A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day. Douglas Hyde
neither death, nor sin, nor strife;[9] we enjoy perpetual feasts without anxiety, and benevolence without contention. A large Sidh [Shee, "fairy-mound"] is where we dwell, so that it is hence we are called the Sidh [Shee] people."
The Druids appear, as I have already remarked, to have acted as intermediaries between the inhabitants of the other world and of this, and in the story of Connla one of them chants against the lady so that her voice was not heard, and he drives her away through his incantation. She comes back, however, at the end of a month, and again summons the prince.
"'Tis no lofty seat," she chanted, "upon which sits Connla amid short-lived mortals awaiting fearful death; the ever-living ones invite thee to be the ruler over the men of Tethra."
Conn of the Hundred Battles, who had overheard her speech, cried, "Call me the Druid; I see her tongue has been allowed her to-day [again]."
But she invisible to all save the prince replied to him—
"O Conn of the Hundred Battles, druidism is not loved, for little has it progressed to honour on the great Righteous Strand, with its numerous, wondrous, various families."
After that she again invites the prince to follow her, saying—
"There is another land which it were well to seek.
I see the bright sun is descending, though far off we shall reach it ere night.
'Tis the land that cheers the mind of every one that turns to me.
There is no race in it save only women and maidens."
The prince is overcome with longing. He leaps into her well-balanced, gleaming boat of pearl. Those who were left behind upon the strand "saw them dimly, as far as the sight of their eyes could reach. They sailed the sea away from them, and from that day to this have not been seen, and it is unknown where they went to."
In the fine story of Cuchulain's sick-bed,[10] in which though the language of the text is not so ancient, the conceptions are equally pagan, the deserted wife of Manannán, the Irish Neptune, falls in love with the human warrior, and invites him to the other-world to herself, through the medium of an ambassadress. Cuchulain sends his charioteer Laeg along with this mysterious ambassadress, that he may bring him word again, to what kind of land he is invited. Laeg, when he returns, repeats a glowing account of its beauty, which coincides closely with those given by the ladies who summoned Bran and Connla.
"There are at the western door,
In the place where the sun goes down,
A stud of steeds of the best of breeds
Of the grey and the golden brown.
There wave by the eastern door
Three crystal-crimson trees,
Whence the warbling bird all day is heard
On the wings of the perfumed breeze.
And before the central door
Is another, of gifts untold.
All silvern-bright in the warm sunlight,
Its branches gleam like gold."[11] * * * * *
In the saga of the Wooing of Etain we meet with what is substantially the same description. She is the wife of one of the Tuatha De Danann, is reborn as a mortal, and weds the king of Ireland. Her former husband, Midir, still loves her, follows her, and tries to win her back. She is unwilling, and he chants to her this description of the land to which he would lure her.
"Come back to me, lady, to love and to shine
In the land that was thine in the long-ago,
Where of primrose hue is the golden hair
And the limbs are as fair as the wreathèd snow.
To the lakes of delight that no storm may curl,
Where the teeth are as pearl, the eyes as sloes,
Which alight, whenever they choose to seek,
On the bloom of a cheek where the foxglove glows.
Each brake is alive with the flowers of spring,
Whence the merles sing in their shy retreat;
Though sweet be the meadows of Innisfail,
Our beautiful vale is far more sweet.
Though pleasant the mead be of Innisfail,
More pleasant the ale of that land of mine,
A land of beauty, a land of truth,
Where youth shall never grow old or pine.
Fair rivers brighten the vale divine—
There are choicest of wine and of mead therein.
And heroes handsome and women fair
Are in dalliance there without stain or sin.
From thence we see, though we be not seen,
We know what has been and shall be again,
And the cloud that was raised by the first man's fall,
Has concealed us all from the eyes of men.
Then come with me, lady, to joys untold,
And a circlet of gold on thy head shall be,
Banquets of milk and of wine most rare,
Thou shalt share, O lady, and share with me."[12]
The casual Christian allusion in the penultimate verse need not lead us astray, nor does it detract from the essentially pagan character of the rest, for throughout almost the whole of Irish literature the more distinctly or ferociously pagan any piece is, the more certain it is to have a Christian allusion added at the end as a make-weight. There is great ingenuity displayed in thus turning the pagan legend into a Christian homily by the addition of two lines suggesting that if men were not sinful, this beautiful pagan world and the beautiful forms that inhabited it would be visible to the human ken. This was sufficient to disarm any hostility to the legend on the part of the Church.
From what we have said it is evident that the ancient Irish pagans believed in the possibility of rebirth, and founded many of their mythical sagas on the doctrine of metempsychosis, and that they had a highly ornate and fully-developed belief in a happy other-world or Elysium, to which living beings were sometimes carried off without going through the forms of death. But it is impossible to say whether rebirth with life in another world, for those whom the gods favoured, was taught as a doctrine or had any ethical significance attached to it by the druids of Ireland, as it most undoubtedly had by their cousins the druids of Gaul.
[1] "De Bello Gallico," vi. 14.
[2] See "Voyage of Bran," vol. ii. pp. 107–111, where all these passages have been lucidly collected by Mr. Nutt.
[3] All of these have been studied by Mr. Nutt, chap. xiv.
[4] Vol. ii. p. 121.
[5] In a large collection of nearly sixty folk-lore stories taken down in Irish from the lips of the peasantry, I find about five contain allusions to the belief in another world full of life under water, and about four in