J.M.J.
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Finney in his rocking chair in his snug and comfy home!
Hello to you! As you know by now, I am Nannie and I have been wonderful-ly blessed by God…I am a Friend of the Leprechauns! You can be a Friend to them, as well, if you are very careful not to try to catch them…and never, never try to steal their pot o’ gold!
Leprechauns love to play and have fun! Bairbre McCarthy, in her Irish Leprechaun Stories, describes Leprechauns as “fun-loving,” and dressed in their suits of green and ‘fine leather shoes adorned with silver buckles’.”
Ireland is an island country.
With the seashore surrounding Ireland as it does, there is plenty of opportunity for a happy little Leprechaun to take a walk by the sea…once, of course, the work of the day is done!
In the story, “Watchin’ The Tide” (#43), Finney tells about what it is like to see the sea waters come and go…what it’s like to see the birds catching a meal…
In Finney’s last story, about his Mum’s “cookin'” (#45), we find out a little more about Leprechaun meals and how the sea provides seaweed that helps feed Leprechauns, too! Finney also mentioned the “prayin’s” that his Leprechaun Family says before they eat…
We’ll eat together and thank God,
For our home on this grand old sod!
We’ll thank Him for our food and drink…
And for each other… and we’ll think
Of all that we are thankful for…
And, for our place in Ireland’s lore!
Also mentioned in “Cookin’!” was the movie, “The Secret of Roan Inish”, and Grandmother Tess making her special soup from seaweed! Her prayer was always special, I thought, when she was “preserving” the fire until morning…
“I rake this fire as the pure Christ rakes us all. Mary at the foot and Brigid at the head. May the eight brightest angels from the City of Grace preserve this house and all its people til the coming of day.”
Interestingly enough, Kathryn Graham (www.lib.latrobe.edu.au) tells us this prayer of Grandmother Tess was inspired by a real life “heroine” of the Blasket Islands (off the southwest coast of Ireland) named Peig Sayers.

Peig’s prayer was recorded in Peig Sayers — An Old Woman’s Reflections, translated from the Irish by Seamus Ennis and Introduced by W. R. Rogers…
“I preserve the fire as Christ preserves all, Brigid at the two ends of the house, and Mary at the center. The three angels and the three apostles who are highest in the Kingdom of Grace, guarding this house and its contents until day” (Sayers xiv).
The book jacket of her Reflections tells us that Peig (1873-1958) was ‘the Queen of Gaelic story- tellers’. “Students and scholars of the Irish language came from far and wide to visit her. She was, as Robin Flower wrote in The Western Island, ‘a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they would have the effect of literature with no savour of the artificiality of composition’. Her Reflections are a collection of her fireside stories…”
There is also a quote from Blackfriars… “Peig reveals in almost everything she says that special gift that will always belong to the simple and unspoiled in Ireland, which one feels quite justified in describing, when one has met with it over and over again, as a unique perception of reality, both in the world of nature and the life of faith.”
I am so happy you stopped by to visit Finney and me! Thank you!
As Finney would say…
I am so glad we talked today!
God bless you is what I do say!