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An overview and contextual-semantic analysis of the cases of usage the lexeme ‘gold’ (zaraniia-) and ‘silver’ (ərəzata-) in corpus of Avestan sources (Yasna, Yashts, Videvdat, Aogəmadaēca, etc.) are provided in the article. ‘Gold’ is used in the Avesta 101 times. ‘Silver’ — only 12 uses, while this metal is always contextually linked with gold. Silver has a semantic connection with the aquatic sphere. Gold is the material from which, according to the texts, the garments of several deities are made (Vayu, Aredvi Sura (partially)). Gold attributes or decorated with this metal tools have a number of gods and heroes (Yima, Mithra, Verethragna, Tishtria, Sraosha) are made completely or partially from it. In the myth of Yima, the divine instruments, the golden suβrā and gilded aštrā, are endowed with reproductive features and help to create the first kingdom (Videvdat 2.6—38). This ideal mythical world turns into the Afterworld. A set of semantic attributes show that gold is directly related to the Otherworld, where the souls of the righteous deceased receive gold places, golden or silver clothes (Videvdat 19.31—32; Aog. 12, 17). The fact that silver and other «colors» are added to gold may indicate the expansion of the spectrum of precious metals and their penetration into the sphere of funeral beliefs. In the treatise of Aogəmadaēca (84), silver-gold (a metaphor of wealth), along with cattle, horses and bravery, is included in the system of concepts related to the Thanatological worldview of the pre-Zoroastrian representations of ancient Iranian tribes.

Basing on the German epic poem “The Nibelungenlied” and European folk tales, authors of the article single out the story of a bride left nearby her groom’s house. Characteristic features of this story are explained as originating from a ritual myth which used to codify the rites of the exogamic marriage. The bride in this plot is viewed as a shape-shifter whose bodily transformations reflect her origins from the Underworld and manifest her ability to kill. Changing the bodily form is thus representative of the evil powers and dangerous qualities of a being. The transformations of the bride’s body are only present in the most archaic forms of the plot, where her ability and proneness to kill are manifested straightforwardly – by assuming the image of a murderous animal. It’s possible to neutralize her harmful potency with the help of a wonderful assistant, the dead man who embodies one’s ancestor, or by performing certain ritual actions, creating special conditions under which the bride could change and become one of our own, safe for herself and her host family, rejecting all ties with the dangerous space of the Otherworld.

An important piece of early Irish literary material, Óengus’ dream bears several similarities with Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman and his Soul. It will be demonstrated that liminality (from limen meaning “threshold” in Latin), as epitomized by the presence of water in both tales, can be interpreted as a passage to the Otherworld. It is the liminal and otherworldly aspect of water that brings into existence the universal human aspiration towards the supernatural unification with the cosmos and the theme of all-encompassing love; recurrent topoi in Irish literature from the very beginnings until today. Furthermore, Wilde’s tale is not so much about the “devotional revolution” of religious transformation in a post-Famine Ireland, but an even more universal expression of a “revolutionary devotion”: the Fisherman’s unusual attachment to the forbidden. This supernatural yet human feeling of transition, “in-betweenness” or metaxy makes both tales operate in several dimensions across time and geographical space.

Houses feature prominently in Helen Oyeyemi’s novels, The Opposite House and White Is for Witching . I describe the connection between the Greco-Roman Underworld and the Yoruba Otherworld in Oyeyemi’s texts as a “liminal intersection”, one in which Gothic and supernatural metaphors from the Yoruba culture are syncretised. The Gothic tropes of the House collide with Oyeyemi’s revisioning of the Yoruba pantheon and Otherworld. Key figures and symbols from Greco-Roman folklore, Yoruba mythology and European fairytales are either represented by characters in Oyeyemi’s novels or are present as metaphors. The problematic postcolonial Gothic relationship between competing cultural imperatives and authorities in The Opposite House and White is For Witching takes place in these liminal intersections. I connect this struggle to the idea of transgression as agency. Pursuant to this, this article interrogates the postcolonial Gothic house as a trope in the two studied texts and argues that it is a site for the enactment of liminal and hybrid transgressions as agency through the deployment of the metaphors of doubling and that of the temporal slippage between multiple realities and the findings elucidate the ways in which the House as a gateway to the Otherworld may be a site for empowerment and decolonising through transgression.

