Leprechauns

Did you know that the cereal Lucky Charms is not sold in Ireland? Yup folks, that’s right… that sugar-wielding Lucky the Leprechaun, with his good luck charm marshmallows, somehow never made it to the Emerald Isle. This begs the question: How did Lucky the Leprechaun make it to America in the first place?

I learned this trivial factoid at the Leprechaun Museum yesterday, an institution dedicated to the teaching of Irish folklore located in the heart of Dublin. While the museum is geared in general towards children, one can learn a tremendous amount and, perhaps, life’s most important lessons from children's literature and folktales.

Anyhow, back to Lucky Charms.

You know those charm-shaped, artificially colored, crunchy magical marshmallows sprinkled throughout the cereal? It turns out that they're shaped in the form of objects that leprechauns - or any fairy for that matter - dread. Take the purple horseshoe-shaped marshmallow, for example. Iron was, and possibly still is, used to ward off leprechauns. Thus the Irish took to hanging horseshoes made of iron above entrances to their homes or barns. Why? They served as an unwelcome mat.

The first reference to the leprechaun is found in the story of Fergus Mac Léti, a King from the ancient province of Ulster. Members of the fairy (sídhe) family, leprechauns became known in rural Ireland for their red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious temper. Leprechauns are portrayed in folklore as short, clever men with thin legs that carefully guard their gold found at the end of rainbow or in bushes.

Over centuries, the legend of the leprechaun spread to other areas of Europe. Irish and British cousins include brownies, hobs, the drunken clurichaun, and far dirrig.

It was important to keep all sorts of sídhe away from one's home. Of course iron horseshoes couldn't possibly do it alone. Other mechanisms to keep changelings - evil fairies bent on kidnapping mortals and replacing them with shapeshifters - emerged. For example, the Irish took to spitting on their hands before shaking someone else's as a means of greeting. If the other person refused to shake hands, it was a fairy, and immediately told to leave. Another way to ward off fairies? Put a bucket of dirty water outside of one's home. Fairies don't care for muck.

I suppose feisty leprechaun could be seen as having some of the traits of the stereotypical Irishman: red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious. One might also see a parallel between the spirit of the leprechaun and that of famous Irish writers.

Earlier in the day, I visited the Dublin Writer’s Museum. There I learned that Irish literature can be classified into one of two general bodies: rural tradition (stories influences by folklore and writing in Irish) and urban writing. The earliest forms of written literature can be found in poems of praise, satire, and lament written by professional poets in the 6th century. They were passed on by oral tradition via the seanachie, traditional storytellers, and eventually collected and written down. Legends such as the Tain Bó Cúlaigne and Fenian Cycle are still being translated into English today, and are studied by people of all ages. They survive today and shed light on early Irish and Scots-Gaelic life.

The following is a quote I copied down from signage at the Dublin Writer's Museum yesterday: "It has been claimed that the greatest weapon the English ever gave to the Irish was their own language."

When the English came to Ireland, literary movements emerged as a means of rebellion. At first, writers took aim at organized religion, particularly that of the Roman Catholic Church. Several hundred years later, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 was enforced upon the people of Ireland by British authorities. Writers were no longer able to publish work with references to sexuality and "individual consciousness".

How did the rebellious, fiery Irish writers respond? They became disrupters of established literary forms. They questioned rules, invented new genres of writing, and ultimately created new forms of literature found nowhere else in the world.

There is so much more that I could write about in this posting… about the work of writers and collectors such as Lady Gregory, John Synge, and W.B. Yeats, writers that worked to preserve the Irish rural tradition. Perhaps it is best to end this post with one of my favorite piece of Irish literature, an excerpt from Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats called The Golden Age:

A while ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last time I had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for a message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who inhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I saw with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog, moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light; and I remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go about representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was gone.