Leanan Sídhe

Somewhere near Port St Mary a farmer began hearing her at night. The rest of the household heard it too, a noising that came up whenever everything else went quiet, and he decided that one of the women he employed on the place must be behind it. He let one go. The noise stayed. He let another go, and then another, and it made no difference at all. Men came over from the far side of the island and sat up to watch for her, and they could do nothing for him either. He died in the end.

That story was still being collected on the Isle of Man in the early 1930s, and the thing in the farmhouse had a name. The Manx called her the Lhiannan-shee. In Ireland she is the leannán sí, in the Scottish Highlands the leannan sìth, and the words are not a title but a description: fairy sweetheart, or closer still, fairy follower. The second half of the name plants her among the people of the mounds. That is the whole of the etymology, and it matters, because it means she was never one woman with a biography. She is a category. Three countries filled it in three different ways, and they did not agree.

The Manx filled it darkest. In their telling she comes out of the land of the dead wearing a fairy’s name, fastens on one man, and appears to him as a woman nobody else in the room can see. If he yields to her she takes him apart, body and soul, over years rather than nights. W. Walter Gill, who gathered these accounts across the 1920s and 1930s, found that the Manx had almost no use for her kinder aspect and recorded her plainly as a ruin. She favours water. There was one at the Chibber Roon in Marown, one at a fairy well near Tholt y Holt in Lonan, something of the sort at a roadside stream near Glen May, and from those places she fixed on whoever came past. Another was picked up at a dance at Ballahick in Malew by a man who could never afterwards shake her off.

Dr Kelly, compiling his Manx dictionary around the turn of the nineteenth century, rendered lhiannan-shee as a genius, a sprite, a familiar spirit, a guardian angel. Then he added that he had also seen the word used to mean nightmare. Both readings sat in the language at once and neither cancelled the other. The same word survived into living memory as a mild scolding for a small child hanging off its mother’s skirt and demanding more than its share of attention.

Cross the water to Ireland and the picture inverts. There she acquired the one quality the Manx never granted her, which is generosity. W. B. Yeats put the version everyone now knows into print in 1888, in the notes to his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, filing her among the solitary fairies beside the leprechaun and the fear gorta. She seeks the love of mortals, he wrote. Refuse her and she must be your slave; consent and you are hers, and the only exit is to find someone else to take your place. The fairy lives on her lover’s life and he wastes away. Death is no escape. “She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes.” The Gaelic poets die young, he finished, because she is restless and will not let them remain long on earth.

That paragraph has done most of the work of keeping her alive, and almost every modern account of the leanan sídhe, including the ones that call her a vampire, is a paraphrase of it. Away from Yeats she is surprisingly hard to find. She does not appear in standard dictionaries of Hiberno-English, and an Irish reader is far likelier to have met her in a song than in a story: the 1904 ballad My Lagan Love, whose words Joseph Campbell set to an air Herbert Hughes had collected in Donegal, uses a lovesick lennanshee as the image for a man whose heart is no longer his own.

The Scottish record is drier and, in one respect, the most interesting of the three. John Gregorson Campbell, a Gaelic-speaking minister who took his material down from Highland and island narrators in their own words, recorded the leannan sìth as a fairy sweetheart and familiar spirit, and noted that it might be of either sex. She tells her lover what is coming before it comes. And at the end of it, Campbell says, he looks on her with aversion. No curse in that, no bargain, no wasting. It is simply how these arrangements finish.

Nobody wrote down what she looked like. Across all three traditions the sources are close to silent on her face, her height, her clothes, and the silence starts to look deliberate, because her appearance is not where the horror lives. The point of her is that one man sees her and nobody else does. A household watches him grow animated, tender, argumentative and wholly absorbed, and there is nothing in the corner he is speaking to. A. W. Moore recorded a man near Port Erin who had a fairy sweetheart and made the mistake of taking notice of her, which the fairies are said to dislike. He was quiet enough by day, like anyone else. At night he slept out in the barn, and the household could hear him talking to her there, and now and then telling her off, and going silent the instant anyone made a sound.

