Fiddler's Green

Fiddler's Green is the happy land imagined by sailors where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing and dancers that never tire.

It features in an old English legend: They say that an old salt who is tired of seagoing should walk inland with an oar over his shoulder. When he comes to a pretty little village deep in the country and the people ask him what he is carrying... he will know that he's found Fiddlers Green. The people give him a seat in the sun outside the Village Inn with a glass of grog that refills itself every time he drains the last drop and a pipe forever smoking with fragrant tobacco. From then onwards he has nothing to do but enjoy his glass and pipe and watch the maidens dancing to the music of a fiddle on Fiddlers Green.

This legend may have some of its origin in Tiresias' prophecy in Homer's Odyssey, in which he tells Odysseus that the only way to appease the sea god Poseidon and find happiness is to take an oar and walk until he finds a land where he is asked what he is carrying, and there make his sacrifice.

It is also the subject of numerous songs, including this Irish sea chanty "fiddler's green" about a seaman who is dying at sea.

Chorus

"Wrap me up in my oil skin and blanket,

No more 'round the docks, I'll be seen,

Just tell me olde shipmates,

I'm takin a trip mates,

and I'll see ya some day in Fiddler's Green"

In Neil Gaiman's Sandman novels, Fiddler's Green is a location in the mystical landscape of the Dreaming. It once spent a few years as a human being, just for a change of pace, basing its appearance and personality on the writer G. K. Chesterton.