Charles Stuart Boswell

“ When he has heard the music’s sound, the note of the birds in Imchiúin, a little band of ladies will come down from the height to the field of games, whereon he stands. Freedom with health shall come to the land on which laughter is poured forth; ’tis on Imchiúin, at every season, that length of life with joy shall come. A day of serenity unending scatters silver on the land; a pure white cliff is on the seaboard range, drawing the sun’s heat from him. The multitude race their horses along Magh Mon, a glorious sport, not languid ”

“ At the sun’s uprising a fair man will come, who illumines the level lands; he rides over the fair plain whereon the sea beats, he tempers the ocean till it is [as] blood. The host will come across the pure sea; they show themselves, rowing towards the land; then they row to a flat rock, well in view, whence a hundred songs arise. It chants melody to the hosts, so that sorrow is not therein; the music swells from the choirs of hundreds, who look not for return or death. ”

“ The missionary zeal of the Irish clergy had made known the Gospel to the courts of barbarian princes, and to the still pagan inhabitants of North Britain and Germany, Gaul and Burgundy, Switzerland, Styria, and Lombardy, and even carried it to the Faroe Isles and Iceland. At home, what sparks of antique learning yet lurked beneath the ashes to which the fires of civilisation had smouldered down were gathered into a focus in schools where crowds of students from the surrounding nations found hospitality and instruction ”

“ The pains of Hell are set out with a more than common minuteness, and with a greater attention to a kind of lex talionis, so to speak, whereby the nature of the punishment is analogous to that of the crime, than is found in most of the Christian descriptions prior to Dante. Hell is represented as a place full of lakes of fire and burning mud, over which those who had blasphemed ‘the way of righteousness’ are suspended by their tongues, and adulterers by the hair, while in them wallow the perverters of righteousness. ”

“ Like most of the myths that have contrived to ‘make their fortune’ by virtue of their strong appeal to the human imagination, these legends, when the myth-making age had long departed from the Hellenic peoples, and the age of creative imagination had given place to one of literary culture, passed into the domain of literature pure and simple. As such they entered upon a new life in the writings of the Latin authors; for even in Virgil the literary aspect of the legend predominates, though not to the exclusion of its more serious elements. ”

“ Even so fare those hordes and companies, with the guardian angel of every soul in their midst, serving and tending them. In the main doorway of the city they are confronted by a veil of fire and a veil of ice, smiting perpetually one against the other. ”

“ Often since then the subjects and characters of Irish tradition have furnished themes for [249] masterpieces of European literature, but these intellectual triumphs have been like the victories which Irish arms have won for others, and under banners not their own. It is only in our own day that any serious and well-directed attempt has been made to resume the interrupted work upon truly national lines. ”

“ In the fragrance of the heavenly land, upon which the blessed sate themselves while hearkening to the music, and in the sweet savour of the candles which illumine the city—the candles themselves being angels in that guise—the old materialistic idea appears to be refined and spiritualised almost beyond recognition; nevertheless every degree in the descent—or ascent—from the pigs and apple-trees and ale-vat of the Dagda can be distinctly traced. ”

“ The romantic literature of Ireland reached its height about the time of the greatest activity of the Irish Church, and the sacred and secular schools did not fail to exercise a mutual influence, for the Irish clergy by no means despised these relics of Paganism: they possessed a large share of that wise tolerance which we find in many of the great clerics of the Middle Ages, who did not desire the destruction of all the associations that had twined themselves about the lives of the people, but rather to enlist them into the service of the new faith. ”

“ What time the holy companies of the Heavenly Host are singing the eight hours with harmonious melody, praising the Lord with cheerfulness and great gladness, then do the souls of the wicked utter piteous and weary wailings, as they are buffeted unceasingly by the demon hordes. ”

“ Sinners arise from out of it in grief and immeasurable sadness, but the righteous proceed with joy and great delight to the door of the third Heaven.
17. Above this, a fiery furnace keeps ever burning, its flames reaching a height of twelve thousand cubits; through it the righteous pass in the twinkling of an eye, but the souls of sinners are baked and scorched therein for twelve years, and then their guardian angel conveys them to the fourth door. ”

“ In the house Cormac found a warrior of exceeding beauty, both in face and figure, and a maiden, ‘the loveliest of the world’s women,’ with a helmet of gold on her yellow hair. Her feet, Cormac noticed, were washed by invisible hands, and within a partition was a bath, heated without visible agency, and Cormac bathed there. In the afternoon a man came in, bearing in one hand an axe and in the other a log of wood, and followed by a pig. At the warrior’s bidding, the man kindled a fire with the log, killed the pig, and put him in a caldron on the fire to boil. ”

