Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/493

Rh taken by the seventh century Senchan Torpeist in welding together our existing version of the Táin had become matter for legend, in other words before the eighth century. And, as a matter of fact, the story was almost immediately made to assume a formal Christian character by the ascription of the feat to the Saints of Ireland. Failing these two late instances, I must emphatically reiterate that the early Irish stories of the Other-world are destitute of any eschatological significance or import. This indeed it is which constitutes their value; they, and with them an early stratum of Greek mythic story-telling, preserve the account of a non-eschatological Other-world which everywhere else in the Aryan world, among Scandinavians and Indo-Iranians, has suffered an eschatological change, has become a Hades.

In the Voyage of Bran I discussed two ideas: that of the Other-world, that of Re-birth. I demonstrated (conclusively, I venture to think) the organic kinship and correlation of the two conceptions. But I failed to notice one piece of evidence which, now that Miss Hull and M. d'Arbois have obliged me to think over the matter again, stares me in the face. I was struck by the fact that, apparently, the ancient Irish told no tales about the land of the dead; I was struck by the way in which the Classical references to the Celtic doctrine of re-birth emphasise the fact that, according to it, death is merely temporary, at all events for the valiant man; he comes back again to this world. If the classical observers are to be believed in their account of this doctrine, and if it was one which the insular Celts held equally with their Continental kinsmen, we see at once why the ancient Irish told no stories about a dead man's land; they did not believe that such a land existed. They would not trouble themselves about the churl and the craven, what became of them was subject for neither speculation nor fantasy; but as for the valiant fighter, the Celtic Achilles, his was not the lot so pathetically bewailed by his Homeric counterpart, he 'came back' and had the usual good time of an early Celtic hero: never did he retire to his couch without an enemy's head for his pillow, and he made love on a truly magnificent scale. And, highest of all