Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/167

 The Idea of Hades in Celtic Literature. 135

god of death, and this god inhabits a region far beyond the ocean ; he has as his dwelling the ' extreme isles,' whence, according to the Druidical teaching, a part of the inhabitants of Gaul had arrived direct."^

And again : '* In Celtic belief, the dead go to inhabit across the ocean, to the south-west, there where the sun goes down during the greater part of the year, a marvellous region whose joys and seductions surpass those of this world. This is the country from which men came. It is called in Irish Tire beo, the land of the living, tir n-aill^ the other world, mag mor, the great plain, mag meld, the pleasant plain " {Cycle Mythologique, p. 28).

Here is the second step; that men not only go when they die into the other world, but they also came from thence ; a belief which he founds on the testimony of a Latin writer, and supports by an Irish doctrine of Elysium unknown, so far as we know, to Latins and Gauls alike.

Immediately afterwards he continues: "For this pagan name {i.e. Mag Mor) to which nothing in the Christian beliefs corresponded, the euhemerism of the Christian annalists substituted the Latin name of the Iberian Penin- sula, Hispania. After the tenth century, when Nennius wrote, this name, unknown to primitive Ireland, had pene- trated into the legend of Partholon ; it was from Spain, and not from the land of death, that this mythical chief of the first inhabitants was made to come with his com- panions " (p. 29) . . . and again, in criticising the account of the return of the second race of settlers from Ireland, according to Nennius and the late pseudo-historic accounts, he says that they re-embarked and returned into Spain, adding : " In this text, the word Spain is a learned transla- tion of the Irish words mag mor, etc., by which the pagan Irish designated the country of the dead, the place of origin,

^ Cycle Myth. p. 26, 27, quoting Ammianus Marcellinus {Alios qiioque ab insulis exthnis confluxhse), Bk. xv. ch. 9 § 4.