souls—The Dá Brón Flatha Nime

113-174 5. THE FIS ADAMNÁIN Its structural and literary superiority to other Visions before Dante—The general plan—Indications of composite authorship—Authorities followed by the writer of the Vision—The guide to the Otherworld—The author’s use of old Irish imagery—His ecclesiastical treatment of the subject—Pictorial grouping and imagery—Parallels to the Imrama—The Cockayne idea and the ascetic idea—The state described to continue to the Last Judgment only—Deferred Judgment of certain spirits and their Limbo—The soul’s progress through the seven Heavens—The Purgatorial theory—Dante parallels—Judgment—The fate of the reprobate—Insistence on the spiritual side of their sufferings—The further description of Hell apparently interpolated—The Bridge incident—Fourfold division of the souls—The punishments of the reprobate—Increasing minuteness of these descriptions by successive Vision writers—Attempts at classification—Dante parallels—Temporary punishment of certain sinners—The region of the damned after the Last Judgment—Characteristics of northern and southern writers respectively—The four rivers of Hell—Adamnán’s message—Enoch and Elias with the Bird-flocks about the Tree of Life—Rhapsodical description of Heaven 174-206 6. LATER DEVELOPMENTS Irish influences upon Continental writers—Enduring effect of St. Brendan’s legend—The Voyage of St. Brendan—Old Irish incidents preserved therein—The Paradise of Birds and the rebel angels—Cessation of the Imram and continuance of the Fis—The Vision of Tundale—Great development of Purgatorial incidents—The Bridge episode—Hell described as the mouth of a dragon—Description of Hell—The half righteous—Converse with persons whom Tundale had known in life—King Cormac—Paradise—The Tree of Life and Bird-flocks—Blending in this vision of Irish and ecclesiastical elements—Influence of the result upon European literature—Relations to the Fis Adamnáin and to the St. Patrick’s Purgatory legend—Dante probably acquainted with the Vision of Tundale—Comparison between the Vision and the Commedia—Prevalence of the Vision legend on the Continent—Foreign Visions derived from Irish sources—The Vision of Drihthelm—St. Patrick’s Purgatory—The Vision of Owen—Doubtful origin of the legend of St. Patrick’s Purgatory—Its popularity on the Continent—Treatment by Continental writers—The Vision of Alberic—Waning influence of the Irish school—Increased number but diminished importance of the Otherworld stories—Lack of originality 206-241 7. CONCLUSION Recapitulation—No theory propounded as to Dante’s indebtedness to the Irish school—His probable acquaintance with the later Visions of that school—Probable nature and limitations of their influence—Tendency of each school to drop the more characteristic traits of its predecessors—Dante’s rejection of many conventional incidents—The literary qualities of the Fis Adamnáin—Irish susceptibility to the beauties of Nature and to music—Absence of dissertations from the Fis Adamnáin—Interruption of the Irish national literature—Modern renaissance 242-249 Index 251

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AN IRISH PRECURSOR OF DANTE

PART I

1. Introductory

Few, if any, of the great masterpieces of literature, even of those which bear the most unmistakable imprint of an original mind, are ‘original’ in the vulgar sense of being invented ‘all out of the head’ of the author. Most frequently they are the development and the sublimation of forms and subjects already current; for, as Dumas père truly said, it is mankind, and not the individual man, that invents. The wagon of Thespis preceded the stage of Æschylus, while Thespis himself had predecessors who did not even adopt the wagon. The great dramatic schools of all periods took the greater and better part of their themes from the myth, history, or fiction current in their day. 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 fortunate in the place won for them by the masters of literature. After occupying an important place in several of the antique religions it afforded subjects to the genius of Homer, Plato, and Virgil; it was then adopted into the early Christian Church, and afterwards constituted one of the favourite subjects in the popular literature of the Middle Ages, until, finally, Dante exhausted the great potentialities of the theme, and precluded all further developments.

The Commedia is like a mighty river formed by the confluence of several great tributaries, each of which is fed by innumerable springs and streamlets, which have their rise in regions remote and most diverse from each other, and are all tinged by the soil of the lands through which they flow. It is with one of these tributary streams that the following pages deal, and that not the least important among them, for to it the Vision of the Otherworld, as current in the later Middle Ages, owed much both of its popularity and its contents, not, indeed, by way of direct derivation or suggestion—a view which several circumstances forbid us to entertain—but as the result of an influence which, in an earlier stage of culture, had determined the direction which the Vision legend actually followed in its later developments.

The subject would appear to have possessed a special fascination for the Irish writers at the time when Ireland was the chief intellectual centre of Western Europe, and the constant flux and reflux of Irish teachers and foreign students necessarily tended to spread abroad so much, at any rate, of the compositions of the Irish schools as was in harmony with the tastes and beliefs of Christendom at large.

By far the most important of the Apocalyptic writings which proceeded from the Irish schools is the Vision which bears the name of St. Adamnán, of which a translation is given in the present volume. It is interesting to compare it with the later and greater work, and to mark the numerous points of resemblance which may be discerned in works so widely different.