knowledge of the secrets of nature which was the proud possession of the pagan bards:
"They know not when the deep night and dawn divide,
Nor what is the course of the wind, or who agitates it,
In what place it dies away, on what land it roars;"
while I imagine that but for Christian teaching about sin and its punishment, such lines as those found in Kat Goðeu:
"A hundred souls through sin
Shall be tormented in its flesh"—
would have been impossible. Now, as there is no portion of Irish imaginative literature that has been more modified and changed through contact with Christian influences than that portion of it relating to the unseen world, it is little likely that Welsh literature escaped without something of the same modification. The immense influence exercised upon the mediaeval mind by the subject known as the "Harrowing of Hell," a subject which produced one of earliest long poems written in the English language,[1] could not have been unfelt in Wales.
The only poem in Irish which recounts a similar experience is open to the same criticism. Cuchulain was recalled to a phantom-life on one occasion by St. Patrick, in order that he might assist in the conversion of the Irish king Laery (Laeghaire) by attesting from his own experience the truth of Patrick's assertions regarding the future life in heaven and hell. Laery was a stout pagan, and, according to this story, he declared that nothing would induce him to believe in the Saint, nor yet in God, unless he should call up Cuchulain in all his dignity, as he was recorded in the old stories, to add his testimony to the truth of Patrick's declarations. Cuchulain comes from hell, to which place all the great heroes of
- ↑ The "Harrowing of Hell" is supposed to have been written in Kent in the latter part of the ninth century.
