land of Sidhe, and then vanished, and with her the branch. Bran set sail, and with him thirty men. After two days' wandering they met Manannan Mac Lir. They continued their journey until they came to an island dwelt in solely by women; their queen it was who had sent for Bran. He stayed with her a while, and then came back to Ireland.
But the most famous of the visits to the Brug of Manannan is that of Cormac Mac Art, whom the Irish legendary annals place in the third century of our era, and bring into connection with Fionn. The story, though only known to us from later MSS., can be traced back to the tenth century at least, as the title of it figures in a list preserved in the Book of Leinster, and as it is apparently alluded to by the eleventh century annalist, Tighernach.[1] The following summary is from a version, with English translation by Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady, in the third volume of the Ossianic Society's publications.
Of a time that Cormac was in Liathdruim he saw a youth having in his hand a glittering fairy branch, with nine apples of red gold upon it.[2] And this was the manner of that branch, that when any one shook it, men wounded and women with child would be lulled to sleep by the sound of the very sweet fairy music which those apples uttered, and no one on earth would bear in mind any want, woe, or weariness of soul when that branch was shaken for him. Cormac exchanged for this branch his wife and son and daughter, overcoming their grief by shaking the branch. But after a year, Cormac went in search of them. And he chanced upon a land where many marvels were wrought before his eyes, and he understood them not. At length he came to a house wherein was a very tall couple, clothed in clothes of many colours, and they bade him stay. And the man of the house brought a log
- ↑ D'Arbois de Jubainville, p. 326.
- ↑ Otto Küpp, Z.f.D. Phil. xvii, i, 68, examining Wolfram's version sees in the branch guarded by Gramoflanz and broken by Parzival a trace of the original myth underlying the story. Gramoflanz is connected with the Magic Castle (one of the inmates of which is his sister), or with the otherworld. Küpp's conjecture derives much force from the importance given to the branch in the Irish tales as part of the gear of the otherworld.
