Angela Puca AP: If you’re interested in the Sídhe, the Fairies, the Fae, the Puca, and other otherworldly beings in Irish folklore stay tuned because you’re just about to find out.

Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today I have a very special guest here on the channel. It’s Dr Jenny Butler, a dear friend of mine and a brilliant scholar. She’s a lecturer at the University College Cork and she specialises in Irish folklore.

So in this interview, we will be talking about the Sídhe the Fairies, the Fae and the Puca, of course, and other
worldly beings of Irish folklore.

And please do check out the time stamps because I will leave everything in the info box so that you
can just jump onto what you are most interested in.

So please help me in welcoming the lovely and extremely knowledgeable Jenny Butler.

Hello Jenny, how are you today?

Jenny Butler JB: I’m very well. How are you?

AP: I’m okay thanks. I’m really happy to have you here on my Symposium once again.

JB: Glad to be here again,

AP: Besides, you know, the fact that I really like you as a person, I also adore your work and so it’s always a pleasure to have you here and have my viewers being exposed to your fantastic work and fantastic academic research.

JB: Thank you and likewise Angela.

AP: So today we are going to talk about otherworldly beings in Irish folklore. So the first question or the first topic I’d like to address is: what are the Sídhe? Where does the term come from and can you give us an overview of the Sídhe as figures in Irish folklore?

JB: Yeah, so the Sídhe. This term comes from the old Irish language. So there’s old Irish, which is now a dead language. People like Celtic Studies scholars study it but it developed into modern Irish. So this is a Celtic language and this is where we get the word Sídhe.

In modern there’s all different spellings of the word but in modern Irish we pronounce it “shee” and it’s thought that it might have been pronounced “shea”, like a sword sheath, in old Irish. So nobody really knows. So this is a word for the otherworldly beings and of, you know, the spiritual realm that’s connected with the landscape. And this is similar in other Celtic mythologies and when Ireland was colonised the people were forced to speak English and Sídhe was translated as Fairy but the term Sídhe and Fairy, they’re not the same and actually the that native term Sídhe is not translatable directly. So when people say Fairy, as Irish people do, we use the words synonymously and people have other many other associations with that word. You know it came into English via French – Fairy. And it has many poetic usages and many more romanticized words. So the Sídhe with different terms and different phrases in Ireland. An sluagh Sídhe means the Fairy host – the collective group of other-world people who move (they’re kind of conceptualised or understood as moving across the landscape together) as a collective and living in this other world community which is described as almost like a mirror image of the human realm.

I’m going to use Sídhe and Fairies synonymously and that the Fairy people have their own habitations, their own cattle and horses and so on. There’s many stories of them having a royal family – like Fairy kings and queens and Ireland, in ancient times, would have had a royal family as well. There’s many colloquial or local ways of talking about Fairies because of the belief that it’s unlucky to directly speak of them. That they don’t like human beings being able to talk about them or see them and some of the phrases we have are both terms of respect and maybe fear as well -you know drawing their attention. So things like calling them, you know, euphemistically; the “Other Crowd” or the “Wee Folk”, the “Little People” or just “Them”. Coded ways of talking about them.

I mentioned the “Wee Folk”, “Little Folk”; well there are many many different descriptions of what Fairy people look like and some are that they’re small but maybe smaller than human beings rather than teensy tiny. So I think the diminutive, cutesy fairy image comes from things like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan and especially the ‘Disneyfication’ of those stories and so there’s the general idea is that the Fairy, the Fairy world is intersecting with the human world, the ordinary reality that human beings experience and that, for most people, Fairies and their world are invisible.

But there’s what’s known as the second sight. An ability, like clairvoyance, to be able to see into the other world. Clairvoyance in French is literally ‘clear-seeing’ and the second sight is a similar concept that somebody has a gift to be able to perceive. Whether that’s, you know, hearing or seeing the Fairy Folk and I mentioned the landscape. So the other world, the Celtic otherworld, as it’s described, is coterminous with the earth. So it’s the same landscape as human beings perceive and go about their activities in.

