Oisín in Tír na nÓg

At a Glance

• Central figures: Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill and poet of the Fianna; Niamh Chinn Óir (Niamh of the Golden Hair), daughter of the sea god Manannán mac Lir.
• Setting: Ireland in the time of the Fianna, and Tír na nÓg - the Land of the Young - reached by riding west across the sea.
• The turn: Niamh rides out of the sea-mist to the shore where the Fianna are hunting and asks Oisín to come with her to Tír na nÓg, where there is no age, no death, no grief.
• The outcome: Oisín returns to Ireland after what he believes is three years, only to find three hundred years have passed, the Fianna are gone, and the moment his foot touches Irish soil he becomes an ancient, blind man.
• The legacy: Oisín is said to have lived long enough to meet Saint Patrick and to tell him the stories of the Fianna, becoming the voice through which the Fenian Cycle was preserved.

The hunt was on the shore at Loch Lein when they saw her. She came riding out of the west on a white horse whose hooves did not break the surface of the water, and her hair was the color of new gold, and the Fianna stopped where they stood because none of them had ever seen a woman like her. Fionn mac Cumhaill stepped forward, but she was not looking at Fionn. She was looking at Oisín.

She told them her name: Niamh, daughter of Manannán mac Lir, king beneath the waves. She told them where she had come from - a country beyond the sea’s edge where no one aged and no one sickened, where the trees bore fruit and blossom at once, where music played without ceasing and sorrow had no word in any tongue spoken there. She said she had watched Oisín from far off. She said she wanted him.

The White Horse

Oisín looked at his father. Fionn’s face was still, the way it was before battle - not angry, not afraid, but knowing. Fionn had tasted the Salmon of Knowledge as a boy and had carried the weight of foresight ever since. What he saw in that moment he did not say.

Oisín mounted the white horse behind Niamh. The Fianna watched them go. Some called out farewells; others said nothing. The horse turned west, struck the water, and ran. The sea did not give beneath it. Behind them Ireland shrank to a green thread, then a green smudge, then nothing.

They passed islands on the way. One was on fire. One had a tower of silver on it with a door that opened onto air. Strange riders crossed their path - a young woman on a brown horse carrying a golden apple, a white hound with red ears running behind her. Oisín asked Niamh what it meant, and she said only, Ride on. The sea turned colors beneath them - grey, then green, then the blue of a sky seen from underneath.

Tír na nÓg

The country was as Niamh had promised. The trees bore apples and white blossoms together. The halls were wide, the floors were clean rushes, the mead was cold and never ran out. There were hunts. There were feasts. There was fighting - good fighting, the kind that leaves no wound. Oisín fought, feasted, hunted, and at night lay with Niamh, and there was nothing in that country to make him unhappy.

They had children. A son. A daughter. He named the son Oscar, after his own son whom he had left behind in Ireland, and the naming of the name was the first crack in the wall. Because after that he began to think about Ireland. Not often. Not every day. But the thought was there, the way a stone is there at the bottom of a river - you can see through the water to it but you cannot move it.

He told Niamh he wanted to go back. Just to see. Just to look at the old places and the faces of his companions. He would return, he said.

Niamh’s face changed. She told him he could go. She gave him the white horse and told him one thing: Do not dismount. Do not let your feet touch the ground of Ireland. If you do, you will never come back to me.

Three Hundred Years

The horse carried him east across the sea, and when Ireland rose before him it was the same green, the same hills, the same grey sky. But when he rode inland everything was wrong. The land was smaller. The people were smaller. They looked at him on his white horse the way you look at something from a story. No one knew the name of Fionn mac Cumhaill. No one had heard of the Fianna. Or rather - they had heard, but the way you hear of things that happened a long, long time ago.

Three years in Tír na nÓg. Three hundred years in Ireland.

Oisín rode through the country looking for a single familiar thing and found nothing. The forts were grass mounds. The great halls were gone. The hounds, the horses, the spears, the men who carried them - all gone, folded into the earth like seeds that never came back up.

He came upon men trying to move a stone in a field near Glenasmole. Small men, straining at a boulder that any one of the Fianna would have shifted with a shoulder. Oisín leaned down from the saddle to help them. The girth of the saddle snapped. He fell.

His feet touched the ground.

The Blind Old Man

The white horse bolted. It ran west and was gone. Where Oisín had fallen there was no longer a young warrior with golden arms and a straight back. There was an old man. His hair was white. His skin hung loose on his bones. His eyes clouded over and he could not see.

The men who had been moving the stone stood around him and did not understand what they were looking at. They brought him to a priest - a Christian, for this was the time of the new faith. The priest’s name was Patrick.

Patrick fed him and sheltered him and asked him to tell his stories. And Oisín told them. He told Patrick about Fionn’s boyhood, and the Salmon of Knowledge, and the battles, and the hunts on the hills of Ireland when the Fianna were alive and the country was full of them. He told Patrick about Niamh and the white horse and the country where no one aged. Patrick listened and wrote, and argued with the old man about the faith, and Oisín argued back, and neither gave ground.

They say Oisín died soon after. Blind, old, the last of the Fianna, lying in a monk’s house with the sound of church bells where there had once been the sound of horns across water. But the stories survived him. Patrick or his monks set them down, and the voice in the manuscripts is Oisín’s voice - a man who had been young in two countries and old in one, speaking from memory of a world that had passed entirely out of the reach of the living.