Tir na Nog

Tir na Nog

The elements of this picture are drawn mainly from the story of Osian (O’shawn) one of the ‘Knights of the Red Branch’ that inhabit the mythic landscape of pre-Christian Ireland. Having been painted in the closing months of the twentieth century it is largely a reflection on time, change and memory.
The poet, William Butler Yeats, in “Lamentation of the Old Pensioner,” muses, “There’s not a woman turns her head to look upon a broken tree; But the beauties I have loved are in my memory.” These lines might well apply to the grizzled, slumbering character on the couch, in whose twilight state the hard borders between present and the remembered past dissolve. He is a modern day Osian, exile from a bygone place and time, drifting back in dream-space to his own ‘Land of Youth.’
The original Osian was one of Finn MacCumhail’s warriors who happens one day to meet a lovely maiden on horseback. Identifying herself as “Niam of the Golden Hair,” she invites him to travel back with her to the enchanted land of Tir na Nog (Land of Eternal Youth) which lies somewhere beyond or below the western sea. Osian accepts, and finds himself, after a long, strange ride through mist and darkness, in a place of golden light that the hand of decay and death never seems to touch. All who live within its borders remain eternally young. He experiences day after day of wonder and pleasure. The mead horn is never emptied. The flowers never fade. Niam herself is the daughter of the king, and so he is treated as a royal guest. But slowly homesickness begins to creep into his heart and he longs to see his friends in Ireland again.
He begs for a leave of absence, which Niam is very reluctant to grant. Does he not have everything a young man’s heart could wish for? She finally gives in to his repeated requests, however. He is given a powerful horse on which to make the journey home, under the one severe condition that his foot must never touch the ground. Upon arrival he begins searching at once for Finn and the Red Branch Knights. They are nowhere to be found. In fact the whole land seems changed, the great forests having given way to cultivated fields in which a diminished race of men are laboring.
Actually, though it seemed only weeks in the faery country, some three hundred years have elapsed since Osian’s departure. The warrior-hunters of the heroic age are long gone. After a time of fruitless wandering the bewildered rider stops to help a group of peasants clearing rocks from a field. Osian lends his considerable strength to their efforts. The boulder moves from its place, but with a sudden lurch which sends him tumbling out of the saddle. At the moment he strikes the ground he is transformed into a white haired old scarecrow with barely the strength to stand by himself. The astonished peasants, afraid at first, take him to a holy man. He is Saint Patrick, who in that generation has brought a new view of the world to the western Celts, one quite unfamiliar to the old fighter. With the kind assistance of the patriarch he lives on. The two become friends, but Osian is never wholly at home there. How like ourselves as the years go by!
The stony landscape of Tir na Nog originated from a visit to The Hickory Run Boulder Field of Pennsylvania, laid down by glaciers there long before the first civilizations ever appeared. Out of the ancient, primeval bedrock rise the crude monoliths of ritual centers like Stonehenge, refined over the centuries into great temples and cathedrals, and on into the modern world.
In some archetypal way the process seems to be repeated in human beings during the course of a life, even as the embryo changes form in the womb. It is often only in old age that the conflicting strata of nature and spirit, the soul’s impulses and society’s demands, celebration and denial find a deeper reconciliation.
When we have been long on the journey we become much like Osian, memory carriers of a world that no longer is, “the beauties we have loved,” that strangely help to seed the future.