By SIDNEY GUNN, M.A.
One of the supreme creations of the human mind is the _Divine Comedy_
of Dante, and undoubtedly one of its chief sources is the literature
of ancient Ireland. Dante himself was a native of Florence, Italy,
and lived from 1265 to 1321. Like many great men, he incurred the
hatred of his countrymen, and he spent, as a result, the last twenty
years of his life in exile with a price on his head. He had been
falsely accused of theft and treachery, and his indignation at the
wrong thus done him and at the evil conduct of his contemporaries led
him to write his poem, in which he visits Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise, and learns how God punishes bad actions, and how He rewards
those who do His will.
To the writing of his poem Dante brought all the learning of his
time, all its science, and an art that has never been surpassed,
perhaps never equalled. Of course, he did not know any Irish, but he
knew Italian and the then universal tongue of the learned--Latin, in
both of which were tales of visits to the other world; and the
greater part of these tales, as well as those most resembling Dante's
work in form and spirit, were Irish in origin.
All peoples have traditions of persons visiting the realms of the
dead. Homer tells of Odysseus going there; Virgil does the same of
Aeneas; and the Oriental peoples, as well as the Germanic races, have
similar tales; but no people have so many or such finished accounts
of this sort as the ancient Irish. In pagan times in Ireland one of
the commonest adventures attributed to a hero was a visit to "tír na
m-beó," the land of the living, or to "tír na n-óg," the land of the
young; and this supernatural world was reached in some cases by
entering a fairy mound and going beneath the ground to it, and in
others by sailing over the ocean.
Of the literature of pagan Ireland, though much has come down to us,
we have only a very small fraction of what once existed, and what we
have has been transmitted and modified by persons of later times and
different culture, who, both consciously and unconsciously, have
changed it, so that it is very different from what it was in its
original form; but the subject and the main outlines still remain,
and we have many accounts of both voyages and underground journeys to
the other world.
The oldest voyage is, perhaps, that of Maelduin, which, Tennyson has
transmuted into English under the title _The Voyage of Maeldune_.
This is a voyage undertaken for revenge; but vengeance, as Sir Walter
Scott has pointed out in his preface to _The Two Drovers_, springs in
a barbarous society from a passion for justice; and it is this
instinct for justice that inspires the Irish hero to endure and to
achieve what he does. Christianity has preserved this legend and
added to it its own peculiar quality of mercy; and this illustrates
one of the characteristics of Ireland's pagan literature--it is
imperfectly Christian and can readily be made to express the
Christian point of view.
Another voyage of pagan Irish literature is the _Voyage of Bran_. In
this tale idealism is the inspiration that leads the hero into the
unknown world. A woman appears who is invisible to all but Bran, and
whose song of the beauteous supernatural land beyond the wave is
heard by none but him; so that, after refusing to go with her the
first time she appears, at length he steps into her boat of glass and
sails away to view the wonders and taste the joys of the other world.
In these tales we have two main elements, one real and one ideal. The
real element is the fact that the ancient Irish unquestionably made
voyages and visited lands which the fervid Celtic imagination and the
lapse of time transformed into the wonderful regions of the legends.
The stories are thus early geographies, and they show unmistakably a
knowledge of western Europe and of the Canary Islands or some other
tropical regions; perhaps also, some have gone so far as to claim,
they are reminiscent of voyages to America.
The ideal element is no less important as indicating achievement, for
it shows that the Irish poets of pagan times had not only realized,
but had succeeded in making their national traditions embody, the
fact that love of justice and aspiration for knowledge are the
foundations of all enduring human achievement and all perfect human
joy. Christianity therefore found moral and spiritual ideas of a
highly developed order in pagan Ireland, and it did not hesitate to
adopt whatever in the literature of the country illustrated its own
teachings, and not only were these stories of visits to the other
world full of suggestions as to ways of enforcing Christian doctrine,
but the Irish church and men of Irish birth were the most active in
spreading the faith in the early centuries of its conquest of western
Europe.
For these reasons it is not strange that all the earliest Christian
visions of the spirit-world were of Irish origin. We find the
earliest in the _Ecclesiastical History_ of the "Venerable Bede," who
died in 735. It is the story of how an Irishman of great sanctity,
Furseus by name, was taken in spirit by three angels to a place from
which he looked down and saw the four fires that are to consume the
world: those of falsehood, avarice, discord, fraud and impiety. In
this there is the germ of some very fundamental things in Dante's
poem, and we know that Dante knew Bede and had probably read his
history, for he places him in Paradise and mentions him elsewhere in
his works.
In Bede's work there is also another vision, and though in this
second case the man who visits the spirit-world is not an Irishman,
but a Saxon named Drithelm, yet the story came to Bede through an
Irish monk named Haemgils; so it, too, is connected with Ireland, and
it also contains much that is developed further in the _Divine
Comedy_.
