Oisín in Tír na nÓg: The Land of Youth and the Three Hundred Years That Weighed Nothing
Of all the journeys to the Otherworld that the Celtic imagination has charted, none returns with a costlier cargo than the ride of Oisín —poet of the Fianna, son of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill—to Tír na nÓg , the Land of the Young. Other travelers to the blessed isles bring back wisdom, or apples, or silence. Oisín brought back three hundred years he did not know he was carrying, and the moment his foot touched Irish soil, they were all paid to him at once. His legend is short as legends go: a horse, a woman, a western sea, a golden country, a homesickness, a broken girth, an old man in the grass. But packed inside it is the most exacting meditation on time, memory, and the price of paradise that the old West produced—and, in its final scene, a confrontation unique in European myth: the last pagan hero, ancient beyond death, arguing theology with Saint Patrick himself. The Woman on the White Horse It began, as the deepest Irish stories do, on the edge between hunting and vision. The...