The notion contributes to the burden of cliché. Play a word-association game with the ‘Celt’ and you can expect to hear such modifiers as ‘intemperate’, ‘exuberant’ and ‘otherworldly’. None of these implies flattery when uttered by most non-Celts. The smile of condescension is implicit, as it was in the 1999 world press accounts of Co. Clare storyteller Eddie Lenihan’s efforts to stop highway construction that would destroy a hawthorn bush where the fairies meet. Could the fairies find such a champion in contemporary Sussex or Kansas?
Cliché, of course, builds on caricature and exaggeration. The closer we get to the several otherworlds denoted in different Celtic texts, the less particular they appear. Earlier Europeans alluded to a realm beyond the senses, fairyland being one of many such conceptions. As a literary device fairyland becomes part of the action in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (1882), appearing wholly English. Earlier European traditional literatures furnish examples of otherworlds that make striking parallels with those described in Ireland, Wales and Brittany. Still other examples from myth, legend and folklore abound in distant lands from Siberia to Hawaii.
Additionally, post-classical Celtic peoples, like other Europeans, long embraced the teachings of the Christian Church, which has defined visions of otherworldly realms of reward and punishment. The certitude of spending eternity in either heaven or hell tends to push aside older visions of a life beyond the physical, inherited from pre-literate civilizations. Additionally, Christian vocabulary portrays an absolute dichotomy between this world and the other world that influences the connotations and nuances of our own English words in trying to speak about the subject.
Regardless of how much ‘paganism’ survives in Irish, Welsh and Breton traditions, the Christian faith of later scribes, ecclesiastical and secular, appears to have shaped the portrayal of worlds beyond the senses. The scribal vocabulary implies no shared belief, no single vision of a realm where the non-physical part of the self, the soul or psyche, might reside.
Of the thoughts of pre-Christian Celts there is little to tell. In an oft-cited text, the first-century Roman poet and historian Lucan remarks that according to druidical belief the souls of the departed survive not in Hades but in orbe alio (Pharsalia, I. 457). As Patrick Sims-Williams (1990) comments, alius orbis probably does not mean ‘the otherworld’ or even ‘an otherworld’, supernatural and divorced from ‘this world’, but simply ‘another region’. The tiny Latin-writing learned elite of the Middle Ages used the phrase alius orbis to denote far-off lands separated from the known world by the impassable sea, lands such as Ceylon or the antipodes. The phrase would also be known to learned elites in the Celtic lands, but there is no evidence that they sought to find equivalents in their own languages.*
The retrieved ceremonial burials of the continental Celts imply the expectation of an afterlife but with fewer specifications than those left by the Egyptian pyramid builders. The extensive Iron-Age cemetery found at Hallstatt (seventh to sixth centuries BC) in Upper Austria includes many men buried with decorative swords and other weapons. These may only signal the wealth it took to assemble them or the prowess their bearers displayed in life. It is mere speculation to suggest that the departed warrior, weapon at the ready, expected to continue to do battle in the next life. On the other hand, the tall chieftain in the tumulus at Hochdorf (sixth century BC?), southwest Germany, was buried with golden plates and drinking vessels, in likely anticipation of a banquet worthy of his high station. The well-born woman buried at Reinheim (5th century BC) near Saarbrücken on the French-German border also has a fine eating and drinking service as well as a full display of her personal jewellery indicating her distinguished social rank: a neck ring, several golden arm rings, bracelets and finger rings. Her time in the afterlife would be stylish as well as comfortable.
VOYAGES TO THE BEYOND
Among the earliest narratives in Irish are those dealing with fabulous journeys, perhaps a projection of the intrepid travel undertaken by Irish monks in Dark-Age Europe, 600–1100 AD. These are categorized into two types by the first words in their titles. In Echtrae, a term meaning ‘adventure’, the distant regions visited are inhabited by men, even if they are shrouded by mist, beyond the sea or in the middle of the earth. Imram or Immram, meaning ‘rowing about’, denotes a sea voyage to one or more islands, often beyond the world inhabited by human beings. Put another way, while both the Echtrae and the Imram take the reader beyond the mundane, it is the latter that goes beyond the human to the otherworld. At the same time the current scholarly consensus holds that the Imram is a monastic genre and that later more vernacular versions of such fabulous voyages are probably secularizations. From the hands of the monks we try to piece together some of the oldest Irish portrayals of the otherworld.
