Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Untiring Joys And Sorrows”: Yeats And The Sidhe, Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the “good people”—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological con- struct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that …