Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/214

188 chain; Mr. Nutt turns to classical evidence, to the Elysian Plain of Homer in the far west, the Hesperian turning-places of the sun on a fruitful isle of marvels afar, to the island of Calypso (Homer's Women's Land), to the undersea dwellings and bowers of the sea-god, to Olympos (mountain-seat of the gods), to a Tartaros of woe, and a belief in metamorphosis.

The same variation and inconsistency of beliefs of western earthly paradises for the ever-living and of underground abodes of the dead is met with in Hellas, as in Ireland and also in Scandinavia, where we find the dead dwelling in barrows underground, where we hear of an underground land of culture, of a garden where certain heroes are kept undying in bliss, and where the faith in Walhall (parallel to Olympos and the Christian heaven) and in Cloudham and a noisome pit of punishment, jostles such primitive conceptions as an under-sea palace where the gods feast with Eager. And it is interesting to note that in Japan one may find to-day, side by side, traditions of a Land of Women over-sea (a tale turned to notable Aristophanic use), of a Land Under-ocean whither my lord Bag o'rice is brought to help the fairy queen against her foe (a story clearly parallel to the Irish tale), of ghosts that cling to earth, of a Land of Bliss over-sea whither a youth is lured by the princess and kept happy for many swift years till home-sickness brings him back to earth, and his foolish breach of the tabu dissolves him into instant decrepitude and decay (a Rip Van Winkle and Oisin of the far East), of a Buddhist heaven and hell, as wild and weird as any medieval Christian could conceive or pourtray, where souls are tormented or made happy, and lastly, of metamorphosis, such as the children of Lear experienced. A like confusion of belief exists in Polynesian mythology, where as in Greece, and (as I think) in old England, certainly in Western Scandinavia and Ireland, the spirit journeying to the land of bliss, arriving through many dangers, starting with a leap from some Leukadian precipice, is a widely spread conception.

Mr. Nutt considers the under-world traditions to be associated with the burial-custom (with which theory Sir H. Howorth would agree), while he takes the "God's garden" over-sea in the far-off west, or south, or east, or north, to be a belief developed "apart from the customs of burial and all that those customs implied,"—a pregnant suggestion.

He notes how the Greeks, like the Western Scandinavians and