For your St. Patrick’s Day enjoyment, one of my favorite Irish songs, done by my favorite Irish group, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

I suspect I may have posted this clip before. I don’t care. It’s only once a year, and this song embodies one of my favorite aspects of Irish culture—the joyous hyperbole of Hibernian rhetoric. C.S. Lewis recalls in Surprised By Joy how his father (an Irishman, of course) used to launch into Ciceronian philippics denouncing the horrific misbehavior of his sons, to the point where sometimes they had to restrain themselves from laughing. One of my favorite stretches of my own writing was Father Aillil’s curse against Erling’s enemies, near the beginning of The Year of the Warrior. One of the reasons I enjoy inhabiting Aillil’s skull is the opportunity to declaim on the large scale, unrestrained by reason or good taste.

Ireland has opened the world’s first Leprechaun Museum. Judging from the story (which might, I’ll grant, provide an incomplete description) it seems to be primarily an exercise in feeling very small, walking around among giant-sized furniture. If that’s the idea, I’d say it misses the point of leprechauns entirely.

I think I’ve told the story before. I was very young, and I’d climbed up into the upper loft of the oldest building on our farm—a storage shed which had once been a stagecoach way station (it was rumored a man had been murdered there, around the 1850s). I was just sitting there in the dim window light, among the stored junk (like my father’s old horse harnesses, hanging on a rack), when my eyes fell on a carton which had a rather poorly done logo, a crude drawing of a little man.

And suddenly I felt as if an electric shock had run through me. I wasn’t afraid of the picture of the little man itself (I think), but of the idea that there was a little man around there somewhere, watching me.

I rushed down the stairs and out, and never felt entirely comfortable up there again.

That feeling—that shock of being watched by a creature both very different from you, and hostile to you, is the essence of the leprechaun, I think.

Leprechauns, as well as fairies, bogeys, hobbyhoods, nixes, nisser, and other such supernatural nuisances were, in their time, the equivalent of aliens today. They were the frightening Other, creatures that had powers to interfere with your life radically (sometimes even fatally), and you could never be sure what the rules with them were. Do a kindness for a leprechaun, and he might become your fast friend and make you rich. Or he might take mortal offense, and blight your barley and dry up your cows.

Movies always seem to cutesify leprechauns. That’s a function of the fact that we don’t believe in them anymore.

If you believe in leprechauns, you’re very careful to give them respect. Plus a wide berth.

I’ll tell you one thing—I’m glad it was another family, not mine, that tore that shed down years later.