The majority of Irish passage tombs (c. 230) predominantly date to the Middle Neolithic (c. 3600–3000 BC). A small number of summit cairns may also contain passage tombs because of their round form, proximity and intervisibility. The island’s passage tombs and related cairns share distinguishing characteristics – elevated siting, visibility and long-range views of distant horizons in varying directions of the compass. This chapter presents the findings of the first scenic analysis of the horizon and views at these sites recorded at an island scale. The method uses measured orientations of horizon sectors related to observed variation in horizon range. This shows that tomb location was likely selected with a preference for view of the distant horizon and, curiously, also in the northerly direction in many cases. This sector of the horizon lies beyond the extreme rising and setting limits of the sun and moon. It is also the region of circumpolar stars which never rise or set and are perpetual in a viewing sense. The hypothesis that the process of cremation released the spirit of the dead to travel to the abode of the ancestors in the north sky, a zone commonly associated with death and the afterlife by other later cultures, is explored.

espanolEn el Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, se conservan dos placas de bronce que reproducen la iconografia del celebre Bronce Carriazo. Se consideran camas laterales de un bocado de caballo elaborado por un taller fenicio occidental en torno al s. VII a. C., y presentan algunas diferencias iconograficas y, sobre todo, tecnicas, con la conocida pieza sevillana. Los bocados representan a la diosa qudsu ’astart, una divinidad alada guerrera vinculada a la realeza fenicia. Las dos cabezas de anades a ambos extremos parecen formar la proa y la popa de una barca solar, con el sol simbolizado en una roseta central, pues el barco solar realizaba el viaje al mas alla en el extremo Occidente, navegando por un cielo de agua. Estas producciones de bronces hispano-fenicios, inspiradas en los repertorios orientales, reflejan la asuncion por las aristocracias orientalizantes de la Peninsula Iberica de una ideologia y simbologia mitica y religiosa de raigambre oriental en el Hierro Antiguo. EnglishThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, exhibits two bronze plaques which reproduce the iconography of the famous Spanish item known as ‘Bronce Carriazo’. They are considered as lateral cheeks of a horse bridle bit cast by a West Phoenician workshop around the 7th century bc. They present some iconographic and, above all, technical differences with the Sevillian piece. These horse harness pieces represent the goddess qudsu ’astart, a winged warrior divinity linked to the Phoenician royalty. The two heads of birds at the upper edges seem to configure the bow and the stern of a solar boat (the sun itself is symbolized in a central rosette). It would be the solar ship that sails through a water sky, depicting the trip to the otherworld in the extreme West. These Hispanic-Phoenician bronzes are inspired by the oriental repertoires and they reflect the assumption of a mythical and religious ideology, strongly rooted in Orient, by the western Iberian aristocracies throughout the Early Iron Age.

This essay explores fabric, clothing and textile motifs in Irish poetry concerned with the relationship between this life and the afterlife. It intersplices readings of poems by W.B.Yeats, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney and Paula Meehan which acknowledge the fact that doubleness of presence and absence is integral to all human lives, and which are alert to the fact that this same duality is already embedded in man’s engagement with cloth. The essay argues that Irish poetry attends to the dense physicality, immediacy and depth texture of textile materials, as a key image complex allowing negotiation of significant loss, including the task of reconstructing life’s meaning following bereavement. Therefore, the essay explores how a concern with texture, processing, feeling and mood is facilitated in a special way through the haptic power of fabric symbolism in Irish elegiac poetry. It proposes that by mediating the theme of afterlife as a space which allows us to imagine multiple alternative lives in the here-and-now, fabric imagery as deployed by Irish poets challenges us to accept both our losses in this world and our on-going potential for life-renewal.

[Extract] The twelfth-century account of the Irish knight Owein’s descent into the otherworld through St. Patrick’s Purgatory, the Tractatus de Purgatorio sancti Patricii, distinguishes itself from many other contemporary visions by its insistence upon the embodied experience of its visionary protagonist and the epistemic value of that embodiment. In most contemporary accounts of voyages to the afterlife, visionaries traveled in spirit or saw the sights of the otherworld within their own minds. In contrast, Owein claimed he reached the afterlife differently, literally walking into it through a cave in northern Ireland.1 He then saw the otherworld “with his own bodily eyes” and endured the torments there in his own flesh.

Taking its starting point from the current trend towards using Indo-European comparative material for elucidating Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art sites, this article develops an interpretation of the overall iconographic program of the Massleberg Stora Skee rock art panel in Bohuslän, southern Sweden. It focuses on the hunting scene which forms one of the centerpieces of the site and poses the question of how this hunting scene relates to the remaining iconographic elements of the panel, especially the ships and footprints, and to the water flowing over the rock. Using analogies drawn from Old French “Breton lays,” medieval Irish and Welsh literature, and the archaeology of the Hallstatt period (the Strettweg cult wagon), it is possible to develop an interpretation which connects the hunt with the communication between the human world and an “Otherworld” and to show how such an interpretation can tie in with the other iconographic as well as natural elements of the site. On this basis, the article concludes with a general discussion of the use of typological analogies versus the application of concepts of Indo-European heritage for the analysis of Scandinavian rock art and discusses the wider applicability of the “Otherworld” term as an analytical concept.

In his archaeological study of elite landscapes in the medieval period, Oliver H. Creighton (2009, 47) states that “[g]ardens were, in a sense, transformative, mediating domestic spaces – carefully managed points of interface between the household and the natural world beyond.” It is the transformative, hybrid and liminal space of the enclosed garden that I will examine in this essay. In particular, I will argue that in Marie de France’s Anglo-Norman/Old French, twelfth-century lay Lanval and the anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, the transformative nature of the orchard marks the space as inherently queer and creates the potential for transgressive acts and Otherworldly encounters. In Lanval, the setting of the orchard allows Marie de France to invert common conventions of medieval literature and gender politics to present an alternative gender dynamic between knight and lady. It is also the physical space in which the protagonist Lanval is directly accused of sodomy. In Sir Orfeo, the “ympe-tre” (Sir Orfeo, 70. All Middle English references are from Bliss 1966, and modern English translations from Tolkien 1975, with line numbers) in the orchard functions as a limen to the Otherworld and thus the orchard is presented as a permeable space which is open to the supernatural fairies.

