Читать книгу THE ELEMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES: An A-Z of Fairies, Pixies, and other Fantastical Creatures - Lucy Cooper - Страница 20

The passage of time works in a similar way in Emhain, the Land of Women. It is related in the story of Bran mac Febail, as told by Lady Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (1904).

One day the Irish king Bran mac Febail heard the sweetest music. It lulled him to sleep and when he awoke he held in his hand a silver branch covered in white blossom. He brought it to the royal house, where a woman appeared in strange clothes and began to sing:

I bring a branch of the apple-tree from Emhain, from the far island around which are the shining horses of the Son of Lir.

A delight of the eyes is the plain where the hosts hold their games; curragh racing against chariot in the White Silver Plain to the south.

She went on to describe a shining, many-colored land of blossoms, birds, and sweet music, without grief, sorrow, sickness, or death. When she had finished her song, the silver branch leaped from Bran’s hands into hers and she vanished.

Next morning Bran set out with a fleet of curragh boats to row across to the sea to find the Isle of Emhain.

After two days and two nights, he and his men encountered Mannanon, Son of Lir, in his golden chariot. He told Bran he would reach the Land of Women before sunset.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long afterward that they reached the Isle of Emhain, where the chief woman welcomed them and pulled them ashore with a ball of thread. They went to a grand house where there was a bed for every couple and food and drink without end. There Bran and his men lived happily for what seemed to them a year.

Despite the beauty and delights of the Isle of Emhain, one of the company, Nechtan, grew homesick for Ireland and begged to return, just for an hour. The chief woman was loath to let them go and told Bran they must not touch the soil of Ireland and must talk to only their company on the boat. Bran promised, saying he would stay only a short while and return quickly.

They rowed away to Ireland, where the people gathered on the shore asked who they were. Bran asked if they had heard of Bran of Febal, but they replied that no such man was alive now, although their old stories told of a man who had rowed away to the Land of Women many hundreds of years before. On hearing that, Nechtan leaped from the curragh and waded to shore. As soon as his foot touched the soil, he turned to a heap of ash, as if he had been in the earth for hundreds of years.

Cautioned by his fate, the other men stayed aboard the curraghs. Bran rested long enough to tell of his voyage, then turned his fleet around and rowed back to the joys of the Isle of Emhain.

Oissin and Bran were lucky to escape the fate of death on returning to the human world. Like Nechtan, many who return from fairyland crumble to dust on touching human soil. This raises comparisons between fairyland and the Underworld, or the land of the dead.