and grotesque exaggerations. The lack of restraint and selfcriticism is everywhere apparent; the old Irish writer seems incapable of judging how to shape his material with a view to presenting it in its best form. Thus, we have the feeling, even with regard to the Táin Bó Cúalnge, that what has come down to us is rather the rough-shaped material of an epic than a completed design. The single stories and the groups of stories have been handled and rehandled at different times, but only occasionally, as in the Story of Deirdre (the "Sorrowful Tale of the Sons of Usnech"), or in the later versions of the "Wooing of Emer", or the Book of Leinster version of the "Wooing of Ferb", do we feel that a competent artist has so formed his story that the best possible value has been extracted from it. Yet, in spite of their defects, the old heroic sagas of Ireland have in them a stimulating force and energy, and an element of fine and healthy optimism, which is strangely at variance with the popular conception of the melancholy of Irish literature, and which, wherever they are known, make them the fountain-head of a fresh creative inspiration. This stimulating of the imagination is perhaps the best gift that a revived interest in the old native romance of Ireland has to bestow.

REFERENCES:

The originals of many of the Tales of the Cuchulainn cycle of romances will be found, usually accompanied by English or German translations, in the volumes of Irische Texte; Revue Celtique; Zeitschrift für Celt. Phil.; Eriu; Irish Texts Society, vol. II; Atlantis; Proceed. of the R. Irish Academy (Irish MSS. Series and Todd Lecture Series). English translations: of the Táin Bó Cúalnge (LU. and Y.B.L. versions), by Miss Winifred Faraday (1904); (LL. version with conflate readings), by Joseph Dunn (1914); of various stories: E. Hull, The Cuchulain Saga in Irish Literature (1898); A. H. Leahy, Heroic Romances of Ireland (1905-6), the Courtship of Ferb (1902). French translations in Arbois de Jubainville's Epopée celtique en Irlande; German translations in Thurneysen's Sagen aus dem alten Irland (1901); free rendering by S. O'Grady in The Coming of Cuchullain (1904), and in his History of Ireland, the Heroic Period (1878). For full bibliography, see R. I. Best's Bibliography of Irish Philology and Printed Literature (1913), and Joseph Dunn's Táin Bó Cúalnge, pp. xxxii-xxxvi (1914).

O

IRISH PRECURSORS OF DANTE

BY SIDNEY GUNN, M. A.

NE 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 con

sciously 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 literatureit 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 there

fore 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