Glimpses of the Hereafter in the Late-Medieval Thet Freske Riim

Abstract

The article analyzes a passage of the narrative poem Thet Freske Riim, one of the few non-legal texts preserved in Old Frisian. The passage in question is a digression describing the Joys of Heaven and the Horrors of Hell, which so far has attracted little attention in the scholarly literature on medieval accounts of the hereafter. The representations of the afterlife and its realms circulating in Medieval Europe draw inspiration from a wide body of both orthodox and apocryphal literature on ecstatic dreams, of which one of the most influential work is the Visio Sancti Pauli or Apocalypse of Paul. The study aims to identify – in the examined passage – themes and features of otherworldly literature, and discover possible sources and analogues, establishing a connection between Thet Freske Riim and the wider apocalyptic tradition of medieval Europe. The analysis of the passage demonstrates that the anonymous Frisian author stands in a long and widely attested patristic tradition to which, however, he also appears to have added new and original elements. The portrayal of heaven as a land covered with thick forests and luxuriant vegetation agrees with the conventional image of the hereafter already found in various eschatological writings of the Jewish tradition (both canonical and apocryphal). And the images of the souls’ hanging punishment as well as of the infernal dragon are among the most popular motifs in medieval representations of hell. Nonetheless, besides parallels with the visionary texts, the description of the afterlife landscape in Thet Freske Riim also shows some interesting innovations, such as the presence in hell of a solitary tree with the hanging souls and the mention of the four demons sitting silently near the tree and striking the sinners. The anonymous author of Thet Freske Riim has tried to compose inside the main poem a little visionary-apocalyptic poem, with an evidently hortatory purpose. This passage of the Freske Riim deserves a place in the heterogeneous panorama of the eschatological literature, where it provides its peculiar contribution to the development and dissemination of visionary narrative.