Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/185

Rh And before the spoils of Annwfn woefully he sings. Thenceforth till doom he shall remain a bard. Thrice enough to fill Prydwen (Arthur's ship) we went into it Except seven, none returned from Caer Sidi."

It is this and similar verses that has given an aspect of gloom to the place; but, if it alludes to Gwydion's unauthorised descent to the south to steal the possessions of Pryderi, as seems obvious, it becomes one of the descriptions of a violent raid for the purpose of carrying off treasure. In the prose tale the Prince gets off safe with the swine, but in the poem he is imprisoned and loses most of his men.

Turning now to Irish literature, we are in presence of a large series of stories relating to the passage of exceptional human beings into the unseen world. There is no thought, so far as I can see, that all mortals will of necessity assemble thither, or that it is a land to be reached through death; it is essentially, and above all things, the land of life, of the Ever-living or Immortal Ones, of the young who will never grow old; not, as I conceive of it, of the dead who will live again, but of beings who cannot, in the human sense, die at all. That is, I do not conceive that the unseen world was generally thought of by the pagan Irish as a place of departed spirits, shades in which they wander, or a Paradise in which they live again, but rather as a dwelling of the Immortals into which by special favour, or, for a special purpose, some single mortals were invited, and whence, like Connla, they may never care to return, or, like Cuchulain, they may stay awhile, and then resume ordinary life; or yet again they may, like Bran or Ofsin, return to earth only to die. But as a rule they do return again, while the idea that they attain to the land only by means of death is entirely absent.

The usual belief is that it lies in an island within a lake or beyond the ocean; or again, it is beneath the