In the Country of the Young
by Lisa Carey
“There is a land under the sea.
It is called Tir na nÓg, the Country of the Young, because age and death have not found it. Only one man who has gone there has ever returned, and that man is Oisin, leader of the tribe of the Fianna.
The Call of Oisin came about in this way. There was a time in Ireland, a time before Saint Patrick, when magic was everywhere and men lived with nature. The Fianna had many horses and hounds and spent their time hunting and playing chess. They were happy, brave, and content in a way it is not possible to be in the world today. One day, when Oisin and his comrades were riding along the shore, they came upon the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, riding bareback on a gleaming white horse. The woman had gold hair and lips like sweet red wine. She wore a dark cloak of silk that was covered in red and gold stars, and a crown of rubies nestled in her curls.
‘I am Nieve Chinn Oir,’ she told them, which means ‘Nieve of the Golden Head’.
‘I am in love with you, Oisin, and wish to take you to Tir na nÓg, where my father is king, where you will never grow old or discouraged, and where no one ever dies.’
Oisin, who was no fool, fell instantly in love with Nieve, and was flattered that she had chosen him. He took her hand and said:
‘Why you should love a man as common as me, I shall never know. It is you who are the shining one, you who are the sweetest and comeliest, you who are my star and my choice above all the women in the world.’
‘If you come with me, you may never return to your home or your people,’ Nieve warned Oisin.
‘Nothing but yourself matters to me now,’ Oisin said, and without a second look he was on her horse and they were gone, to the Country of the Young under the sea.
Tir na nÓg was everything Nieve had promised and more, and Oisin lived there happily for three hundred years. But one day he became homesick and asked permission to visit Ireland. Nieve sent him on her magic horse, but warned him that he must not step down from it or all his years would immediately come upon him.
‘You will be disappointed, Oisin,’ she said. ‘Ireland is not the land you remember.’
So Oisin rose from the sea to Ireland and searched everywhere, but could not find any of the Fianna. The country seemed full of strangers and sadness. Then he saw something in the sand – which looked like a piece of armor from a Fianna warrior – and he forgot Nieves warning and jumped off the horse.
In an instant, three hundred years fell on him, and he wrinkled and shrank, lost his hair and his teeth, and became the oldest man alive. When Saint Patrick found him, he was blind as a bat and keening for all he had lost. They say the saint tried to convert him – these were the days when everyone was getting religion – but I don’t think it worked, because Oisin believed in things even a saint couldn’t understand. Oisin died soon after that, and they say the sea raged that night, as if the Country of the Young were mourning beneath the water.”
Because their father was Irish, it was after this story that the twins Nieve and Oisin were named. They lived with their parents in an Irish-American neighborhood in Boston and traveled to Ireland every summer.
Oisin was the awkward twin; shorter, shyer, and not by far as beautiful as his sister. But he had a gift – a second sight. Until he was fifteen, he could see things no one else could see. And he saw the ghosts much more vivid, real-looking, and bright than human beings, who seemed shadowy and insubstantial in comparison. He was never capable of explaining this glowing to the asking Nieve, even though he tried a dozen times.
Because of reasons Oisin and Nieve didn’t know until they were teenagers, their parents Declan and Sara had never loved each other, which over the years ended with both of them drinking too much, and Sara flirting with other men (a sentence that really thrilled me, was this one: For the rest of his life, the smell of gin would remind Oisin to brush his teeth.). In the beginning, it was as all right as it could be, but later, Sara’s family tree of female mental instability would come upon her. This resulted in a mother-and-daughter-relationship based mostly on hatred.
When the twins were fifteen years old, Nieve killed herself. After that, Sara divorced Declan and ran off with his brother. By the time Oisin entered art school, Declan drank himself to death. When he was twenty, Sara and his uncle Malachy died in a car accident in Italy. Oisin never contacted his mother’s family, nor his aunts, uncles and cousins in Ireland. Instead, he settled as an artist in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue Island outside of the coast of Maine.
Every year at All Hallows’ Eve, Oisin has lit a candlelight in the window of his cottage and let the door open; hoping it would serve as an invitation for a ghost. Not any ghost – the ghost of his sister. And then, for the first time since he was a boy, a restless spirit actually seeks comfort and warmth in Oisin’s house. But it turns out not to be Nieve anyway. This ghost is a seven-year-old girl named Aisling.
Aisling, who lived in Ireland more than a century earlier, was an unwanted and hated child who, even before she could talk, learned to appear invisible. She was well aware of being her own family’s curse, caused by some sin of her mother. Aisling was a páiste gréine; a sun child. The only one who referred to Aisling not by “Her” or “the baby”, but gave her a name, was her twelve years older brother Darragh. He gave her an Irish name, meaning “dream”, or “vision”. Aisling, whose instinct told her that the words Mammy or Da didn’t belong on an unwanted child’s tongue, used pronouns – Himself, Herself – when she was forced to refer to the man and woman.
Her parents never talked to each other, had never exchanged a word for as long as Aisling could remember. If it was necessary for them to communicate, they did so through Darragh or her three sisters. Each of their parents pretended the other one was not there; they ignored each other effortlessly if they didn’t have to communicate.
