[194] The influence of the Fis Adamnáin likewise appears in the opening portion of the Life, which cites precedents for the Saint’s devout and holy life among the worthies of the Old and New Testaments.
[195] The principal Latin Life of St. Brendan, though later than the Irish life, was written in the eleventh century. Both Lives, however, contain elements which the Lives of other Irish saints prove to have been of much earlier date.
[196] Imrama still continued to be written, and the late mediæval story of Tadg Mac Céin (published, with a translation, in Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica), presents a very admirable specimen of its class. That work, however, is a more purely literary production, consciously imitative, and deliberately archaic in style.
[197] The summary in the text follows the Irish version contained in La Vision de Tondale, V. H. Friedel and Kuno Meyer (Paris, 1907), which also contains two French versions in prose, and a fragment of an Anglo-Norman version in verse. The Irish translation was made in 151-, by Muirgheas Mac Páidin ui Maoilchanaire (op. cit., Introduction). The original Latin has been edited by Scade, Halle, 1869, and A. Wagner (with an O. G. version), Erlangen, 1882. For translations into modern languages see op. cit., Introduction, and Ancona, op. cit., p. 53 n.
[198] In Christian art, Hell was often symbolised by a picture of the Dragon, his open mouth filled with flames, into which the wicked were impelled. This image survived in book illustrations into the eighteenth century at least. It occurs in many of the mediæval visions; possibly the Vision of St. Paul may have been the immediate authority. It appears so early as the Vision of Esdras, if not before.
[199] This lake corresponds to the sea haunted by strange monsters which swarm about the hero’s curach in the early Imrama and in the modern romantic folk-tales.
[200] Signor D’Ancona (op. cit.) suggests that the apologue of the bridge in the Fioretti of St. Francis (cxxvii.) is an imperfect quotation from Tundale, as also a similar passage of Joachim of Flora.
[201] See the remarks in the preceding section upon a similar conception in the Fis Adamnáin, and contrast the treatment of it by the two authors.
[202] The destruction of the guilty soul, and its reintegration for a renewal of its suffering, dates back to Plutarch’s Vision of Thespesios. See Sect. I ante.
[203] Cp. the analogous ideas in the Shepherd of Hermas, and the vision in St. Gregory’s Epistle.