The Leprechaun (Leipreachán)

A solitary shoemaker with a hidden purse, and a name whose origin is less settled than you would think.

The leprechaun of Irish tradition has very little to do with the one on the aeroplane tail. He is solitary, which already separates him from the aos sí, who are a society. He is old, ill tempered, and he mends shoes. The sound that gives him away is the tapping of a hammer on a single shoe from a hedge where nobody should be working.

The money matters because it is bait. Catch him and he must tell you where his gold is, but he cannot be taken off trust and he cannot be looked away from: the whole of every story is him working to make you blink, and the whole of your part is not blinking. Nobody in the older tales keeps the gold.

The name is argued about. The usual derivation is from Old Irish luchorpán, read as lú, small, and corp, body, itself borrowed from the Latin corpus, with a diminutive ending. That is what the dictionaries give. But a paper published in Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies has proposed instead that it comes from the Latin Luperci, the priests of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, misunderstood by medieval Irish scholars as a kind of creature. There is also a folk etymology from leith bhróg, half shoe, invented backwards from the fact that he is always working on one.

The oldest appearance of the word is in Echtra Fergus mac Léti, where three lúchorpáin drag a king of Ulster into the sea.