More Cat Tales
Oct. 17th, 2009 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatYesterday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vilajunkie alerted me to a kind of magical black cat that I had omitted from my recent post, the Cait Sith of the Scottish Highlands. From what I've seen, this is pronounced "cat shee," and hence has no connection to the Sith from Star Wars. Then again, I've read that a giant green rabbit is a significant character in the comics based on the franchise, so I suppose a feline Dark Lord wouldn't be out of place. But I digress. The Cait Sith is a fairy cat, distinguished from an ordinary black cat by its size and a white spot on its breast.
(Okay, maybe Reagan is too small to be a Cait Sith, but she DOES have the correct marking.)
The general consensus online seems to be that the Cait Sith could be dangerous and ferocious, but I can't find much about what they were actually thought to DO. But a few tidbits I was able to pick up included that the Cait Sith was sometimes thought to be a transformed witch, that some Scots also believed in a demonic cat called Big Ears that could be summoned by burning other cats, and that the canine equivalent is a typically silent green dog known as the Cu Sith. It seems that the legend of the fairy cats probably came from the Kellas Cats, Scottish hybrids between wildcats and domestic cats.
Nowadays, the name Cait Sith is more likely to be associated with a character from Final Fantasy VII, a robotic cat with a megaphone that rides around on an animated stuffed Moogle. It turns out that the cat is actually under the control of Reeve, head of Urban Development for the Shinra Corporation, who is operating as sort of a double agent. This Cait Sith differs from its namesake in that it has an entire white underbelly instead of simply one white spot, but it DOES sometimes speak with a Scottish accent. A few other Final Fantasy games have either a generic enemy or a summoned creature called Cait Sith. In the original English translation of Final Fantasy VI, the summoned Cait Sith was translated simply as "Stray."
vilajunkie alerted me to a kind of magical black cat that I had omitted from my recent post, the Cait Sith of the Scottish Highlands. From what I've seen, this is pronounced "cat shee," and hence has no connection to the Sith from Star Wars. Then again, I've read that a giant green rabbit is a significant character in the comics based on the franchise, so I suppose a feline Dark Lord wouldn't be out of place. But I digress. The Cait Sith is a fairy cat, distinguished from an ordinary black cat by its size and a white spot on its breast.(Okay, maybe Reagan is too small to be a Cait Sith, but she DOES have the correct marking.)
The general consensus online seems to be that the Cait Sith could be dangerous and ferocious, but I can't find much about what they were actually thought to DO. But a few tidbits I was able to pick up included that the Cait Sith was sometimes thought to be a transformed witch, that some Scots also believed in a demonic cat called Big Ears that could be summoned by burning other cats, and that the canine equivalent is a typically silent green dog known as the Cu Sith. It seems that the legend of the fairy cats probably came from the Kellas Cats, Scottish hybrids between wildcats and domestic cats.
Nowadays, the name Cait Sith is more likely to be associated with a character from Final Fantasy VII, a robotic cat with a megaphone that rides around on an animated stuffed Moogle. It turns out that the cat is actually under the control of Reeve, head of Urban Development for the Shinra Corporation, who is operating as sort of a double agent. This Cait Sith differs from its namesake in that it has an entire white underbelly instead of simply one white spot, but it DOES sometimes speak with a Scottish accent. A few other Final Fantasy games have either a generic enemy or a summoned creature called Cait Sith. In the original English translation of Final Fantasy VI, the summoned Cait Sith was translated simply as "Stray."
