The Call of Oisin[1]
It was a misty morning and the remaining men of the Fianna decided to go hunting. They were “hunting near the borders of Loch Leinh, where the brushes were in blossom and the birds were singing; and they were waking up the deer that were as joyful as the leaves of a tree in summer-time” (399-400).
A beautiful young woman on “a very fast slender white horse” approached (400). Her red-gold hair was crowned and bejeweled. She wore a dark silk cloak, the color of indigo, that reached all the way to the ground. It was embossed with red gold stars. Her skin was as white as the snow, her cheeks like foxglove, her eyes like sapphires. Her lips were “as sweet as honey that is mixed through red wine” (400).
She held “a bridle having a golden bit, and there was a saddle worked with red gold under her” (400). A “wide smooth cloak” covered the horse “and a silver crown on the back of his head, and he was shod with shining gold” (400).
“I am Niamh of the Golden Head,” she said to Finn, “the daughter of the king of Tir na n’Og, the Country of the Eternally Young.”
“What has brought you here?” asked Finn.
“I have come to meet my beloved,” she said.
“And who is your beloved,” asked Finn. “Your son, Oisin of the strong hands,” she said. “I have come to marry him, to take him away to Tir na n’Og, where we will live in love forever.”
Oisin had been reunited with his father for only a few years and it would be painful to lose him, even to a vision such as this. But Oisin was taken; “there was not a limb of his body that was not in love with beautiful Niamh” (400).
“’I live in the most beautiful country; the trees are heavy with fruit and the flowers are always in bloom. ’Honey and wine are plentiful there, and everything the eye has ever seen; no wasting will come on you with the wasting away of time.’ You will never grow old or ill and you will never die. You will eat sumptuous feasts, drink the best wine and mead; you will be surrounded by the music of the spheres, by golden harps that sing on the soft breeze. Your body will be adorned in the finest armor, impervious to all that strike it; you will wear the finest gold, encrusted with gems from around the world and beyond.
“’A hundred glad young girls shining like the sun, their voices sweeter than the music of birds; a hundred armed men strong in battle, apt at feats, waiting on you, if you will come with me’ to Tir na n’Og.
“’You will get everything…and delights beyond, that I have no leave to tell; you will get beauty, strength and power,’ and me for your wife” (401).
“With you I will go anywhere,” said Oisin. He bade his father and the men of Fianna farewell and joined Niamh on her horse. And the horse took off and headed for the sea. When they reached the sea, Finn and the Fianna “gave three great sorrowful shouts” (402).
“I do not think I shall ever behold my son again,” said Finn.
Oisin’s Story
Facing west, Niamh and Oisin turned their backs to the land and flew out over the sea. Oisin saw many a wondrous thing on his way to Tir na n’Og. “The sea moved away from us, and waves filled up after us. We then saw ‘cities and courts and duns and lime-white houses, and shining sunny-houses and palaces. And one time we saw beside us a hornless deer running hard, and an eager white red-eared hound following after it. And another time we saw a young girl on a horse’ (405). She held a golden apple and she flew over the waves. A young man on a white horse followed her. He wore a “crimson cloak’ and held ‘a gold-hilted sword in his right hand’” (405).
“And when we arrived in Tir na n’Og,I beheld a land in full blossom, covered by smooth plains, ‘and a king’s dun that was very grand, and that had ever colour in it, and sunny-houses beside it, and palaces of shining stones, made by skilled men. And we saw coming out to meet us three fifties of armed men, very lively and handsome….And there came out after that a hundred beautiful young girls, having cloaks of silk worked with gold,’ and they welcomed me (406). Then came ‘a great shining army, and with it a strong beautiful king, having a shirt of yellow silk and a golden cloak over it, and a very bright crown on his head.’ Behind him was ‘a young queen, and fifty young girls along with her’” (406).
“You are welcome here, my son,” said the comely king. “Your life here will be eternal and you will be young and strong forever. We will begin with a wedding celebration that will last for ten days and ten nights.”
Oisin was in Tir na n’Og for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years. Many accounts suggest 900 years, a parallel to the nine months a human child spends in the womb. However long it was, it did not seem so. Oisin lived in bliss and fathered three children with Niamh. He named one Finn, after his father. He named another boy Osgar, after a famous warrior and family friend. He named his daughter the Flower.
“’And I did not feel time passing, and it was a long time I stopped there,’ he said, ‘till the desire came on me to see Finn and my comrades again. And I asked leave of the king and of Niamh to go back to Ireland.
“If you go, I fear that you will never return,” Niamh said.
“Of course I will,” he said. “Just give me the horse that brought me here. I will go and return with him.”
Niamh agreed, but she warned him: “’If you once get down from the horse, you will be an old man, blind and withered, without liveliness, without mirth, without running, without leaping. And it is a grief to me, Oisin,’ she said, ‘you ever to go back to green Ireland’ (408). For it is not the same. You will not find your father and his people. A new army has come, a new ‘Father of Orders and armies of saints’” (408). With that she kissed him goodbye for the last time.
Oisin arrived in a new Ireland, a new world. Gone were the great men of the Fianna. Oisin looked all over, searched the four corners of Ireland, and did not see familiar family, friend, or even foe. Instead, he saw a smaller, slighter race, with bent back, stooped and frail, sickly and tired. He also heard the sound of bells. After a while, he encountered some soldiers. Oisin asked them about Finn and the Fiana. “He lived a long time ago,” they said. “They are legend. ‘And we heard Finn had a son…that was beautiful and shining, and that there came a young girl looking for him, and he went away with her to the Country of the Young’” (408).
Oisin headed back to the Almuin of Leinster, once the land of his father. “’And there was great wonder on me when I came there to see no sign at all of Finn’s great dun, and his great hall, and nothing in the place where it was but weeds and nettles’”(408-409).
Oisin was about to return to Niamh, to Tir na n’Og, when he saw some of these small men trying to move a stone from the opening of a cave. He reached down to help them, and, in doing so, fell from the magical horse. “’And in the minute all the years came on me, and I was lying on the ground, and the horse took fright and went away and left me there, an old man, weak and spent, without sight, without shape, without comeliness, without strength or understanding, without respect’” (409).
And the Christians that beheld Oisin called him a wizard and threatened to stone the blind old man. One of them decided to take him to their leader, St. Patrick, instead. Patrick wanted to hear his story. He wanted to write it down for posterity. He had some respect for their pagan culture.
It was not a very friendly meeting. Patrick fed Oisin, but the food was overcooked and not very meaty. Oisin was a big meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. He went on and on about how good the Fianna fare had been. Patrick reminded him that all his pagan Fianna buddies were now roasting forever in Hell. Oisin took offence to this and talked about how the Fianna could defeat both God and the devil. In the end, and probably because the victors—in this case, the Christians—are telling the story, Oisin converted to Christianity, whereupon which, his hundreds-of-years-old body died and went to Heaven.
William Butler Yeats, however, imagined a better end for the Irish hero, in his poem, “The Wanderings of Oisin.”
[1] All quotes come from Gregory, Lady Augusta, Irish Myths and Legends. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1998. Much of this story is an amalgam of several stories; anything that is directly quoted (and I don’t mean dialog, unless there are the triple-quotes [“’]), however, comes from Gregory’s text.
