Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/216

190 Saxo's stories of Eric the Fartravelled and the land of Undeath or of Living men in the remote East, the story of Helge Thoreson in the Glittering Plains ruled by Gudmund, the story of Gorm and Thorkill journeying to the lands of Gudmund and Garfred, the story of Hadding and the Underground Land of Life, legends written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He notes that in some of the Scandinavian tales a Tartarus (completely unknown, he believes, to the heathen Irish authorities) appears hard by the Elysian realm; he notes the weakened tradition of the Land of Ladies, and he considers the Scandinavian stories to "approximate more closely to the later, the Irish to the earlier, aspects of Greek mythology." The Iranic authorities supply evidence of beliefs in (1) an Eden like Hesiod's picture of the Golden Age or that of the Genesis story; (2) a closed land where the best of earth are kept hidden away (as in Voluspá) from the Ice-age or Frost Era; (3) a heaven for the righteous after death.

But, of course, in the present state of Iranic studies, the date and prominence of these ideas is fiercely debated, though the close parallel between the Iranic and heathen North Teutonic beliefs is incontestable and remarkable. As to Vedic evidence, we are met by the difficulty of an unsettled chronology, though it is quite certain that Vedic texts of some sort must be older than Buddhism, which starts in the sixth century In them we find a heaven (Yama's abode) for the pious, and a hell of darkness and constraint for the ungodly. Swarga, Indra's heaven, is a Walhall of warriors, and Uttaru Kuru is a Hyperborean Elysium of the old Golden Age. The early Indian development of penal mythology is clear.

The result of the investigation carried so far, and summed up in convenient tabular form, is that in Hellas alone, "outside Ireland, do we find the Elysian ideal disassociated from eschatological belief." And the problem this conclusion raises, "and upon its correct solution depends in a very large measure the correct appreciation of religion among the Aryan races," is this: "Have Irish and Hellenes alike preserved the first stage of the Happy Otherworld conception, that in which it is solely the gods' land, and is altogether unconnected with speculation concerning the fate of man after he has quitted this life?" And Mr. Nutt postpones his answer till, in the second volume, he has examined the doctrine of Reincarnation.

As the first serious attempt to deal as a whole with the develop-