PILGRIMSPLAZA
Active Member
Georgiana King mentiones the Celts only 3 times and says: “To the Romans as to the Celts, the Tierra de Santiago was the Land of the Dead.” So here it is what she says about them, beautifully written as ever on “Celts and Jugo-Slavs” in THE WAY OF SAINT JAMES, Volume III, THE BOURNE - By GEORGIANA GODDARD KING, M. A., Professor of the History of Art, Bryn Mawr College; Member the Hispanic Society of America; in full text in http://www.archive.org/details/wayofsaintjames03kinguoft - [replace the 3 by 2 and 1 for the other Volumes]
[p267] Lancelot crossed the Bridge of Dread, to see Guenevere in the land of the dead. 'The land of the dead played a great rôle in ancient Celtic beliefs, and the information about the Gauls that the writers of [Blessed souls were at the Bridge – 268] antiquity have left, testify no less than the most authentic documents of Irish poetry."
"The Celts [Celts, says Shelley, for Jugo-Slavs] represented the abode of the dead as an island situated in the west which was at the same time the abode of the blessed. There, under a sky always mild, heroes grew not old..."
Guenevere's Maying, which has dropped out of the story of Chrétien, is a Celtic trait and recalls the Slavonian pilgrims, who for May Day, put garlands on their heads.
This provokes on the one hand, a reminiscence of Owain Miles who saw the procession of bishops that came out smelling of incense and "bearing banners and branches of golden palm trees." But it is older than that, for these green branches grew by the gates of Paradise. When to the Wife of Usher's Well her three sons came,
Their hats were of the birk:
It neither grew in syke not ditch
Nor yet in ony sclough;
But at the Gates of Paradise
That birk grew fair eneugh.
[THE BOURNE 269] Scott quotes, as a gloss on these lines, from the Maase Book, the case of a returned ghost, Jewish, who says: "I wear the garland to the end that the wind of the world may not have power over me, for it [Wind o' the World] consists of excellent herbs of Paradise."
If it is, on the other hand, like all Maying, a spell to secure fertility for their far-off fields and gardens, then, like the ceremonies of Candlemas, it seems to offer more than a bare vestige of earlier worship than the Christian of S. James, in the city of the hollow hill.
More: http://pilgrimagetoheresy.blogspot.com/2011/06/who-were-celts.html#comment-form
[p267] Lancelot crossed the Bridge of Dread, to see Guenevere in the land of the dead. 'The land of the dead played a great rôle in ancient Celtic beliefs, and the information about the Gauls that the writers of [Blessed souls were at the Bridge – 268] antiquity have left, testify no less than the most authentic documents of Irish poetry."
"The Celts [Celts, says Shelley, for Jugo-Slavs] represented the abode of the dead as an island situated in the west which was at the same time the abode of the blessed. There, under a sky always mild, heroes grew not old..."
Guenevere's Maying, which has dropped out of the story of Chrétien, is a Celtic trait and recalls the Slavonian pilgrims, who for May Day, put garlands on their heads.
This provokes on the one hand, a reminiscence of Owain Miles who saw the procession of bishops that came out smelling of incense and "bearing banners and branches of golden palm trees." But it is older than that, for these green branches grew by the gates of Paradise. When to the Wife of Usher's Well her three sons came,
Their hats were of the birk:
It neither grew in syke not ditch
Nor yet in ony sclough;
But at the Gates of Paradise
That birk grew fair eneugh.
[THE BOURNE 269] Scott quotes, as a gloss on these lines, from the Maase Book, the case of a returned ghost, Jewish, who says: "I wear the garland to the end that the wind of the world may not have power over me, for it [Wind o' the World] consists of excellent herbs of Paradise."
If it is, on the other hand, like all Maying, a spell to secure fertility for their far-off fields and gardens, then, like the ceremonies of Candlemas, it seems to offer more than a bare vestige of earlier worship than the Christian of S. James, in the city of the hollow hill.
More: http://pilgrimagetoheresy.blogspot.com/2011/06/who-were-celts.html#comment-form
