Oisín in Tír na nÓg (Campfire Story)

Of all the warriors in the Fianna, the band of heroes who guarded Ireland, none was a finer poet than Oisín, the son of Finn McCool. He could fight with the best of them and hunt with the best of them, but when Oisín sang his stories by the fire, even the wolves out in the dark stopped to listen.

One misty morning, as the Fianna were hunting near the shore of Lough Leane, a rider came galloping across the water. Across it, not through it, on a pure white horse whose hooves never sank. The rider was a young woman with golden hair and a cloak the color of the summer sky.

'I am Niamh of the Golden Hair,' she said. 'My father is the King of Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth. I've heard the songs of Oisín, even across the sea, and I've come to ask him to come home with me.'

In Tír na nÓg, she told him, no one grows old. No one is sick or sad. The trees are always full of fruit, and the feasting never stops. Oisín looked at Niamh, and Niamh looked at Oisín, and that was that. He said goodbye to his father and his friends, climbed up behind her on the white horse, and they rode away across the waves until Ireland was only a gray line behind them, and then not even that.

Tír na nÓg was everything Niamh had promised. Oisín and Niamh were married, and they were happy. They hunted in forests where the deer were silver, and danced in halls where the music never ended. Oisín never got a gray hair or a sore back. It seemed like no time at all had passed. Perhaps three years.

But after those three years, Oisín began to dream of home. He dreamed of his father's laugh, and the smell of the campfire, and the hounds baying on the hills. 'I want to visit Ireland,' he told Niamh. 'Just for a little while. Just to see my father again.'

Niamh grew very quiet. 'You may take the white horse,' she said. 'He'll carry you there and bring you back. But whatever happens, Oisín, do not get off the horse. Do not let your feet touch the ground of Ireland. If you do, you can never come back to me.'

Oisín promised, and away he rode across the sea.

But Ireland was strange. The great forests were cut down. The forts of the Fianna were nothing but grassy mounds. The people were small and thin, and they spoke strangely, and when Oisín asked them where he could find Finn McCool and the Fianna, they laughed at him. 'Finn McCool? He's in the old stories. He died three hundred years ago.'

Three hundred years! Each year in Tír na nÓg had been a hundred years at home.

Heartbroken, Oisín turned the white horse toward the sea. On the way, he passed a group of men struggling to lift a great stone. 'Help us, big fellow!' they called. Oisín leaned down from the saddle to give the stone a push with one hand. But as he heaved, the saddle strap snapped, and Oisín tumbled off the horse onto the ground.

The moment his feet touched the soil of Ireland, the white horse reared up and galloped away across the waves. And Oisín changed. His back bent. His hair went white. His skin grew wrinkled and thin. Three hundred years caught up with him all at once, and the young hero became the oldest man in Ireland.

They say he lived just long enough to tell the stories of the Fianna one last time, about Finn and the Salmon of Knowledge, about the Giant's Causeway and the great hunts and the brave deeds. That's how we still know them today. Because the last of the Fianna remembered, and he passed the stories on.

And some say that out past the western edge of Ireland, Niamh is still waiting on the shore for her poet to come home.

Storyteller tips: let the white horse feel magical, and build the warning ("do not get off the horse") so the audience is worried when he leans down. The last part, Oisín telling the old stories, makes a good bridge if you're telling a Finn McCool story next.