nequalled in all other sagas
or _Maerchen_, and it is insisted on by those who come to lure mortals
there. The beauty of its landscapes--hills, white cliffs, valleys, sea
and shore, lakes and rivers,--of its trees, its inhabitants, and its
birds,--the charm of its summer haze, is obviously the product of the
imagination of a people keenly alive to natural beauty. The opening
lines sung by the goddess to Bran strike a note which sounds through all
Celtic literature:

"There is a distant isle, around which sea-horses glisten,

...

A beauty of a wondrous land, whose aspects are lovely,
Whose view is a fair country, incomparable in its haze.
It is a day of lasting weather, that showers silver on the land;
A pure white cliff on the range of the sea,
Which from the sun receives its heat."

So Oisin describes it: "I saw a country all green and full of flowers,
with beautiful smooth plains, blue hills, and lakes and waterfalls." All
this and more than this is the reflection of nature as it is found in
Celtic regions, and as it was seen by the eye of Celtic dreamers, and
interpreted to a poetic race by them.

In Irish accounts of the _sid_, Dagda has the supremacy, wrested later
from him by Oengus, but generally each owner of a _sid_ is its lord. In
Welsh tradition Arawn is lord of Annwfn, but his claims are contested by
a rival, and other lords of Elysium are known. Manannan, a god of the
sea, appears to be lord of the Irish island Elysium which is called "the
land of Manannan," perhaps because it was easy to associate an oversea
world "around which sea-horses glisten" with a god whose mythic steeds
were the waves. But as it lay towards the sunset, and as some of its
aspects may have been suggested by the glories of the setting sun, the
sun-god Lug was also associated with it, though he hardly takes the
place of Manannan.

Most of the aspects of Elysium appear unchanged in later folk-belief,
but it has now become fairyland--a place within hills, mounds, or _sid_,
of marvellous beauty, with magic properties, and where time lapses as in
a dream. A wonderful oversea land is also found in _Maerchen_ and
tradition, and Tir na n-Og is still a living reality to the Celt. There
is the fountain of youth, healing balsams, life-giving fruits, beautiful
women or fairy folk. It is the true land of heart's desire. In the
eleventh century MSS. from which our knowledge of Elysium is mainly
drawn, but which imply a