There is a mythological account of different peoples who, they’re described as mythical invaders, but different people who came to Ireland battled with each other for control of the country. Two of those mythical peoples; they’re the Milesians or the sons of Mill and the Tuath Dé Danann. So the Tuath Dé Danann means, Tuath is a tribe or people and uh Dana or Anu is a goddess and so it’s generally agreed that this is a feminine form of the name. So Tuath Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Anu, they lose their battle against the Milesians at uMag Tuired, or Moytura and the Tuath Dé Danann and go into the landscape, into the mounds on the landscape.

So we have a tradition known as the hollow hills. So there are both naturally occurring hills, known as Fairy hills but we also have many different structures, you know, archaeological remains, including mounds like at the Hill of Tara in County Meath and New Grange in the Boyne Valley. There’s also many structures called ring forts that are colloquially known as Fairy forts and all of these mounds, these are also circular monuments some of them, the ring forts, remain as mounds, some have flattened out over time and so these are in fields all over Ireland. They’re actually the most well-preserved archaeological monuments because of the beliefs about them – before they had protection from the state people left them alone because it’s unlucky to interfere with so-called Fairy places. Another place, another thing, associated with the Fairies, is the hawthorn tree. So this, in Ireland, is known as a Fairy tree and so there are many legends and first-hand accounts as well, of something bad happening. If somebody breaks the branches of a hawthorn tree or cuts one down – it’s quite ambiguous, the landscape is the point of numinous contact uh between this other world and the human realm.

But it’s not so clear-cut as Fairies being under the ground so you know from the mythological story and you have the idea that the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann are the Fairies living below the ground or inside the earth and the descendants of the Milesians are the human beings who live above the ground so you have that kind of idea of neighbours sharing the same physical landscape. But at the same time, it’s quite ambiguous. They’re not it’s not so clear-cut as I said about them being under the ground because that’s not always how things are experienced by people or how you know how legends describe how someone might end up in the other world with the Fairies.

AP: That’s really interesting and I was wondering is there a difference then between the Fae and the Fairies or are these the same thing?

JB: Well the word, lots of different words are used for Fairy beings or for different otherworldly beings and they become mixed together from different cultural contexts. But I think a lot of it has to do with the English language and things being translated into English. So the word Fae goes back to the Greek “fates” the goddesses who have control over human destiny and the word Fae then was used in poetry and in the literary tradition for something kind of whimsical or something more to do with enchantment and then you also have Shakespeare. You know the whole imagery around Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”.

So that kind of more romantic enchantment … I never know what word to use … were kind of very light-hearted or very whimsical association [that] comes in with that word Fae. It took on that meaning in English anyway and so it’s different from the traditions about the Sídhe because the native understandings, while Sídhe are associated with enchantment and being magical, it’s sometimes quite sinister and they’re, as I mentioned, they’re otherworldly people so they’re people. Human beings can be good or bad they can behave very nicely they can appear very beautiful but then they can turn on you they can do bad things, so it’s the same with the Fairies with the Sídhe.

And there are connections between the Sídhe and the dead. So this has been suggested by different folklorists, Katherine Briggs for example. And there are hints in legends about the other world of the Fairies possibly being the world of the dead or that the human dead go there. So it’s never explicitly described but there are associations with deaths that don’t fit, they don’t mesh very well with those other ideas of a more whimsical kind of enchantment.

AP: Yeah I was actually wondering that’s really fascinating so what kind of relation they have found between the Fae, the Fairies and the world of the dead?

JB: Well, in the mythological material that the early Irish literature or the mythology was written down by Christian scribes in medieval times. So there’s a big gap in time there, you know, if you can imagine the pagan world has already ended by the time something is written down about about them in the Irish context. So in some of the early, medieval manuscript accounts there are references to the other world, like there’s different names for the other world. Tír na nÓg is one of them. So Tír means country and Óg, in Irish, means young. So it’s translated as ‘land of eternal youth’ or ‘land of the young’ and there it’s described as a bright paradise.

