[331] Lytton: The Odes and Epodes of Horace. London, 1869.
[332] Cf. Johannes Peschel, 1878. Moltke Moe has called my attention to this essay, but, as he says, Peschel is certainly wrong in assuming that ancient notions like that of Schlaraffenland are the originals from which the ideas of the happy abodes of the departed, the Isles of the Blest (the Elysian Fields), have been developed. The reverse is, of course, the case.
[333] Cf. J. N. Wilse: “Beskrivelse over Spydeberg Præstegjæld.” Christiania, 1779-1780. In the appended Norwegian vocabulary, p. xiii.: Fyldeholmen == Schlarafenland. I. Aasen [1873] has “Fylleholm” in the phrase “go to Fylleholm” (== go on a drinking bout), from Sogn, and other places. This may be derived from the same mythical country. H. Ross [1895] gives “Fylleholm” from Smålenene. From this it looks as if the idea was widely spread in Norway.
[334] In Hauk’s Landnámabók Vin(d)land is mentioned in one other passage [cap. 175], in connection with Karlsevne, who is said to have discovered it; but nothing is said about this in the Sturlubók, and it may be a later addition (cf. [p. 331]).
[335] Ravn told the story to Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney (ob. circa 1064), who in turn told it to some Icelanders, and from them it reached Thorkel Gellisson, Are Frode’s uncle.
[336] Cf. Zimmer, 1889, pp. 257, 261; Kuno Meyer, 1895, i.
[337] This is evidently the land that in the Christian Breton legend of St. Machutus (ninth century) has become the paradisiacal island of “Yma,” inhabited by heavenly angels.
[338] In the Christian Irish legend “Imram Maelduin,” the voyagers arrive at two islands, that of the lamenting people with complaining voices, and that of the laughing people. The same two islands are mentioned in the Navigation of the Sons of O’Corry, “Imram Curaig Ua Corra” [cf. Zimmer, 1889, pp. 160, 171, 188, 189]. They are evidently connected with Greek conceptions, as we find them in Theopompus, of the rivers Hedone and Lype in the distant land of Meropis (see above, [p. 17]; cf. also the springs of voluptuousness and laughter in Lucian’s Isle of Bliss in the Vera Historia). There may further be a connection with the island of the lamenting people in the statement of Saxo Grammaticus, in the introduction to his Danish history, that it was thought that in the noise of the drift-ice against the coast of Iceland the lamenting voices of lost souls could be heard, condemned to expiate their sins in that bitter cold.
[339] These Irish ideas of a happy land of women have, it may be remarked, many points of resemblance with our Norwegian belief in fairies (“hulder”) and with the German Venusberg myth, since the “hulder,” like Frau Venus, originally Frau Holle or Holda [cf. J. Grimm, 1876, ii. p. 780], kidnaps and seduces men, and keeps them with her for a long time; but the sensual element is more subdued and less prominent in the Germanic myths. It may seem probable that the Irish land of women also has some connection with the amorous, beautiful-haired nymph Calypso’s island of Ogygia, far off in the sea, in the Odyssey [v. 135 ff.; vii. 254 ff.]. Just as the men in the Irish legends neither grow older nor die when they come to the land of women, and as the queen of the country will not let the men go again (cf. Maelduin), so Calypso wished to keep her Odysseus, and to make him “an immortal man, ever young to eternity.” In a similar way the men who come to the “hulder” in the mountain do not grow old, and they seem to have even greater difficulty in getting out again than kidnapped women. (It is a common feature that they do not grow older, or that a long time passes without their noticing it in the intoxication of pleasure. Lucian also relates that those who come to his Isle of Bliss grow no older than they are when they come.) Odysseus longs for his home, like one of Bran’s men (and like Maelduin’s men, the kidnapped men in the German myths, etc.), and at last receives permission to go, like Bran. Calypso means “the hidden one” (from καλύπτω == hide by enveloping) and thus answers to our “hulder” (== the hidden one, cf. “hulda,” something which covers, conceals, envelops), and the German Frau Holle or Holda (== “hulder”). They are precisely the same beings as the Irish “síd”—people, who are also invisible, and the women in “Tír na-m-Ban,” the island in or under the sea precisely like our “huldreland” (see later).
It may further be supposed that there is some connection between the ideas which appear in certain Irish legends of the land of virgins—where there are no men, and the virgins have to go to the neighbouring land of men (“Tír na-Fer”) to be married [cf. Zimmer, 1889, p. 269]—and the conceptions of Sena, the Celtic island of priestesses or women, off the coast of Brittany, where according to Dionysius Periegetes there were Bacchantes who held nightly orgies, but where no men might come, and the women therefore (like the Amazons) had to visit the men on the neighbouring coast, and return after having had intercourse with them. Similar ideas of islands with women and men separated occur already in old Indian legends.