Borrowed from the delight which the Celt took in music is the recurring reference to the marvellous music which swelled in Elysium. There, as the goddess says to Bran, "there is nothing rough or harsh, but sweet music striking on the ear." It sounded from birds on every tree, from the branches of trees, from marvellous stones, and from the harps of divine musicians. And this is recalled in the ravishing music which the belated traveller hears as he passes fairy-haunted spots—"what pipes and timbrels, what wild ecstasy!" The romantic beauty of Elysium is described in these Celtic tales in a way unequalled in all other sagas or Märchen, and it is insisted on by those who come to lure mortals there. The beauty of its landscapes—hills, white cliffs, valleys, sea and shore, lakes and rivers,—of its trees, its inhabitants, and its birds,—the charm of its summer haze, is obviously the product of the imagination of a people keenly alive to natural beauty. The opening lines sung by the goddess to Bran strike a note which sounds through all Celtic literature:
"There is a distant isle, around which sea-horses glisten,
...
A beauty of a wondrous land, whose aspects are lovely,
Whose view is a fair country, incomparable in its haze.
It is a day of lasting weather, that showers silver on the land;
A pure white cliff on the range of the sea,
Which from the sun receives its heat."
So Oisin describes it: "I saw a country all green and full of flowers, with beautiful smooth plains, blue hills, and lakes and waterfalls." All this and more than this is the reflection of nature as it is found in Celtic regions, and as it was seen by the eye of Celtic dreamers, and interpreted to a poetic race by them.
In Irish accounts of the síd, Dagda has the supremacy, wrested later from him by Oengus, but generally each owner of a síd is its lord. In Welsh tradition Arawn is lord of Annwfn, but his claims are contested by a rival, and other lords of Elysium are known. Manannan, a god of the sea, appears to be lord of the Irish island Elysium which is called "the land of Manannan," perhaps because it was easy to associate an oversea world "around which sea-horses glisten" with a god whose mythic steeds were the waves. But as it lay towards the sunset, and as some of its aspects may have been suggested by the glories of the setting sun, the sun-god Lug was also associated with it, though he hardly takes the place of Manannan.
Most of the aspects of Elysium appear unchanged in later folk-belief, but it has now become fairyland—a place within hills, mounds, or síd, of marvellous beauty, with magic properties, and where time lapses as in a dream. A wonderful oversea land is also found in Märchen and tradition, and Tír na n-Og is still a living reality to the Celt. There is the fountain of youth, healing balsams, life-giving fruits, beautiful women or fairy folk. It is the true land of heart's desire. In the eleventh century MSS. from which our knowledge of Elysium is mainly drawn, but which imply a remote antiquity for the materials and ideas of the tales, the síd-world is still the world of divine beings, though these are beginning to assume the traits of fairies. Probably among the people themselves the change had already begun to be made, and the land of the gods was simply fairyland. In Wales the same change had taken place, as is seen by Giraldus' account of Elidurus enticed to a subterranean fairyland by two small people.1302
Some of the Elysium tales have been influenced by Christian conceptions, and in a certain group, the Imrama or "Voyages," Elysium finally becomes the Christian paradise or heaven. But the Elysium conception also reacted on Christian ideas of paradise. In the Voyage of Maelduin, which bears some resemblance to the story of Bran, the Christian influence is still indefinite, but it is more marked in the Voyage of Snedgus and MacRiagla. One island has become a kind of intermediate state, where dwell Enoch and Elijah, and many others waiting for the day of judgment. Another island resembles the Christian heaven. But in the Voyage of Brandan the pagan elements have practically disappeared; there is an island of hell and an island of paradise.1303 The island conception is the last relic of paganism, but now the voyage is undertaken for the purpose of revenge or penance or pilgrimage. Another series of tales of visionary journeys to hell or heaven are purely Christian, yet the joys of heaven have a sensuous aspect which recalls those of the pagan Elysium. In one of these, The Tidings of Doomsday,1304 there are two hells, and besides heaven there is a place for the boni non valde, resembling the island of Enoch and Elijah in the Voyage of Snedgus. The connection of Elysium with the Christian paradise is seen in the title Tir Tairngiri, "The Land of Promise," which is applied to the heavenly kingdom or the land flowing with milk and honey in early glosses, e.g. on Heb. iv. 4, vi. 15, where Canaan and the regnum c[oe]lorum are called Tír Tairngiri, and in a gloss to 1 Cor. x. 4, where the heavenly land is called Tír Tairngiri Innambéo, "The Land of Promise of the Living Ones," thus likening it to the "Land of the Living" in the story of Connla.
