ple live there waiting on the god
who sometimes appears to them and prevents their departing. Meanwhile
they are happy and know no care, spending their time in sacrificing and
hymn-singing or in studying legends and philosophy.

Plutarch has obviously mingled Celtic Elysium beliefs with the classical
conception of the Druids.[1183] In Elysium there is no care, and
favoured mortals who pass there are generally prevented from returning
to earth. The reference to Kronos may also be based partly on myths of
Celtic gods of Elysium, partly on tales of heroes who departed to
mysterious islands or to the hollow hills where they lie asleep, but
whence they will one day return to benefit their people. So Arthur
passed to Avalon, but in other tales he and his warriors are asleep
beneath Craig-y-Ddinas, just as Fionn and his men rest within this or
that hill in the Highlands. Similar legends are told of other Celtic
heroes, and they witness to the belief that great men who had died would
return in the hour of their people's need. In time they were thought not
to have died at all, but to be merely sleeping and waiting for their
hour.[1184] The belief is based on the idea that the dead are alive in
grave or barrow, or in a spacious land below the earth, or that dead
warriors can menace their foes from the tomb.

Thus neither in old sagas, nor in _Maerchen_, nor in popular tradition,
is the island Elysium a world of the dead. For the most part the pagan
eschatology has been merged in that of Christianity, while the Elysium
belief has remained intact and still survives in a whole series of
beautiful tales.

The world of the dead was in all respects a _replica_ of this world, but
it was happier. In existing Breton and Irish belief--a survival of the
older conception of the bodily state of the dead--they resume their
tools, crafts, and occupations, and they preserve their old feelings.
Hence, when they appear on earth, it is in bodily form and in their
customary dress. Like the pagan Gauls, the Breton remembers unpaid
debts, and cannot rest till they are paid, and in Brittany, Ireland, and
the Highlands the food and clothes given to the poor after a death, feed
and clothe the dead in the other world.[1185] If the world of the dead
was subterranean,--a theory supported by current folk-belief,[1186]--the
Earth-goddess or the Earth-god, who had been first the earth itself,
then a being living below its surface and causing fertility, could