Leprechauns and Moriarty
by Cal Meacham
This essay’s a departure from my previous ones.
It’s actually slightly-edited pair of mini-essays culled from my notes
on Ireland from about six years ago. When we go on trips, my wife and I take
a lot of pictures (Pepper Mill is an accomplished amateur photographer),
an when we get home, we promptly forget what they were of. Unless, of course,
we immediately label them and paste them in books.
To remind myself what the pictures were of (“Ireland:
Church” just doesn’t cut it), I go all-out. I photocopy maps and
tape them in, noting where the pictures were taken, and outlining our route
with highlighters. I stick in ticket stubs and historical booklets I buy
along the route. I throw in 3-D pictures I took at interesting sights. And
to keep it all straight, I write down an account while it’s still fresh
in my head, giving full head to my talent for digression.
The following is, I swear, taken from my photo album
essay written right after the trip - notes and all. The only thing I’ve
done is to “sanitize” it by taking out the names of people we met.
Leprechauns
And now a word about Leprechauns.
There's a reason for putting this here, don't worry.
I'll get to it at the end of this section.
Interested in mythology as I am, I've long been curious
about the leprechaun. Is he a real figure of Irish mythology and folklore,
or is he the creation of more recent times. Most of our lore of the vampire
is only a hundred years old, created by Bram Stoker for his novel "Dracula".
Some details, such as the dissolution of the vampire when hit by sunlight,
are even more recent -- they came about because it was an interesting
photographic effect. Before Murnau's silent film Nosferatu the concept
didn't exist -- Stoker's Dracula walked about London in broad daylight. Most
of what people think they know about werewolves is even more recent -- it
was codified in the Universal films of the 1930's and 1940's. Curt Siodmak
had a bigger impact on modern horror fiction, perhaps, than anyone. But no
one knows his name.
People trying to explain vampirism rationally (as porphyria,
or some other disease) often labor under the incorrect notion of what the
real vampire legend is, mistaking the Stoker/Universal creature for the real
legend. Their explanation isn't really valid, since it "explains" a modern
creation, not an ancient legend. See Barber's book Vampires, Burial, and
Death for more details.
Similarly, I suspect a lot of leprechaun-lore is modern
creation for films and the like. Actually, there doesn't seem to be much
of a legend. I can summarize what I have picked up about the leprechaun pretty
quickly:
- A little man (you never see female leprechauns. Maybe
they reproduce by fission), dressed in a green suit with buckled shoes and
a green top hat. He smokes a clay pipe (bowl turned down, usually), and often
has a red beard and sideburns, but no moustache. He can look cartoon cute,
or like the worst of Thomas Nast's nasty anthropoid caricatures of Irishmen.
- He supports himself by cobbling, hence the fancy shoes.
(By the way, I find that "cobbling" means repairing shoes, not making them
from scratch. Someone who constructs shoes is properly a "cordwainer".)
- He keeps a pot of gold, often called a "crock" of
gold, which he knows every last coin of. He will protect this slyly, and
if you catch him with it you can keep it. He'll probably trick you out of
it, though.
- The pot of gold is kept "at the end of the rainbow",
and if you go there, you'll find it.
How much of this can we accept as the genuine Irish
legend?
I think the present image of the leprechaun, with his
suit of Irish green , his clay pipe, the shamrock that's often tucked into
his hatband, and the Thomas Nast features, is a pretty recent creation, and
almost certainly the work of non-Irish hands. It's so obviously a caricatured
Irishman in miniature that there's little doubt in my mind that an Irish
person did not create it. About the only features I'm willing to believe
are original are the small stature (many peoples have legends of tiny folk),
and the shoes, as I'll get to in a moment.
The Britannica confirms that there were leprechauns
in Irish folklore, and that they were diminutive folk. The Funk and Wagnall's
Encyclopedia of Folklore and Mythology claims that the name was originally
lu chorpan, meaning "little body". Over time, folk etymology transformed
this into "leprechaun", which means something like "half brogue", meaning,
I gather, a small shoe. Hence the image of the leprechaun as a cobbler, with
his shoes.