The Middle English romance Sir Orfeo presents a medievalized version of the classical myth of Orpheus that shows the influence of Celtic lore. Modern scholars seem to have accepted the views of A. J. Bliss, the editor of this Middle English poem, who argues that the English text is a translation of an Anglo-Norman or Old French version. Since we have no textual evidence that can positively support Bliss’s hypothesis, this article tests the possibility that the Middle English romance actually represents an insular tradition of the Orpheus myth that originated in Anglo-Saxon times with King Alfred’s rendering of the story and continued evolving by means of oral-memorial transmission until the fourteenth century, when the English romance was written down in the Auchinleck manuscript. El romance de Sir Orfeo presenta una versión medievalizada del relato clásico de Orfeo con fuertes influencias de origen celta. Sin embargo, la crítica parece que ha dado por bueno el criterio de A. J. Bliss, editor del texto en inglés medio, quien considera que la versión inglesa debe de ser una traducción de un original anglonormando o francés. Dado que no existen testimonios textuales directos que confirmen la hipótesis de Bliss, este artículo explora la posibilidad de que el romance medieval sea el resultado de una versión inglesa que se originó en tiempos anglosajones con la versión del rey Alfredo y que siguió evolucionando por medio de su transmisión oral hasta el siglo XIV, cuando se compone el romance in inglés medio.

To the early medieval Irish, the non-Christian Otherworld—the sid—was at once familiar and exotic. Its immortal creatures moved in and out of human reality, unseen; its portals lay concealed in the ancient religious monuments and placenames of local landscapes. Early medieval authors (ca 650–800 CE) conveyed the complexities of this inherited Otherworld in vernacular tales of otherworldly folk set in the Iron Age past of their ancestors. Although scholars have debated the relative Christian or “pagan” nature of Irish otherworldly literature and its locations, in fact, the sid and its folk were neither—they were supernatural. Tales of the sid attest to the pace and texture of religious change in early medieval Ireland, and sketch the ways that ordinary people made and remade their religion on the ground.

Many medieval tales feature encounters between human characters and Otherworld beings. In most cases, the Otherworld visitor is female, but in the Middle Irish Cath Maige Tuired, the Middle English Sir Degaré, and in Marie de France’s Yonec, a young woman is visited by a supernatural man who seems to have been summoned by her own desires. In each case, the man impregnates her and leaves tokens to pass on to their child. Although these tales also express anxieties over dynastic succession, their depiction of intense emotional moments focalized through a female perspective suggests an interest in women’s subjectivity that is highlighted through contact with the Other.

The book concludes by answering this question: did Synge dramatize the residue from pre-Christian Ireland to negotiate the Ascendancy’s anxiety over their Irish heritage, or was it because he had difficulty accepting that the wanton cultural imperialism that was articulated by the Catholic Church and its newly enfranchised bourgeois laity exploited the residue from pre-Christian Ireland? The book answers this question by exploring the final days of Synge’s life and the reaction to his death that was mythologized by W.B. Yeats into a pre-Christian fantasy.

The present article is a re-evaluation of a marvellous element in a medieval Welsh romance, Chwedl Iarlles y Ffynnawn ‘Tale of the Lady of the Fountain’, also known as Owein. One of the characters encountered by the hero is a one-eyed one-legged dark giant forester who appears to have a particular power over animals. Previous interpretations of this character and episode have sought explanations and parallels in re-constructed Celtic mythology and the Celtic ‘Otherworld’. The objective of the present article is to demonstrate that the element in question belongs to the pan-European medieval tradition of the marvelous rather than, as has previously been suggested, to an exclusively Celtic tradition.

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments.

This paper discusses the ancient Greek beliefs from a different perspective; I attempt to approach the old themes in an interdisciplinary way. I refer to the studies of French anthropology and on the ethnological studies of the conceptualization of the landscape through oral tradition. Some classical antiquity researchers have already done so. Such authors that relate to ancient Greece as a whole discuss the symbolism of sacrifices and snakes. Thus, the belief system of the community manifests in the landscape in its symbolic sense, and with this working guide, I managed to apply the abovementioned contemporary (modern) perspectives to the example of the ancient Greek Delphi.

