Introduction Isle of
the
with
attached "
the
hail,nor
whole
exploit,in Herakles,
idea
far
of
parallelto the idea Avalion (Avalon), where Underlying any snow."
the
Island
fortuna vacatur.
quae
so
of
rain, nor
is the
insula promorum
Blessed, and
Vale
the
to
falls not
the
it may
as
be
the
As
to
Blessed, Fraoch's that
parallelto
Wilamowitz-MoellendorfF, the
of
in
his
of
mentary Com-
of
Euripides,has pointed that the garden of the gods, with the tree which out carries the apples of life,is reallyquite independent on
of
the
of
that
of
a
Herakles
Herakles
saga, while
story is that
sea-monster,
ground,
too,
we
the have
highly archaic variant Herakles. leaps into the jaws On Celtic jaws of death. the
a
contest
of
hero
a
with
quite apart from Fraoch, and the tree rowan guarded by the dragon. The continuation Tdin Bo of the the Frdich across brings the hero the Here the sea to to Langobardi. Alps and Fraoch is represented as : being of the Ultonians the after high exploits he and his friends to came of the Cruithen-tuath, the Pictish people, territory a
and B6 we
water-monster
joined Ailill and Medb Cuailnge. It is impossible to be
later
have
on
not
he
here
a
hint
that
Fraoch
the
on
whether
sure was
T^din
a
hero
of
the Gael called Cruithne people whom a word (Cruithen-tuath), cognate in root with Cymric pryd in Ynys Prydain, and pointing to the preGadhelic population of these isles as a people who practised tatooing. Apart from the accessory of the Tree of Life, the the
Picts, the
xliii