Simon Magus to Darius, King of the Romans. The inference is that a foreign strain may be looked for in very early Irish legend: it is possible that along with reading and writing there may have come the stories of the wonders of India, and other still stranger lands, to increase the Celtic collection of tales; perhaps even the adventures of Alexander may have helped the story of Maelduin. For a large part of the world, at any rate, if not for Ireland, the Alexander romance was an introduction to the Eastern mythology. Some of it appears to be as old as anything in fable. The central and most generally quoted part of the story has three main incidents in it: the ascent of Alexander to Heaven; his inclusion of Gog and Magog in a wall not to be scaled nor broken; his descent into the sea in a glass box. The second of these, Gog and Magog, is connected with the history of Antichrist, for at his coming Gog and Magog, the hideous nations, are to burst from their prison. The ascent of Alexander has a different kind of interest. As generally told, it is an ascent of the same sort as that of Nimrod in Victor Hugo's poem (an Arabian tradition), in a car borne up by eagles. This adventure of Nimrod, which is told of another great king in the poem of Firdausi, seems to come from a Babylonish tale, and may, as Mr Wallis Budge remarks, have been indefinitely old in Babylon. Etanna, for that is the name of the hero, is carried up to heaven by an eagle, who points out to him the diminishing earth and ocean below him—an ancestor, probably, of the eagle in Chaucer's House of Fame. The motive is that of the Somnium Scipionis, used with a satirical purpose in the Icaromenippus of Lucian, and common in many literatures. It seems as if Alexander had taken up, in the East, a number of adventures and attributes which in rather different forms were already known to Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Germans: the romance of Alexander broke into an old treasury of fable which had been partly plundered before. A strange thing about it is that the wildest versions given in Mr Budge's Ethiopic Alexander often contain analogies to Western myth which are not found in the Greek or Latin texts; the Ethiopic Alexander is much more like Maelduin than anything in the Western Alexander books. But that is not for the present occasion; it is enough to recognise the legend of Alexander as a large addition to the literary stock. Alexander became later a chivalrous hero, but before that he was accepted gladly all over Europe as one more of those adventurers who find their way beyond the known limits of the world. The story of his wanderings was valued because it was full of views about far countries. Mandeville continues what the letter to Aristotle began. Visions of the other world, like those in the Republics of Plato and Cicero, are frequent in the Middle Ages, and the source, direct or Visions. indirect, of a large amount of literature in verse and prose.1 The Vision of St Paul was rejected as fabulous by Elfric and many others, because of the words of St 1 Wright, St Patrick's Purgatory; D'Ancona, Precursori di Dante. Paul himself "things that cannot be uttered." But for all that the Vision was widely received in all languages. The Visions of Furseus, of Drihthelm, of Salvius,1 of Wettin, and others, begin in the same way as that of Er in Plato, the man apparently lying dead while his soul is conducted through hell and heaven. One great beauty in the stories of these visions is that they are indeed explorations of untravelled countries: they are not bound by conventional theories, nor are they mere repetitions of teaching. The places seen by these travellers are not the formal and symmetrical provinces described by Dante; their souls pass out into the waste places of the universe, the regions of a wilder and more primitive belief than that of the Divine Comedy.2 : The vision of Wettin, Monk of Reichenau (+824), is found in his prose life by the Abbot Heito (+836), which is the substance of a Latin poem by Walafrid Strabo it has the character of a real vision, at least in its independence of the traditional pictures of hell. Wettin travelled through a landscape like that of The Pilgrim's Progress, a world like this world in its variety and its surprises. Hell is wide, and much of it is empty. The torments have no allotted place or gradation. Wettin found a former abbot, Waldo, in purgatorial torment on a mountain top, beaten by the 1 Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc., vii. 1. 2 One of the most beautiful stories of this sort quoted by Dr Tylor in Primitive Culture, ii. 50. Celtic Heathendom, 265. is a Maori one, See also Rhŷs, winds. The angel, his guide, took and led him by a wondrous pleasant way till they came to high beautiful mountains of marble-stone, as it seemed: round about the foot of the mountain went a fiery river, in which an innumerable multitude of the damned were being punished, many of whom he knew. In one place he saw a hideous castle with smoke rising from it, and was told that it was for the tribulation of certain monks brought together there to be purified; one of them in a leaden ark till the Day of Judgment, because, like Ananias and Sapphira, he had sinned against the order. The place of glory is a city or a castle built with arches of gold and silver, adorned with sculpture (opere anaglifo): he comes to it on his way, like Christian; he is not carried up to heaven. The Bridge of Dread is found in many of these narratives,1 as in the Irish Vision of Adamnan and the Vision of Tundal "Over that lake thai se lygge A wonder longe narowe brygge, It is known in many romances. Gawain and other knights have to attempt it, for many ways lead from King Arthur's court, some of them in plain daylight, like that followed by Geraint along the ridge from the Usk to Cardiff, others again through valleys of darkness and ominous woods to the river of Death. Be 1 Compare also St Gregory's Dialogues, iv. 37; St Boniface, Epistles. yond that are walls and towers, and other forests, hills, and plains. There are some knights who have brought back a report of it. How Buddha came to be a saint of the Church, in the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, has been gradually discovered and explained in the writings of several scholars.1 Solomon contributed in a less honourable way to the literature of the Middle Ages, through the legend of his unfaithful wife which appears in the romance of Cliges, and through the Dialogue tradition, in which his wisdom is met and parodied by the irreverent genius of Marcolf. The same fashion of dialogue led to a different myth about another wise man; Epictetus as well as Buddha becomes a legend, in Ypotis, so strangely noted by Chaucer as a specimen of romance. IV. "The Heroicall Poetry of the old Bards of Wales and Ireland (and perhaps all other Barberous Nations), who at publique Solemnities were wont to sing the Prayses of their valiant Ancestors, was the Originall of all the more Elegant Greeke and Roman Epique Poems." -Samuel Butler's Commonplace Book, fol. 203. The Heroic Heroic poetry and the heroic motives in literature were well known in the Dark Ages; indeed they give those ages their character more than anyPoem. thing else, apart from the educational Latin influences. It is the age in which the exploits and conflicts of kings and chieftains have transcendent 1 Gaston Paris, Poëmes et Légendes; Jacobs, Barlaam and Josaphat. |