The Imram Brain, dating from the early eighth century, is the oldest surviving example. Its title may be translated as ‘The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal’ or ‘Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women’. The narrative is short, but the antiquity of its texts raises many questions of interpretation. Séamus MacMathúna’s translation (1985) runs to twelve pages but is accompanied by 498 pages of commentary. The full text, assembled from eight manuscripts, consists of two long lyric poems filled with description and three brief prose passages of narrative. Bran, one of several Irish and Welsh personages of this name, is a king but a mortal one, distinguished only by his patronymic mac Febail.
While strolling about his fort one day, Bran hears music behind him, which follows and haunts him until he falls asleep from its sweetness. Awakening, he finds beside him a silver branch with blossoms he is unable to identify. When he takes the branch into the palace with him, a woman from ‘The Land of Wonders’ in strange attire appears and recites a poem to him. No one can explain where the woman has come from as all the entrances and ramparts are closed. The assembled kings both hear and see her.
Her poem begins with a description of the wondrous apple tree of Emain, whose twigs of white silver bear crystal leaves in blossom. This Emain appears to be identical with Emain Ablach, the realm of Manannán mac Lir, the sea god, and may be glossed as the ‘Fortress of Apples’ or the ‘Land of Promise’. She describes the far-off island of Emain, held up by four pillars, just south of the plains of White Silver and Silver Cloud and near to the Silvery Land, the Gentle Land and the Plains of the Sea and of Sport.
In a quick transition, a host is seen rowing in a coracle or curragh, a small leather boat, across a clear sea to land with a large conspicuous stone, from which arise a hundred melodies. Here are many thousands of women clad in various colours, encircled by the clear sea. A very white rock on the edge of the sea receives its heat from the sun. On the nearby Plain of Sports people expect neither decay nor death.
The tone then shifts abruptly to Christian didacticism with a prophecy of the birth of Christ and a short description of the nature and extent of his kingdom. Bran, as the chosen from all the people of the world, is admonished not to be slothful and to cast off his drunkenness. He is about to begin his voyage to the Land of the Women.
After the silver branch springs from Bran’s hand to that of the woman from the ‘Land of Wonders’, she departs and no one knows where she goes. Bran embarks with twenty-seven companions (a magical number: 3 x 3 x 3), with each of his three foster-brothers in charge of one group. On their way the men encounter Manannán mac Lir driving his chariot over the sea. The sea god says he is destined after a long while to go to Ireland where he will father a son named Mongán upon an already married woman, a boy who will still be known as ‘son of Fiachna’ after the woman’s husband. Parallel stories of Manannán’s cuckolding of Fiachna and of Mongán’s many adventures are told elsewhere in early Irish literature.
Bran’s perceptions are not Manannán’s. What Bran sees as a flowery plain is for Manannán the Plain of Sports or the Plain of Delights. Bran, it turns out, is really rowing over a beautiful fruitful wood. Manannán descri
bes a gentle land where the inhabitants play a gentle game under a bush without any transgressions. They are ageless and do not expect decay, for the sin of Adam has not reached them.
The fall of Adam is then described, along with implications of gluttony and greed. Cautions are uttered against the sin of pride that leads to the destruction of the soul through deceit. This is followed by the prophecy of the coming of Christ and the introduction of a just law.
Manannán again predicts his procreation of Mongán and describes the son’s life, death and ascension into Heaven. The prophecy that a divinely conceived child might achieve the realm of the gods is no doubt an echo of Christ’s story in the Gospels, as more than one commentator has observed.
