Oisín

Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhail, poethero of the Fionn cycle, and original of James Macpherson's Ossian (whence ‘Ossianic’). He is lured to Tír na nÓg [see sídh] by Niamh, where he spends hundreds of years. By his return Ireland has been Christianized, and much Fionn lore is devoted to the exchange, mostly acrimonious, between St Patrick and the pagan survivor.

Warrior and poet of the Fianna, principal son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, and sojourner in Tír na nÓg with the beautiful Niam; so much of later Fenian literature revolves around Oisín, especially his dialogues with St Patrick, that those stories are referred to as the Ossianic Cycle. Additionally, much later Fenian material is a recounting of earlier adventures as retold from Oisín's point of view. When the 18th-century charlatan James Macpherson encountered Scottish Gaelic ballads constructed on this rhetorical frame, with Oisín as narrator, he fabricated a series of prose narratives purportedly derived from Ossian [anglicized, of Oisín], whom he depicts as a historical figure.

Two stories are told of Oisín's birth, both with a deer-mother. In the better-known version Sadb comes to Fionn in the form of a doe, having been enchanted by Fer Doirich the druid. When the hounds Bran and Sceolang chase the doe to the Hill of Allen, Fionn gives her protection, and is delightfully surprised when she turns into a beautiful young woman the next morning. Soon they are married, Fionn abandons the chase and fighting, and Sadb is with child. But when Fionn returns to his old ways, Sadb is again enchanted by Fer Doirich and abandons the newborn Oisín to follow him. Seven years later Fionn finds a naked boy, Oisín, under a rowan tree on Ben Bulben. An alternative version, naming Blaí as the mother, comes in two variants. In one she appears first in deer form, as Sadb does, but in the second she is a beautiful girl married to Fionn and later transformed into a deer by a malicious wizard while her husband is away. In the Blaí stories the mother again abandons her newborn, who is found later by the father, Fionn. Such stories are apparent rationalizations of traditions dating from at least the 9th century, explaining that father and son meet over a roasting pig in a forest and begin to contend with one another before they recognize each other's identity.

In much of older Fenian literature, Oisín is one of the half-dozen most important members of the Fianna, although not necessarily the leader; neither is the the esteemed poet of later tradition. The reputation for valour and bravery of his son Oscar surpasses his own. In Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne [The Pursuit of Diarmait and Gráinne], Gráinne expresses a romantic interest in Oisín before she espies Diarmait; later Oisín sides with the fugitive lovers against his vengeful father.

Oisín plays a far larger role in later Fenian literature, in action set after the collapse of the Fianna at Cath Gabhra [The Battle of Gabhair/Gowra], focusing on two prolonged encounters, with St Patrick and with Niam. In the 12th-century text Acallam an Senórach [The Colloquy of the Elders], Oisín and Caílte survive their comrade's destruction and live on to meet St Patrick. This was not the only portrayal of the saint's attempts at posthumous conversion to Christianity of pagan heroes, but it became the most widely known, inspiring an immense body of popular variations upon a theme, composed between the 13th and 18th centuries. While Caílte dominates more of the conversation with the saint in Acallam, the subsequent variations bring Oisín to the fore, apparently because the son inherits his father's mantle of nature wisdom and poetic invention. In these contentious dialogues with the saint, Oisín retells new adventures of the Fianna not found in the older literature, and continually champions the pagan nobility and generosity of Fionn against what he portrays as the cramped and joyless strictures of the new Christian dispensation.

Stories of Oisín's visit to the Otherworld with a beautiful woman are widespread in the oral traditions of Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, but Micheál Coimín's [Michael Comyn's] literary version, Laoi Oisín i dTír na nÓg [Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth], effectively displaces all others. Evidently drawing on abundant oral tradition, Coimín composed Laoi Oisín in Irish about 1750, a text circulating in manuscript for 100 years before it was edited and translated. In this version, Oisín is hunting one day with the Fianna when he is visited by a beautiful fairy-like woman named Niamh Chinn Óir [of the Golden Head/Hair] on a white horse who tells him she loves him and wants him to accompany her to Tír na nÓg [the Land of Youth] or Tír Tairngire [the Land of Promise]. In earlier versions (see NIAM (3)) she is merely a mortal woman who elopes with him. Travelling due west, Oisín slays a giant so that when he arrives in Tír na nÓg he is awarded Niamh as a consort. They begin 300 years of love-making, which produces two sons, one confusingly named Oscar (2), and a daughter. When Oisín then decides to return to Ireland, Niamh warns him not to dismount from his horse or he will find himself old, withered, and blind. What was once familiar to him now seems strange; he passes the Hill of Allen [Almu] and finds it abandoned and overgrown. At Glenasmole, Co. Wicklow, he answers the call of men trying to lift a stone into a wagon. As he stoops, his reins break; Oisín falls to the ground and is immediately transformed into the very aged man that Niamh had predicted. His white steed returns to the Otherworld. Whatever Coimín's reliance on oral tradition or the degree of his invention, his text of Oisín's story offers examples of two tale types, 470 and 766, and the folk motifs C521; C984; D1338.7; F302.1; F378.1. See also HERLA, KING.

Texts: Laoi Oisín ar Thír na n-Óg, ed. and trans. Tomás Ó Flannghaile (Dublin, 1907); ‘The Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth’, trans. Bryan O'Looney, Transactions of the Ossianic Society, 4 (1861), 227–80; ‘Ossian in Tir na n-Og’, in Blanaid and Other Irish Historical and Legendary Poems, trans. T. D. Sullivan (Dublin, 1891), 115–42. Recent commentary: Máirtín Ó Briain, ‘Some Material on Oisín in the Land of Youth’, in Donnchadh Ó Corráin (ed.), Sages, Saints and Storytellers (Maynooth, 1989), 181–99. The most celebrated English-language adaptation of the story is William Butler Yeats's poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889). Others include T. W. Higginson, ‘Usheen in the Island of Youth’, in Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic (1898), 25–31; James Stephens, ‘Oisín and Niamh’, Sinn Féin, 26 (26 Feb. 1910), 2; John Varian, Oisín the Hero (1910).