One year, three months before harvest of the potato crop, a potato disease arrived from the west, called Dúchán, (meaning “darkness”) because it rotted the potatoes to soil-like, slimy blackness. Her father was recommended to dig up the crop right away, to save at least a part of it. But he refused, because it was only the middle of August and the potatoes were not even half-size yet. Every day, Darragh checked the crop for early signs of disease, but it took no more than a few hours of sleeping for the whole crop to die.
Hunger was an idea familiar enough, but it drastically worsened when the potatoes failed for the second year in a row. And just in a matter of time, the dúchán infected people, too. Poor started to die in large numbers. Except for Darragh and herself, fever killed her whole family. The two of them escaped with a ship named Tir na nÓg, that was supposed to reach Canada and freedom. But on the journey, Darragh was also infected by fever, and died after four days. The ship ran aground on Tiranogue Island. Aisling herself was saved by a man named Jack Seward, but died only hours later wrapped in a blanket.
More than hundred years later, she finds an invitation on All Hallows’ Eve. She confines this as a chance of being wanted for the first time.
What Oisin does not figure, is that the ghost-girl he did not mean to invite is becoming human again. She is also growing, and not at the normal rate of a living child. In only a year, she transforms from a seven-year-old little girl to a grown-up woman aged twenty, before she has to go back to the dead next Halloween. In the course of this time Oisin, too, changes. Into a completely different person.
For instance; Oisin, who has seduced and bedded many women but never been in a relationship, falls in love for the first time at the age of forty-two; begins talking friendly to his surprised neighbors; starts celebrating Christmas, which he has not done in decades. He learns to reach people again. In the beginning, he does not want the responsibility for a child at all, feeling inability to concentrate about his art, which irritates him. But after a while he comes to see, he has been living his whole life in the past. The life of an anti-social, in-locked and reserved hermit who used to spend whole days in his art studio, will never be the same again.
This is one of my top 3 favorite books. It is exciting; dreamy, graceful. Everything is beautiful, and nothing is boring. The words are just catching your mind, and carrying you away to a new place. Reading In the Country of the Young is like forgetting who you are, and all the descriptions of ghosts are so real, you cannot avoid to believe in at least a little of it.
There is also a lot to learn in this book. Among many things are Irish glossary and history. Of course; everyone cannot be as fond of this book as I am – I feel like a part of me has transformed into a different person; much more grown-up, and still, at the same time, able to stay young for the rest of my life.
I have even learned the story about Tir na nÓg completely. The Irish story about the land under the sea, where one never grows old or discouraged, and where no one ever dies...
by Lisa Carey
“There is a land under the sea.
It is called Tir na nÓg, the Country of the Young, because age and death have not found it. Only one man who has gone there has ever returned, and that man is Oisin, leader of the tribe of the Fianna.
The Call of Oisin came about in this way. There was a time in Ireland, a time before Saint Patrick, when magic was everywhere and men lived with nature. The Fianna had many horses and hounds and spent their time hunting and playing chess. They were happy, brave, and content in a way it is not possible to be in the world today. One day, when Oisin and his comrades were riding along the shore, they came upon the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, riding bareback on a gleaming white horse. The woman had gold hair and lips like sweet red wine. She wore a dark cloak of silk that was covered in red and gold stars, and a crown of rubies nestled in her curls.
‘I am Nieve Chinn Oir,’ she told them, which means ‘Nieve of the Golden Head’.
‘I am in love with you, Oisin, and wish to take you to Tir na nÓg, where my father is king, where you will never grow old or discouraged, and where no one ever dies.’
Oisin, who was no fool, fell instantly in love with Nieve, and was flattered that she had chosen him. He took her hand and said:
‘Why you should love a man as common as me, I shall never know. It is you who are the shining one, you who are the sweetest and comeliest, you who are my star and my choice above all the women in the world.’
‘If you come with me, you may never return to your home or your people,’ Nieve warned Oisin.
‘Nothing but yourself matters to me now,’ Oisin said, and without a second look he was on her horse and they were gone, to the Country of the Young under the sea.
Tir na nÓg was everything Nieve had promised and more, and Oisin lived there happily for three hundred years. But one day he became homesick and asked permission to visit Ireland. Nieve sent him on her magic horse, but warned him that he must not step down from it or all his years would immediately come upon him.
‘You will be disappointed, Oisin,’ she said. ‘Ireland is not the land you remember.’
So Oisin rose from the sea to Ireland and searched everywhere, but could not find any of the Fianna. The country seemed full of strangers and sadness. Then he saw something in the sand – which looked like a piece of armor from a Fianna warrior – and he forgot Nieves warning and jumped off the horse.
In an instant, three hundred years fell on him, and he wrinkled and shrank, lost his hair and his teeth, and became the oldest man alive. When Saint Patrick found him, he was blind as a bat and keening for all he had lost. They say the saint tried to convert him – these were the days when everyone was getting religion – but I don’t think it worked, because Oisin believed in things even a saint couldn’t understand. Oisin died soon after that, and they say the sea raged that night, as if the Country of the Young were mourning beneath the water.”
