1. Legend of Tundal.⁠[448]—As the protagonist lived in 1149, there is no doubt that this legend dates from the second half of the twelfth century. The author of the Latin version, an Irish monk, states that he composed it from a text written in a barbarous tongue.⁠[449] Was this an Arabic text? The great number of Moslem features, several of them very striking, would seem to suggest it.

The legend tells of a journey, undertaken by the soul of Tundal upon his apparent death, to the realms beyond the grave, and describes many scenes the Moslem origin of which has already been sufficiently proved—the tortures by fire, by intense cold, and by the fiends wielding red hot prongs; the river of sulphur, the narrow bridge that only the righteous succeed in crossing, and many others.

2. But there are other more interesting visions. Thus, at the further side of the bridge of hell is a monster, named Acheronte, which, with its mighty jaws opening wide, is seen devouring two sinners. The literary device whereby hell is represented as a monstrous fiend rather than as a place of torture is to be found in Islam many centuries earlier. The Moslem hadiths on the final judgment describe a monster, called Gehenna, which, according to some versions, with its many mouths devours three sinners.⁠[450]

Tundal further tells of a place of expiation for souls that, being neither good nor wicked, are spared the torments of hell, but are not worthy of association with the saints. The prototype of this region has been shown to be the Moslem Aaraf.⁠[451]

In another part of hell Tundal sees demons, who with heavy hammers deal furious blows at sinners stretched upon anvils. This vision is evidently an adaptation of the Moslem scene of the punishment in the grave.⁠[452]

Two demons, black and of sinister and repulsive mien, appear before the sinner as soon as he is buried. So misshapen are they that they cannot be likened to angels, men, or animals. In his hands each bears, for the purpose of Divine vengeance, an iron hammer, so heavy that not all the men in the world could lift it. In thunderous tones they begin to question the soul on the sincerity of his belief in God and the Prophet. Paralysed with terror at the sight of the monsters, whose eyes flash like lightning in the darkness of the grave, the sinner is too conscious of his guilt to give a ready reply to the fiends, who at each faltering answer bring down their hammers with terrific force seven times alternately upon the wretch’s head.

The picture is so vivid that the story must undoubtedly have created a profound impression; and, indeed, it is to be found in an adapted form in many a mediæval legend. Thus, the tale of Hugh, Margrave of Brandenburg, tells how, when hunting in a wood, he came across some men of a black colour and deformed shape torturing souls by beating them with hammers as they lay stretched on anvils.⁠[453] This picture agrees even more literally with the Islamic model than does the scene in the legend of Tundal.

3. There remain three episodes that unquestionably are copies of Islamic descriptions. These are the very three scenes that prompted D’Ancona to remark,⁠[454] “Never perhaps has man shown such wealth of imagination in the invention of infernal tortures as did the anonymous monk that composed this legend”—a remark that the eminent critic would surely not have hazarded, had he known of the existence of the Moslem originals. The first of these scenes depicts Lucifer.

Surrounded by demons and chained to a red hot grill, he roars in agony; and, as if seeking vengeance for his own suffering, with his hundred hands he clutches at innumerable souls and crushes them between his fingers even as a man would crush a bunch of grapes. The mangled bodies are then to be seen floating in the fiery vapour of his breath, alternately attracted and repelled by the respiration of the monster.

The posture of Lucifer, chained down amidst his fiendish host, is a Moslem feature that has already been referred to.⁠[455]

The idea of the alternate attraction and repulsion of the bodies by his breathing appears to be taken from the scene of the Isra in which the bodies of the adulterers are shown floating up and down in the heat of the furnace. The most striking feature—that of Lucifer crushing the bodies of the sinners in his numerous hands—is modelled upon a hadith of the eighth century, which reads as follows:

“God has created an angel with as many fingers as there are sinners condemned to fire, and each sinner is tortured by a finger. I swear by Allah that the firmament would melt with heat, were that angel to place but one of his fingers upon it!”⁠[456]

4. The second episode is prefaced by D’Ancona with the following remark:

“The sole aim of the legend of Tundal is to provoke terror. With a refinement of torture truly mediæval, the souls of the damned are first taken to see the delights of the life led by the elect, in order that their suffering be all the greater: ut magis doleant.”⁠[457]