Leaving Manannán, Bran expects to reach Emain by sunset. He and his men row around the Island of Joy, whose people gape and jeer at them. Bran sends ashore one of his men, who immediately begins to act like the islanders and so is left behind. Arriving at the Land of Women [Tír na mBan], Bran does not dare to leave the coracle. The leader of the women calls out to Bran, ‘Come here on the land, oh Bran son of Febal. Your coming is welcome.’ When the woman throws a ball of thread to Bran, it clings to his palm but is sufficiently secure to allow the woman to pull the entire coracle into the harbour. They proceed to a large house where there is a couch for each of the men to share with a paired woman. Sumptuous food appears on dishes, more than the men can eat.
Bran’s men lose all sense of time. What seems like one year is really many years. One of the shipmates, Nechtan mac Collbrain, acknowledges his homesickness for Ireland and asks Bran to return with him. Bran’s unnamed lover cautions him against this, predicting that only sorrow will come of it. When it is clear that she will lose him, the lover counsels Bran to retrieve the man left on the Isle of Joy to complete his company. Further, she advises them to call out to friends when they reach Ireland but that no one should actually set foot on the land. The first point they see is Srúb Brain, usually identified with Stroove Point on the Inishowen Peninsula above Lough Foyle, Co. Donegal. Following the lover’s instructions, Bran calls out to people on the shore and announces his name. No one knows him, but they say that such a person existed in their ancient stories. Nechtan’s longing to return is so great he heeds no caution and leaps to the shore, immediately becoming a heap of ashes, as if he had been in the earth for hundreds of years. The shocking death causes Bran to sing this quatrain:
Great was the folly for the son of Collbran
To lift his hand against age;
Without anyone who might cast a wave of holy water
Over Nechtan, over the son of Collbran.
Bran then relates all his adventures in quatrains recorded in ogham, down to the time of this gathering. After bidding them farewell, he is not heard from again. (Summarized from Séamus MacMathúna’s translation, 1985, 46–58, 286–90.)
For all its antiquity and exoticism, many elements in Bran’s Voyage will be familiar to readers of traditional literature. One is the journey to the land of women, the very phrase MacMathúna uses as a subtitle for his translation. According to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1975), such an imagined journey bears the international number of F112. It can and does appear in traditional literatures anywhere. There is nothing exclusively Celtic or Irish about such a vision. Then again, it does appear in early Irish otherwordly voyages. Máel Dúin of the eighth- to tenth-century Imram Curaig Maíle Dúin [The Voyage of Máel Dúin’s Boat] may return to Ireland a more pious Christian than he departed, but he too visits an Island of Women. Here the queen offers her seventeen daughters as bed-partners for the crew, providing uninterrupted pleasure and perpetual youth. After what the men perceive to be three months, they try to leave, but the queen throws yet another ball of thread, this one to prevent their escape. On a fourth attempt they succeed. Linked to the Land of Women motif are F111, journey to an earthly paradise, and F302.3.1, a man enticed to fairyland or the otherworld by a spirit or fairy.
Two other motifs, F373, the mortal abandons this world to live in the other, and F377, the mortal loses time in the otherworld, are also found worldwide, the latter perhaps best known in the story of Washington Irving’s faux folk hero, Rip Van Winkle (1819). The Irish elaboration of the motif, Nechtan’s immediate transformation into a pillar of ash at touching foot to the homeland, is repeated in dozens of later stories. After 300 years of lovemaking with the beauteous Niam of the Golden Hair in Tír na nÓg [the Land of Youth], incidentally producing three children, the Fenian hero Oisín returns to Ireland (see Chapter 11). Initially heeding the warning of his lover not to dismount, he nonetheless offers to help men in lifting a stone. His saddle girth breaks, and he falls to the ground. In an instant he is a withered old man. A comparable fate befalls the children of Lir in the early modern Oidheadh Chlainne Lir [The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir], who lose their human form rather than spending time in the otherworld. After being transformed into swans, they spend three exiles of 300 years each in the waters of central, northern and western Ireland (see Chapter 8). When a prophecy is fulfilled, they too re-inhabit human bodies, columns of dust that hold together long enough for them to be baptized into the Christian faith.
