Banshee

The cry is heard at night, outside the house, and it is not anyone in the village. The neighbours hear it, sometimes the household hears it, and the dying person traditionally does not. By morning someone of the family inside is dead. The banshee is the Irish supernatural woman who announces a death by performing the keen at the door before the news has arrived through any human channel. Her name in Irish is bean sídhe, modernised as bean sí, literally “woman of the fairy mound.” Her job is to keen.

The mound

Síd in Old Irish means a fairy mound, which in medieval Irish literature means a prehistoric burial chamber understood as a doorway to the otherworld. The named ones are still there in the Irish landscape: Newgrange, Knowth, the rest of the Brú na Bóinne complex. The medieval texts treat them as the dwellings of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the older gods who retreated underground when the human Irish arrived. Bean sídhe is then literally “woman of the mound,” which is to say a being from the otherworld with a specific attachment to a specific family on this side of it. The Scottish Gaelic cognate is bean shìth, with a related figure, the bean nighe (washerwoman), playing the death-messenger role in the Highlands.

The standard study

Patricia Lysaght’s The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger, published by Glendale Press in Dublin in 1986, is the standard modern academic treatment, based on her UCD doctoral work and on hundreds of testimonies in the manuscript and audio holdings of the Irish Folklore Commission archive (now the National Folklore Collection at UCD). Lysaght’s typology distinguishes recurring forms across the testimonies: a young beautiful woman in green or grey; an old hag of the cailleach type; and (most distinctively in her own emphasis) a small dark-clad woman combing long white or red hair near a doorway or a stream at night. Regional names track regional forms. The Wexford, Carlow and Wicklow name is “the Bow” (an Bhadhbh). In Waterford she is “the Bibe.” Tipperary and Mayo use “the bean chaointe,” the keening woman. In Cork and Kerry she is typically heard but not seen at all.

The family rule, and its exceptions

Popular tradition says the banshee follows only the old Irish families: those whose surnames carry the Ó or Mac prefix, with the formula “five great families” naming the O’Neills, O’Briens, O’Connors, O’Gradys, and Kavanaghs as the originals. Lysaght’s actual scholarly framing is looser. She extends the rule to long-Hibernicised Anglo-Norman houses such as the Fitzgeralds, the Geraldines, “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Yeats’s 1888 banshee section makes the point in passing: he prints “The Banshee of the MacCarthys” alongside “A Lamentation for the Death of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald,” a Norman name. The strict five-families list is a memory device that travels well on the internet. The actual folk corpus is wider.

The medieval ancestor

The figure of the supernatural woman who appears at the warrior’s death and announces it through her own ritual act is at least eight centuries older than the term bean sídhe in the modern sense. In Aided Con Culainn, The Death of Cú Chulainn, preserved in the Book of Leinster from the 12th century, the hero on his last ride meets a young woman washing bloody clothes at a ford. The washer is identified with Badb, one of the three figures of the Morrígan alongside Macha and Nemain. Scholars including Lysaght see a structural continuity from the Badb at the ford through to the early-modern bean sídhe. The continuity is functional rather than a documented unbroken lineage; the medieval text predates the term in this exact use. The Scottish Highland counterpart, the bean nighe, is also a washerwoman at the ford, documented by John Gregorson Campbell in Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in 1900. In several Highland districts she is said to be the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth, now doomed to wash bloody shrouds at a ford until her natural lifespan expires.

The keen

The caoineadh, anglicised “keen,” is the high sustained lament-cry of Irish funeral tradition, sometimes verbalised into improvised poetry, historically performed by women and often by professional keening-women (mná caointe). Yeats’s introduction to his 1888 banshee section quotes the link directly:

The banshee (from ban [bean], a woman, and shee [sidhe], a fairy) is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death. The keen [caoine], the funeral cry of the peasantry, is said to be an imitation of her cry.

Whether the human keen imitates the banshee or the banshee is the supernatural archetype of the human keen is a chicken-and-egg question the tradition itself does not settle. What is documented is the long Catholic-Church campaign against the human keen across centuries of Irish religious history: synods condemned the practice from the sixteenth century onwards; the campaign intensified through the nineteenth-century devotional revolution that followed the Synod of Thurles in 1850. By the early twentieth century human keening at Irish funerals had been largely suppressed. The supernatural keen at the door at night, harder to legislate against, did not stop being heard.

Why she survives

The banshee is one of the few figures of Irish folk tradition that did not die out under nineteenth-century rationalism or twentieth-century modernisation. People still report hearing her. Lysaght’s archive of recorded testimonies grew into the 1980s and the National Folklore Collection still takes new accounts. What survives is the original function: a sound at night, heard by somebody other than the dying person, that turns out to have arrived before the news of the death itself. The banshee is the cultural infrastructure that registers a particular kind of premonition. The family is told first, before the world is. The keen is the medium.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Lysaght, Patricia. The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger. Dublin: Glendale Press, 1986.
• Croker, Thomas Crofton. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. 3 parts. London: John Murray, 1825 (Part I), 1828 (Parts II and III).
• Wilde, Lady Jane Francesca. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland. London: Ward & Downey, 1887.
• Yeats, W. B., ed. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. London: Walter Scott, 1888.
• Campbell, John Gregorson. Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1900.
• Campbell, John Gregorson. Witchcraft & Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1902.
• Black, Ronald, ed. The Gaelic Otherworld: John Gregorson Campbell’s Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005.
• Aided Con Culainn / Brislech Mór Maige Murthemne, in the Book of Leinster, fols 77a1–78b2 (12th c.). Critical edition: Bettina Kimpton, The Death of Cú Chulainn, Maynooth Medieval Irish Texts, Maynooth: School of Celtic Studies, 2009.
• Briggs, Katharine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon, 1976. (s.v. banshee, bean-nighe.)