“ Never perhaps in sacred or profane literature has a passage of equal brevity portrayed with equal vividness that Celestial Feast which, as fact or symbol, enters into every creed; from the gross delights of that ‘humbler heaven’ which ‘kindly Nature’ has given to the hopes of primitive man, to the imagery wherewith higher creeds seek to picture the indescribable ben dell’ intelletto. ”

“ It is enough, in this place, merely to refer to the Tree of Life and the Waters of Life, to both of which Indian, and yet closer Chaldæan, parallels exist; the mystical bird Karshipta, which is an Indian myth; the Elysium of the Gods, which is little more than an improvement on the Chaldæan Elysium; Mount Elborz, as the Persian Holy Mountain, corresponding to the Indian Mount Meru; the World Sea, which renews and purifies all created things, and is akin to the ocean out of which a new world was churned by the Hindu gods. ”

“ The Oriental Tradition
To Dante, Virgil appeared as the sacer vates in every sense of the term. As a poet, he towered above all other masters of the craft with whom Dante was acquainted; the testimony of ages had concurred in pronouncing him to be the repository and the exponent of the wisdom and learning of the ancient world, the only secular wisdom and learning to which the Middle Ages could turn for instruction and guidance. ”

“ Seven thousand angels, as it were great candles, shine and illumine that city round about; seven thousand others in the midst thereof are aflame for ever, throughout the royal city. The men of all the world, if gathered into one place, many as they are, would derive sustenance enough from the sweet savour of any one of those candles. ”

“ For three nights after death the soul sits by the head of the body, and all this time, if a righteous soul, experiences the consciousness of a delight as great as any that the whole living world together are capable of enjoying. ”

“ We may add that it seems most unlikely that a Christian scribe would, if he could, introduce a touch of the kind, when he has not found it necessary, in this and other legends where the old Irish conception of the Otherworld has undergone an euhemerising and Christianising process, to delete the episodes of enchanted dúns and islands where the wayfarer is refreshed with delights akin to those of the Mohammedan Paradise. ”

“ By far the greater number of the visits which the heroes and heroines of Irish tradition pay to the Otherworld are variations upon the same theme: a supernatural visitant, smitten with love for chief or maiden, induces him or her, by persuasion, guile, or force, to follow to fairy rath or oversea Elysium; a theme which has survived to our own day in the common legend of the Leanamhán Sidhe, or Fairy Lover. ”

“ No human form thereto, with head or foot, may be discerned, but a fiery mass, burning on for ever, while one and all are filled with awe and trembling before Him. Heaven and earth are filled full with the light of Him, and a radiance as of a royal star encircles Him. ”

“ Thus the Jewish writers of the centuries immediately preceding our era found ready to their hands a rich store of traditions relating to the lot of man in the Otherworld, formed by the combination of Oriental dogmas with the classical tradition in the forms in which this was preserved in the Hellenistic schools of Asia. Before, however, we proceed to trace the manner in which these blended traditions entered into subsequent versions of the legend, it may not be superfluous to ask what, if any, contributions were made by the remaining great centre of ancient religion and culture, Egypt. ”

“ The whole conception of a supernatural country, inhabited by human beings who lead a happy life amid conditions which reproduce the present world, but under a brighter and serener aspect—a country, moreover, which reproduces a traditionary golden age—is entirely in accord with the familiar Elysium of the Aryan peoples. But more than this, in the ancient Persian mythology Yima is identical with the Indian Yama, the ruler of the departed, who crossed the rivers, leading the fathers after him, and now [75] presides over the spirits of the dead in a land beyond the sunset. ”

“ One very striking image, and, so far as I know, the offspring of our author’s imagination, is the symbol whereby he has endeavoured to represent the Divine Omnipresence—‘a majestic countenance, seven times as radiant as the sun,’ gazing from out a fiery mass, and facing the spectator, from whatever side he might regard Him. The naïveté of this attempt to represent the Inconceivable reminds us of the triple orbs of iridescent fire in canto 33 of the Paradiso, whereby Dante symbolised the Trinity. ”

“ Twelve fiery dragons swallow up every spirit, one after the other, until the lowest dragon lands him in the Devil’s maw. There doth he experience the consummation of all evil, in the Devil’s own presence, throughout all ages.
21. After that his guardian angel had revealed to Adamnán’s spirit these visions of the Heavenly Kingdom, and of the first progress of every soul after parting from its body, he brought him to visit the nethermost Hell, with all its pains, and its crosses, and its torments. ”

“ So it has been with most other kinds of literature, and to this rule the Commedia of Dante, though one of the most truly original creations of the human mind, forms no exception. The main subject of the poem, the visit of a living man, in person or in vision, to the world of the dead, and his report of what he had seen and heard there, belongs to a class of world-myths than which few are more widely distributed in place or time, and none have been more [2] fortunate in the place won for them by the masters of literature. ”