Irish Farewell Blessings

A country that exported its people for two centuries has a lot of ways to say goodbye. Irish farewell blessings are almost all about roads and safe arrival, and they are addressed to the person leaving rather than spoken about them.

The best known in English ("may the road rise to meet you") has a complicated relationship with Irish, and this site is careful about it. The form attested in the dictionaries is go n-éirí do bhóthar leat, literally may your road succeed with you, where éirigh le is the ordinary Irish verb for succeeding at something. It is a wish that the journey goes well, not an image of a road lifting.

The shortest of the road blessings is Go dtí tú slán. May you come back safe. It is said to the person setting out, and what it wishes is not the going but the safe return. The verb form is one Ó Dónaill marks as literary, which is a register note rather than a doubt: the wording here is the dictionary's own.

Alongside the road blessings are proverbs about travel and about leaving, including the observation that people who go places come back with something to say: Bíonn siúlach scéalach.

Where a form is contested we say so on the record page rather than quietly picking one, and where a popular version has no source behind it, it does not appear here at all.