She has no origin story, which is unusual even for a folk creature. Nothing names her parents, her making or her first appearance anywhere on any of the three islands. Gill’s suggestion that she comes from among the dead is an inference drawn from her behaviour rather than a tale anybody told, and the tradition seems to have felt no want of one. A fairy sweetheart is something that happens to a man, not a person with a past.

Only once did the belief build her a rite and an object to go with it. The manor of Ballafletcher in Braddan kept a fluted crystal glass, engraved with scrolls and columns, understood to belong to the Lhiannan-shee of the house. It passed down through the Fletcher family, was sold off with the last Fletcher’s effects in 1778, and ended up shut inside a silver-mounted oak box by a later and more nervous owner. Once a year at Christmas, and possibly again at Easter, the head of the house filled it and drank it off at a breath to the spirit of his hearth and domain. Break the glass and she would haunt you, and the fortunes of the family would go the way of the crystal. Here the ruinous mistress has quietly turned into a household guardian, nearer to the Highland glaistig who stays on in a house to look after its tenants than to the thing in the farm at Port St Mary.

What she can do follows from what she is. She grants inspiration beyond anything a mortal reaches unaided, she gives foreknowledge, she controls absolutely who is permitted to see her, and she binds a man so completely that leaving is not among the courses of action he can picture. Age does not touch her.

Her limits mirror all of it. She cannot sustain herself alone and needs a living man to spend, which leaves her dependent on the one creature she is busy destroying. In Yeats’s account the trap has a seam in it: a captive can buy his way out by handing her on to a replacement, and the mortal who refuses her outright, and means it, inverts the whole arrangement and takes her as his servant instead. In the Highlands she simply outstays her welcome and is loathed. And the Manx add a smaller, stranger rule, which is that she does not care to be noticed. The man at Port Erin noticed his, and it cost him his reason rather than his life. Attention is the one thing that cannot safely be given her, which is an awkward property in a spirit whose entire business is being adored.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Leanan Sídhe?

The Leanan Sídhe is a fairy sweetheart from Gaelic folklore who attaches herself to a single mortal man and appears to him as a woman nobody else can see. The name is a plain description rather than a personal name, so she is a class of being rather than one individual. Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and the Isle of Man each kept a version of her under a cognate name.

Is the Leanan Sídhe a vampire?

She is often called one, and the Manx version supports it best: there she comes from among the dead and consumes the man she attaches to, body and soul, over a period of years. She does not drink blood in any account. The vampiric reading of the Irish version rests almost entirely on W. B. Yeats, who wrote in 1888 that the fairy lives on her lover’s life while he wastes away.

Why do the Leanan Sídhe’s lovers die young?

According to Yeats, the inspiration she gives is paid for out of the poet’s own life, and she is too restless to let him stay long on earth. That is the Irish version of the bargain, and it is the one that made her famous as a muse. The Manx accounts describe the same ruin without the artistic compensation, and the Scottish ones describe a lover who simply comes to loathe her.

How can someone escape the Leanan Sídhe?

In Yeats’s version a captive can only get free by finding another mortal to take his place, passing the attachment along. He also recorded a reversal: the man who refuses her outright makes her his servant rather than his mistress. The Manx tradition offers no reliable escape at all, and the one man on record who tried simply drew her attention, which the fairies are said to dislike.

Is the Leanan Sídhe Irish, Scottish or Manx?

All three. She is the leannán sí in Ireland, the leannan sìth in the Scottish Highlands and the Lhiannan-shee on the Isle of Man, and the three records differ sharply in character. The Irish version is the inspiring muse, the Manx version is a destroyer who comes from the land of the dead, and the Scottish version is a familiar spirit that may be of either sex and gives its lover knowledge of the future.

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Gancanagh, Sídhe, Banshee, Far Darrig, Fear gorta, Púca, Leprechaun, Fenodyree, Mooinjer veggey, Baobhan Sith, Glaistig, Bean-Nighe, Fairy, Succubus, Muse