One of the best-known stories belonging to this cycle is that which relates the adventures of Cormac, son of Árt, in the Tír Tairngire.[122] At the dawn of a May morning Cormac was walking on the ramparts of Temair, when he espied a dignified, grey-haired warrior approaching him, bearing on his shoulder a branch of silver and three golden apples on it; and the music which those apples made when shaken would lull to rest sick folk, and wounded men, and women in the pains of childbirth. After the two had exchanged greetings, Cormac asked the stranger whence he had come. ‘From a land,’ he replied, ‘where there is nought save truth, and there is neither envy, nor jealousy, nor hate, nor haughtiness’ (tr. W. S.). They plighted their friendship, and Cormac begged for the musical branch, which the other gave him, exacting in return the promise of three boons which he should crave. A year later the warrior returned, and claimed his first boon, which was none other than Cormac’s own daughter Ailbe. Though loath, Cormac submitted, bound by his promise,[123] and stilled the lamentations of his household by shaking the branch, and casting them into a profound sleep. After a month the warrior returned, and demanded Conn’s son, and, finally, his wife. Cormac still felt himself bound to comply, but he started off in pursuit, followed by all his people. Upon their passing beyond the walls a dense mist fell upon them, and Cormac found himself in the plain alone. Before him stood a great dún, with a stockade of bronze about it, and within it a house of silver. The thatch of this house was the wings of white birds. It was half thatched only, and troops of fairy horsemen kept bringing other wings to complete it, but the wind was always carrying them away. After this, he saw a man feeding a fire with a great oak-tree, entire, and as soon as one was consumed he would replace it with another. Then he came to an enclosure also ramparted with bronze, and four houses therein; one of these was a great palace, ‘with its beams of bronze, its wattling of silver, and its thatch the wings of white birds. Then he sees in the garth a shining fountain, with five streams flowing out of it, and the hosts in turn a-drinking its waters. Nine hazels of Buan grow over the well, the purple hazels drop their nuts into the fountain, and the five salmon which are in the fountain sever them and send their husks floating down the stream. Now the sound of the falling of those streams is more melodious than any music that men sing’ (W. S. loc. cit.). In the house Cormac found a warrior of exceeding beauty, both in face and figure, and a maiden, ‘the loveliest of the world’s women,’ with a helmet of gold on her yellow hair. Her feet, Cormac noticed, were washed by invisible hands, and within a partition was a bath, heated without visible agency, and Cormac bathed there. In the afternoon a man came in, bearing in one hand an axe and in the other a log of wood, and followed by a pig. At the warrior’s bidding, the man kindled a fire with the log, killed the pig, and put him in a caldron on the fire to boil. After a while the damsel bade him turn the pig, but he replied that it was useless, for that pig would never be done until a truth had been told for every quarter. Thereupon each one told some truth; the man how he had obtained the log and the pig, the properties of which were such that after the log had been burnt out at night, and the pig eaten, the pig would be found alive in the morning, and the log whole; and one quarter of the pig was cooked. The warrior told how there was a field outside the lios, which was found, at ploughing time, to be ready ploughed, harrowed, and sown with wheat; at harvest time, ready stacked, and so on, and they had been eating of that wheat ever since, and it none the less; and another quarter was done. The girl said that she had a herd of seven cows, whose milk sufficed for all the people of the Tír Tairngire, and seven sheep whose wool furnished the garments of them; and the third quarter was cooked. Then Cormac related the reason of his coming, and the pig was cooked entirely. When Cormac’s portion was set before him, he said that he never ate unless there were fifty men in his company. Then the warrior sang a strain which sent him to sleep, and on waking he beheld fifty men, and with them his wife, son, and daughter. So they set to upon the food and ale in all mirth and gladness. And a silver cup was placed in the warrior’s hand, who, as Cormac admired the workmanship of it, told him that there was something yet more wonderful about it, for when three lies were told under it it would break into three pieces, while the utterance of three truths would make it whole again. He then told three lies, and the cup broke, even as he had said; then, to restore it, he declared that neither had Cormac’s wife nor daughter seen a man, nor his son a woman, since they had left him, and in proof that his words were true, the cup came together, perfect as before. So Cormac received again his wife and son and daughter; and with them the cup, that he might discern between truth and falsehood in his judgments, and the bell-branch for music and delight. And the warrior declared that he was Manannán Mac Lír, who had allured Conn to the Tír Tairngire that he might behold the wonder of it. And the men who had brought the wings to complete the thatch of the house were ‘the men of art in Ireland, collecting cattle and wealth which passed away into nothing’; the man burning oak-trees was a young lord, paying out of his own husbandry for all that he consumed; the fountain was the Fountain of Knowledge, and the five streams issuing thereout the five senses, ‘And no man will have knowledge who drinketh not a draught out of the fountain itself, and out of the streams. The folk of many arts are those who drink of them both’ (W. S. loc. cit.).