So it’s not clear whether those descriptions were influenced by the Christian cosmology of heaven or whether this was the understanding in the pagan tradition. But it seems like there’s connections between the Sídhe and the dead if the other world is also, excuse me, the afterlife but then in much later stories and our folklore collections. Then there’s another big jump from medieval times to the 19th, early 20th century [that] would be the main the main time frame for the folklore collections that we have in Ireland.

So there are legends where you have the motif or the happening of somebody falling asleep on a ring fort, a Fairy fort and then waking up in the other world, with the Fairies and so you have dreams being mentioned as well. So the person who wakes up in the other world they see something like a beautiful banquet hall with food laid out that smells beautiful and looks beautiful. They’re warned, often by a dead relative like let’s say an ant, not to eat the Fairy food because it’s not food as we understand it. So that would also connect the dead with this world of the Fairies, like why is there a dead relative in this world? The reason for not eating the food is you know it’s believed that if you eat Fairy food you become incorporated into the world of the Fairies and maybe can’t leave. So this also hints at it being the world of the dead because if it’s so wonderful and described as people singing and dancing and partying and having nice food and being happy and described as the land of eternal youth where people don’t get sick, where they don’t age. Why would somebody not want to stay there?

So there’s many inconsistencies and contradictions and also to mention the festival of Samhain, which becomes Halloween on October 31st through November 1st there’s traditions in Ireland about remembering the dead. The idea that the dead return to where they once lived and so people would leave the doors unlocked of their house and maybe in some parts of Ireland, they would put out what’s known as a ‘dumb supper’ or set a place for the returning dead relative, or usually a relative.

It’s mentioned in the early Irish literature in this medieval material that the Sídhe open up at Samhain. So this word sídhe, which I forgot to explain has different meanings. So it can mean the Fairy beings themselves like the An Sluagh Sídhe the Fairy host as it’s called, the Fairies themselves. Then it can mean he mounds on the landscape. They’re also called sídhe and then the word also has a meaning of peace – so the peaceful quality of life that’s believed to exist in the other world. We still have this meaning in the Irish language. So, for example, our police force are called An Garda Síochána which means literally ‘the guardians of the peace’. So sídhe or síochán as being peaceful. So the mounds on the landscape, the sídhe, opening up at Samhain you have the whole belief around the spirits intermingling with human beings during this time of year. And so there’s also a connection there with the later traditions that we’ve recorded of the returning dead. So some have suggested that the Sídhe are the dead or that the other world incorporates the human dead.

There’s a distinction in Ireland between what’s known as a good death and a bad death. So a good death, it’s not that it’s good someone has died; it’s that they’ve lived a long life and they’re very old and everybody dies so they’re expected to die, and a bad death would be a tragic death, like a woman dying in childbirth, somebody dying, you know, a young person dying in an accident, a child dying so these things are associated with going to the Fairy realm. So whereas people are dying when they’re very old they get the last rites the Roman Catholic ritual of the last rites and they’re understood as going to heaven. So by the time the folklore collections were made, Ireland had already been Christianised, you know from the very first accounts in medieval times and then by the time the legends that we have were recorded you had people, we don’t know how the people who told the stories would reconcile somebody being in the Fairies, that’s an expression, “in the Fairies”, somebody being in the other world with the Fairies while others are believed to be in heaven.

So part of the problem with that is that people, there was a lot of focus on the legends so we had the literary revival of the Anglo-Irish literary revival, where people like Yates, William Butler Yates, Lady Augusta Gregory, and their contemporaries collected stories and they published them. But they didn’t give a huge amount of contextual information. Then, later you had the Irish Folklore Commission from 1935 until 1970. So again there was a lot of emphasis on the stories you know the texts of the stories and the storytelling tradition and but not so much in the way of interviews about people’s beliefs so to give a wider context or bigger picture to those to those stories and just to mention the Irish Folklore Commission did send out surveys to the houses in the country and asked about things like festivals, celebrations and many other beliefs and customs and so on. So we also have material from that but we don’t have very many interviews, as anthropologists and folklorists would do today, to give that kind of context of belief. So we don’t really know how people would have reconciled those ideas or whether they believed in the stories they were telling or whether they, you know, whether they claimed to believe these things.

