It is a sign of the times that before arriving at the exact definition of a banshee, I traipsed through 3 Google pages of bansheedom mentioning everything from a tv series to a bike to (figure this one out) a wine store until the Wikipedia blue penmanship alit on a site « Ireland days » appropriately Celtically crossed. Other pen drawings included Gaelic mists feathering about a woman’s face, vaguely Virgin Maryish, proving that our Hibernian friends never did make it completely over into dogmatic Roman Catholicism, and thus the banshee thrives but does not thrive for all; she discriminates in her early death warnings by appearing to only a few select families. The O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, the O’Gradys and the Kavanaghs (why is there no O’?),constitute the happy few to receive her visit before an imminent death, so if you are not in the lot ,no pale haggard female sprite shalt thou see. According to Ireland Eyes, the banshee chooses the bimbo, the battle ax or the beggar as memes representing the tripartite aspects of the old Celtic goddess whose moniker resembles an Icelander choking on reindeer stew, therefore she is in her own way multi-cultural, diverse and unpronounceable and even the misnomer banshee is a colonial corruption of the original bean-sidhe. Her modes of communication are also diverse, geographically and musically, ranging from the “low pleasant singing of Kerry” (I’m not making this up) to “a piercing wail” in Leinster to…well, whatever you want it to be, as long as it is funereal and or unpleasant. In Tyrone she emotes as “two boards being stuck together,” and elsewhere, an O’Neill, an O’Brien, an O’Connor, an O’Grady or a Kavanagh can be regaled by a “thin, screeching sound somewhere between the wail of a woman and the moan of an owl” before meeting his Maker or not, because there is, I suppose, a way of buying off a banshee with a little bit of insider trading knowledge, cheating the Boss of another soul if only for a short duration. Also, she can adopt other forms, sneak up on you as a crow, a stoat, a hare and a weasel – a Yalie, an Amhersty, a Mizzou, a Swedish minister on public tv, a former French housing minister, two former speakers of the House, a former Secretary of State…
