These were the invisible lands and peoples of the Irish imagination;
and they live in and out of many of the stories. Cuchulain is lured
into a fairy-land, and lives for more than a year in love with Fand,
Mananan's wife. Into another fairy-land, through zones of mist,
Cormac, as is told here, was lured by Mananan, who now has left the
sea to play on the land. Oisin, as I have already said, flies with
Niam over the sea to the island of Eternal Youth. Etain, out of the
immortal land, is born into an Irish girl and reclaimed and carried
back to her native shore by Midir, a prince of the Fairy Host. Ethne,
whose story also is here, has lived for all her youth in the court of
Angus, deep in the hill beside the rushing of the Boyne.
These stories are but a few out of a great number of the loves and
wars between the men and women of the human and the fairy races.
Curiously enough, as the stories become less ancient, the relations
between men and the fairies are more real, more close, even more
affectionate. Finn and the Fianna seem to be almost in daily
companionship with the fairy host--much nearer to them than the men of
the Heroic Cycle are to the gods. They interchange love and music and
battle and adventure with one another. They are, for the most part,
excellent friends; and their intercourse suffers from no doubt.
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