The foregoing group of stories from the Conn cycle probably represent a very ancient legend, several of them being manifest variants of a single original, which at some period became connected in turn with the successive members of the dynasty. This is apparent even in several minute points of detail: e.g. Conn’s first wife, for whom he mourned, and Cormac’s wife, taken from him by Manannán, were both named Ethne Taebfada (Long-side). The group represents a stage in the theory of the Otherworld in advance of previous conceptions;[124] and although the ideas which it contains fall far short of an eschatology, properly so called, they yet contain materials which later writers were able to employ in that sense. We can discern here the rudiments of an ethical theory of the Otherworld. In the story of Connla, the land of Tethra appears as a happy place whither the souls of famous chieftains and warriors are borne across the sea, as Achilles was rapt away to the isle of Leuke; and even this aristocratic Elysium—parallels to which abound from Polynesia to Greece, and from Greece to America—contains in germ a certain ethical idea. The favour of the immortals is reserved for chieftains famous for their birth and qualities, and thus the process is begun which first designates as a ‘gentleman’ the scion of a noble gens, and then goes on to require in such an one qualities worthy of his origin, and to
‘Loke who that is most vertuous alway,
Privë and apert, and most entendeth ay
To do the gentil dedes that he can,
And take him for the gretest gentilman.’
Thus, in the Adventures of Cormac, Manannán describes the Tír Tairngire as ‘a land where there is naught save truth, and there is neither envy nor jealousy, hate nor haughtiness’; a description which is applied in a greatly amplified form to Heaven, at the close of the Fis Adamnáin, and in other Christian writings. It reminds us of a passage already cited from the Avesta, descriptive of the Var of Yima. Indeed, in Ireland as in Irân, ‘everything that maketh a lie’ is excluded from the ideal country, even as we have seen a want of fidelity to plighted faith to be the vice most inconsistent with the character of a king.
In the episode of Segda Saerlabrad, and again in the Adventures of Cormac, occurs that idea of chastity in connection with the Tír Tairngire to which, in its more developed form in the Voyage of Bran, we shall have to refer. This group, moreover, is marked by a tendency to conscious allegory which is foreign to the previous cycles. The maiden whom Conn finds in the dún is a personification of the sovereignty of Éire; and the dún visited by Cormac is a veritable ‘House of the Interpreter.’ The ethical significance of the wonders seen by Cormac on the way thither, and there expounded to him, is entirely symbolical of the life of this world, wherein the story resembles not merely the Shepherd of Hermas and the Pilgrim’s Progress, but the Tablet of Cebes and the Choice of Herakles among the Greeks, and countless moral apologues, Oriental and mediæval.
The Dé Danann chieftains, seated on their crystal thrones beside the marvellous tree and the vat of ale, are an advance upon the Dagda, seated beside his vat of ale and apple-trees, and display the legend in a stage at which it is ready to coalesce with, and give native colour to, the Hebraic imagery of the Throne and its Occupant.
The pleasantly told little apologue of the Fountain of Knowledge and its five streams, which are the five senses, interprets a very primitive Irish legend in the light of a simple but not shallow philosophy.