Both sources say that the leprechaun has his stock of
gold, but it's not clear that it’s that cauldron-like crock at the rainbow's
end. It's not altogether implausible that the rainbow is part of the original
legend, but I strongly suspect it is not. It is a mythologically consistent
detail, since one cannot get to the rainbow's end, for two reasons. It will
always seem to move away from you (since it is always 42 degrees from the
anti-solar point), and one can no more reach the end of the rainbow than
one can reach the point where the dome of heaven touches the horizon. This
seems like a perceptive bit of folklore, which seems to tell you how to get
the leprechaun's gold (just go to the end of the rainbow), but really is
telling you that you can never find it (since you can't actually get to the
rainbow's end). On the other hand, the legend of the vampire not being visible
in a mirror (since he has no soul, and the doppelganger in the mirror is,
after all, one's soul) seems to follow a sort of medieval logic, and seems
as if it might be part of the real legend of the vampire. Alas, it's not
-- Stoker made up that bit of "fakelore". You won't find it in any vampire
story before 1895. I have this awful suspicion that the crock of gold at
rainbow's end is just as artificial. It has a Victorian sensibility about
it.
On the other hand, the ownership of a store of gold
by the little people seems more probable as a genuine legend. There are plenty
of parallels.
All of which brings me to the book I found in an Irish
Bed and Breakfast. On the back cover is an extract on "The Mullawn Urn",
taken from a paper read by G.H. Kinahan at the Royal Irish Academy on April
24, 1882. I quote from the paper:
...Here, some years ago (before 1882), three men,
while removing a ditch came on a kistvaen (evidently a stone box or small
chamber) and left it, intending to open it at midnight but when they returned
at midnight the howling of the wind in the trees frightened them away. Afterwards
when it was opened an urn with ashes was found.
The common belief in all this county is that if the
urn is opened at the proper moment, which is generally considered to be midnight,
it will contain gold; but if at any other time, the gold will melt into ashes.
When this is supposed to have happened the urn is nearly always smashed.
This made me think about the prehistoric burial structures
at Newgrange and all those cremated bodies buried in stone bowls. What if
down south, and perhaps at a different era, cremated bodies were buried in
urns, rather than in elaborate structures, and if occasionally gold effects
were buried with them? Such could give rise to the above legends. The myth
of the leprechaun's pot of gold is only a minor variation on this, with the
tricky leprechaun stealing away the gold by turning it to ashes. Of course,
many burials will be only ashes, without any gold artifacts. But there will
be enough burials with gold artifacts to create and keep alive the legend
of buried pots of gold. Something had to bury the gold, and who more likely
that the ubiquitous "little people"? Elsewhere in the book found it states
that as recently as 1863 a local farmer found a buried ring of gold (which
is now believed to have been a chieftain's coronet. But might it not have
been a torc?).
Moriarty
I noticed something while we approached the Dingle
peninsula. There were a lot of signs that bore the name "Moriarty".
I had my wife photograph me under the sign for Moriarty's Liquors. There
were a lot of "Moran"s , too. You may ask why this is significant (or you
might be one of the afflicted, and know already). This makes for a digression,
again, but it's my recounting, and I think it interesting. The revelation
at the end of it actually did occur to me as I drove down the road, there.
Professor Moriarty is the name of the greatest nemesis
of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. He actually only appears in
two stories (The Final Problem, meant to be Holmes' last epic, until
a demanding public forced Arthur Conan Doyle to resurrect the character of
Holmes; and The Valley of Fear, probably the least-known Holmes novel),
but dramatists have always felt the need for a strong villain to balance
the great and angelic Holmes. So William Gillette began a grand tradition
of introducing Moriarty into stories he was not originally a part of. Moriarty
has been imported into adaptations of "The Sign of Four", "Silver Blaze",
and "The Red Headed League", and I don't doubt he has been imposed on several
other dramatizations of the Canon. Besides these, he shows up in Holmes pastiches
by other hands, such as the Basil Rathbone film The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, The Roger Moore TV film Sherlock Holmes in New York, and
the Gene Wilder comedy The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter
Brother.
