The Otherworld Door

Medieval Irish literature classified its Otherworld narratives by shape. The echtrae ("adventure") draws a hero across the boundary into the síd, usually at the summons of a supernatural woman or rider; the immram ("voyage") sends him island to island over the sea, each landfall a stage of purification; the aisling ("vision") foregrounds the prophetic or sovereignty-conferring apparition itself. Read three of them — Immram Brain, Echtrae Conle, Baile in Scáil — and you will keep meeting the same working parts: the call; the passage through mist or water; the feast in a hall out of time; the sacred vessel from which a maiden serves; the binding prohibition (geis); time running differently; the return that marks the traveller forever.

The parts matter because the later romance tradition inherits them assembled. In Baile in Scáil, the god Lugh presides while a crowned woman — the Sovereignty of Ireland — dispenses drink from a golden cup, asking to whom the cup should be given: a question in the presence of a vessel, deciding a kingship. In Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin, a vessel feeds each traveller what he most desires — the exact wonder Malory's Grail performs at Camelot seven centuries later. Whether these correspondences are genealogy or convergence is the central scholarly quarrel of the tradition (Unit 24 stages it properly); this unit's job is to make sure you have read the Irish evidence before anyone summarizes it at you.

Note, finally, what the Otherworld is: not an afterlife and not an allegory, but a country adjacent to this one — under the hill, over the water, coterminous and invisible. John Carey's essay on its "location" is the essential companion. The romances will call it Avalon, the Grail castle, the land of Gorre. The door never quite closes.