Leprechaun

Leprechauns appear sporadically in older Irish saga material (for example the episode in Echtra Fergus mac Léti featuring lúchorpáin) but are not central figures in early mythic cycles. They became prominent figures in later folkloric collections and the late‑19th century literary revival (collectors such as W. B. Yeats and commentators like McAnally), who classified them among solitary fairies distinct from the trooping Aos Sí. Some folklorists recorded folk explanations of mixed supernatural parentage (described by McAnally as offspring of an 'evil spirit' and a 'degenerate fairy'), while scholarly etymologies trace the name through Old Irish forms (luchorpán/lupracán) with multiple proposals for its derivation.

Traditionally described as diminutive (one account gives about three feet high) and male; nineteenth‑century collectors commonly describe red clothing — a red jacket or roundabout, red breeches buckled at the knee, gray or black stockings, and a cocked hat — with regional dress variants. Samuel Lover and Yeats note richly laced red coats and Yeats contrasts solitary fairies' red dress with trooping fairies' green. The modern popular image (small bearded man in green with a hat and pot of gold) is a later, twentieth‑century development and not the dominant color scheme in older sources.

Leprechauns are chiefly portrayed as solitary cobblers or shoemakers who enjoy practical jokes and mischief of a comparatively light, cautionary order. They are associated with hidden or buried treasure — described by Yeats as wealth from 'treasure‑crocks, buried of old in war‑time' — and folklore preserves a motif in which a human who captures a leprechaun may compel him to reveal treasure or bargain for release. Saga material (Echtra Fergus mac Léti) records an episode where three lúchorpáin grant wishes when captured, but collectors stress that bargaining and revelation of treasure are the recurring motifs rather than an inherent, universal power of wish‑granting.