Faery Tales

Frank Kinahan's scrutinizes at length the Irish legend of Oisin and Niamh that formed the basis for William Butler Yeats' The Wanderings of Oisin. Oisin, leader of the Fenians, who have been vanquished in battle, is lured away to the realm of Faery by the faery Niamh, who has fallen in love with him. Once there, Oisin spends a hundred years hunting, a hundred years fighting, and a hundred years sleeping. Upon his return to the earth, against Niamh's wishes, the full weight of his three hundred years falls upon him when his foot touches the earth. He lives long enough to recount his story to St. Patrick. Niamh wastes away and dies.

One suspects that J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of Medieval English literature at Oxford, had stories such as Oisin's in mind when he composed the stories of Beren and Luthien (see the ) and of Aragorn and Arwen (see ). The twist, in Tolkien, however, is that the emphasis is on the renunciation by the Elf of her immortality for the sake of love, rather than on the mortal human's renunciation of the chance for immortality.

Kinahan emphasizes that the realm of poetry is the impermanent, material world, not the unchanging (and sterile?) realm of Faery or the occult, a truth that both Yeats and Tolkien implicitly recognize.