Tír na nÓg (Tír na nÓg)

The land of the young, which is always reached across water and always costs more than it seems.

Tír na nÓg is the best known of the Irish otherworlds, and it is not the only one. The tradition also has Magh Meall, the pleasant plain, Tír Tairngire, the land of promise, and Eamhain Abhlach, the place of apple trees. They overlap, they are described in much the same terms, and no source tidies them up.

The constant is that it is across the sea to the west, not above or below, and that it is reached by boat or on horseback over the water rather than by dying. Nobody there is sick, nobody ages, nobody wants for anything, and there is always music.

The other constant is the catch, which is time. Whatever is happening there is not happening at the same rate as here. Oisín spends what feels like three years and finds three hundred have gone. The visitor is always warned not to touch Irish soil on returning, and always, in the end, does, and the delay collects itself all at once.

That is what makes these stories what they are. The otherworld is never punished and never evil. It simply runs on its own clock, and a person who goes there has chosen, without being told the price, to lose everybody.

The immrama, the voyage tales, are the literature built on this, and they carry on into Christian writing: the Voyage of Bran, and later the Navigatio of Saint Brendan, which is the same shape of story with a monastery at the start of it.