AP: I hope it’s not too off-topic but what you just said made me completely rethink Peter Pan. So now I think that he wouldn’t age because actually he was dead and he was actually in the world of death. Yeah, like in that kind of afterlife where you won’t age anymore and that’s why he was surrounded by Fairies. I just had this kind of complete different vision of Peter Pan. I’m not sure whether it’s what they actually had in mind but yeah connecting all the things that you said in terms of the folklore surrounding the Fairies there’s.

JB: There’s no one explanation that would account for all of this Fairy lore because, for example, you have changelings. The changeling stories of a Fairy being usually an old Fairy man being put in place of a human person and so the stories we most often associate with that are about babies being taken away by the Fairies and replaced by a changeling. And people have, you know, this there have been quite reductionist academic studies of changeling narratives from a medical or psychological perspective to try to match up the descriptions of the changeling with things like medical conditions and illnesses and psychological things like being depressed or things like autism as well to try to explain. To really to explain away this material and if I’m using this example because if we say that the Sídhe are the dead, if this is the world of the dead, then that doesn’t fit with changelings. Why would the dead, why would they try to take young human beings? You know, there isn’t a cohesive way of understanding – because the material has been collected in such a piecemeal way, in different centuries and from different perspectives and different lenses for analysing culture. Even the idea of folklore itself is problematic when we’re trying to understand this as a bigger picture.

AP: Do you think that they, when they thought of Fairies, they were referring to different beings or is it just different places and different times interpreted Fairies differently?

JB: I think there’s both things. I think ideas and beliefs change through time and even within religious traditions beliefs change. So that’s occurring all through time but then you also have the difficulty with the linguistic side of it and the translation into, you know, different time periods as well as, you know, you’ve cultural and linguistic translation. And one of the things, in the Irish context, is that everything seems to be called a Fairy. The Sídhe are not differentiated in very precise ways so you have the different mythical peoples like I mentioned the Tuath Dé Danannand so on. But when you compare [it] to something like the Greek context, where the mythological tradition is much more defined in terms of the different beings, you have sprites and the water nymphs, and dryads in the trees and then you have the deities. But in the Irish, there’s a whole issue of the different religious cosmologies and cultural cosmologies because Christians were the first ones to write down the material and then, in the stories collected in different time periods, many things are described as Fairies. That may be in other parts of the world would have unique names or, you know, categorisations.

AP: Yeah, that happens sometimes with certain terms. Maybe they become so attached to the folklore of that specific place that they become very fluid in nature, in what they represent and what the term denotes.

JB: Yeah.

AP: I also wanted to ask you about the Puca, which I know that in Irish is spelled like my surname. So what are the Puca is there a plural like Pucas or is it just Puca?

JB: Well a Puca, in Irish, is the word for a ghost. So people can mean ghost if they’re saying Puca but there are different legends. It seems the more prevalent idea [is] that there is the Puca, like it’s a particular being like the Banshee being [an] otherworldly death messenger. But there’s also beliefs that there are many different Banshees and similarly many, many different Pukas. So it’s been suggested that this is a shape-shifting kind of trickster being and it’s been suggested that there might be a connection with the Scandinavian mythology and folklore that, generally speaking, the Norse came to and settled in Ireland. The Danes in England other parts of Britain had “Puki” (p-u-k-i) which is thought to have some connection with the Irish Puca but it’s variously described, sometimes, appearing as a horse with red eyes the mane being more like bristles going the wrong way or something askew and of taking people on nightmare rides which is something we also have in the Scandinavian “Mara”, you know, nightmare traditions. And in Ireland, there’s stories that the Puca comes and either urinates or spits on the fruit before Samhain or on the evening of Samhain. After that time that’s why you shouldn’t eat the fruit like blackberries and so on from the bushes.

