ey would live on the worldly plane, without half so many of their angelic powers, still able to catch a glimpse of God now and again but, unlike Man and Woman, never quite able to go all the way back into Himself's presence again, either. Those clever angels, don't you know, would be the leprechauns now.
(Speaking of Himself's presence, it is said by some about the leprechauns of Donegal that "It is very pleasant to hear that [they] conduct the souls of the dead as far as the gates of heaven and then return disconsolate like the poor earth-bound creatures they are.")
Obviously, from this telling, the rhythm of Irish speech is an integral part of the leprechaun folklore. As well it must be: Irish legend is an oral tradition, for "the Irish have remained an oral rather than a literate people. ... it is a language, if not of a race of poets ... then at least of a race which has 'tired the sun with talking'..." The language being spoken of is the Irish dialect of Gaelic. It is a spoken language dying out today, but actively thriving until the 1840s, when the Great Famine combined with British land laws to decimate the island of Eire's land-tilling population through death or starvation-forced emigration. This was a disaster for the Irish tradition of oral mythology, as noted at the time by Sir William Wilde, an Irish ethnologist:
With the depopulation the most terrific which any country has ever experienced on the one hand, and ... [British administered, English-speaking] educational schools on the other ... [promotes] the rapid decay of the Irish vernacular, in which the most of our legends, romantic tales, ballads and bardic annals ... and relics of fairy charms were preserved - can [they] continue to exist?
Therefore it is important to note before delving any deeper into explorations of the leprechaun folklore that the familiar mode of expression - i.e. the English language - is not the proper one. Each langua...