Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/492

 44^ Correspondence.

is. We claim that the Celtic Other-world was not, originally, at all events, a sejour des morts, an Isle of Spirits, at all ; and we are unable to find any sound justification for the statement " chez les Celtes tous les morts sans exception arrivent au Mag Mell, a la plaine agreable." I confess I had hoped that the analysis of the Irish Other-world stories contained in my Voyage of Bran would have had some effect upon M. d'Arbois, would have induced him to revise and modify the sweeping assertions he made in the Cycle Mythologique, assertions which, when I reviewed the book in these columns twenty-three years ago, seemed to me very hazardous, and which, when ten years later I examined and discussed the entire extant body of evidence, seemed to me demonstrably erroneous. But alike here, and in the Introduction to his recently-issued instalment of a trans- lation of the Tain, M. d'Arbois stiffly maintains his original position. It therefore seems needful that those who hold a different view should state in an equally categorical way that in the oldest mythic tales the Irish Other-world is not a Hades, a land to which all men, or even men generally, go after death, but is a god's land to which certain favoured mortals, and they alone, penetrate, and from which they may return. M. d'Arbois relies upon a passage in the Echtra Condla ; but even if this is correctly interpreted by him (and trans- lations diff"er), it will only admit the deduction he draws from it thanks to a very strained exegesis. Apart from this text M. d'Arbois is compelled to have recourse to stories which, on the face of them, are post-Christian in date and betray manifest signs of being influenced by Christian eschatology. One of these is the story of Patrick's calling up Cuchulainn from the dead for the purpose of converting King Loegaire. Obviously this story must postdate the full development of the Patrick legend, and cannot well be older than the ninth century. Although therefore it does contain references to incidents of a character seemingly very archaic, still its late date and its nature compel the assumption that the original Irish view of the Other-world has been modified. The other story, which tells how Fergus was raised from the dead to recite the Tain b6 Ciialnge, can only have come into existence after the part