AP: Not a nice being to be associated with then. What about the Banshees can you tell me something more about the Banshees? And how they are seen as beings in the Irish folklore?

JB: So the folklorist Patricia Lysaght describes the Banshee as the supernatural death messenger. So this is an otherworldly woman who cries and wails to notify about death. So she’s telling the living that somebody among them is going to die. She doesn’t cause death. It’s believed to be very, very unlucky to interfere with the Banshee like to try to stop her from approaching or from crying. There’s different names for the Banshee. So I mentioned the way everything seems to be called a Fairy. She’s sometimes described as a Fairy or Fairy woman because the name ‘bean’ in Irish is woman and then ‘Sídhe’ being Fairy so it’s translated, sometimes, as Fairy woman and the Bean Sídhe, as I mentioned, she cries and wails or appears sitting on somebody’s windowsill. So the person who is dying doesn’t normally see or hear the Banshee, it’s usually somebody else like somebody in the family or some neighbour who hears the Banshee and or sees her. So her cry is described as something like either an animal, at first, like a fox or an owl and then it changes so that people [who] have heard it have described as being just something unearthly. It’s very loud and sometimes they’re the only ones to hear it. If there’s a group of people may be only one person hears this.

The Banshee is associated with having a comb that’s some kind of magical comb, sometimes described as being made of human bone or of precious metals that she combs her hair with. So you have a parallel there with things like the mermaid and the siren who, well the siren is a bit different because she does cause death by singing and luring the sailors so that their ships get wrecked. But combing the hair comes into different legends so there’s the advice in Ireland that, if you are walking along a country road or anywhere and you see a comb, you shouldn’t touch it because it could be the Bean Sídhe’s comb and it could cause burns or cause somebody to die because you’re you know the person would be touching the other world. And so again you have the association with the death.

I mentioned that there’s different beliefs about the Bean Sídhe so some think there’s one Bean Sídhe and others think there are many different Bean Sídhe that follow different families. So there’s an expression that the Bean Sídhe follows families with O or Mac in their name and we have Gaelic names so going back to the clan system of Ireland. names like ‘O’ means ‘of’ so O’Brien of the Brian family. ‘Mac’ means ‘son of’ so McCarthy. The equivalent for women would be Nic – Nic Carthic um but because the colonization and the language and so on the names became formalized as McCarthy – whether it’s a man or a woman. But saying the Banshee follows people with ‘O’ or ‘Mac’ in their name is a way of saying that she follows the Gaelic clan structure and or those lineages um rather than people with Anglo-Norman names. So Irish names like mine, Butler, are not Gaelic and so she’s said to follow ‘O’ or ‘Mac’ and this might connect her to the sovereignty goddess tradition.

In the early Irish literature, we have stories and poems about a sovereignty Goddess who represents the land of Ireland and is associated with giving a cup of sovereignty – a drink to the new king or the rightful king. There are, in this sovereignty Goddess tradition, legends that a very frightening, so-called, hag, [an] ugly woman would appear and when the person who’s going to be king kisses her she transforms into a beautiful young woman. So there are also different descriptions of the Bean Sídhe, some being that she’s a young beautiful woman combing her hair, others the more familiar one is that she’s an old woman with long grey or white hair and very frightening in appearance. So this might have something to do with that sovereignty goddess tradition but again it’s nobody knows. So we’re kind of tracing back and trying to tie up or connect strands that are separated by hundreds or possibly thousands of years and very different cultural expressions and understandings. So another name for the Bean Sídhe is Badhbh which is also a name of a war goddess who can transform into a crow and we have the Morrígan, Nemain and …

AP: What what is the name again?

