and he travels back later with a cargo of corpses, which miraculously revive when they arrive on the further shore and seeds are put into their mouths. Mythology Breton One of the Breton lais recorded in Old French by Marie de France in the 12th century concerns a young man named Guigemar. Injured in a hunting accident, after making his way to a harbour that he had no idea existed, he climbs aboard a boat on which there is a bed, lies on this bed and soon the boat is underway, although there is nobody on board but himself. Burning at the boat's prow are lighted candles and, like King Arthur, this vessel takes him to a place where he will be healed of his wound. Later in the tale, now healed, Guigemar returns to his homeland with the aid of this same boat and is followed a little while afterwards by the lady who healed him. But now that they have both crossed the sea again in the boat with candles at its prow, they are only able to recognize one another by distinguishing knots in their garments. Irish In Irish mythology, the Otherworld often lies across the sea. The poet Oisín is approached by a maiden on horseback while walking on the shore with his father Fionn mac Cumhaill. The maiden is the daughter of the king of the Land of Youth and she has come to take Oisín back with her. They travel on horseback together across the waves and when Oisin returns to Ireland only a few weeks later, he finds that hundreds of years have passed there since he left. According to an early-12th-century Irish manuscript, the Lebor na hUidre, Bran mac Febail is visited by a mysterious female stranger holding a bough of apple blossom who urges him to sail his boat to a Land of Women, and a similar thing happens on his return. Connla is visited by a maiden, summoning him into her boat to a land of "women and girls only" and he is never seen again. A daughter of the Irish god Manannan carries her dead lover in her boat to an island, where she finds a plant that revives him. Greek Odysseus, in Homer's 8th century BC epic the Odyssey, having suffered so much in an ocean within which he has been unable to find his way home, is