Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/211

Rh 603. Mongán fulfilled his father's prognostications, and was prosperous and warlike. He outwitted the bard Forgoll and the king of Leinster, Brandubh; he knew where the treasures of the fairy hills lay; he could summon the mighty dead to parley with him; he was supposed by some to have been a re-incarnation of Find MacCumhal himself; he was mortally smitten by Artur the son of Bicor, a Welshman, that came in a host from Cantyre; and he was taken off in a "wheel of clouds by the white host to the gathering where no sorrow is."

There is a good deal of beauty in the verse of the poems that adorn some of these tales, and it is in the midst of a fine passage concerning the Earthly Paradise in the West that these lines occur:—

a passage that may stand beside the famous and oft-quoted bit from the Senecan tragedy.

Mr. Nutt has added to the value of this excellent edition of a pretty story by his Essay on the Irish belief in the Happy Otherworld and the Celtic doctrine of Rebirth. It is with the former of these two curious conceptions that he is occupied in this first volume; in the second he will give his views on the theory of metempsychosis, as held in the West. Starting here with a chronology of Irish legend, he proceeds to review the stories that are most akin to those of Bran and Mongán. Nearest is the story of Condla, son of Cond, the Hundred-fighter (122-57 ), high king of Ireland, who vras invited by a lady from the Land of Them that live for ever, to go with her to the Plain of Joy and the Land of Women; with which invitation, in spite of warning, and resisting druid, he gallantly complies and disappears, sailing away, never to return, in the glass corracle with the lady. The stories of Oisin and Caoilte going off to the Land of Youth with ladies, and dwelling there from the days of Cormac, the son of Art ( 284), to those of St. Patrick ( 440), can be traced back to the fourteenth century in their present form. In all these stories the return from the Otherworld is either impossible or penal. Bran cannot come back, and Nechtan falls into dust as