What a beautiful, fascinating, and exciting thing Irish and Scottish folklore is. Let us delve a little. A common name of all spirits, monsters, magic creatures, and fairy tale characters is “fairy.” The gradation of all of them is quite queerish. They are:
- Strolling fairies;
- Lonely fairies;
- Heroic fairies;
- Seelie court;
- Unseelie court.
It is obvious that everyone can appertain to few categories at once. Concerning fairies’ origins, there are few versions, some of them are stereotyped as fallen angels/friends, reborn human souls – former corpses, saying shorter. There are really a lot of fairy kinds and most of them are hostile.
Drunken Redhead Irish Douchebags
A bearded, smart, extremely greedy, and troublemaking midget, nonetheless not evil. He always has a red nose because of booze and is dressed in a cozy green suit. He lives mostly alone, but there can be groups of nearly five dwarfs. Every leprechaun has a pot of gold, presumably stolen from an Irishmen. It is considered that the main leprechaun’s occupation is making a footwear, though one never been noticed working.
Always carries left shoe and knocks on it with little hammer – that is how people find them. Seeing a leprechaun, a courageous and agile man can try to catch him and demand a pot of gold or even two, which is almost impossible. But this fairy is not as simple and can easily trick you. If you blink, he will become invisible just at that moment. He can also generously give you the desired pot, which will turn into the bunch of leaves in a few hours.
If you succeed after all and stole the pot or tricked this little drunkard, you should immediately bury it under the thorn – they are afraid of it. Later, a total mess with the lethal result will wait for you if you will not find quatrefoil, of course. Though, if you are not a greedy carrion, he might unselfishly help you.
Leprechaun has a “cousin” – clurichaun. A patron of wine cellars (consequently always drinking from a skull) looks almost like the leprechaun, but he is a domestic fairy and his clothes are colored just like host’s. Credibly, he was invented by manhood, from father to son, to make someone to blame for disappeared bottles or barrels and debauch consequences. He protects wines from corruption but can spoil it if he gets angry. He can ride cats, pigs, chickens, goats and so on when he drinks too much.
Creepy Horse-like Evil Spirits
Kelpie (if lives in the river) or aughisky (if lives in the sea or lake) is a ferocious and cruel turnskin. It can get many faces, but the favorite ones are the beautiful and powerful horse with a mane of water or reed, beautiful men or women. A spirit is totally incoherent, that is why girl-shaped kelpie always wears dress inside out. Its true face is a creature with the human body, horse hind legs, powerful front three-fingered paws and utterly ugly horse head with sharp teeth. It eats only meat and loves hunting people, mainly horse-shaped, by enticing some dunce peasant with an offer to have a ride or sex (if girl-shaped, of course).
Joyful man jumps on horse/girl and tightly sticks to the spirit. Then kelpie carries a victim into the water, drowns and eats. There is a belief that it is possible to catch one: cut an enchanted bridle with a silver knife in the moment kelpie comes out of the water and you will get magic racer, but if you filed – you will be eaten alive. Such horse can be saddled only far from water, if not – death. If use it as a pack horse it will be offended and curse all your clan.