Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (16 page)

BOOK: Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)
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6
Otherworlds
THIS WORLD AND THE ‘OTHER’

The 26-year-old William Butler Yeats framed the issue when he wrote of ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ (1891), set in Leitrim and Sligo in the rural northwest. The dreamy, spiritual Celts, it appeared, could perceive a world beyond the senses, an otherworld, imperceptible to their powerful, rational, practical neighbours, like the English. Not only does such a Celtic otherworld exist simultaneously with the empirical world of consciousness, but it is preferable to it, a gossamer ideal that contrasts with the grubby here and now.

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 describes 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.

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