COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
A woman on a white horse carries Oisín over the sea to the Land of Youth, and when he comes home three hundred years later and touches the ground, he is old and blind. The poem that tells the journey was written in County Clare around 1750, but the old man who tells it to St Patrick is centuries older.
Read story 11 min readA jealous stepmother turned Lir's four children into swans for nine hundred years, and only a monk's bell released them, as old people on the point of death. The tale is often called an ancient pagan myth, yet the earliest known mention of it is a title in a book list of 1526, and it ends with a baptism.
Read story 10 min readA boy raised in hiding burns his thumb on the salmon of knowledge and grows up to lead the Fianna, the warrior bands who lived by hunting and fighting. Folk tales of later centuries made him a giant who built the Giant's Causeway; the medieval texts never do.
Read story 13 min readShe meets the Dagda in a river at Samhain, fights Cú Chulainn as an eel, a wolf and a heifer, and after the great battle of the gods foretells first peace, then the end of the world. Even the scribes who copied her stories could not agree whether her name meant great queen or phantom queen.
Read story 13 min readAt seven he killed a smith's hound and took its place; at seventeen he held the fords of Ulster alone against the armies of four provinces. The two medieval versions of his saga disagree on much, and modern Ireland has made him a symbol on both sides of its divide.
Read story 13 min readThey came to Ireland in dark clouds, won it in two battles at Mag Tuired and lost it to the sons of Míl, who left them the half of the island that lies under the ground. The Christian scholars who wrote the story down could not decide whether they had been gods, demons or men.
Read story 14 min read
