An Chraobh Airgid

Being of the sídhe

The Bean Sí

bean sí · older spelling bean sídhe

Say it: ban SHEE

The woman of the sídhe who keens before a death in the old families.

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

Her name is Irish for “a woman of the sí”, and it came into English as banshee. W. B. Yeats called her “an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death”, and counted her among the solitary fairies, with the púca; the keen raised over the dead, he wrote, was said to be an imitation of her cry. Lady Wilde added that she attends those gifted with music and song, and Sir Walter Scott that she is allowed only to families “of the pure Milesian stock”. In The Bean Sí she keens under a lightning-struck tree by an old abbey in Co. Cork, and at the window of a dying harper, Charles Bunworth.

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.

See also

  • Charles Bunworth Rector of Buttevant, harper, and friend of the travelling harpers.
  • Cill na Mallach Buttevant. A small old town on the Awbeg in north Cork, where the bean sí keened for a harper.
  • 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.