It is also believed that the Cave of the Cats is the actual physical birthplace of Queen Medb. The legend states that the Fairy Queen/Goddess Étain who was fleeing her human husband with her fairy lover Midir came here. Midir wanted to visit a relative named Sinech (the large breasted one) who lived in the cave. Within the cave was said to be a great otherworldly palace where a maidservant named Crochan Crogderg (“Blood Red Cup”) lived, and she had granted Midir and Etain entrance. It was here that Crochan was believed to have given birth to a daughter named “Medb“.
“Niamh of the lovely hair” was the daughter of the Irish Sea God, Manannon Mac Lir. She was the Queen of the Tir na n-Og, the mythological race of Faeries who lived in the Land of the Eternal Youth. She would often ride on her Faerie steed “Embarr” across the waves to the West Coast of Ireland. On one of these trips, she met members of the warrior group known as the Fianna. One of the warriors, a bard named Oisin, she came to have a liking for. He fell for her with love at first sight. She quickly took him on her horse with her back to Tir na n-Og.
She was most notorious for having been the Faerie princess who lured off the great Bard Oisin to Faerieland, where they were married, and she had hoped he would have been fine residing in the Land of the Eternal Youth. After three years in Faerie, He grew weary and tired, missing his family, and asked to return to his land to see them. She set him off on the same white magical steed that she brought him to the land of Faerie on, the horse “Embarr” (which means “Imagination”), and warned him not to step foot off his horse when he returned to the human world. He discovered three years in Faerie was three hundred years in Human.
He accidentally fell off Embarr while trying to help some farmers move a big stone, and Embarr ran home across the waves. Poor Oisin immediately became a blind old man who wandered Ireland searching for his family and Niamh. He could never find the entrance to Tir na n-Og again. Niamh waited and waited for him, but Oisin never returned. She had become pregnant with his daughter, Plur na mBan, a beautiful Faerie princess known as “The Flower of the Lady.”
After many years, Niamh returned to the mortal world to search Ireland high and low for her sweet Oisin. She was too late; Oisin had died and disappeared forever. His tomb is somewhere up in Northern Ireland near the Giant’s Causeway. While searching for Oisin, she meets Brittany’s faeries, who invite her to join them. She didn’t but rather sent them a magical moving picture of herself. This upset Brittany Faeries, who placed her in a deep wood where she wandered for a long time with a light on her forehead, eternally lost. After discovering her escape, she experienced great disappointment and anger with Brittany Fae. She returned to Tir na n-Og, presumably casting a magic spell that took all of Brittany’s faerie children with her in revenge.
Oisin and Niamh – Irish Mythology Exhibit – Wax Museum Plus off Dame Street, Dublin, Ireland. April 22, 2012. (c) 2012 – photography by Leaf McGowan, technotink.net/photography.
