6 Chapter Six: The Sidhe/Fairies

“These taller, otherworldly beings eventually develop into ‘the little people,’ the fairies and leprechauns of later Irish legend, whose spirits haunt the tombs and fairy mounds they once built. ‘The little people’ is a euphemism—rather like the prehistoric phrase le bon dieu—meant to disguise the speaker’s fear of something unfamiliar and much larger than himself. It is possible that this flickering phenomenon of the little people represents the afterglow of Irish guilt over their exploitation of more artful aborigines” (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization 76-77).

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W.B. Yeats: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33887/33887-h/33887-h.htm#Page_105

• • “The Trooping Fairies,” pp. 2-3
  • William Allingham’s “The Fairies,” pp. 4-5
  • “The Brewery of Egg-Shells,” pp. 48-49

The Otherworld

“We need to understand that the Otherworld was more than an imaginary realm where the ancient gods and heroes dwelt and feasted; it was an elusive and indefinable space that was as much connected to the subconscious or inner psyche of the individual and the group consciousness of the community as it was to magical gods, or the spirit of past ancestors, or the energetic resonances of the natural world. All these things come together in the Otherworld, just as they might in a dream” (Magan 158).

“A púca is an energetic manifestation that engenders fear in the dark or an apparition arising from the uncertainty sparked by the absence of light.  The most specific description I’ve found in a dictionary is a indefinitely shaped evil spirit that goes about on all fours and carries victims off on its back” (Magan 37-8).

Fun Fact: College students who wear predominantly black are often referred to as pookies (a reference to pookas).

“When they use the term ailse for ‘cancer,’ they are unlikely to know that it is also a disparaging term for a particularly mischievous form of fairy. . . [B]raon ailse could mean both a chemotherapy drip treatment and magical fairy droplets that fall on the tombs of certain tyrants, causing rot” (Magan 110).

“The word iamhar–the empty husk of someone when the fairies have taken their essence” (Magan 111).

Vocabulary

• pookas
• leprechauns
• banshee (bean-sidhe)
• fairy rings, forts, wells
• Samhain, Imbolc, Lughnasa, Beltane
• The Otherworld