Because their father was Irish, it was after this story that the twins Nieve and Oisin were named. They lived with their parents in an Irish-American neighborhood in Boston and traveled to Ireland every summer.
Oisin was the awkward twin; shorter, shyer, and not by far as beautiful as his sister. But he had a gift – a second sight. Until he was fifteen, he could see things no one else could see. And he saw the ghosts much more vivid, real-looking, and bright than human beings, who seemed shadowy and insubstantial in comparison. He was never capable of explaining this glowing to the asking Nieve, even though he tried a dozen times.
Because of reasons Oisin and Nieve didn’t know until they were teenagers, their parents Declan and Sara had never loved each other, which over the years ended with both of them drinking too much, and Sara flirting with other men (a sentence that really thrilled me, was this one: For the rest of his life, the smell of gin would remind Oisin to brush his teeth.). In the beginning, it was as all right as it could be, but later, Sara’s family tree of female mental instability would come upon her. This resulted in a mother-and-daughter-relationship based mostly on hatred.
When the twins were fifteen years old, Nieve killed herself. After that, Sara divorced Declan and ran off with his brother. By the time Oisin entered art school, Declan drank himself to death. When he was twenty, Sara and his uncle Malachy died in a car accident in Italy. Oisin never contacted his mother’s family, nor his aunts, uncles and cousins in Ireland. Instead, he settled as an artist in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue Island outside of the coast of Maine.
Every year at All Hallows’ Eve, Oisin has lit a candlelight in the window of his cottage and let the door open; hoping it would serve as an invitation for a ghost. Not any ghost – the ghost of his sister. And then, for the first time since he was a boy, a restless spirit actually seeks comfort and warmth in Oisin’s house. But it turns out not to be Nieve anyway. This ghost is a seven-year-old girl named Aisling.
Aisling, who lived in Ireland more than a century earlier, was an unwanted and hated child who, even before she could talk, learned to appear invisible. She was well aware of being her own family’s curse, caused by some sin of her mother. Aisling was a páiste gréine; a sun child. The only one who referred to Aisling not by “Her” or “the baby”, but gave her a name, was her twelve years older brother Darragh. He gave her an Irish name, meaning “dream”, or “vision”. Aisling, whose instinct told her that the words Mammy or Da didn’t belong on an unwanted child’s tongue, used pronouns – Himself, Herself – when she was forced to refer to the man and woman.
Her parents never talked to each other, had never exchanged a word for as long as Aisling could remember. If it was necessary for them to communicate, they did so through Darragh or her three sisters. Each of their parents pretended the other one was not there; they ignored each other effortlessly if they didn’t have to communicate.
One year, three months before harvest of the potato crop, a potato disease arrived from the west, called Dúchán, (meaning “darkness”) because it rotted the potatoes to soil-like, slimy blackness. Her father was recommended to dig up the crop right away, to save at least a part of it. But he refused, because it was only the middle of August and the potatoes were not even half-size yet. Every day, Darragh checked the crop for early signs of disease, but it took no more than a few hours of sleeping for the whole crop to die.
Hunger was an idea familiar enough, but it drastically worsened when the potatoes failed for the second year in a row. And just in a matter of time, the dúchán infected people, too. Poor started to die in large numbers. Except for Darragh and herself, fever killed her whole family. The two of them escaped with a ship named Tir na nÓg, that was supposed to reach Canada and freedom. But on the journey, Darragh was also infected by fever, and died after four days. The ship ran aground on Tiranogue Island. Aisling herself was saved by a man named Jack Seward, but died only hours later wrapped in a blanket.
More than hundred years later, she finds an invitation on All Hallows’ Eve. She confines this as a chance of being wanted for the first time.
What Oisin does not figure, is that the ghost-girl he did not mean to invite is becoming human again. She is also growing, and not at the normal rate of a living child. In only a year, she transforms from a seven-year-old little girl to a grown-up woman aged twenty, before she has to go back to the dead next Halloween. In the course of this time Oisin, too, changes. Into a completely different person.
For instance; Oisin, who has seduced and bedded many women but never been in a relationship, falls in love for the first time at the age of forty-two; begins talking friendly to his surprised neighbors; starts celebrating Christmas, which he has not done in decades. He learns to reach people again. In the beginning, he does not want the responsibility for a child at all, feeling inability to concentrate about his art, which irritates him. But after a while he comes to see, he has been living his whole life in the past. The life of an anti-social, in-locked and reserved hermit who used to spend whole days in his art studio, will never be the same again.
This is one of my top 3 favorite books. It is exciting; dreamy, graceful. Everything is beautiful, and nothing is boring. The words are just catching your mind, and carrying you away to a new place. Reading In the Country of the Young is like forgetting who you are, and all the descriptions of ghosts are so real, you cannot avoid to believe in at least a little of it.
There is also a lot to learn in this book. Among many things are Irish glossary and history. Of course; everyone cannot be as fond of this book as I am – I feel like a part of me has transformed into a different person; much more grown-up, and still, at the same time, able to stay young for the rest of my life.
I have even learned the story about Tir na nÓg completely. The Irish story about the land under the sea, where one never grows old or discouraged, and where no one ever dies...