It is
as real as the intercourse between Welsh and English on the
Borderland.
There was nothing illusive, nothing merely imaginary, in these fairy
worlds for the Irish hero or the Irish people. They believed the lands
to be as real as their own, and the indwellers of fairyland to have
like passions with themselves. Finn is not a bit surprised when
Vivionn the giantess sits beside him on the hill, or Fergus when King
Iubdan stands on his hand; or St Patrick when Ethne, out of fairyland,
dies on his breast, or when he sees, at his spell, Cuchulain, dead
some nine hundred years, come forth out of the dark gates of Sheol,
high in his chariot, grasping his deadly spear, driven as of old by
his well-loved charioteer, drawn by the immortal steeds through the
mist, and finally talking of his deeds and claiming a place in the
Christian heaven--a place that Patrick yields to him. The invisible
worlds lived, loved, and thought around this visible world, and were,
it seems, closer and more real to the Celtic than to other races.
But it was not only these agreeable and lovely folk in pleasant
habitations whom the Irish made, but also spirits of another sort, of
lesser powers and those chiefly malignant, having no fixed
dwelling-place, homeless in the air and drifting with it, embodying
the venomous and deadly elements of the earth and the angers and
cruelty of the sea, and the hypocrisy of them all--demons, some of
whom, like the stepmother of the children of Lir, have been changed
from men or women because of wicked doings, but the most part born of
the evil in Nature herself.
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