Tir na nOg

Tir na nOg, the "Land of the Young", is the most celebrated of the Irish otherworlds, a realm of everlasting youth, beauty, health, and joy, imagined as lying beyond the western sea (one of several Irish names and locations for the blessed otherworld, alongside Mag Mell, the "plain of delight," and the islands of the immortals). There sickness, age, and death have no power, and the passage of time runs utterly differently from the mortal world, a feature that drives its most famous story.

In the tale of Oisin, the poet-warrior of the Fianna, the fairy woman Niamh of the golden hair carries him across the sea to Tir na nOg, where he lives in happiness for what seems three years; but when he grows homesick and returns to Ireland, warned never to let his feet touch the ground, he finds that three hundred years have passed, everyone he knew is long dead, and Christianity has come to the land. When he falls from his horse and touches the earth, the centuries catch him at once, and he withers into an ancient man. Tir na nOg embodies the Celtic vision of an otherworld that is not a place of the dead but a parallel land of the ever-living, close at hand yet unreachable, and its stories turn again and again on the incommensurable gulf between fairy time and human time.

The story most people know, in which Oisin rides west with Niamh, spends what feels like three years in the Land of Youth, returns to find three hundred have passed, touches the ground and ages instantly, is a poem by Micheal Coimin composed in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is a fine poem and it is not medieval. Its enormous popularity, in schoolbooks and translations, has made a late literary composition the standard account of an old idea.

The older material is the immram, the voyage tale, in which a hero sails west and visits a series of islands. Immram Brain and Immram Maele Duin are the best known, they are centuries earlier, and their otherworlds are plural rather than single: an island of laughter, an island of women, an island where a day is a year. Tir na nOg is one name among several, alongside Mag Mell and Tir Tairngire, and the sources do not treat them as a single mapped place.

The time distortion is the durable element and it is very widely distributed, appearing in Japanese, Chinese and Germanic tales as well. What the Irish versions add is the rule about the ground. The returning visitor is safe while mounted and lost the moment he touches the earth, which turns the whole story into a warning about the price of the journey rather than a description of the destination.