What Do Leprechauns Look Like?

Let me put it this way: in Irish folklore, leprechauns are definitely closer to the “movie murderer” end of the appearance spectrum than the “cereal mascot” end.

Short. Wizened. Decrepit. And dressed in outdated clothes. That is the general description. 

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

Or, as D. R. McAnally, Jr. put it in his 1888 book Irish Wonders:

“He [the Leprechawn] is of diminutive size, about three feet high, and is dressed in a little red jacket or roundabout, with red breeches buckled at the knee, gray or black stockings, and a hat, cocked in the style of a century ago, over a little, old, withered face.”

McAnally goes on to specify that the leprechaun will typically wear an Elizabethan ruff around his neck and frills of lace at his wrists, with the exception being on Ireland’s “wild west coast,” where he “dispenses with ruff and frills and wears a frieze overcoat over his pretty red suit, so that, unless on the lookout for the cocked hat, ‘ye might pass a Leprechawn on the road and never know it’s himself that’s in it at all.’”

Now, as you might have noticed, one color keeps popping up again and again in McAnally’s leprechaun description. And that color…is not green.

It’s red.

And this aligns with Yeats’ opinion that “[t]he trooping fairies wear green jackets, the solitary ones red” (source: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry).

As a solitary fairy, the leprechaun essentially has a uniform that is red by default. And in some areas of Ireland, that uniform is an actual, military uniform. (I mentioned this in my Celtic Santa article, FYI.)

For example, according to McAnally, in northern counties where the leprechaun is known as the Logheryman, he wears “the uniform of some British infantry regiments, a red coat and white breeches, but instead of a cap, he wears a broad-brimmed, high, pointed hat, and after doing some trick more than usually mischievous, his favorite position is to poise himself on the extreme point of his hat, standing at the top of a wall or on a house, feet in the air.”

Then there’s the Lurigadawne in Tipperary, which wears “an antique slashed jacket of red, with peaks all round and a jockey cap, also sporting a sword, which he uses as a magic wand.”

And prepare yourself for the Luricawne in Kerry, whom McAnally describes, in great detail, as follows:

“The Luricawne is a fat, pursy little fellow whose jolly round face rivals in redness the cut-a-way jacket he wears, that always has seven rows of seven buttons in each row, though what use they are has never been determined, since his jacket is never buttoned, nor, indeed, can it be, but falls away from a shirt invariably white as the snow. When in full dress he wears a helmet several sizes too large for him, but, in general, prudently discards this article of headgear as having a tendency to render him conspicuous in a country where helmets are obsolete, and wraps his head in a handkerchief that he ties over his ears.”

That is very specific. 

And while we can certainly find a resemblance to modern leprechaun depictions in these descriptions—with the stockings, and the breeches, and the jacket—the colors are way off. 

Modern leprechauns are almost always decked out in green, whereas in earlier iterations, they wear red. 

Indeed, only one solitary fairy from Irish folklore is known to wear the color green. And it isn’t the leprechaun; it’s the leprechaun’s cousin—or evil twin, one might say:

The Clurichaun.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for my next post: “What’s the Difference Between a Leprechaun and a Clurichaun?“

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