid became Saint Brighid and continued uninterruptedalbeit under the aegis of Christian worship.David Remnick, "States of Mind: The Devil Problem - the Gnosticscholar Elaine Pagels has decided to take on a new task: aradical reinterpretation of the biblical creation of Satan," TheNew Yorker (3 April 1995), 56.W. Come away, O human child! Not, as would befound in Teutonic dwarf lore, because of hidden mining operations spiritingaway precious veins of ore from the earth. The Folklore of Fairy-Tale. B. The influence of Latin culture and international trade dominatedthe "known" world until the Empire's decline and the onslaught of Dark Agechaos. ... Croker's recordings of Irish folklore areimportant, coming as they did before the Great Famine andsubsequent decline of the Gaelic storytelling tradition. B. TheArchangels Michael and Gabriel were, of the course, to be seen at theforefront of God's legions, casting down Lucifer and his jealous crowd withthe zeal of the righteous. Patrick's Day. Yeats, "Irish Wonders," Providence Sunday Journal (7 July 1989). means the Red Man, for he wears a red cap and coat, busies himself with practical joking, especially with gruesome joking. As with earlier notes, this observation is repeatedamong various observers, and this particular citing of MacLeodis used only for the convenience of specificity.W. "Preface." Gods and Fighting Men: the Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory. Analternate Gaelic spelling is offered, leith brogan, as well as asuggested English pronunciation, "leith brog."Colum, 396.Yearsley, 6, notes that brog is "possibly connected with theSlavonic bóg, a god" with several diminutive forms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.Yearsley, MacLeod. This was suffering more thanLucifer thought he could stand. A sophisticated modern adult laughs ata folk tale with faeries hiding under a bed waiting to steal away a child -yet the common response to a child's fear of the fairy-filled night bedroomis "the consolatory remark: 'You need not be afraid to be alone in thedark; remember God is in the room, He will take care of you.'"[xv] One characteristic of Irish folklore is that it is by no means theproduct of a single tradition, despite the preceding implication that therewas a "pure" Gaelic population prior to the British occupation. Angels cannot be extinguished save by God'shand, however, and the Lord thought it fitting that they should be banishedfrom His sight rather than ceasing to be. It is a level of response to natural phenomena notmuch disguised by modern religion. Yeats: Volume VII - Letters to the New Island, George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, editors. "Irish Wonders." Providence Sunday Journal, 7 July 1889. Insulated from the power andcultural might of Rome, the Irish developed a Catholicism steeped in Celtictradition and speaking the Gaelic tongue in its churches and monasteries,in addition to the Church Latin.[xx] The 5th through 8th Centuries areoften referred to as Ireland's "Golden Age." It was interrupted in thelate 8th Century, when Viking raiding parties attempted to establishfootholds on the island; unlike in Britain, those Germanic incursionsremained minor enclaves. By the same token, leprechaun lore reflects the Irishrealities of occupation and disenfranchisement - while offering a hope anda strategy for survival. The men who imagined [these stories] had the imagination of children... B.Yeats: Volume VII - Letters to the New Island, George Bornsteinand Hugh Witemeyer, editors (New York: MacMillan PublishingCompany, 1989), 92.Padraic Colum, A Treasury of Irish Folklore (New York: CrownPublishers, 1962), xiv.ibid., xvii.John Montague, The Book of Irish Verse (New York: MacMillanPublishing Company, 1972), 21.Colum, xviii.Quoted in W.
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