The Beginning of Leprechaun Folklore

To those angels who had thought to stay mingled with the sides, he would drop them a tad down from the celestial field to live between Heaven and Hell. That is, they would live on the worldly plane, without half so many of their angelic powers, belt up able to catch a glimpse of God without delay and again but, unlike Man and Woman, never quite able to go all told the way back into Himself's presence again, either. Those cagey angels, don't you know, would be the leprechauns now.

(Speaking of Himself's presence, it is said by some about the leprechauns of Donegal that "It is very(prenominal) pleasant to hear that [they] conduct the souls of the dead as farthest as the gates of heaven and then return coloured like the poor earth-bound creatures they are.")

Obviously, from this telling, the rhythm of Irish speech is an intrinsical part of the leprechaun folklore. As well it mustiness be: Irish legend is an oral tradition, for "the Irish have remained an oral quite than a literate people. ... it is a language, if non of a melt down of poets ... then at least of a race which has 'tired the cheerfulness with talking'..." The language being spoken of is the Irish dialect of Celtic. It is a spoken language dying out today,

Leprechaun folklore as it is recounted today, it is obvious, stems from some head in date after the introduction of Christianity into Ireland. Religion historian Elaine Pagels points out in The Origin of Satan that the concept of Satan/ Lucifer as a dissenting figure from within the heavenly tribunal is notably a New Testament innovation; the leprechaun as "neutral" in the angelic civil war would not predate that invention. Moreover, "Christianized" leprechaun-lore has its counterparts elsewhere in the world. The jinn (genie) of Arabia, indigenous desert demi-demons in both ancient Arabic and Hebrew folk lore, put in mention in Islam's Qur'an, a work definitely influenced by the Bible, with a jinn-creation myth remarkably similar to that of the leprechaun.

(For good measure, it must be noted that Padraic Colum, making his compilation of Irish folklore in the 1940s and 50s, discovered a County Kildare version of the leprechaun called the Lurikeen. Since, in all respects it was a leprechaun of the shoemaker type, Colum concludes that the name was a local anaesthetic mutation of the Gaelic variants.)

One characteristic of Irish folklore is that it is by no means the ware of a single tradition, disrespect the preceding implication that on that point was a "pure" Gaelic population prior to the British occupation. This is by not a unique characteristic in the general - certainly the Greeks and Romans were the product of different migrations of people over a long period of time - yet in the Irish past there is the rather individualistic accomplishment of having, until the 12th Century A.D., those sieve migrations all come from variations of the same ethnic group: the Celts.

The Brothers Grimm in Germany were among the first ethnologists of folklore to note that fairy tales of recent folk developing often had specific social or political origins. What else is the overlord Red Riding Hood tale but a cautionary allegory against sleeping with the enemy, i.e. collaborati
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.