Ireland

Irish literature is unusually rich in places to go after death and unusually poor in ways for the world to end. The síd mounds hold a deathless people; the immram voyages carry heroes west to islands of apples and birds and women who do not age; Tír na nÓg keeps its visitors young until they touch Irish soil again. Against that abundance there is no native final battle, no judgment of all the dead, no cosmic dissolution.

What Ireland built instead was a scheme of successive settlements. Lebor Gabála Érenn arranges the island's prehistory as a sequence of invasions, each ending in plague, flood or defeat, culminating in the Tuatha Dé Danann and then the sons of Míl. Worlds end repeatedly in this literature, but they are Irish worlds, local and political, and a new population always follows. The catastrophes are the fall of a king, the breaking of a geis, the burning of a hostel.

The absence has to be stated carefully, because the material was written down by Christian monks who already possessed a doctrine of the last judgment. As Kim McCone argues, what survives is a learned reworking rather than a pagan transcript, which makes the absence more striking, not less: scribes who knew the apocalypse did not retrofit one into the native lore. When a last day does appear in Irish sources it comes in the Latin apocalyptic tradition and in homiletic material, the same current that produced Wulfstan's sermon next door. The case is set out in The Irish Absence: a People Without an Apocalypse and belongs with the others in Documented Absences. A tradition can populate eternity in detail and still never close the world.