Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/172

140 and Ireland which we have little ground for presupposing.

Professor Rhys, accepting in general M. D'Arbois's theory of the land of the dead, goes much further. He finds this doleful country everywhere, and a travelling people like the Britons, Gauls, and Irish must have been perpetually in danger of falling into it! In his Arthurian Legend, the kings of Hades are as numerous as (to use an old Irish expression) "the son of Ler's horses in a storm at sea." Among them are Uther Pendragon, Bran otherwise Balan, Gwen ab Nûð, Llyr, Urien, Aralach and his father, Beli, in addition, of course, to Arawn, Avagðu, Pwyll, and Pryderi. Among others, the following places are regarded as having been sites of Hades itself: Britain, Caledonia, Ireland, the district south of the Thames at Westminster, the Isles of Man, Tory, and Bardsey, Glastonbury, Gower or Somerset, Cornwall, with numerous local sites within the borders of Wales.

The general impression left upon the mind by these volumes is that the Celts, alike of Gaul, Britain, and Ireland, were oppressed by the perpetual sense of a surrounding world of death and gloom from which they came, and to which they must go, the conception of this world being distinctly that of a place of the dead to which all the dead must go, and from which, inasmuch as it is always placed beyond the waters, they could (happily for the living) never return. However M. D'Arbois de Jubainville may guard himself by an occasional reference to earlier and brighter Greek conceptions of the unseen