Sea Voyages
For the seagirt Irish, each ocean voyage was certain. The waters of the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic were speckled with strange and shifting islands, as the Irish immrama - voyage tales - record. Adventures told of sighting such islands as one of cat-headed men and another of men with dogs' heads; one with a fountain that yielded milk, ale and wine, one of giant horses; and one that turned anything cast on one side white, and anything cast on the other black.
It was hard to tell in those days whether a sea voyage would go on in a normal, uneventful way, or whether the fierce wind and tides of the North would drive the little boats off course and across an invisible barrier into the realm of Faerie, where adventures would begin, as they did for a prince named Teigue. His story was this:
Teigue was the heir of an early lord of Munster, in the west of Ireland, and he took the sea on a voyage of rescue and revenge. A marauder named Cathmann, with a fleet of nine ships, had invaded Teigue's lands, laid waste the fields, burned the villages and departed for his own stronghold - an island off the coast of Spain - taking as captives Teigue's wife, Liban, and two of his brothers.
Teigue was left with forty warriors, one captive from Cathmann's band and a fierce determination to deliver his family. He caused a currach - a stout ship - to be built. It had strong masts and broadbladed oars; and the frame was covered, the story says, with hard, red leather made from the hides of forty oxen.
On a bitter morning in March, they launched the little ship at Kerry Head, sliding her over the pebbles of the shore and into the grip of cresting seas. With their oars flashing, the Irishmen drove forward into wind and icy rain, and it was not long before Teigue and his forty warriors - and the captive enemy, whom they had taken along to guide them - were out of sight of the cliffs of Munster.
They sailed for a month, seeing little on the limitless and rolling sea except the sleek brown heads of inquisitive seals and the flash of leaping fish; from time to time they heard the blowing of whales. Twice they put in at unnamed islands to rest and reprovision. Then came a space of six weeks when they made no landfall at all and traveled in a cloud of mist that was broken only occasionally by streaks of pale and watery sunlight.
The men grew hushed and drawn. The captive guide, chained in the bow, squinted anxiously ahead, but he had lost his bearings in the fog. At last he said hopelessly,
- "We are adrift, drifting with the tide and I know not where it will take us."
Immediately after he spoke, a howling wind arose in the distance and tore across the sea toward them like a falcon stooping on its prey. The sea swelled high above the masts in roaring mountains that smashed icy torrents across the bow. Gasping under the onslaught, the men pulled at their oars with cold-stiffened fingers. At Teigue shouted encouragement, they brought the boat around into the wind and held her there safely, throughout the day and the screaming night that followed.
Morning came at last, and the gale died. The sun rose, scattering diamonds across the surface of the sea. The men raised the currach's sails and headed west, and the sun played on their backs as they rested. Soon they saw in the distance a coastline. They steered for it, and at length the currach slid quietly into an estuary of green water so clear that the voyagers could see the silvery sands of the bottom and watch the darting of the scarlet salmon that played there. The shore on either side was fringed with trees, and from their midst poured the carols of unknown birds.
Teigue and his men made for shore and together pulled the currach up to dry on the shingle. Then they entered the wood... The travelers knew at once that this was no ordinary place. In Munster, spring had just begun; the earth was bare and hard there, and the trees were black. Here, however, the trees were thick with leaves and heavy with fruit. Their branches swayed gently, although no wind stirred, and they seemed to listen as the intruders passed beneath them. All were trees sacred to the Irish from ancient times, so revered that anyone who cut them might forfeit his life. Some were venerable and mighty oaks, worshipped since time began and sentient still: Oaks wailed when they were cut. Apple trees - fertile guardians of immortality - grew in abundance, laden with scarlet globes. And among them stood many hazel trees, heavy with the clusters of yellow nuts that in Ireland sometimes bestow all the world's wisdom on the mortal lucky enough to eat them.
After the men had walked some little distance, the wood thinned and became stunny again and parklike. Then the travelers found themselves at the verge of the wood, looking into the country that it guarded. They laughed and exclaimed at the sight that met their eyes.
Stretching out to the rim of the sky was a wide, smooth plain, cloaked in the green and white of flowering clover. Breaking the expanse were three grassy hills, each guarded by a high-walled palace. The men set out for the nearest one. At its marble ramparts, they met a blithe and shining lady. She seemed to expect the travelers and to trust them, for she called Teigue by name and sent him with his men to the hill beyond, where the scene was repeated.
The travelers came to the third of the hills and, as they had been instructed, passed through they mighty arched gate of the castle there and entered the courtyard. At its center grew a wide-spreading apple tree, its brances white with blossoms - and also laden with fruit.
From among the white blossoms drifted a woman like a flower, her hair resembling silvered petals. She regarded the mortals with a calm gaze and said Teigue's name. Care fell from him at the sound of her voice, and he listened with a calm that matched her own as she told these things.
