An Chraobh Airgid

People

The aos sí

aos sí

Say it: ees shee

The people of the mounds: the Good People.

Open it on the full site There every name opens, and a web shows who is kin to whom.

In folklore the Tuatha Dé Danann live on as the aos sí, “the people of the sí”, the fairy mounds. People spoke of them carefully, as the Good People or the Gentry, and did not cut their thorn trees.

In the tales

  • The Bean Sí The herdsman swore he had not touched a drop. All the way through the glen, a woman with long white hair had kept at his side, keening and calling his master’s name.
  • The Lone Thorn Nobody would cut a lone old thorn in a field: it was the Good People’s. One man cut a thorn in a thicket, and heard a voice he took for one of them, mourning for it.

See also

  • The Fairy Thorn The old hawthorn standing by itself that nobody would cut: the Good People’s bush.
  • The Púca A shape-shifter of Irish folklore: now a horse, now an ass, now a goat.

Sources

Collected folklore. Recorded from storytellers and local tradition.

Each tale above lists the sources it is retold from. Every source the site draws on is listed on the full site.