The quite ‘historical’ question of when the lower Otherworld in Ireland was first separated from the upper world is dealt with in a number of early Irish tales. The problem of áes síde and their antagonism with humans is posed in order to determine the conflict in the tales. The paper focuses on an opening fragment from an Ulster cycle tale ‘The drunkenness of the Ulaid’ (Mesca Ulad). The special allocation of the Otherworld is associated in the text (as well as in other narratives to be discussed) with the coming of the sons of Míl and the beginning of Goidelic Ireland. The very notion of separation between the world of humans and the Otherworld is closely related to the beginning of history as such. When the history begins the sacred (belonging to gods) has to be separated from profane (belonging to mortals). Since this separation is performed the binary opposition between the lower Otherworld and the upper world of humans becomes a distinctive feature of the early Irish mythological narrative. Typologically similar phenomenon is observed in the northern Russian “synthetic history” and folklore dealing with the hidden supernatural autochthons (чудь белоглазая). Both Celtic and Slavic examples seem to reflect a transition stage when cosmological elements are superimposed on the emerging historical consciousness.

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Western Europe. The tradition of the Purgatory is strictly connected with the diffusion of a text, the Tractatus de Purgatorio sancti Patricii, composed in the last part of the twelfth century, which tells of an Otherworld journey undertaken physically by a living person after having crossed a geographical threshold located in Ireland. This treatise, however, does not explicitly mention any recognizable place on the Irish isle. On the other hand, there exist accounts of a pilgrimage ritual a few years later in a place that can be identified as an island (or two) on the Lough Derg in the North of Ireland. In other words, in the tradition of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, the primary literary text originated and developed independently from a given place, just as the ritual of pilgrimage to the Purgatory was independent from a given text. But both the text and pilgrimage came together in Avignon around 1353, from which time both textual traditions and pilgrimage reports began to interact and modify each other, inspiring and shaping new texts and new ritual forms, while creating fictional characters derived from historical figures and, conversely, portraying literary characters as historical figures.

Coach tours are ubiquitous in Ireland. On any given day in the cities of Killarney, Galway or Dublin, on the Ring of Kerry or the Cliffs of Moher, literally hundreds of tourist-filled coaches can be seen. Often scoffed at by visitors who consider themselves to be something other than uncultured and vulgar, coach tourists come to Ireland to see the place of their dreams. They come for the same reasons "less vulgar" visitors do. Many are descendants of the diasporic Irish forced to leave the island in search of a better life during times of famine or economic desperation. Having grown up hearing tales of "home" from their families, these tourists are visiting a land that for them exists in the dream-time of collective memories. For them, tales from parents and grandparents evoke a blissful otherworld of bucolic harmony (only disrupted by those annoying English and that Potato Famine). Likewise, tantalizing advertisements suggest an Ireland that "calls you back" and where "our mothers" wait for their children's return at the cottage door.

The Centre of the World: Robert McGhee's Inter-Connected Actic The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World. By Robert McGhee. Toronto: Key Porter Books; Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2004. 296 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1-55263-637-2. Ian MacRae As those who have researched in the far North will know, the Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP), from its base in the resettled community of Resolute Bay (Qaussittuq) on Cornwallis Island, provides much of the ground and air support for field work in the Canadian High Arctic. The PCSP control room can be a high-stress and high-stakes place, where Twin Otters and helicopters are deployed across thousands of kilometres of formidable terrain under fickle and often treacherous conditions. One afternoon a few years ago I was at PCSP, checking the weather on Ellesmere Island, waiting to fly out to Alexandra Fiord, and as I waited I couldn't help but overhear the station's chief operator who, in between firing off directions and co-ordinates to far-off pilots and ground crews into his headset-umbilicus, busily moving people and fuel and gear across the Arctic archipelago, was humming the old Janis Joplin tune, "Me and Bobby McGee." Robert McGhee was out there somewhere, he told me, digging through a pile of old bones. It was not a slight but an homage, one that should serve as introduction enough for an eminent Canadian archaeologist, the curator of Arctic Archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and for his latest book-length work, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (2004). If they are singing about you at PCSP, then this is good enough for me. The Last Imaginary Place is a book that is truly circumpolar in scope and articulation. A compendium of some 35 years of thinking and travelling and working in the Arctic, it has the feel of a summarizing effort, one that treats the deep patterns of climate and language and the flows of goods and people across the top of the world. Its structure is episodic, with each of 12 chapters treating a specific region and time (the first two more generally than the rest), such that the entire Arctic region is covered. The chapters are only loosely linked into an overall thesis, which slowly emerges as the evidence accumulates, that the Inuit are not a timeless, isolated, primeval people, but are our contemporaries, alive in this same historical time. Along with other northern peoples, asserts McGhee, the Inuit are active participants in globalized flows of resources and economy, and are well prepared and equally willing today to manage their relationships with the modern world, as indeed they always have been: "The small nations of the north have histories as long and as complex as those of more southerly peoples, a fact that archaeologists are continually and surprisingly demonstrating" (McGhee 2004, 41). To establish a baseline for his argument, McGhee reaches back to the beginnings of Homo erectus in Africa, and moves forward through the warming and cooling events that have impacted human and animal migrations throughout time. He traces Western perceptions of the Arctic in ancient Greek thought, the apocryphal escapades of the Irish monk St. Brendan, the Norse and their societies in Iceland and Greenland, Basque whalers and French fur traders, and the English and the vanity of their follies in a frozen world. Inuit shamanism and the "beauty, security and comfort" (35) of Arctic life for hunting peoples are considered, as are European voyagers such as Thomas Hearne (who wins some respect travelling overland with the Dene) and Martin Frobisher (who, mining for gold on a bleak Arctic island, gains little). Peary and Cook and their race to the pole are taken up, with emphasis on the support of the Inughuit, the local Inuit of northwestern Greenland, the unsung Sherpas of the north. McGhee is clear in his conclusion that the Arctic has largely served as a foil, a blank screen for the West to project its fears of death and imaginings of paradise: "To most southerners," says McGhee, "the Arctic remains what it was to their counterparts centuries and perhaps even millennia ago: the ultimate otherworld" (19). …

