A quote from my least favorite site, wikipedia...

"Fiddler's Green features in an old Irish legend that a sailor can find the paradisical village by walking inland with an oar over his shoulder until he finds a place where people ask him what he's carrying. 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, or why he is carrying a winnowing fan, and there make his sacrifice."

"Fiddler's Green is the afterlife imagined by sailors and later adopted by U.S. cavalry and artillery, where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire. There is some evidence to support the claim that the major propagators of this belief were pirates who, knowing they would never meet the criteria for entry into Christian heaven, simply created a religion of their own."