Sources and Further Reading

The books and collections below are the ones the archive actually uses. Most of the nineteenth-century titles are out of copyright and can be read online or obtained cheaply in reprint. Where a book is hard to find, your local library can usually arrange an inter-library loan. Prices and editions change; we have stopped trying to keep them current and give the original publication dates instead. The list was first put together in 2019 and is revised when links change or new editions appear.

Collections and archives

• The Schools' Collection, Irish Folklore Commission, 1937–39. Folklore collected by schoolchildren from parents and neighbours, under teacher supervision. Digitised at dúchas.ie and searchable. The source of our case INT/0002. The standard of handwriting varies.
• The Fairy Census 2014–2017 and 2017–2023, compiled by Simon Young for the Fairy Investigation Society. Free PDFs at Fairyist. Modern first-hand accounts collected by questionnaire. Leprechaun-specific entries are few; the archive's review of the leprechaun material lists all nine.
• Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive, at digitalfilmarchive.net. Holds the 1989 UTV Carlingford footage (our INT/0003) among much else.

Books

• T. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825). The earliest substantial printed collection. The leprechaun material is in the later sections, under older spellings.
• Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (1828). Places the Irish material alongside the wider European tradition.
• W. B. Yeats (ed.), Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). The source of the trooping/solitary division used on our identification page. Yeats's notes are short and worth reading.
• D. R. McAnally, Irish Wonders (1888). Describes the leprechaun in a red jacket. Readable, though the rendered dialect has dated badly.
• W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911). Field interviews collected across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Man. Long, and the author's own theory takes over towards the end, but the witness material is unmatched.
• Seán Ó Súilleabháin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942). The collectors' questionnaire used by the Irish Folklore Commission. Useful for understanding how the Schools' Collection was made.
• Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (1976). The standard single-volume reference. The entries for leprechaun, cluricaun and fear dearg set out the naming problem more clearly than we can here.
• Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green, Meeting the Other Crowd (2003). Modern oral accounts from Co. Clare and thereabouts, collected by a working storyteller.
• Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook (eds.), Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies (2018). Recent scholarship, county by county. The chapters on industrial and urban sightings are relevant to our Liverpool file.

Articles and press

• The Irish Times, “Westmeath was a hotbed of 'leprechaun' activity in 1908”. Reviews the 1908 press coverage behind our INT/0001.
• Nigel Watson, “The Case of the Liverpool Leprechauns”, Magonia. The most careful assembly of the 1964 newspaper record; the backbone of our LUK/0007.
• J. H. Craigen, “An Encounter with a Fairy,” John O'London's Weekly, 2 May 1936. Transcribed at Fairyist; our LUK/0004.

A note on provenance

Where this site quotes a source, the quotation is checked against the source before publication, and the source is named. Where we summarise, the summary is ours and errors in it are ours. If you find a quotation here that does not match its source, please treat the source as correct and the archive as mistaken, and we would be glad to hear of it.