This paper focuses on some medieval dramas that raise the question of reward and punishment in the otherworld. These dramas contribute to medieval ideas about divine justice and its locations (Heaven and Hell): for example, the Cant de la Sibila, the Sponsus (source of some Romanesque iconographies), or certain Catalan passion plays that end with the Last Judgement. Heaven and Hell also play an important role in some celebrations such as Corpus Christi processions, triumphant entries, or coronations. All these stage performances share a visual component with late medieval visual arts. Both show interesting analogies and share important iconographic elements, as it can be inferred from the image of the otherworld in Catalan and Aragonese altarpieces.

An exploration of the semantic and cultural fields behind the term ‘Breton’ suggests that the modern word ‘Celtic’ corresponds better to what is implied by the expression ‘Breton lay’. It is commonly supposed that the Breton lays, in both Old French of the 12th century and Middle English of the 14th century, were based on songs originally sung by Breton minstrels. But the word ‘Breton’ is misleading ; while it now refers to the inhabitants of Brittany, in medieval literature ‘Breton’ and ‘Briton’ were undifferentiated, applying to the early, non-Germanic inhabitants of Britain and Armorica, whose language was Old Welsh. For the English and French, these people were ‘other’, their culture a source of mystery. Being neither English, Norman or French, the language of the Bretons, Britons, or British appeared exotic to the dominant political groups. Their poetry, often associated with the Otherworld and a belief in fairy magic, would be labelled ‘Celtic’ later in history, but that term was not available when the ‘Breton lays’ first appeared. The Anglo-Norman poet ‘Marie de France’, writing for the Plantagenet royal court in the 12th century, had at her doorstep the well-attested riches of Welsh literature as a model and inspiration, whereas no evidence exists for any independent songs or tales from Brittany at this time. It would thus be more apt to speak of ‘Celtic lays’ in Old French and Middle English, since the word ‘Celtic’ now conveys to us what medieval French and English poets meant by the word ‘Breton’.

White cows with red ears often appear in early Irish literature and folklore as signs of the fairy otherworld. Osborn Bergin suggested that there may be a historical basis for this folk motif. This paper takes up Bergin’s suggestion and further examines white, red-eared cattle and their appearance in early Irish literature.

The Irish saw their land and sovereignty as feminine, the marriage of the king to the sovereignty/territorial goddess, also called banais righe was a prerequisite for the latter's successful rule. However, the fairies in most echtrai have undergone a more or less drastic transformation. This chapter illustrates their original role as sovereignty goddess is still intact in Echtrae Chonnlai and Immram Brain but already somewhat compromised in Echtrae Nerai . In spite of their supernatural powers, the women in the three tales are made subordinate to human and supernatural males who determine their fate. The most straightforward manifestations of the sovereignty goddess occur in two of the earliest witnesses to the tradition. Keywords: Echtrae Chonnlai ; Echtrae Nerai ; goddess; Immram Brain ; Irish Echtrai ; supernatural power; women

Completed in May 1946, Bend Sinister is the first novel Nabokov wrote in America "half a dozen years after she and [he] had adopted each other."1 The novel is set in an imaginary European country, the languages of which include German, Russian (used by some of the characters during the most emotionally intense moments), and an invented combination of the two. The country has recently been shaken by a communist-like revolution, installing the dictatorship of Paduk and his Party of the Average Man, the theoretic platform of which is a blend of "Lenin's speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet constitution, and gobs of Nazist pseudo-efficiency" (164). The narration is carried out by the author-persona, whom Nabokov calls "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me" (169). The central characters of the novel are Adam Krug, a philosopher of international prominence, his wife Olga (who dies from an unsuccessful operation of the kidney before the novel opens), and their eight-year-old son David. Being the country's ...

Novica Tadic (1949–2011) is one of the more authentic poets who gave importance – his own precious pearl – to poetry and the Serbian language. Tadic remained consistent with his style and commitment to poetry and finding creative inspiration in everyday life: in broad daylight and in the dark side of the night. This paper points out some of the basic elements of poetic language in the poetry of Novica Tadic. Primarily, the analysed collection of Friend of the devil. Interpretation of poetic language is accessed by pointing out the most common motives and finding their connections with other, similar motifs. Tadic’s poetic images are based on motifs of both worlds: the real, where one is a temporary resident and: the unreal (Otherworld) – another world in which dreams, imagines, and in the end, every living thing goes. Motives in the ambience of another world is one of the poetic creativity features of this author.

