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Notes
The poem’s Gaelic sources were Oisin i dTir na nOg (‘The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’) and Agallamh na Senorach (‘The Colloquy of the Ancients’); see notes below on a hornless deer … young man, p. 486. See Giles W. L. Telfer, Yeats’s Idea of the Gael (1965). Yeats revised the poem extensively, see VE, 1–63
p. 5, Book I S. Patrick: Patrick (c. 385–c. 461), patron saint of Ireland, was captured in Britain by Irish slave raiders, escaped after six years’ slavery and became a monk in France. Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland in ad 432 as a missionary, converting various chiefs and preaching to the High King, Leary, at Tara. After twenty years’ missionary work he fixed his see in Armagh Oisin: son of Finn and Saeva (of the Sidhe (see Glossary)); his name (spelt ‘Usheen’ in some earlier versions) means the little fawn. Yeats described Finn as the poet of the Fenian cycle of legend (as Fergus was of the Red Branch cycle). These Fenian legends centred on the mythological deeds of Finn MacCumhaill (MacCool) and his warriors, the Fianna, thought to have been a body of infantry; they were prominent in the reign of Cormac MacArt, reputedly Finn’s father-in-law; they are thought to have been put down in the Battle of Gabhra (ad 297). The legends — tales and ballads — seem to have been composed in the 12th century according to MS evidence, though some may have been composed as early as the 8th century Caoilte: Caoilte MacRonain, Finn’s favourite warrior. See Standish James O’Grady, History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical (1881), I, 324–5, 354,
and Eugene O’Curry, ‘The Fate of the Children of Tuireann’, Atlantis (1863), 4, 231–3, and On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), III, 366. He appeared to Finn when the King was lost in a forest, ‘a flaming man that he might lead him in the darkness’. When the King enquired who he was, he replied, ‘I am your candlestick’ (notes to WR). He appears, ‘tossing his burning hair’, in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, p. 89, and in ‘The Secret Rose’, p. 104, where he ‘drove the gods out of their liss’ when almost all his companions were dead after the Battle of Gabhra. See notes on these poems, pp. 506 and 518 Conan: Conan Mail (‘the Bald Headed’ or ‘the Crop Headed’), a braggart Fenian warrior described in P (1895) as the Thersites of the Fenian cycle (in Greek legend Thersites, the ugliest and most evil-tongued of the Greeks fighting in the Trojan war, was killed by Achilles when he mocked him) Finn: see note above on Oisin, p. 484. Yeats described Finn as ‘a very famous hero, and chief of the heroes of Ireland in his time’ (P (1895); rev. edn 1899) Bran, Sceolan and Lomair. Bran and Sceolan were Finn’s cousins, his aunt Uirne having been transformed to a hound while pregnant. Lomair was another of Finn’s hounds Firbolgs’ burial-mounds: the Firbolgs were supposedly prehistoric invaders of Ireland, a short, dark, plebeian people. Yeats described them as an early race ‘who warred mainly upon the Fomorians, or Fomoroh, before the coming of the Tuatha de Danaan’ (P (1895)). He added that certain of their kings, killed at the battle of Southern Moytura, were supposed to be buried at Ballisodare, Co. Sligo (including Eochaid MacEirc, buried ‘where he fell’, according to
H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, tr. Richard Irvine Best (1903), 93: ‘It is by their graves that Usheen [Oisin] and his companions rode’). The Fomoroh (Fomorians), Yeats commented in P (1895), were powers of death and darkness, cold and evil who came from the north (‘Northern cold’ in ‘The Madness of King Goll’ p. 51). He commented that Fomoroh means from under the sea and is the name of the gods of night and death and cold. The Fomoroh were misshapen and had now the heads of goats and bulls, and now but one leg, and one arm that came out of the middle of their breasts. They were ancestors of the evil faeries and, according to one Gaelic writer, of all misshapen persons, the giants and the leprechauns are expressly mentioned as of the Fomoroh. [P (1805)]
p. 24, Book III owls had builded their nests: perhaps an echo of the image of ‘the parents of the Gods’, used in ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, p. 44, whose hair was filled by the nests of ‘aweless birds’ bell-branch: ‘a legendary branch Whose shaking cast all men into a gentle sleep’ (P (1895)) Sennachies: (Irish, Seanchai) story-tellers, persons who recite ancient lore king: early editions read ‘cann’, a chieftain moil: to toil or drudge the demon: Culann, a smith who made sword, spear and shield for Conchubar MacNessa, King of Ulster, one of the major figures in the Red Branch cycle of tales Blanaid: wife of the King of Munster in the Red Branch cycle, in love with Cuchulain, one of the Ulster heroes; ‘the heroine of a beautiful and sad story told by Keating’ (P (1895)). Geoffrey Keating (c. 1570–c. 1650), author of a History of Ireland, used ‘The Death of Cu-Roi Mac Daire’ (now available in R. I. Best’s translation, Eriu (1905), 2, 20–35), in which Curaoi, son of Daire, helped Cuchulain to sack Manainn and claimed Blanaid, daughter of the Lord of Manainn as his prize; he carried her off when Cuchulain refused. Later she conspired with Cuchulain to kill Curaoi, whose murder was avenged by his harper Feircheirtne, who leapt off a high rock with her, killing himself as well as her Mac Nessa: Conchubar, King of Ulster, son of Nessa Fergus … Cook Barach: Fergus, Conchubar’s stepfather, who gave up his throne to Conchubar, was under geasa (a kind of tabu, an imperative) never to refuse an invitation to a feast. He was invited by Barach (on Conchubar’s orders) to a feast when acting as safe-conduct, bringing back to Ulster Deirdre and the sons of Usna (who were murdered by Conchubar’s men when Fergus was — unwillingly — away from them at Barach’s feast). Deirdre, intended as Conchubar’s bride, had run away to Scotland with Naoise, a son of Usna, one of Conchubar’s warriors; his brothers Ainle and Ardan, accompanied them. See also notes on To the Rose of the World’, p. 498 Dark Balor, a Fomorian king, described by Yeats as ‘the Irish Chimaera, the leader of the hosts of darkness at the great battle of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, which was fought out on the strands of Moytura, near Sligo’ (P (1895)) Grania: Yeats took his account from Standish Hayes O’Grady, Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1857), 3, the only version in which Grania returns to Finn. Yeats described her as a beautiful woman, who fled with Dermot to escape from the love of aged Finn. She fled from place to place over Ireland, but at last Dermot [Diarmuid] was killed at Sligo upon the seaward point of Ben Bulben, and Finn won her love and brought her, leaning upon his neck, into the assembly of the Fenians, who burst into inextinguishable laughter. [P (1895)]
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Jeffares, A.N. (1996). The Wanderings of Oisin 1889. In: Jeffares, A.N. (eds) Yeats’s Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26155-0_1
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