Sensuous as many of the aspects of Elysium are, they have yet a spiritual aspect which must not be overlooked. The emphasis placed on its beauty, its music, its rest and peace, its oblivion, is spiritual rather than sensual, while the dwelling of favoured mortals there with divine beings is suggestive of that union with the divine which is the essence of all religion. Though men are lured to seek it, they do not leave it, or they go back to it after a brief absence, and Laeg says that he would prefer Elysium to the kingship of all Ireland, and his words are echoed by others. And the lure of the goddess often emphasises the freedom from turmoil, grief, and the rude alarms of earthly life. This "sweet and blessed country" is described with all the passion of a poetical race who dreamed of perfect happiness, and saw in the joy of nature's beauty, the love of women, and the thought of unbroken peace and harmony, no small part of man's truest life. Favoured mortals had reached Elysium, and the hope that he, too, might be so favoured buoyed up the Celt as he dreamed over this state, which was so much more blissful even than the future state of the dead. Many races have imagined a happy Other-world, but no other race has so filled it with magic beauty, or so persistently recurred to it as the Celts. They stood on the cliffs which faced the west, and as the pageant of sunset passed before them, or as at midday the light shimmered on the far horizon and on shadowy islands, they gazed with wistful eyes as if to catch a glimpse of Elysium beyond the fountains of the deep and the halls of the setting sun. In all this we see the Celtic version of a primitive and instinctive human belief. Man refuses to think that the misery and disappointment and strife and pain of life must always be his. He hopes and believes that there is reserved for him, somewhere and at some time, eternal happiness and eternal love.
Footnote 1235:(return)LU 120a; Windisch, Irische Gramm. 120 f.; D'Arbois, v. 384 f.; Gaelic Journal, ii. 307.
Footnote 1237:(return)LU 43 f.; IT i. 205 f.; O'Curry, Atlantis, ii., iii.; D'Arbois, v. 170; Leahy, i. 60 f.
Footnote 1249:(return)Skene, i. 264, 276. Cf. the Ille tournoiont of the Graal romances and the revolving houses of Märchen. A revolving rampart occurs in "Maelduin" (RC x. 81).
Footnote 1252:(return)Chretien, Eric, 1933 f.; Geoffrey, Vita Merlini, 41; San Marte, Geoffrey, 425. Another Irish Liban is called Muirgen, which is the same as Morgen. See Girald. Cambr. Spec. Eccl. Rolls Series, iv. 48.
Footnote 1257:(return)Le Braz2, i. p. xxxix, ii. 37 f.; Albert le Grand, Vies de Saints de Bretagne, 63.
Footnote 1258:(return)A whole class of such Irish legends is called Tomhadna, "Inundations." A typical instance is that of the town below Lough Neagh, already referred to by Giraldus Cambrensis, Top. Hib. ii. 9; cf. a Welsh instance in Itin. Cambr. i. 2. See Rh[^y]s, CFL, passim; Kennedy, 282; Rev. des Trad. Pop. ix. 79.
Footnote 1262:(return)In the Vedas, Elysium has also a strong agricultural aspect, probably for the same reasons.
Footnote 1264:(return)For the text see Windisch, Ir. Gram. 120: "Totchurethar bii bithbi at gérait do dáinib Tethrach. ar-dot-chiat each dia i n-dálaib tathardai eter dugnathu inmaini." Dr. Stokes and Sir John Rh[^y]s have both privately confirmed the interpretation given above.
Footnote 1266:(return)Tethra was husband of the war-goddess Badb, and in one text his name is glossed badb (Cormac, s.v. "Tethra"). The name is also glossed muir, "sea," by O'Cleary, and the sea is called "the plain of Tethra" (Arch. Rev. i. 152). These obscure notices do not necessarily denote that he was ruler of an oversea Elysium.
Footnote 1269:(return)Both art motifs and early burial customs in the two countries are similar. See Reinach, RC xxi. 88; L'Anthropologie, 1889, 397; Siret, Les Premiere Ages du Metal dans le Sud. Est. de l'Espagne.
Footnote 1272:(return)TOS iii. 119; Joyce, OCR 314. For a folk-tale version see Folk-lore, vii. 321.
Footnote 1276:(return)See Gaidoz, "La Requisition de l'Amour et la Symbolisme de la Pomme," Ann. de l'École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1902; Fraser, Pausanias, iii. 67.
