Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/183

Rh gladsomeness of Magh Mell, the Irish Land of Youth and Promise. Nothing could be further removed from those notions of death and gloom that we associate with Hades than the account of this cheerful "Other-world." It is manifest that the name Annwfn as "an abyss" in no way fits it, any more than does M. Gaidoz's attempt to equate the word with the Breton "anaoun," and make it a place of souls. The idea of it as a place inhabited by the souls of men is quite foreign to it; it is a cheerful and happy land of the superior beings, into which, as occasion arises, the chosen mortal may venture and return alive, by the special invitation of its prince.

It is very evident that we are in the presence of two overlapping conceptions—an earlier one, representing a country of bliss and contentment; and a later one, in which this mysterious world has lost its original significance as a world of life and happiness, and has become synonymous with a place of death and the shades. The number of times that we meet with the word "Uffern" (the Welsh word for "hell") in connection with Annwfn is very significant. Uffern is derived from the Latin "infern-a," and like the ideas of "soul"-existence, of "penance," and of future "punishment," it came in with Latin teachers of Christianity, who grafted imperfectly the notions derived from quite other sources upon the native stock of ideas.