The tormenting of the spirits by the eager hosts of demons that infest the infernal lakes may be compared to the sportive malice of the fiends in Inf. xxii.-xxiii.
In chapter 31 Adamnán is re-conducted, by another skilfully managed transition, to the Land of Saints. He desired to tarry there, but like several of his predecessors, from Plato’s Er downwards, he heard a voice which bade him return to earth and relate what had been revealed to him, for the instruction of his countrymen: he was then restored to the body.
Chapter 32 would provide the work with a symmetrical conclusion. As in the exordium the author represents Adamnán as the last in a series of holy men to whom analogous revelations had been vouchsafed, so in this peroration he declares the identity of the doctrine preached by Adamnán, respecting the world to come, with the teaching of other saints and fathers of the Church. In designing his work with this structural completeness, the author stands alone, so far as I am aware, until Dante comes on the scene.
The episode of Enoch and Elijah standing under the Tree of Life, surrounded by the bird-flocks, though well told, adds nothing to the form in which it appears in other Irish legends of the period. We have already given reasons for supposing that it is an excrescence upon the original design.
The reflections there made upon the sorrow experienced by the righteous on hearing of the sorrows of Doomsday,[185] remind us of a similar passage in Dante:
‘Se di là sempre ben per noi si dice,
Di quà che dire e far per lor si puote,
Da quei, ch’hanno al voler buona radice?’
Purg. xi. 31-33.
The rhapsodical description of Heaven, which concludes the work as it now stands, is likewise a matter of ‘common form.’ It may possibly be an amplification of several passages in the Revelation (e.g. xxi. 4, etc.), though we have seen that something of the kind existed, in a rudimentary form, in some of the Echtra, when describing the Sidhe of a Dé Danann chief. The curiously close parallel in the Avesta has been noted already.