Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/215

Rh Irish, made mock and merriment of their other-world beHefs, as the Comedians and Lucian amply and amusingly prove. The Romans borrowed the Greek conception of Elysium, though without any effect other than literary (albeit Sertorius, like Harold Hardrede, a thousand years later, sought for a blessed westward land in vain), but they paid great attention to the Orphic-Pythagorean conception of an ethical and practical under-world, as is powerfully manifested by that poem which substituted the Vergilian for the Homeric Hades in men's minds throughout the Empire, and inspired the majestic medieval poet, highest of Christian singers.

Mr. Nutt, while unduly, I think, despising the Elysian conceptions of the Irish, which are simple and animal (and why not?), but never vulgar, goes on to the following important conclusions. "Christian influence on the Irish account of the Happy Otherworld is slight and unessential; features common to the Irish and Christian account are explicable by the fact that both stand in a certain relationship to pre-Christian Greek belief; the Christian account is the natural development of the later and more highly organised stage of that belief after its modification by contact with the East, in this case the relationship being one of derivation; the Irish account is akin to the earher, more purely, mythic stages of Greek belief before the rise of particular ethical and philosophic doctrines." A statement that seems to fully agree with our present evidence, and is not likely to be modified by the discovery of fresh material.

The final question naturally arises next. Are we to "regard this kinship" of belief "as due to the dependence of the Irish upon the Hellenic account, or to possession by Irishmen and Greeks of a common body of mythical beliefs and fancies?" The answer is sought in an examination of Scandinavian, Indian, and Iranic mythologies, the latest and the earliest recorded of Aryan forms of belief. To this examination the last chapter is dedicated. Justly refusing credit to Bugge's theory, Mr. Nutt considers that the eschatologic beliefs of the Northern Teutons were developed and systematised, "under the stress of contact and in competition with the highly organised creeds (Pagan and Christian) of classic antiquity;" and he considers the "Eddaic hell," Asgard and Walhall, were closely akin to the conceptions of Tartaros, Olympos, and the Elysian fields of pre-Christian Hellas. He refers to