JB: Badhbh It’s spelt b-a-d-h-b-h. There’s different spellings but it’s pronounced ‘baib’.Another name for the Bean Sídhe is bean, it’s a woman and bean chaointe which is so bean chaointe. Caoineadh in Irish is crying and there’s a human woman, this figure of Irish history, that would lament for the dead called the bean chaointe. So that’s been analysed by, you know, folklorists like Garold O’Crulee[?] who’ve looked at the otherworldly Bean Sídhe as being the woman who cries death into the community and then the human, bean chaointe would cry death out of the community. So it’s thought that the role of lamenting the dead, which was a female role in the pagan world. This was to cry the soul or the spirit over into the afterlife. So it was an extremely important cultural tradition that eventually died out for different reasons including the Catholic Church trying to stamp it out.

AP: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I was wondering what role do these otherworldly beings and creatures play in the practice of magic in Irish folklore.

JB: Well, the Fairies are understood as being magical beings and that they have powers to shape-shift, for example, and to cause harm, to cause confusion in human beings, so there’s many stories and experiences of being ‘turned around’ – it’s called, of being confused in a very familiar landscape. So that’s a magical quality associated with Fairies either changing the landscape or changing the human’s perception. There’s a lot of the magical practices in terms of charms, you know, charms for protection would often be to ward off Fairies or keep them away. Particularly on the festival of Bealtaine, or Mayday, which is the traditional start of butter making so when people were relying, you know, subsistence farmers, people relying on the food they were making themselves or selling it as their livelihood. Butter was extremely important and so many of the magical abilities of Fairies are, you know, it’s the same concern about Fairies and the practice of witchcraft so the same kinds of things would be used to protect the butter and the household or the farm from Fairies’ influence and from witchcraft. So it’s more magical protections but there’s also the, you know, the bean feasa or the wise woman and the fairy doctor or the cunning folk, their magical abilities are associated with communicating with the Fairies. So there’s different associations with magic.

AP: Now I’d like to ask you a few questions from my patrons, from the members of my Inner Symposium to whom I’ve asked whether they had questions for you. So the first one comes from Andrew. He’s a big fan of yours.

JB: Thanks, Andrew.

AP: And Andrew asks, actually there are two questions from him. I’m gonna start with the first one. So he says that you gave a talk at the Trans States Conference this year on UFO religions. Given that and your knowledge of the Sídhe and other non-ordinary beings would you consider alien encounters to be related to human interaction with Fairy folk throughout history?

JB: Well there are many parallels that we can identify between Fairy encounters and alien encounters and for example, I mentioned a while ago about the being ‘turned around’, being confused in a familiar landscape. Often someone’s own field or this is something also recorded by what are known as the Contactee Movement, people who believe they have been abducted by aliens or they’ve encountered alien beings. They often describe being confused in their own house or, you know, in their own locality. So confusion is something associated with both Fairies and aliens. Also unusual lights. So we have the folklore of will of the wisp, lights, little lights, or orbs that move and this is also something that comes up quite a lot in the descriptions of alien encounters. Sometimes associated with different crafts but not always – like that the alien beings are somehow shining or bright themselves and so this is also described in many legends. The Tuath Dé Danann, in the mythological accounts that become associated with the Fairies in later tradition, these are described as the shining ones, that they have some kind of radiance and so that’s another parallel. And also missing time. So you know there are many stories about people who go to the Fairy world.

So we have the other world where Oisín; in the mythology, we have a hero Oisín who goes to Tír na nÓg and he thinks he’s been there for a year, depending on the version, but he’s been away for hundreds of years and he comes back to Ireland. He’s told by Niamh, this otherworldly woman, not to get off the horse that she gives him and he remembers this and he’s a very strong person. So he sees people, a group of men trying to move a boulder. So he tries to help them without getting off the horse and he gets a stick and he’s trying to move the boulder with one hand but he falls and, in different versions of the story, he turns to dust because he’s hundreds of years old. Or he asks for the last rights or he hears the church bell so you can see the Christian influences there. But losing time is something that comes into both the mythological accounts and the later experiences that we have recorded about Fairies and so this is also a common feature of the alien encounters.

