What Is a Leprechaun? The Folkloric Origins of Ireland’s Most Famous Fairy

Is it a type of elf? A dwarf? A little old man?

While you’ll often find such terms included in dictionary definitions of “leprechaun,” the reality is that those are merely descriptions of what leprechauns look like.

And of course, I’m using the word “reality” here very loosely. 

Because as far as we know, leprechauns are imaginary beings, or, if they do exist, we certainly do not have indisputable evidence of their existence.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Pssst. You can watch a video summary of this article here. (Text continues below.)

Imaginary or not, leprechauns exist in the Irish folktales and fairytales that have been passed down for centuries. And based on the characterizations found in those stories, I propose the following concise definition for “leprechaun”:

A leprechaun is a solitary Irish fairy, characterized by its short stature, habitual shoe-making and mischief-making, and its immense wealth, which typically takes the form of crocks of hidden treasure.

Or, as Thomas Keightley defines “leprechaun” in his 1828 book The Fairy Mythology:

“The most remarkable of the Fairy-tribe in Ireland, and one which is peculiar to the country, is the Leprechaun…He is by profession a maker of brogues; he resorts in general only to secret and retired places, where he is discovered by the sounds which he makes hammering his brogues. He is rich, like curmudgeons of his sort, and it is only by the most violent threats of doing him some bodily harm, that he can be made to show the place where his treasure lies; but if the person who has caught him can be induced (a thing that always happens, by the way) to take his eyes off him, he vanishes, and with him the prospect of wealth.”

Keightley goes on to note that there is only one story he knows of in which multiple leprechauns are seen together, which aligns with what W. B. Yeats wrote about leprechauns in his 1888 book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry—that the leprechaun is a solitary fairy as opposed to a trooping fairy.

What’s the difference between a solitary fairy and a trooping fairy?

You’ve probably already guessed it. Solitary fairies generally live and work alone, whereas trooping fairies live and work together. But there’s actually more to it than that.

According to Yeats, solitary fairies, including the Cluricaun, Far Darrig, and Lepracaun, appear withered and old and are “in every way unlike the sociable spirits [or trooping fairies]. They dress with all unfairy homeliness, and are, indeed, most sluttish, slouching, jeering, mischievous phantoms. They are the great practical jokers among the good people.”

Granted, Yeats also mentions leprechauns in his section on trooping fairies, noting that the chief occupations of these more sociable spirits are “feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them,” Yeats continues, “the lepra-caun—the shoemaker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing.”

Accepting this definition of leprechaun, it’s clear that the creature is not a recluse. And indeed, its incessant shoe-making may serve a crucial function in the broader fairy world.

But where do leprechauns come from?

As to the origins of the leprechaun in Irish storytelling, many theories abound. But one theory we must dispel immediately—and really it’s more of a meme than an actual, evidence-based theory—is the one concerning leprechauns being an actual race of tiny humans who came to Ireland from Africa before being expelled and/or exterminated by Saint Patrick.

I actually did a whole video on the Saint Patrick murderer theory that you can check out if you so desire.

But long story short, there’s no historical or archaeological evidence that substantiates such a claim.

What’s more, as W. Y. Evans Went pointed out way back in 1911 in his book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries: 

“The testimony of Celtic literature goes to show that leprechauns and similar dwarfish beings are not due to a folk-memory of a real pygmy race, that they are spirits like elves.”

Some scholars and folklorists—Yeats included—get more specific in their analysis of leprechauns and believe them to be descendants/degradations of the gods and goddesses of Irish mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann. To quote Yeats:

“[T]he pagan gods of Ireland–the Tuath-De-Danān–robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies.”

Then there are those who get even more specific, arguing that the leprechaun is derived both in name and character from the many-skilled god Lugh (more on him later).

Regardless, the leprechaun’s penchant for cobbling could potentially hint at a connection to the Tuatha Dé Danann, a supernatural race renowned for their artistic skills.

As Thomas Cahill wrote in his 1994 book How the Irish Saved Civilization:

“In the foundation myth, the Tuatha De Danaan are preternaturally skilled in building and craftsmanship. These taller, otherworldly beings eventually devolve 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.”

There is a lot to unpack there, so let me do my best to translate this into you’re-at-a-St. Patrick’s-Day-party-and-want-to-explain-this-to-someone speak:

Leprechauns are small because the people who lived in Ireland before the arrival of Celtic culture—this is back in the Stone Age—those people built all of the giant stone circles and dolmens and other stone monuments in Ireland. They often get attributed to Celtic druids, but the Celts did not build those. What they did build was a religion on top of those stone structures, assigning their Celtic gods to different sídhe, or mounds.

And what Cahill is suggesting is that Irish people, most likely in the centuries following the arrival of Christianity, grew afraid of their former pagan deities and the sites they were believed to occupy, so the storytellers literally (orally?) shrank those deities in their stories as a way of stripping them of their power.

Alternatively, or simultaneously, perhaps, the shrinkage of the pagan gods of Ireland could be a guilt thing. A sort of late apology to Ireland’s original inhabitants. A “hey, we’re sorry we hijacked your intricately constructed megalithic sites for our mythology, as a consolation, we’ve decided to shrink all of our gods and make them fairies in our folklore moving forward.”

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