Tír na nÓg- Celtic LocationLocation · Realm"Land of Youth"

Connla's Apple

The Echtrae Chonnlai is one of the oldest surviving Otherworld tales. Connla, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, was approached by a woman no one else could see. She told him of a land where people lived forever and wanted for nothing. Conn's druid Corán sang against her and drove her away, but before she vanished she threw Connla an apple. For a month he ate nothing else. The apple never diminished no matter how much he consumed, and he thought of nothing but the woman's country. When she returned, Connla stepped into her crystal boat and sailed west. He was never seen in Ireland again.

The Voyage of Bran

In the Immram Brain, composed in the seventh or eighth century, Bran mac Febail heard a woman singing of an island supported by four golden pillars, where games and chariot-racing filled the days and death had never entered. She carried a silver branch hung with white blossoms that made music when shaken. Bran sailed with twenty-seven companions. They reached the Island of Women, where each man was paired with a woman and lived in contentment. When one companion grew homesick, they turned back. The woman of the island warned them not to set foot on shore. The homesick man leaped from the boat and crumbled to ash, as if he had been dead for centuries. Bran told his story to those on the beach, then sailed away and was never seen again.

Niamh and Oisín

The Fianna were hunting near Loch Léin in Kerry when Oisín saw a woman riding toward them on a white horse. She named herself Niamh Chinn Óir, Niamh of the Golden Hair, a daughter of the king of Tír na nÓg. She had crossed the sea because she had heard of Oisín's fame as a warrior and poet.

Oisín mounted behind her. The white horse carried them west across the surface of the sea, its hooves skimming the waves. They passed islands shrouded in mist and towers rising from the water. In Tír na nÓg, Oisín lived as Niamh's husband and they had children. The trees bore fruit and flowers at the same time. No one aged. No one was sick. He believed three years had passed.

The Changed World

Oisín wanted to see Ireland again, to visit his father Fionn and the Fianna. Niamh warned him that far more time had passed than he knew and begged him to stay. When he insisted, she lent him the white horse and told him he must not dismount. If his feet touched Irish soil, he could never return.

He rode back and found everything changed. The Fianna were long dead. Not three years but three hundred had passed. The great halls stood in ruin. A new religion had come to Ireland. While wandering the changed landscape, Oisín saw men struggling to move a stone from a path. He reached down from horseback to help, and the saddle girth broke. He fell. Three centuries of age struck him in a single instant. The golden warrior became a blind, withered old man. The white horse galloped west and vanished, returning to Tír na nÓg without its rider.

Oisín and Saint Patrick

In the Acallam na Senórach and Micheál Coimín's eighteenth-century Laoi Oisín i dTír na nÓg, the aged Oisín encounters Saint Patrick. Blind and feeble, the old warrior tells Patrick the stories of the Fianna. Patrick urges baptism. Oisín refuses. He declares that Fionn's household offered more than heaven could, and he will not believe his father burns in hell. In the Acallam, Oisín eventually accepts the new faith. In Coimín's poem, he dies unbaptized, choosing the company of the Fianna over the promise of heaven.