Day Eighteen: Leprechauns
This post is not about the films, I just want to clarify that to start. I have not seen any of the Leprechaun films and I don't intend to. It may be one day that I am at a friend's and they decide to subject me to it but, so far, I have never seen them. I do however, intend to talk about Leprechauns and how scary they actually are.
Leprechauns have gone a similar way to unicorns and become, happy cartoony parodies of themselves. Original stories of leprechauns were not quite as pleasant as we have ben led to believe. I do remember an episode of the Ghostbusters animated series that featured a Leprechaun, I quite enjoyed that one.
Leprechaun myth actually started off quite innocently. Leprechauns were solitary Irish fairies that liked making shoes and sometimes causing mischief. Not necessarily malevolent or evil creatures, they liked to mess with people a little and play their pranks. Similar to many early folk characters. As time passed, they became a lot more sinister.
These days, leprechauns are rather ugly creatures, wizened, old and bent over, they are grotesque litle creatures who are not to be trusted. Leprechauns offer people gold. Leprechauns like gold and often have a cauldron of it. Often they will ask a question, sometimes a riddle and the way the people answer determines their fate. If you accept the leprechaun's challenge you have to answer, you have no choice. Answer incorrectly (or refuse and/or try to back out) and the leprechaun takes it's revenge. It is unclear what happens to some people. Some are cursed to spend the rest of their lives in poverty, some simply disappear. Whether the ones who disappear are dead or simply somewhere else is rarely revealed. As stories of malevolent and mischievous fairies often have them stealing people away to the fairy world, it is fair to assume this may be the fate of some of the leprechauns' victims.
One thing about leprechauns is that you don't want to mess with them. Any attempt to trick a leprechaun or steal it's gold will not end well. Some leprechauns guard the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, if you steal it, it will take it's revenge. If not on you, it will take it's revenge on your descendants. In the Ghostbusters episode I watched, the leprechaun appeared to people asking "Where's me gold?" Even though some people tried to repay the leprechaun, as they didn't have the original gold and did not know where it was, the leprechaun took it's revenge and the people disappeared. I didn't watch the whole episode so I don't know how the Leprechaun was defeated (if he was) and what became of the people he had already taken. By all means enlighten me.
While I have not seen the films, as I understand it, it focuses on a malevolent and murderous leprechaun called Luban, who is after his gold. In the first film he targets a family whom he believes has stolen his pot of gold. That's pretty much all I know and I learned most of that from Wikipedia.
All in all there are two kind of leprechauns, the overdone, overused sweet Irish little men who seem to be constantly celebrating St Patrick's Day and the evil, scheming little creatures it is probably best to avoid. Either way, they have become part of popular culture. Of course Artemis Fowl fans are familiar with the Lep-Recons, but other than that, they're pretty run of the mill fairies of today.
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