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T'yeer-na-n-oge
Taken from Fairy & Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
[There is a country called Tír-na-n-Og, which means the
Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it neither
tears nor loud laughter have gone near it. The shadiest boskage
covers it perpetually. One man has gone there and returned. The
bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse, moving on the surface
of the foam with his fairy Niamh, lived there three hundred years,
and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment his foot
touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he was
bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his sojourn
in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died. Since then many
have seen it in many places; some in the depth of lakes, and have
heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells; more have seen it
far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the western cliffs.
Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw it. It never
appears unless to announce some national trouble.
There are many kindred beliefs. A Dutch pilot, settled in Dublin,
told M. De La Boullage Le Cong, who travelled in Ireland in 1614,
that round the poles there many islands; some hard to be approached
because of the witches who inhabit them and destroy by storms those
who seek to land. Her had once, off the coast of Greenland, in sixty-one
degrees of latitude, seen and approached such an island only to
see it vanish. Sailing in an opposite direction, they met with the
same island, and sailing near, were almost destroyed by a furious
tempest.
According to many stories, Tír-na-n-Og is the favourite
dwelling of the fairies. Some say it is triple - the island of the
living, the island of victories, and an underwater land.]
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