5 Things You Didn’t Know: Leprechauns

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Leprechauns are Irish folklore's answer to the mythological trickster. The great Irish poet and writer William Butler Yeats referred to them as "sluttish, slouching, jeering, mischievous phantoms" and "great practical jokers." They're difficult to catch, but the difficulty isn't with the leprechaun himself, but with the catcher: If you can lock a focused, unbreakable gaze on him, he can't escape, and presumably he'll lead you to his pot of gold. The problem thus far has been that no one has an attention span sufficiently long enough to stay fixed on him. The advent of MTV and the internet suggest that the leprechaun's alleged stash of the shiny stuff is safe.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day and all that is proudly Irish, we present 5 things you didn't know about leprechauns.



1- Leprechauns used to wear red

2- Early leprechauns were pagan divinities

The first thing you didn't know about leprechauns is that while everything associated with the Emerald Isle is green, especially on St. Patrick's Day, the figure of the leprechaun himself — a symbol of Ireland whether Ireland likes it or not — hasn't always been dressed in green. In fact, according to Samuel Lover (writing in the 1830s) and the badass Yeats himself (writing some 50 years later), this famous figure of Irish folklore, the leprechaun, wore a red frock coat, not the green one he's so closely associated with today.While it's easy to imagine leprechauns originating in mythology, it's not so easy seeing these good-natured, magical figures that can turn regular white marshmallows into an array of colorful and curiously shaped marshmallows as decedents of mythological gods.

Yet, according to Joseph Campbell's famous The Hero with a Thousand Faces, leprechauns are just that. Campbell calls leprechauns "reductions of the earlier pagan divinities" known as Tuatha De Danaan, a race of gods and part of the Celtic mythological cycle of Medieval Ireland.



3- Leprechauns are derogatory symbols in Ireland

Another thing you didn't know about leprechauns is that while they may be popular in other parts of the world, they are anything but popular in Ireland. The term “leprechaun” and what he represents, when applied as an adjective, almost always comes in a depreciatory sense — whether discussing politics, language or exported Irish culture.

The 1959 Disney film Darby O'Gill & the Little People may be partly to blame. According to the History Channel, this innocuous flick about an Irish storyteller and a leprechaun king virtually reinvented the leprechaun, divorcing him from his Celtic roots, infusing him with the American mirth and good-time trickery intimately associated with the figure we know today and forever shackling him to St. Patrick's Day. This is an oddity since, prior to the film, the leprechaun had had nothing to do with the religious feast of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

We have two more things you didn’t know about leprechauns after the jump…