O'Corra, ch. 62). In Maelduin it is all those things that have been begrudged on earth, the treasures about which men have shown themselves covetous and selfish, which are being ground in the mill (ch. xiv.).
We are not yet in the full tide of mediaeval dogmatic belief, but the time is not far off when the miller will no longer grind the goods of this world, but the bodies and souls of men.[1]
The same moral intention is seen in O'Corra in the man who is condemned to dig perpetually with a spade with a handle of fire, because during his life he had dug his fields on Sunday; and in Maelduin in the punishment of the cook who stole and secreted the valuables of the church.[2]
The Pagan Paradise or Land of Promise seems at first to retain its position in the stories independently of the Christian heaven, but inevitably it becomes in the later tales confused with it, and passes into it. In Maelduin, in the Voyage of Snedgus and the Story of Columcille's Clerics, it is a land that may not be entered, and which is usually guarded by a rampart or revolving wall. In Maelduin (xxxii.) we read: "After that they sight another island, and it was not large, a fiery rampart round about it, and that rampart revolved round the island. In the side of the rampart was an open door, and whenever the doorway came in the course of its revolution opposite to where Maelduin and his companions were, they could see through it the entire island and all that was in it; its inhabitants also, human beings, beautiful, very many, wearing embroidered garments, and feasting with golden vessels in their
- ↑ The same gradual transference from a moral and allegorical to an actual state is shown in an interesting manner in comparing the Vision of Fursius (Bede, Eccl. Hist. Bk. iii. c. 19), in which the fires of hell are symbolic, with the grim reality of the later visions.
- ↑ Voyage of Maelduin, Rev. Celt. vols. ix. x.; Voyage of the Sons of O'Corra, ibid. vol. xiv. 27-63, both edited by Whitley Stokes.
