Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/212

186 he touches Irish ground. In the story of Cuchulinn's Sickbed Liban comes to invite the hero to a land called the Plain of Delight, where his help in war to her husband Labraid would win him the hand of Fand, relict of Manannan, the son of Lear. Fair horses, sweet-voiced birds singing on glittering trees of metal, an inexhaustible mead-vat, are described as collateral advantages to be enjoyed by the hero. He goes, but after a while Fand gives up the mortal to his mortal wife, Emer, and returns to the sea-god, who shakes his cloak between Fand and Cuchulinn, causing forgetfulness and severance for ever. We can trace this story back to the tenth century, when it was put together out of two separate earlier versions. In the famous voyage of Maelduin, which probably took shape in the eighth century, and can be traced to the tenth, we meet with the magic apples, the Island of Women, the clue of thread that cleaves to the hand, and the Island of Laughter; but there are tabus against touching treasures, and an Isle of Wailing. The wooing of Etain, which, as we have it, is believed to be an eleventh-century fusion of several older versions, may go back to the seventh or eighth century. Etain, wife of Mider, of the Tuatha De Danaan, is born again, and weds Eochaid, high-king of Ireland. Mider wins her back to the Great Plain under the hill, and to its simple joys, without sin, sorrow or death. In the tale of Laegaire, the son of Crimthann, king of Connaught, Fiachna of the Sid seeks mortal help against his fairy foes. Laegaire goes with him under the loch, fights his battles, and weds his daughter, and abides with him for a year; then he goes back to see his father, but refuses all offers to stay on earth.

Of later character, but still keeping up the old tradition of a land of Cockayne and of Undeath, is the tenth-century tale of Lug's prophecy to Conn. In a tale of the enchantment of Cormac by an old man with a silver branch bearing golden apples, Manannan and his land are again shown. In the Colloquy of the Ancients and the Dinnshenchas are found traditions relating to the fate of Clidna, daughter of Genann, and undersea realm of Manannan, now known under the borrowed Biblical