hands. And the wanderers heard their drinking-songs. A long time they pondered that marvel, for it seemed delightful to them."[1]
In- the Irish Voyage of Brendan this island still remains apart from Paradise, but the inhabitants have become Christian. "On a certain day when they were prosperously on the sea, rowing, they beheld a certain beautiful island, and it was lofty. Howbeit they found no easy harbour or port of entrance. For twelve days they continued going round it, and during all that space they were unable to land upon it. Howbeit they heard men's voices therein praising the Lord, and they beheld a church therein, high, famous, delightful." They were not permitted to land on the island, but from above a waxed tablet was thrown down to them, which bid them spend no more toil in trying to enter that island, for it was not the land they sought, and they could never come therein; for it was written in the Scriptures, "Mansiones Dei multae sunt."[2]
In later times, as Zimmer points out, the Tir tairngiri, or Land of Promise, becomes identified with Canaan, or the promised land of the Jews, and in the Irish commentaries on certain verses in the Epistles to the Hebrews and Corinthians, these passages are so explained by the commentators. It is the promised land of the living (tīre taīrngiri innanibēo), thus identifying it exactly with the Land of the Living (tīr beo) of Echtra Condla.
In the Irish version of the Voyage of St. Brendan, that wondrous tale which caught the imagination of the whole of mediaeval Europe, there is strangely mingled in the young adventurer's mind the longing for an
- ↑ Cf. in the Voyage of Snedgus and MacRiagla (ed. Whitley Stokes, Rev. Celt. vol. ix.) the Isle of Gaelic men and women, who sing to them; also the revolving rampart of Cúroi's fort in the Feast of Bricriu (ed. G. Henderson for the Irish Texts Society, 1899, pp. 102-3).
- ↑ In Snedgus and MacRiagla, and in Columcille's Clerics a leaf is sent down.