As beings neither angelic nor demonic, fairies constitute the ambiguous supernatural in romance. From their first literary appearances in the Old French Lais to their representations in the early printed romances of the late sixteenth century, fairies are portrayed as ontologically unique figures who possess the ability to do things that are unexpected, unprecedented, and otherwise impossible. They come from the Otherworld (distinct from the worlds of ordinary humanity and orthodox theology), and on account of these supernatural origins they are free not only from the physical laws of normal time and space, but also from the standard laws of logic, and from the moral strictures of ordinary human interaction. It is these qualities, above all, that give fairies their unique narrative interest and their imaginative depth. Romance authors recognized this creative potential, and in a fully fictional form that allowed for, and even privileged, the presence of marvels and the supernatural, these authors used fairies to explore issues and achieve narrative effects that could not be accomplished in any other way. This book traces these functions, examining how fairies are represented and used across romance to fit different audience expectations and aesthetic purposes. A study of fairies in romance, however, cannot only be about the fairies themselves.

ON a recent visit to a Cardiff bookshop specialising in Welsh publications, the writer of the present article counted eleven different published versions of the story of the fairy from Llyn Y Fan Fach. The tale, which first appeared in print in the nineteenth century, tells the story of a fairy woman from the depths of Llyn y Fan Fach in Carmarthenshire who married a mortal. She returned to her supernatural realm when her husband violated conditions she herself had laid down, but her children became the famous doctor-magicians, the Physicians of Myddfai.' The published versions, both Welsh and English, currently gracing the shelves of the bookshop at the time of this little ad hoc field exercise all contained suitably romantic illustrations ' la Arthur Rackham. The tale has become firmly fixed in the canon of 'Welsh folktales'. Somehow it seems so typically Welsh with its otherworld fairy bride, poignant sense of lost love, and its doctor-magician sons. Very few printed collections of 'Welsh Folktales' are without it, which presents the interesting situation, in regards to the variant associated with Llyn Y Fan Fach, of a Welsh tale having to be translated back into its original language.2 Print is of course the important word. The Llyn y Fan Fach story appeared in 1861 in the introduction to The Physicians of Myddfai which contained a translation of the medical texts associated with this family and an introduction containing a long, printed English version of the tale.3 This is the first time this story of an otherworld bride was attached to the quite genuine, but presumably independent, traditions and medieval medical texts associated with this family of famous physicians.4 The printed version is long, and rather over-written. The lake lady's hair 'flows gracefully in ringlets over her shoulders ... whilst the glassy surface of her watery couch served for the purpose of a mirror'. The sun 'gilds with its rays the peaks of the Fan' and the young man vainly 'strains his eyeballs' over the lake looking for the 'enchanting vision'.5 Although the elements of the tale are probably genuine and were collected by the Welsh publisher and antiquary William Rees, native of Tonn, which is not far from Llyn Y Fan Fach, the version is given here in English. Once again the Celtic Twilight seems about to cast its roseate and distorting glow on the folklore itself. Fortunately Llyn y Fan Fach is not the only source for information about the Welsh Lake Lady. About three dozen variants of the tale dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are known, and the very fact that the tale has attained such a curious, almost icon-like status, tells us much about perceptions of Welsh tradition in and outside Wales. The study of folklore is not simply a matter of disentangling the purely oral from the literary and fictitious. The strands intertwine, and despite the comparatively small numbers, the Welsh versions of the Otherworld Bride allow us to chart the development of the tale in a changing cultural context. The tale is part of a widely distributed supernatural legend tradition in which an otherworld woman marries a mortal, but eventually returns to her world leaving him and their children. The tale is widespread, particularly in northern and western European countries where the woman is sometimes in animal form and the loss and recovery of her animal skin motivate her marriage and return. Sometimes she

The environmental sense of text as image evoked by the color-term glas requires further examining of the Otherworld trope in relation to early medieval visual theory. The “problem” of landscape in Tain Bo Cuailnge and its context in the Ulster cycle provides a place to start. The Celticist Francesco Benozzo notes that Tain Bo Cuailnge offers “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention.” But the Tain’s allusive landscape also has been highlighted by an able translator, Thomas Kinsella (among many others), for showcasing topography, “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature.” While the Tain in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces, and terrain on Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ. To read the Tain as a literary landscape that in a modern sense is “not there” but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography is necessarily to consider its context in the Ulster Cycle and related stories in the Mythological Cycle, all featuring landscape in which otherworldly and human realms interweave with natural topography. The role of such landscape echoes textually Ernst Gombrich’s view of the function of colors in visual art as Benozzo restates it, metonymic in at once being part of reality and representing it,3 but with words in topography taking the place of colors in images. The landscape of the Tain as textual image related to environment subverts Augustine’s paralleling and hierarchizing of reading over viewing, so influential in the West.4