Testimonials of Christian faith initially appear intrusive in narratives such as Imram Brain, especially when the stories are reviewed in summary. There is no anticipation of the Gospels in the early passages or any foreshadowing of the traveller seeking salvation. Yet the presence of Christ’s prophecies within the text changes the way the reader encounters Emain Ablach or the Land of Women. Such otherworlds, whatever their origin, are no longer absolutes but only by-ways on a traveller’s journey, not unlike those encountered by the character called Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the Palace Beautiful or Vanity Fair. These do not look like the happy realms that the Hochdorf chieftain or the Reinheim matron were preparing to enter.
Then again, some readers wished those fantastic lands really existed. The desire to believe early Irish travellers’ tales no doubt led to the popularity of the narrative whose manuscript circulated most widely in medieval Europe and was extensively translated and adapted in several languages. That text was Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis [Voyage of the Abbot Saint Brendan], composed in the late ninth or early tenth century, the last notable Hiberno-Latin literary production. The historical St Brendan the Navigator founded two abbeys, Ardfert in Kerry and Clonfert in Galway, and died in 577 AD, at least 300 years before the composition of the Navigatio. While an interest in determining whether Saint Brendan actually sailed across the Atlantic has persisted down to contemporary times, scholars still dispute whether the Navigatio is a Christianization of a legend based on a nearly forgotten travel tale or a saint’s story embracing secular episodes.
The impetus for the saint’s two voyages is his hearing of the Land of Promise on the western ocean. Translated from Tír Tairngire, ‘Land of Promise’, this is one of the familiar Irish terms for the otherworld (see pp. 121–2). With fourteen companions in a leather coracle, St Brendan sets sail for the west and reaches what appears to be Iceland, where he stays five years. Iceland was indeed discovered by Irish monks before the Norse settled there, and a small archipelago is still named for those early seafarers, Vestmannaejar [Irishmen’s islands]. Receiving acclaim on his return, St Brendan resolves to sail again, this time with an oaken boat and a crew of sixty. On his passage west he enters upon a sequence of fifteen adventurous landfalls and crossings: (i) an island with a large building sheltering travellers; (ii) an island of sheep bigger than cattle; (iii) an ‘island’ that turns out to be the back of the whale Jasconius [cf. Ir. iasc, fish], an episode paralleled in the voyages of Sinbad; (iv) the island of spirits taking bird form; (v) the island of St Ailbe, giving a detailed portrait of the lives of silent monks; (vi) the curdled sea, through which he passes without stopping; (vii) the island of Strong Men, populated by boys, young and old men, all of whom eat a purple fruit called scaltae; (viii) the island of the
grape trees; (ix) a stream of clear water through which sailors can see to the bottom; (x) the great crystal column, possibly an iceberg; (xi) the island of Giant Smiths; (xii) a smoking and flaming mountain, perhaps a volcano; (xiii) a rocky mass, above which rises a man-shaped cloud, thought to be Judas, reprieved from damnation on Sundays; (xiv) the Island of Paul the Hermit; (xv) the Island Promised to the Saints.
Something in the Navigatio has always invited credulity in certain readers despite its prominent fabulous episodes. It was on Christopher Columbus’s preparatory reading list. Despite its resemblance to such otherworldly voyages as Imram Curaig Maíle Dúin, not to mention the Arabian Nights (c.1450), the Navigatio has continued to inspire believers in its historicity. They seek to identify descriptions in the text with specific locations in Newfoundland, Florida and the Bahamas. Interest in St Brendan is allied to a wider popular fascination with purported pre-Columbian visits to North America, claims being made for different national groups, including the Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What appear to be ogham carvings have been found at many sites, from Nova Scotia to the Ohio River Valley. Genome studies of Native Americans indicate evidence of European DNA arriving on the continent well before 1000 AD. In the late twentieth century there were three transatlantic voyages in curraghs of the kind we know early ecclesiastical travellers used. Bill Verity led the first two in 1966 and 1970, and Tim Severin commanded the best known of the three in 1976–7, and followed it with his book The Brendan Voyage (New York, 1978) and a widely seen television documentary.
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Page 16
