[5] In a large collection of nearly sixty folk-lore stories taken down in Irish from the lips of the peasantry, I find about five contain allusions to the belief in another world full of life under water, and about four in a life in the inside of the hills. The Hy Brasil type—that of finding the dead living again on an ocean island—is, so far as I have yet collected, quite unrepresented amongst them. An old Irish expression for dying is going "to the army of the dead," used by Déirdre in her lament, and I find a variant of it so late as the beginning of this century, in a poem by Raftery, a blind musician of the county Mayo, who tells his countrymen to remember that they must go "to the meadow of the dead." See Raftery's "Aithreachas," in my "Religious Songs of Connacht," p. 266.
[6] Admirably translated by Kuno Meyer, who says "there are a large number of [word] forms in the 'Voyage of Bran,' as old as any to be found in the Wurzburg Glosses," and these Professor Thurneysen ascribes unhesitatingly to the seventh century. Zimmer also agrees that the piece is not later than the seventh century, that is, was first written down in the seventh century, but this is no criterion of the date of the original composition.
[7] I give Kuno Meyer's translation: in the original—
"Fil inis i n-eterchéin
Immataitnet gabra rein
Rith find fris tóibgel tondat
Ceitheóir cossa foslongat."
In modern Irish the first two lines would run
"[Go] bhfuil inis i n-idir-chéin
Urn a dtaithnigeann gabhra réin."
Réin being the genitive of rian, "the sea," which, according to M. d'Arbois, the Gaels brought with them as a reminiscence of the Rhine, see above p. [10].
[8] Preserved in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, a MS. compiled from older ones about the year 1100. See for this story "Gaelic Journal," vol. ii. p. 306.
[9] "Dodeochadsa for in ben a tirib beó áit inna bi bás na peccad na imorbus, i.e. [go], ndeachas-sa ar san bhean ó tíribh na mbeó, áit ann nach mbionn bás ná peacadh ná immarbhádh."
[10] Also contained in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, a MS. transcribed about the year 1100.