however, he found everything changed. The hills seemed small, the forests and woodlands had shrunk, and the great fort of Tara was reduced to nothing more than a hill. There wasn’t even a single voice or face anywhere that he recognized.
In despair, Oisin turned his horse to return to Tir Nan Og, but came across a group of men, who seemed to belong to a smaller, less mighty race than the Fianna Finn. They were struggling to move a stone. Even though they tried with all their might, they could not shift it. Feeling compassion for their weakness and courage, Oisin stopped to help them. Remembering his promise, he didn’t dismount from his white charger, but bent down and lifted the stone with one hand. The men regarded the shining golden warrior with amazement. But at that moment, the saddle slipped and he fell to the ground. The white horse thundered away to the sea. Where the great warrior had fallen, there lay an old man, the weight of hundreds of years heavy upon him.
Unlike many returning from the fairy realm, Oisin did not crumble to dust on mortal soil, however, but lived on and told the new Irish race about the heroic days of the Fianna Finn.
Bran and the Land of Women
The passage of time works in a similar way in Emhain, the Land of Women. It is related in the story of Bran mac Febail, as told by Lady Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (1904).
One day the Irish king Bran mac Febail heard the sweetest music. It lulled him to sleep and when he awoke he held in his hand a silver branch covered in white blossom. He brought it to the royal house, where a woman appeared in strange clothes and began to sing:
I bring a branch of the apple-tree from Emhain, from the far island around which are the shining horses of the Son of Lir.
A delight of the eyes is the plain where the hosts hold their games; curragh racing against chariot in the White Silver Plain to the south.
She went on to describe a shining, many-colored land of blossoms, birds, and sweet music, without grief, sorrow, sickness, or death. When she had finished her song, the silver branch leaped from Bran’s hands into hers and she vanished.
Next morning Bran set out with a fleet of curragh boats to row across to the sea to find the Isle of Emhain.
After two days and two nights, he and his men encountered Mannanon, Son of Lir, in his golden chariot. He told Bran he would reach the Land of Women before sunset.
Sure enough, it wasn’t long afterward that they reached the Isle of Emhain, where the chief woman welcomed them and pulled them ashore with a ball of thread. They went to a grand house where there was a bed for every couple and food and drink without end. There Bran and his men lived happily for what seemed to them a year.
Despite the beauty and delights of the Isle of Emhain, one of the company, Nechtan, grew homesick for Ireland and begged to return, just for an hour. The chief woman was loath to let them go and told Bran they must not touch the soil of Ireland and must talk to only their company on the boat. Bran promised, saying he would stay only a short while and return quickly.
They rowed away to Ireland, where the people gathered on the shore asked who they were. Bran asked if they had heard of Bran of Febal, but they replied that no such man was alive now, although their old stories told of a man who had rowed away to the Land of Women many hundreds of years before. On hearing that, Nechtan leaped from the curragh and waded to shore. As soon as his foot touched the soil, he turned to a heap of ash, as if he had been in the earth for hundreds of years.
Cautioned by his fate, the other men stayed aboard the curraghs. Bran rested long enough to tell of his voyage, then turned his fleet around and rowed back to the joys of the Isle of Emhain.
Oissin and Bran were lucky to escape the fate of death on returning to the human world. Like Nechtan, many who return from fairyland crumble to dust on touching human soil. This raises comparisons between fairyland and the Underworld, or the land of the dead.
Fairyland, the Underworld, Glamor, and Taboos
As in many stories of the Underworld, often there are taboos placed on eating and drinking in fairyland, and visitors would be wise to refuse any food or drink offered to them, no matter how appealing it appears. Fairies are known for using their glamor, or magic, to conceal the real nature of things.
The Legend of Innis Sark
Lady Wilde’s Legend of Innis Sark (1887) provides a cautionary tale against consuming fairy food and a lesson that all may not be as it seems in fairyland.
One November Eve (soon after Halloween), exhausted after a hard day’s work, a young man fell asleep under a haystack. He awoke to find himself in a fairy kitchen where, to his horror, he saw an old hag being chopped up and boiled to serve to the dinner guests.
The next thing he knew, he was being seated at a banquet table and a prince sitting on a throne at the head of the table was inviting him to eat. He looked around at the beautiful ladies and noblemen seated at the table, and then at the banquet. Fruit, chicken, turkey, butter, freshly baked cakes, and glasses of bright red wine filled the table.
Again, the prince invited the young man to eat. But, the scene from the kitchen still fresh in his mind, he declined. The prince persisted, insisting the young man taste the wine. Unable to resist the bright red liquid winking in a crystal cup offered to him by one of the beautiful ladies, the lad gave in and drank it down in one gulp. No sooner had he set down the empty glass than a clap of thunder shook the table, the lights went out, and he found himself alone in the dark night lying beneath the haystack.
Cherry of Zennor
In another tale, it is not food and drink but a special ointment that is taboo. This is a Cornish tale, “Cherry of Zennor,” collected by Robert Hunt in Popular Romances of the West of England (1865).
A few generations ago there lived a man known as Old Honey, such was the sweetness of his nature. He had a wife and several children and together they lived in a humble two-room cottage set on the cliffs at in the far west of Cornwall in a place called Trereen. Despite a simple diet of winkles and whelks and potatoes, they were a healthy, handsome family, and none more so than one of their daughters, Cherry.
When the miller’s boy visited to collect corn for the mill and left his horse tied to a furze bush, Cherry would climb onto its back and gallop off across the rugged cliffs and up onto the rough, rocky cairns that rose behind the little village.
Inevitably, this lively young lady soon became frustrated with the simplicity of her daily life and longed for a pretty frock to wear to the fair, or the church, or even to the preachings at the nearby villages of Morva or Nancledry. When one of her friends did just this and boasted of all the young beaus who had walked her home, she decided that she must leave home and look for work in the “low countries,” as the adjacent parishes were known. Her mother wanted her to go no further than Towednack, so she might still see her occasionally. But Cherry said, “No! I’ll never go where the cow ate the bell rope, and where they eat only fish and tatties and conger pie on Sundays.”
Old Honey saw that his daughter was determined and so one bright spring morning, Cherry put a few things in a bundle, waved goodbye