Footnote 1281:(return)O'Donovan, Battle of Mag Rath, 50; D'Arbois, v. 67; IT i. 96. Dagda's cauldron came from Murias, probably an oversea world.
Footnote 1282:(return)Miss Hull, 244. Scath is here the Other-world, conceived, however, as a dismal abode.
Footnote 1288:(return)For the use of a vessel in ritual as a symbol of deity, see Crooke, Folk-Lore, viii. 351 f.
Footnote 1289:(return)Diod. Sic. v. 28; Athen. iv. 34; Joyce, SH ii. 124; Antient Laws of Ireland, iv. 327. The cauldrons of Irish houses are said in the texts to be inexhaustible (cf. RC xxiii. 397).
Footnote 1290:(return)Strabo, vii. 2. 1; Lucan, Usener's ed., p. 32; IT iii. 210; Antient Laws of Ireland, i. 195 f.
Footnote 1292:(return)See Villemarqué, Contes Pop. des anciens Bretons, Paris, 1842; Rh[^y]s, AL; and especially Nutt, Legend of the Holy Grail, 1888.
Footnote 1296:(return)For parallel myths see Rig-Veda, i. 53. 2; Campbell, Travels in South Africa, i. 306; Johnston, Uganda Protectorate, ii. 704; Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, i. 307; and cf. the myth of Prometheus.
Footnote 1297:(return)This is found in the stories of Bran, Maelduin, Connla, in Fian tales (O'Grady, ii. 228, 238), in the "Children of Tuirenn," and in Gaelic Märchen.
Footnote 1299:(return)Burton, Thousand Nights and a Night, x. 239; Chamberlain, Aino Folk-Tales, 38; L'Anthropologie, v. 507; Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l'Orient, i. 183. The lust of the women of these islands is fatal to their lovers.
Footnote 1300:(return)An island near New Guinea is called "the land of women." On it men are allowed to land temporarily, but only the female offspring of the women are allowed to survive (L' Anthrop. v. 507). The Indians of Florida had a tradition of an island in a lake inhabited by the fairest women (Chateaubriand, Autob. 1824, ii. 24), and Fijian mythology knows of an Elysian island of goddesses, near the land of the gods, to which a few favoured mortals are admitted (Williams, Fiji, i. 114).
Footnote 1301:(return)P. 274, supra. Islands may have been regarded as sacred because of such cults, as the folk-lore reported by Plutarch suggests (p. 343, supra). Celtic saints retained the veneration for islands, and loved to dwell on them, and the idea survives in folk-belief. Cf. the veneration of Lewismen for the Flannan islands.
Footnote 1303:(return)Translations of some of these Voyages by Stokes are given in RC, vols. ix. x. and xiv. See also Zimmer, "Brendan's Meerfahrt," Zeits. für Deut. Alt. xxxiii.; cf. Nutt-Meyer, ch. 4, 8.
Abnoba, 43.
Adamnan, 72.
Aed Abrat, 65.
Aed Slane, 351.
Afanc, 190.
Agricultural rites, 3, 4, 57, 80, 107, 140, 227, 237. See Festivals.
Aife, 129.
Aillén, 70.
Aine, 70 f.
Aitherne, 84.
Albiorix, 28.
All Saints' Day, 170.
All Souls' Day, 170.
Altars, 282 f.
Amours with mortals, divine, 128, 159, 348, 350, 355.
Andarta, 41.
Anextiomarus, 125.
Animal gods, anthropomorphic, 34, 92, 106, 139 f., 158, 210, 212, 226.
Animal worship, 3, 92, 140, 186, 208 f., 260.
Animals, burial of, 186, 211, 221.
Animals, descent from, 213, 216 f.
Animals, domestic, from the gods' land, 37, 384.
Animals, dressing as, 217, 260.
Animals, sacramental eating of, 221 f.
Animals, slaughter of, 382.
Animals, tabooed, 219.
Ankou, 345.
Annwfn, 106, 111, 115, 117, 367 f., 381.
Apollo, 25, 27, 125, 180, 183, 231.
Archæology, 2.
Arduinna, 43.
Arianrhod, 104, 105, 106, 109 f.
Arthur, 88, 97, 109, 117, 119 f., 211, 242, 344, 369, 381.
Artor, 121.
Arvalus, 125.
Astrology, 248.
Auto-suggestion, 254.
Avagddu, 116.