Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/213

Rh name of the Land of Behest. The story of the Furies and the Giantess from the Land of Women, in the far west, again preserves the myth. In the tale of Teigue, son of Cian, Christian eschatology is allowed to mingle with the old pagan tradition. Teigue sails oversea six weeks west to an island, where stands the fortalice of the kings of Ireland, and reaches a loch with a golden crannoge, called the Isle of Patmos, within it, one of the four earthly paradises. The others being the Isle of Daleb in the south, the Isle of Iscander (Alexander) in the north, the paradise of Adam in the east, ruled by four daughters of Adam: Venuisa, Letiusa, Aliusa, Eliusa. Condla and Clidna are there in bliss of song and feast and green raiment, waiting joyfully for the uttermost judgment. MacCongHnne's Rabelaisian Cockayne is but a merry parody of such a fate.

Stories connected with the Dagda and Angus the Young, and the great mounds on the Boyne, also speak of an Otherworld full of good things, whence, indeed, come cattle, magic fruit, and the draught of wisdom and poesy, whence also streams and lochs rise.

The Vision (probably of the ninth century) ascribed to Adamnan has, like Teigue's tale, pagan and Christian elements commingled: there are singing birds and musical pillars, white-clad saints, in fourfold divisions, enringed by the "waver-lowe," a kingdom noble, admirable, delightful, with fruitfulness, with light, with odour of plenteous earth, wherein is joy of all goodness. The Tidings of Doomsday, another Christian piece of the same date, replaces the fourfold geographical division of the blessed by a four-fold ethical division of all the dead. There are the boni valde, who pass at once to heaven; boni non valde, who must wait for heaven till judgement; mali valde, whom hell at once receives; and mali non valde, who have a respite till the crack of doom.

Having traced the Irish literature of the Otherworld in forms that may be classified as the Land Oversea, the Underground Land, and the Undersea Land, with their characteristics of physical bliss, and of riches tabued, and shown how these were accepted and modified by Christian eschatology, citing the parallel of Brythonic Avalon, and of the Old English Phoenix (founded on the poem of Lactantius, Claudian's predecessor); and proving that the Jewish and Christian eschatology is deeply coloured by classic and borrowed tradition, and must be regarded as the last link in a long