Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/195

Rh both be entered in turn. In the Voyage of the Sons of O'Corra this purpose is faintly shadowed, the travellers pass into the realm of spirits and behold the living and the dead; but in the Irish Voyage of Brendan, which is a homily, and hence an opportunity for edification not to be missed, a long description of hell couched in the adjectival language of the homilies is dragged uncomfortably in amid native dreams of a yellow-haired maiden floating on the waves, of the little bird that became a monstrous sea-cat, and other reminiscences of fancies and legends of an earlier time. But even in Ireland the Legend of Brendan is a composite one.

As the chief object of such stories was to point a moral and warn a hardened race by a description of the terrors of hell, the framework of a voyage was by degrees seen to be no longer necessary; it had become a mere superfluous adjunct. And so there arose in Ireland, or out of the imagination of Irish monks, a long series of Visions, in which the soul, usually parted from the body in trance or cataleptic sleep, wanders into realms unknown and sees revelations of heaven and hell. Into these visions we do not enter. There is one of them only that retains and carries into the new tradition something of the radiant fancy, the hopeful tenderness, of the beautiful native Gaelic tales. It is called the Vision of Adamnan, and though, as in all the others, we are here conducted through heaven and hell, there is no appeal to that horror and disgust which is called up by the hideous and often grotesque scenes of the later visions, such as those of the Tidings of Doomsday, of Owain Myles and Tundale, and of the Spanish prince Ramon.

Its resemblance to the Divine Comedy of Dante is remarkable, the circles of ascent to heaven, the angelic watchers, the graduation of the punishments and their