Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/127

 Reviews. 107

An Irish Precursor of Dante. A Study of the Vision of Heaven and Hell ascribed to the 8th century Irish Saint Adamnan, with Translation of the Irish Text. By C. S. BoswELL. (Grimm Library.) Nutt, 1908. 8vo, pp. 262.

Undoubtedly the most interesting, as it is the most beautiful, of all the mediaeval visions of Heaven and Hell which preceded the Divine Comedy of Dante is the Irish Vision ascribed to Adamnan, the ninth Abbot of lona, but probably of a later date. It was a curious fancy of the mediaeval Irish writers which caused them to place two visions to the credit of Adamnan, a man whose chief characteristic was a hard-headed practical ability turned towards a thorough reorganisation of the church system with which he was connected, and whose social reforms were directed towards such definite aims as the emancipation of Irish captives from their Northumbrian captors, or the exemption of women from the necessity of taking part in warfare, as they had done from time immemorial. Yet the Irish nature was so frequently a blend of dissimilar qualities, it had so often a dreamy and reflective as well as a practical side, that the man who recounted in all seriousness the miracles and visions of St. Columba, his relative and first predecessor at lona, may also himself have had visions of the other world. There is nothing impossible in the thing itself; the circumstances which point to a later age are not so much its inherent im- probability as the language and allusions to be found in these pieces called by his name.

Mr. C. S. Boswell has attempted a re-translation of the Stokes in 1870 in Calcutta and was afterwards revised by him for Miss Margaret Stokes' Forests of Fratice. The special feature of this Vision is the delicacy and beauty of its imagery, and a note of hopefulness and joy absent from nearly all the mediaeval Visions save that of Dante. Though it treats, much in the brief and pregnant manner of the Revelation of St. Peter., to which this portion of the tract is closely allied, of the tortures of the lost, it lays less stress upon the pains of Hell than upon the glories of Heaven. In nearly all the other Visions
 * Vision ' which was first published privately by Dr. Whitley