In resurrecting Holmes, Doyle introduced another villain,
Professor Moriarty's right-hand man, Colonel Sebastian Moran. I know all
of these, because I am a fan. And it made me think, again, of George Bernard
Shaw.
Why Shaw? Well, curiously enough, Shaw's feelings on
the Great Detective are well known. Hesketh Pearson, the British biographer,
reported in his book GBS: A Postscript that Shaw made his feelings
known two years before his death: "Sherlock was a drug adict without a single
amiable trait, (but) Watson was a decent fellow." (See also William S.
Baring-Gould's fictional biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street,
p. 185). I'd read this years ago, and always wondered why he had this opinion,
and why it was so strong. After all, Holmes was the sort of interesting character
Shaw specialized in. Many people have noted the powerful similarities between
Holmes and Watson, and Shaw's Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering (A
Professor and a Colonel! Like Moriarty and Moran!). Holmes, like Higgins,
can place people by their accents. Pickering, like Watson, came from India,
and met Higgins in London (as Watson met Holmes). Both pairs of men then
agree to share lodgings in rooms with a following letter ( 221B Baker Street
vs. 27A Wimpole Street), looked after by motherly landladies (Mrs. Hudson
and Mrs. Pearce.) It's hard to believe the heroes of Pygmalion weren't
influenced by Holmes and Watson.
Furthermore, with Shaw active in London during Holmes'
supposed life, a lot of Sherlockians have felt compelled to "prove" that
the two did, in fact, know each other. A fellow named Rolfe Boswell got the
ball rolling with an article entitled Sarasate, Sherlock, and Shaw in the
Baker Street Journal, Vol. II, #1 (new series) pp. 22-29, January
1952. Boswell claimed that the two music fans clashed over the talents of
violinist Sarasate. (Shaw did review Sarasate, and Holmes attended a Sarasate
concert in "The Red-Headed League". As the reader will have gathered, Holmes
fans are well-read, have eidetic memories, and entirely too much free time.
Over 75 years before Star Trek appeared, the essential habits and
mind-set of the Trekkies were undoubtedly present among fans of Sherlock
Holmes. I've noted that an awful lot of Trekkies are also Holmes fans. A
lot of people would toss me in with both camps.) Baring-Gould picked up the
incident and reported it in his biography of Holmes, and it was from Baring-Gould
that Nicholas Meyer got the idea to make Shaw a character in his Holmes pastiche
The West End Horror. (Meyer also co-wrote three of the Star Trek movies and
directed two of them. In Star Trek VI he implies that Holmes was Spock's
ancestor.)
So, to wander back to the point -- why would this famous
writer, who ought to have so much in common with Holmes, end up hating him
so strongly? I suggest part of the reason is that Doyle saddled his creation
with chief opponents with such distinctively Irish names, and the Irish Shaw
didn't take very kindly to this denigration of his homeland.
Not convinced? Consider the following lines of dialogue
(Act II of Pygmalion), placed in the mouths of Shaw's surrogate-Holmes
and surrogate-Watson:
Higgins: Pickering: this chap has a certain natural
gift of rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. 'I'm willing
to tell you: I'm wanting to tell you: I'm waiting to tell you.' Sentimental
rhetoric! thats the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity
and dishonesty.
Pickering: Oh, please, Higgins: I'm west country myself.
Just substitute "Irish" for "Welsh", and Higgins commenting
on Mr. Doolittle might be Holmes commenting on Moriarty and Moran. And note
that it is the "decent fellow" Pickering/Watson who protests.