One of the most celebrated of the works belonging to this class of
so-called "visionary" writings is the _Fis_ or "Vision" which goes
under the name of the famous Irish saint, Adamnan, who was poetically
entitled the "High Scholar of the Western World." This particular
vision, the _Fis Adamnáin_, is remarkable among other things for its
literary quality, which is far superior to anything of the time, and
for the fact that it represents "the highest level of the school to
which it belonged," and that it is "the most important contribution
made to the growth of the legend within the Christian Church prior to
the advent of Dante."
Another Irish vision of great popularity all over Europe in the
Middle Ages is the _Voyage of Saint Brendan_. This is known as the
Irish Odyssey, and it is similar to the pagan tales of Maelduin and
Bran, except that instead of its hero being a dauntless warrior
seeking vengeance or a noble youth seeking happiness, he is a
Christian saint in quest of peace; and instead of the perils of the
way being overcome by physical force or the favor of some capricious
pagan deity, they are averted by the power of faith and virtue.
The _Voyage of Saint Brendan_, like its pagan predecessors, has a
real and an ideal basis; and in both respects it shows an advancement
over its prototypes. It contains some very poetic touches, and is
credited with being the source of some of the most effective features
of Dante's poem. Its great popularity is shown by the fact that
Caxton, the first English printer, published a translation of it in
1483; so that it was among the first books printed in English, and
for that reason must have been one of the best-known works of the
time. Dante undoubtedly knew it, for he was a great scholar in the
learning of his day, and especially in ecclesiastical history and the
biography of saints.
Another vision of Irish origin that Dante and other writers have
borrowed from is that of an Irish soldier named Tundale. He is said
to have been a very wicked and proud man, who refused to a friend who
owed him for three horses an extension of time in which to pay for
them. For this he was struck down by an invisible hand so that he
remained apparently dead from Wednesday till Saturday, when he
revived and told a story of a visit to the world of the dead that has
many features later embodied in the _Divine Comedy_. Tundale's vision
is said to have taken place in 1149; Dante probably wrote his poem
between 1314 and 1321.
The Irish also produced another legend of this sort that was
enormously and universally popular, and became the chief authority on
the nature of heaven and hell, in the story of _Saint Patrick's
Purgatory_. Saint Patrick was said to have been granted a view of
heaven and hell, and a certain island in Lough Derg in Donegal was
reputed to be the spot in which he had begun his journey; and there,
it was said, those who desired to purge themselves of their sins
could enter as he had entered and come back to the world again,
provided their faith was strong enough.
This legend was probably known in Ireland from a very early time, but
it had spread over all western Europe by the twelfth century. Henry
of Saltrey, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of that name in England,
wrote an account in Latin of the descent of an Irish soldier named
Owen into Saint Patrick's Purgatory in 1153; and this story soon
became the subject of poetic treatment all over Europe. We have
several French versions, one by the celebrated French poetess Marie
de France, who lived about 1200; and there are others in all the
languages of Europe, besides evidence of its wide circulation in the
original Latin. Its importance is shown by the fact that it is
mentioned by Matthew Paris, the chief English historian of the
thirteenth century, and also by Froissart, the well-known French
annalist of the fourteenth while Calderon, the great Spanish
dramatist, has written a play based on the legend. Dante undoubtedly
knew of Marie de France's version as well as the original of Henry of
Saltrey and probably others besides.
From what has been said it will be seen that Dante's masterpiece is
largely based on literature of Irish origin; but there are other
superlative exhibitions of human genius of which the same is true.
One of these is the story of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan is the
paragon of all knightly accomplishments, the most versatile figure in
the entire literature of chivalry; while Isolde is an Irish princess.
By a trick of fate these two drink a love potion inadvertently and
become irresistibly enamored of each other, although Isolde is
betrothed to King Mark of Cornwall, and Tristan is his nephew and
ambassador. The story that follows is infinitely varied, intensely
dramatic, delicately beautiful, and tenderly pathetic. It has been
treated by several poets of great genius, among them Gottfried of
Strassburg, the greatest German poet of his time, and Richard Wagner;
but all the beauty and power in the works of these men existed in the
original Celtic form of the tale, and the later writers have only
discovered it and brought it to light.
The same thing is true of the Arthurian Legend and the story of the
Holy Grail. Dante knew of King Arthur's fame, and mentions him in the
_Inferno_. To Dante he was a Christian hero, and the historical
Arthur may have been a Christian; but much in the story goes back to
the pagan Celtic religion. We can find in Irish literature many
references that indicate a belief in a self-sustaining, miraculous
object similar to the Holy Grail, and the fact that this object was
developed into a symbol of some of the deepest and most beautiful
Christian truths shows the high character of the civilization and
literature of ancient Ireland.