The Leprechaun

Before you read

The fields and hedges of Ireland, in the folk tradition

The leprechaun (leipreachán) is a solitary fairy, which means he lives alone, not with the fairy crowds in the hills. In the old stories he is a tiny, wrinkled old man, a shoemaker who is always working on one shoe, never a pair. You can find him by the tap-tap-tap of his little hammer. He has a crock of gold, and if you catch him, he must tell you where it is; but he is very clever, and he always tricks you into looking away.

His name may come from the Old Irish luchorpán, “little body”. The earliest story about such creatures, from the 8th century, tells how a king called Fergus mac Léti fell asleep on a beach and woke up being carried into the sea by tiny water spirits; he caught three of them, and they gave him a wish: the power to breathe underwater. In the old folk tales, the leprechaun usually wears a red coat and a cocked hat. The green suit and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow are mostly modern, from the 20th century, when the leprechaun became a symbol of Ireland for tourists and Saint Patrick’s Day.

In 1825, the Irish writer Thomas Crofton Croker published “The Field of Boliauns”, one of the best leprechaun stories, which Yeats later included in his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. A boliaun is a ragwort, a tall yellow weed that grows in Irish fields. Our story tonight is that tale, retold.

What comes too easily often goes just as easily.

The story

Retold for this lesson from “The Field of Boliauns” by Thomas Crofton Croker (1825), in W. B. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888).

One fine day in harvest, a young man called Tom Fitzpatrick was walking along the side of a field, when he heard a strange little noise in the hedge: tap, tap, tap, like a tiny hammer. He crept up quietly and looked through the leaves. There, sitting on a little stool, was a tiny old man with a leather apron and a red coat, hammering a heel onto one tiny shoe. “A leprechaun!” thought Tom. “And if I catch him, he’ll have to show me his gold.”

Tom jumped, grabbed the little man and held him up in front of his face. “Now,” he said, “show me where your gold is, or it will be the worse for you!” The leprechaun looked at him slyly. “Oh, look out!” he cried suddenly. “The cows are breaking into your field and eating the corn!” Tom nearly turned his head, but he remembered just in time, and kept his eyes on the little man. “You won’t trick me,” he said.

At last the leprechaun sighed. “Very well,” he said. “Carry me.” Tom carried him across ditches and fields, never once taking his eyes off him, until they came to a great field full of tall yellow weeds called boliauns. The leprechaun pointed to one boliaun. “Dig under that one,” he said, “and you’ll find a crock full of gold.” But Tom had no spade. So he took off one of his red garters and tied it round the boliaun, to mark it. “Promise you won’t take that garter off,” he said. “I promise,” said the leprechaun, and Tom let him go.

Tom ran all the way home for a spade and ran all the way back. But when he came to the field, he stopped and stared. On every single boliaun in the field, and there were thousands of them, someone had tied a red garter exactly like his own. The leprechaun had kept his promise: he hadn’t taken the garter off. Tom went home with his spade on his shoulder, and every time he heard a tap, tap, tap in a hedge after that, he only laughed.

Talk and write

Discussion and writing

Catch the leprechaun. In pairs, one student is the leprechaun and tries to trick the other into looking away, using the present continuous: Look! A bird is flying over there! Your house is burning!

Talk. 1. What would you do with a crock of gold? 2. Why do you think the leprechaun became a symbol of Ireland? 3. Are there tricksters in the stories of your country?

Write (70–90 words). I caught a leprechaun! Write what happened, using the present continuous, the first conditional and phrasal verbs with look.