So I think there are, because Andrew asked, what I think, just to mention as well quickly, that there’s two different versions, two different translations of the medieval texts and that one says the Tuath Dé Danann came on the sea in their ships and that they burnt their ships and it caused a smoke. The Tuath Dé Danann are associated with a magical mist. There’s another account, another translation – that the Tuath Dé Danann came in cloud ships and landed on a mountain. So that they came from the sky. So it’s interesting, you know, that that’s a completely different meaning. If they came from the sky and so we do have those kinds of associations or those parallels. But I think personally I think there are different kinds of beings that people are describing differently. I think there’s a reinterpretation of older material and that doesn’t always have to do with looking outward. I think there are many associations with this world, this planet. If you want to say that in different mythologies, older religions around the world to do with an otherworld that is accessible through the land, through flora and fauna and rather than it being something cosmic but I think there are also many interesting parallels and part of the difficulty is that is the way all of this has been recorded historically and so we’re all trying to understand it and find explanations for things. So I think it’s interesting.

AP: Yeah, absolutely and also he’s got another question for you. He says Briggs defines three basic types of Fairies: trooping, solitary, and domestic; are these related, do they intermingle. For example, would a domestic Fairy return to a mound if it left the house having been slighted?

JB: I think Katherine Briggs gave some different categorizations. William Butler Yates also talked about solitary Fairies and trooping Fairies. So that you know both Briggs and Yates have been very influential on how people think about these kinds of beings so there seems to be a difference between an sluagh Sídhe, the Fairy host who are connected with the landscape, with those Fairy places like trees and caves and mounds and other beings, like the Leprechaun who’s associated with the house and you know, there are stories that is lucky to catch a Leprechaun because he grants wishes. It’s not so lucky to catch a member of the Sídhe. This would something very dangerous in the Irish tradition. And so it seems to be, they’re different kinds of beings and there’s many, you know, in other cultural traditions in the Germanic and Slavic. There’s beings that are associated with the house like Cobbles and things that live in the hearth, you know, usually male, otherworldly beings that are somehow tricksters or they make things and they fix things like the results of the Cluricawne, in Irish folklore, who makes shoes and you know that seems something quite different from these other worlds. People who have their own community that somehow kind of intersects with the human world.

AP: Okay thanks for answering that. Then I have a question from Thomas. He asks about the figure of the Puca, which we have actually already covered but then he also mentions whether the Puca is good or mischievous and whether the media representation of the Puca is actually accurate or is it exaggerated?

JB: So the good or bad thing, you know there’s been many. There’s books like Brian Froud’s “Good Fairies Bad Fairies”. So people might think of them as being one or the other but it seems from the Irish tradition, anyway, that Fairies, as other worlds’ people, can be good or bad in a moral sense. They can behave as humans would. They make a choice rather than being inherently bad and I think there’s an influence from the Christianisation of all of these things where people tend to think of angels or demons they’re either one or the other. Demons being, you know, hell being below and the darkness and this influences people’s understanding of the Fairy world – being this chthonic realm.

So in terms of the media representation – I didn’t really answer the question. So the Puca is portrayed as being like a trickster, being mischievous. I don’t know if evil or bad would be right. You could interpret it that the urinating or spitting on the fruit is for people’s own protection. That they shouldn’t eat them because they’ll start to go mouldy. Anyway, after a certain point, this has also been understood as a kind of way of protecting people from eating fruit when they shouldn’t.

But the only film portrayal I’ve seen of the Puca is in “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” which I thought was true to the legends that we have documented. But in terms of Fairy lore, generally, there are some films that I like and there’s one called “The Hole in the Ground” about a changeling and there’s another one called “Daisy Chain” which is also about a changeling so I thought those were well done.

