Note 5 — Chapter X

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.