Realms of Fantasy and Myth: Week 46 - Dullahan

Oct 27, 201219 min read

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Published: Oct 27, 2012

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Realms of Fantasy and Myth: Week 46 - Dullahan

Welcome to the forty-sixth issue of my fantasy features! These are now part of a collection in a group created specifically for this project.
If you like this feature, you can find more gorgeous artwork at the group, including some never featured in these articles before.

I hope you enjoy it, and please, show the featured artists some love and recognition through pageviews,

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This week's creature feature - just in time for Halloween - is: Dullahan

From Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dullahan and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lege…:

The Irish dullahan (also Gan Ceann, meaning "without a head" in Irish) is a type of unseelie fairie.  It is headless, usually seen riding a black horse and carrying his or her head under one arm.  When the dullahan stops riding, it is where a person is due to die. The dullahan calls out their name, at which point they immediately perish.
There is no way to bar the road against a dullahan—all locks and gates open on their own when it approaches.  Nonetheless, they are frightened of gold, and even a single gold pin can drive a dullahan away.

In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage. The most prominent Scottish tale of the headless horseman concerns a man named Ewen decapitated in a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. The battle denied him any chance to be a chieftain, and both he and his horse are headless in accounts of his haunting of the area.

The story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is set in crica 1790 in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (based on Tarrytown, New York), in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, who is a lean, lanky and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut, who competes with Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. As Crane leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during "some nameless battle" of the American Revolutionary War, and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head". Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones, who was "to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related". Although the nature of the Headless Horseman is left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was really Brom in disguise.

There have been many other versions of the story of the dullahan/headless horseman, many involving his constant search for his missing head.  Some even add that he will chase down and take the heads of others to replace his own.  That person might then become the next horseman.

Now, for the features!  Works are featured from various categories, in no particular order:

The Headless Horseman by StalkedByDragons

Ride Of The Headless Horseman by Nytcrawler

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Bretonnian Headless Horseman by ladylyzar

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31 DOH: The Horseman Cometh by croonstreet

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Headless Valentine by Hazel-Weatherfield

Sleepy Hollow High School by riotofconvicts

Fealing Headless by The-Nightmare-Escape

Sicily, In the Headless Flesh by Glass-Scenery

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Headless Horseman from Sleepy Hollow by Catskind

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H Halloween HeadlessHorseman by Destinyfall

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+Headless Horseman - Final+ by TownOfWolves

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Thank you so much for viewing, and come back next time for a different inhabitant of the Realms of Fantasy and Myth!