AP: We have one last question from one of my patrons, this is from Dave. Dave says; first, Dr Butler I really enjoy your work. So you’ve got lots of fans …

JB: Thank you, Dave.

AP: … in my Inner Symposium. So the question is: some Fairy myths change, post-Christianity, in terms of their origin and cosmology. Is there evidence that these stories are pre-Celtic and were absorbed and adapted in a similar cultural way or are they seen as a Celtic invention?

JB: Okay so this is quite difficult to answer because we don’t have really any information about the pre-Celtic way of life or religion. So we can say that the Celtic peoples, who came to Ireland, absorbed something of the pre-Celtic. So there’s many debates about calling Irish culture Celtic. So that the Celts first arrived in Ireland around 500 before the common era and the word ‘keltoi’, from the Greek, you know, the people wouldn’t have called themselves Celts. We don’t even know what their own name for themselves was and Celts, as a word, we use for many different peoples who were moving into different parts of Europe around that time. So while we can make comparisons between the other world, as it’s described and portrayed in Irish tradition, we can compare that to other Celtic regions like Wales and there’s many similarities between Scottish and Irish Gaelic tradition that’s much later. We know that some pan-Celtic deities like Bridget, in Ireland you have the Christianised goddess. There was Bríd or Bridget who became Saint Bridget. We know there was a goddess, who’s thought to be the same goddess, Brigindo in Gaul, which is modern-day France and the Brigantes in Brigantia, so the Burgantes tribe in Yorkshire. So we know there are those Celtic connections but there’s also things in the medieval descriptions, by those Christian scribes, that are pre-Celtic. So some of the sites like New Grange in the Boyne Valley and the goddess Boann. So ‘bo’ being cow. So this is a cow goddess, associated with this site New Grange. New Grange is pre-Celtic, so it’s thought to be older than the pyramids at Giza. The Hill of Tara, the megalithic monuments some of them are likely to be pre-Celtic. So nobody knows who built those structures but they became associated with the Celts through many different romantic movements, so-called Celtic revivals. It’s very complex and it’s generally accepted, in academia, to call the mythological material, what survives or has been passed on about the old religion the pre-Christian – this is described as Celtic mythology. But no it’s far more complex than that. There are older influences and strands there that we aren’t able to untie because we don’t know anything really about the pre-Celtic.

AP: When it comes to history it’s really difficult to pinpoint even the moment and yeah, it’s a very difficult thing to answer and I think it’s more it would have more to do with history rather than folklore perhaps.

JB: Well there’s, you know, the Celtic studies, as an academic discipline, looks at – the definition of Celtic rests on the language families that are Celtic like Irish and Welsh and Breton and so on. And the regions where those people settled and spoke their language in the distant past or in the modern-day where there’s a Celtic language spoken. So, you know, it’s time-limited. The discipline only looks at a certain period of time. So you’re kind of going into archaeology to explore anything before that. But nobody knows. Nobody knows who built those sites or what exactly they were for and so there’s different celestial significances, different alignments to solstices or equinoxes. Like I mentioned, New Grange – there’s an inner chamber where the rays of the rising sun, on the winter solstice, lights up the chamber. So there are many theories about what that means. And cremations have been found in some of the sites but nobody knows for sure, only that they were somehow significant for the Celtic peoples and they come into the myths and the legends all down through time.

AP: Thank you so much, Jenny. This was really fascinating.

JB: Thank you for having me on your channel again.

AP: Yeah absolutely. Any time. Thank you so much again Jenny for being here on this channel again. It was absolutely fascinating. I really look forward to hearing all of your comments in the in the comment section I really want to know what you think about everything we have discussed. And you will also find Jenny’s contact details and related publications and related publications in the info box.

So do check everything out. And if you did like this interview smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new video from me and, as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

JENNY’S CONTACT DETAILS

Email: j.butler@ucc.ie

Website: www.drjennybutler.com

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXTgVJJwJIDnbX2q7uVAhqQ

First uploaded 21 Jan 2021