In the early Irish story Immram Brain, whose origins probably trace back at least to the lost eighth-century Book of Druimm Snechtai,1 the legendary Irish ruler Bran mac Febail is near home when he hears music behind him. Although he keeps looking back for the source of it, the music always stays elusively behind. He falls asleep finally in its sweetness. When he wakes, he is lying next to a silver branch whose white blossoms are hard to distinguish from the stem. When he takes the branch into the stronghold where his warriors are gathered, suddenly they see a strangely dressed woman, who sings a song of the otherworldly realm Emain and tells of how she has brought from there a silver branch of an apple tree. So sweetly she sings of her distant otherworldly island that Bran and a party of men sail off to find it, only to discover in their many adventures that the sea itself is an Otherworld, and that their home cojoins this multidimensional archipelago of elements and beings that ultimately makes it an Otherworld as well. While on his adventure, Bran meets Manannan mac Lir, a sea god who shows him that the ocean is teeming with hidden life. Addressing Bran, Manannan says: Caine amrae lasin mBran ina churchan tar muir nglan; os me im charput do chein, is mag scothach imma-reid.

In the early Irish story Tochmarc Etaine (“The Wooing of Etain”), the Otherworld ruler Midir and his former wife Etain are reunited, a millennium after magic had broken up their marriage, near the royal mounds at Temair (Tara) where she lived with her husband, the high king of Ireland. Midir reminds Etain, who has been reborn in cycles of new life, of his Otherworld realm in the landscape of Ireland and her old name in it, Be Find, or “fair lady.”

The ninth-century Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae) by the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena culminates early Irish Sea writings on nature from the standpoint of intellectual history, although the book was banned for centuries by the Western church and, despite renewed interest in recent years, remains little read (there is no easily accessible English-language translation, for example) and less understood given its early medieval experiential approach to philosophy.1 The work’s symbolism of nature—its sea of divinity and clouds of theophany, its cosmic tree uniting Paradise and earth, and its fourfold textualiconography of a cosmic landscape—remains indispensable, however, for understanding larger cultural contexts of the naturally miraculous Otherworld trope, which move it even beyond the Heideggerian sense of region explored in the last chapter into a more elemental realm. The cosmic-landscape symbolism of the Periphyseon more than its philosophy forms the focus of this chapter, which examines how, in effect, Eriugena’s cosmic iconography extends a place-region analogous in qualities to the Irish Sea Otherworld onto a Creation-wide scale. In other words, the text illustrates views of nature implicit in the Otherworld trope, in ways relevant to current environmental philosophy. Written around the same time as the formation of core literary narratives of Tochmarc Etaine, Tain Bu Cuailnge, and key Irish sources for the Welsh Mabinogi, by an Irish author in Francia with an educational background in the archipelagic milieux of those other texts, the Periphyseon challenges modern assumptions that the distinctive early Irish exegetical concern with miracles as natural “was not tied to a wider theoretical outlook,” but does so with its own iconography.

After rereading the Otherworld trope and Eriugena’s philosophy in terms of connections between environment and text in early Irish Sea cultures, examining the Irish color term glas in two other literary tropes can highlight environment as text in archipelagic ascetic practices. The colors of the winds and colors of martyrdom in early Irish tradition illustrate how color can textually and iconographically express the fluidity of the boundary between body and idea, human and nonhuman, physical and spiritual. In them, color becomes a metonymic expression of landscape, linking the visual and the textual. The primary overlap between the two tropes is found in environmental and cultural associations of the term glas, best translated as “the color of sky in water.” Glas is the color of a southwest wind, from the quadrant of Ireland oriented by tradition toward the Otherworld and by geography toward the ocean. Glas is also the color of a nonviolent ascetic “martyrdom” involving strict self-discipline, glasmartre. The latter encompasses specific bodily and environmental practices, and in them its color evokes biblical aerial waters and clouds associated both with Eriugena’s cosmology and hesychastic-style exercises linking the body and physical world with the uncreated light of divine energies. These motifs of the winds and martyrdom, in the relation of shared colors, evoke the physical context of the Irish Sea archipelago itself.

Many cultures describe their “story-shaped world”1 spatially in terms of a household, hall, or home. Delaware Indian traditions did this in tales of a cosmic longhouse. Early Irish texts sometimes described the three households of heaven, hell, and earth.3 Paul’s cosmic use of the term economia,4 and the modern neologism ecology, both harken back etymologically and semantically to a view of the earth or cosmos as a household. In early vernacular narrative landscapes of Europe’s Atlantic archipelago, the preeminent formative Insular motifs of the “cosmic longhouse” arguably were the otherworldly mound-portals or side of early Irish stories, together with that of the lord’s mead hall of Anglo-Saxon literature.5 These could be extended into larger landscapes, as well. As we saw in chapter three, the Irish mirrored the chthonic Otherworld in the sea. But in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the eighth-century locale of St. Guthlac’s mound mirrored the mead hall in Beowulf as transformative citadel-tomb opposed to surrounding fenlands, even as the sea figured alienation in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Rabey, David, 'Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language', In: 'A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880-2005', Mary Luckhurst (ed), (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.541-550, 2006

Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of realms that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life, domains often entered through a hill or barrow that seem to be of two worlds at once. The Welsh otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at Gorsedd Arberth, a mound atop which adventurers like Pwyll sit seeking wonders. In the account of Cu Chulainn’s love for Fand, queen of the mysterious and aboriginal Irish people known as the sidhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript tumulus. The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn and the Only Jealousy of Emer [Serglige Con Culainn ocus Oenet Emire] describes the uncanny beings inhabiting this domain as differing from contemporary islanders in their customs, elder history, and potency in magic. Cu Chulainn is cured of self-destructive love for his Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh stories involving hills as portals, the dominant narrative of The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn seems to enfold within it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory’s earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at dimming twilight.

This article argues that Friel’s concern with paganism goes beyond his well-known play Dancing at Lughnasa: it actually extends to Faith Healer and Wonderful Tennesssee. Like Lughnasa festival, shamanic healing and the mythological Otherworld are also parts of Irish pagan traditions. By depicting the Irish people’s spiritual world of supernatural power, gods, and realms, Friel shows that pagan cultures are not mummified in the museums or memoirs but alive in their corrupted, erratic forms and interwoven with Christian beliefs and modern rationalities, whose connection with the past and engagement with the present challenge the mutually excluded category of tradition and modernity, and exemplify what David Lloyd calls “non-modern culture.” Keywords: Non-modern culture; pagan traditions; shaman; the Otherworld; modernity; hybridity.

W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu gives the reader a thorough background in the lore of the supernatural people of Irish myth, legend and folklore. It discusses Yeats’s creative use of this material in his early poetry, demonstrating that Yeats’s work “has very deep roots in tradition and is yet intensely personal” (p. 19). The book is in three parts. Part I describes the Tuatha De Danaan, the most prominent supernatural race of early Irish mythology; part II examines the fairy faith of modern Irish folklore. Part III traces Yeats’s growing involvement with fairyland and the fairies in The Countess Cathleen, “The Rose”, “Stories of Red Hanrahan”, and The Wind Among the Reeds, and his unsuccessful struggle between two conceptions of the Otherworld (as fairyland and as the land of death) in The Shadowy Waters, and finally interprets selected poems from In the Seven Woods and Responsibilities, including “The Two Kings”, as showing a gradual decision to abandon fairyland and the escapism it supposedly entails.

THEO BROWN died in hospital in Exeter on February 3rd, 1993, and her death has revealed something of her wonderful capacity for making and keeping friends. There are many with a keen sense of loss at her passing, not least the children from the local primary school with which she became involved a short while ago. There is little doubt that she passed on to them something of her overwhelming passion-for it was nothing less-for local traditions, strange legends, eccentric characters and Otherworld beliefs. Her last published article reached her shortly before she died, in the collection Boundaries and Thresholds, and is typical of Theo's work at its best. She suggests that the song 'Widecombe Fair' is based on memories of a journey to the land of the dead, quoting from local records in support of this, with occasional flashes back to learned works to strengthen her case, and she presents it all with a lively directness characteristic of her folklore writing. Theo was an adopted child of Welsh parentage, whose mother had died at her birth. She studied at the Westminster School of Art and described herself as a wood engraver; her lifelong interest in art and poetry enriched her interpretation of folklore. During the war she served in the WRNS, with the Fleet Air Arm. Afterwards she lived for a time in a caravan, collecting local lore and setting out on countless journeys to visit other folklorists and antiquarians, or to investigate haunted houses, screaming skulls, white witches or black dogs, as well as giving frequent interviews on the local radio. Her Tales of a Dartmoor Village, first published in 1961, gives some idea of her work as a collector around the village of Postbridge, and in a long review in Folklore in 1962, W. F. Jackson Knight describes it as 'important beyond its length'. Later it appeared in the West Country Folklore Series which she edited, and to which such writers as Leslie Grinsell and Roy Vickery contributed. Her ambition-never fulfilled-was to set up a research centre and museum in some abandoned schoolhouse. Always generous in her readiness to help others, Theo would reply promptly to queries in her characteristic red and black typescript, often with valuable information from obscure sources, while she would drive visitors vast distances to see the Padstow Hobbyhorse or some reputed entrance to the underworld. Her work was devoted and spontaneous, and she had no instinct for self-advertisement or commercial gain. For a considerable time Theo's activities were curtailed by the long illness of her adoptive mother, and she was isolated in their gloomy house at Chudleigh. A visit there was an unforgettable experience: it was crammed from floor to ceiling with books and papers, pictures, bygones, maps and recordings, with furtive cats peering through the window and pigeons in the loft, but her friends were relieved when she moved much closer to Exeter, to Dog Village. She worked as Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History and later in the Department of Theology in Exeter University, and in 1971 organized the first of a series of small conferences held there by the Folklore Society. This was in conjunction with the History Department and was on the Journey to the Land of the Dead, and papers from it were published in the Mistletoe Series in 1975.