Lately I’ve been probing another folkloric rabbit-hole. Specifically, I’ve been digging into the history of the dullahan, a being of Irish fable generally portrayed as a headless horse-rider or coach-driver. Regrettably, a lot of the online sources on this folkloric entity are badly-researched, with the frankly awful Wikipedia article – which, incredibly, uses a page on Cracked.com as one of its main references – being typical. So, I decided to do some of my own research into the cultural history of the dullahan.
The earliest references to the dullahan that I’ve managed to trace is in a 1802 text on comparative linguistics by Charles Vallancey, entitled Prospectus of a Dictionary of the Language of the Aire Coti, or Ancient Irish, Compared with the Language of the Cuti, or Ancient Persians, with the Hindoostanee, the Arabic, and Chaldean Languages. The book includes a section in which Vallancey compares terms from Irish and Arabic folklore; amongst other things, he compares the Irish dullahan with something called a “wulahan”, which is apparently an Arabian demon:
The Dullahan or Wullahan is a terrible bug-bear at this day; the peasants hear him in the night dragging a heavy chain through the villages and along the roads; this is the wulahan, or Satanas of the Arabs…
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