This pathetic scene is frequently to be found in the religious works of Islam. According to the Moslem creed, identical on this point with the Christian, the moral suffering of sinners is intended to be far greater than their physical suffering. Algazel develops this theme in his Ihia. The grief of the sinners over their exclusion from heaven, he avers, would not be so intense were it not that God, to add to their punishment, has ordered them to be shown paradise from outside.⁠[458] In proof, he quotes the following hadith:

On the day of judgment God will ordain that some of the damned be led to heaven; but, when they are near enough to inhale the delicious perfumes with which the air is laden, and behold the castles of paradise and the delights awaiting the blessed, a Voice will of a sudden be heard saying: “Withdraw them, for they are unworthy of a place in heaven”; and as they are turned away, they will be filled with a sorrow such as no one yet has felt or ever will feel. Then will they cry out, “Oh, Lord! Hadst Thou but cast us into hell without showing us the rewards prepared for Thy chosen, it had been easier for us to bear our torment”; and God will answer, “To-day shall ye taste the pain of torture, ye to whom I have denied the prize.”⁠[459]

This scene, in which cruelty is blended with sarcasm, shows no trace of the sweet message of pity preached by the Gospel, but rather breathes the spirit of vengeance that is characteristic of the Old Testament and is transparent in more than one passage of the Koran. Some of these passages are glossed in the Tadhkira with other hadiths, attributed to the converted Jew, Kaab al-Akhbar, describing various practical jokes played upon the sinners. Thus, the gates of hell are opened, as if to let the sufferers escape, to be quickly closed again whenever an attempt is made to pass through them; or, a pretence is made of allowing the sinners to enter paradise, the gate of which is then slammed in their faces. Under the heading of “Tricks played upon the Damned,” these cruel hoaxes prove that the comic and grotesque element found in many of the pre-Dante Christian legends was not wanting in the tales of Islam.

5. The last episode in the legend of Tundal that may be said to be of Moslem origin forms a striking picture:

The protagonist confesses to having stolen a cow from a fellow-priest and, as a punishment, his angel-guide obliges him to cross the narrow bridge leading to paradise at the same time warding off the attacks of that very cow.

D’Ancona points out a similar scene in the vision of the usurer Gottschalk, in which the Burgrave of Reiningen is condemned to be tossed and trampled upon by a mad cow, of which he had once robbed a poor widow.⁠[460]

The episode appears to be a copy of an early Moslem hadith:

“I swear by Him in whose hands lies my soul that every owner of a sheep, a cow, or a camel, who has omitted to pay the ritual tax, will be confronted on the day of judgment by the animal in the fiercest form it ever assumed on earth; it will gore him with horns of fire and trample upon him until his ribs are broken and his belly split in twain; in vain will he cry out for help, for in the form of a wolf or a lion the beast will continue to torment him in hell.”⁠[461]

6. Legend of Purgatory of St. Patrick.⁠[462]—This legend appeared in Ireland in the second half of the twelfth century and rapidly became popular throughout Christendom. Calderon immortalised it in his drama of the same title, and there is hardly a nation in Western Europe that has not drawn upon the legend for some literary purpose or other. The theme is a journey to the realms of the after-world by one Owen, an Irish knight, who is bold enough to penetrate into the cave by which, according to tradition, St. Patrick communicated with the other world. As D’Ancona observes, the legend is not remarkable for originality. “The visionaries,” he says, “begin to copy one another, and this is but natural, seeing that their imaginative powers have become exhausted.” The remark is very true and applies exactly to the present thesis; for most, if not all, of the picturesque features of this legend existed in Moslem eschatology.

7. Thus, Moslem models exist for the following scenes, common to so many of the legends: the torture by serpents; the submersion of sinners in a river of molten metal, on the banks of which stand demons ready to harpoon them; the passage of the narrow and slippery bridge; the monster whose breath alternately attracts and repels the bodies of the sinners; the wheel of fire; the pit of sulphur; the sinners hanging by their eyelids or nostrils, or head downwards, over flames of sulphur.

Other features of greater interest also appear to be of Islamic origin. Thus, the sinners lying crucified to the ground existed, as was shown in connection with Dante’s picture of Caiaphas, in the Moslem hell.⁠[463]

The blast of bitterly cold wind to which other sinners are exposed, is but the zamharir of Islam in one of its accepted meanings.⁠[464]

Finally, the burning sepulchres in which some of the sinners lie buried, and the garments of fire covering others, have been shown to be of Islamic origin.⁠[465]