She said that she was a daughter - called Clíodna Fair Hair - of the Tuatha Dé Danann and that the island was her own. She said that the fruit of her apple trees was of such power that mortals who ate it would never hunger and would always be drawn to her lands. And she warned them that when a day passed in her realm, though it seemed but a day, a year passed in the mortal world, so that Teigue was reminded of the quest he had undertaken.
Then the fairy told Teigue that she would give three gifts to aid him on his quest. The first was a guide to the place of battle. The guide comprised three birds she summoned from the branches of the apple tree: one blue with a crimson head, one scarlet with a head of green and one of many colors whose head shone gold. The second gift the fairy gave was an emerald chalice. It would guard Teigue's life as long as he kept it by him, she said. And the last gift was this: She told Teigue what the manner of his death would finally be, so he knew that the time for it had not yet come. She told him, too, that she herself would be with him on his last day, on the banks of the Boyne River, when a wild hart would gore and kill him.
After she had spoken, those two - the mortal and the fairy - smiled gravely at each other, for such was the Fair Hair's power that she had armored Teigue against fear, although the men with him shuffled anxiously and whispered among themselves. But they followed Teigue willingly when he left the court and, with the fairy beside him, crossed the flowering plain again and made his way through the enchanted wood to the currach.
The water whispered around the ship's bow as it headed down the estuary. High above the masts, the three birds rode the bright air and sang without cease. On the bank stood the fairy, arrow-straight and starbright. She neither moved nor spoke again, but she watched Teigue steadily.
When the currach reached open water and gathered speed, Teigue turned to look a last time and thus saw the sheet of mist that rose from the water at the island shore and crept swiftly up the banks, curling around the trees and around the figure of the fairy until at last it blankered even the tops of the tallest oaks.
The mist eventually dispersed into coiling white ribbons drifting on the water's surface; then even these ribbons disappeared, and where the island had been was only empty sea. And the red-sided currach, her canvas billowing with Faerie wind, sailed southward. Above her masts, the three birds flashed and tumbled and sang their dancing harmonies. In the boat, the men of Munster lay entranced.
They awoke only when the singing ceased, and the birds had become three bright specks in the northern sky, heading for home. At once, the currach grated on a beach, her sails slack. The travelers were at the edge of a narrow lock that pierced the shore of a harsh, pine-covered country. Across the waters of the loch were the ramparts of a wooden stronghold, from its tower hung the pennon of the pirate Cathmann, abductor of Teigue's wife and enslaver of his brothers. The Munstermen had arrived at the place of battle.
Leaving his company to guard the currach, Teigue armed himself and set out to reconnoiter. As he walked along the sand, he heard his name called softly across the water. A ragged ferryman, pulling hard at the oars of a shabby boat, approached and beached his craft. It was Teigue's brother Eoghan, brought to this humble pass after a year of captivity under Cathmann.
Eoghan's news was good: Teigue's wife was safe but a prisoner, and Cathmann meant soon to take her for his own, having been delayed only by her pleading. Teigue had arrived in time of conspiracy, for two of Cathmann's kinsmen were armed, and Eoghan as well as Teigue's brother Airnelach had joined them in secret. Eoghan spent some time describing Cathmann's defeses. Then he ferried Teigue and his men to the opposite shore, where Cathmann's castle stood. Among the pine trees there, rebellious kinsmen of the pirate hid with their forces.
Thus it came about that the Irish Prince took his revenge on the outlander, not with a small force of forty men, but with a company of 700. The warriors stormed the fortress at night, when Cathmann and his men had drunk deep after their feasting. It was a savage battle, and in the end, the Irish put the castle to the torch. Amid the flickering light of the flames and crowds of sweating, shouting men, Teigue and Cathmann fought alone, and the Munsterman took blow after blow from the pirate until he was driven to his knees. He carried the fairy's emerald talisman, however, and it gave him the strength to rise once more and strike his enemy's head from his shoulders. Teigue bore thirty wounds, but he did not die.
His death came many years later, long after Teigue and his wife and brothers had returned to Ireland. He lived in peace until the day that a white hart attacked him on the banks of the Boyne and the maiden from the enchanted isle appeared before him once again, as she had promised years before.
In none of their tellings of the venture could Teigue or his men ever identify the point on the ocean where they had crossed the borders of their own world and entered the realm of Faerie. They did not know. The borders of the other world were evershifting and transitory. It was significant, however, that the moment of crossing came when the currach was adrift - off course and traveling in no direction that could be defined. It was significant, too, that the first event of the crossing was a sample of chaos in the shape of a storm. The fairy world was in some ways the antithesis of the world of mortals, and things of Faerie had a natural affinity for the indeterminate and the undefinable. To relax the mortal grasp of order was to invite passage between the two worlds.
Fairies - Content | Myths and Legends