Irish Translation Forum

Can someone give me the Gaelic equivalent of the hereafter or heaven?

I know I ask way too many questions.

Shara

You can NEVER ask too many questions. How else can we learn?

Anyhow, "heaven" is either neamh or na Flaithis

"hereafter" or "afterlife" is "the world to come" : an saol atá le teacht

oisin718 wrote:You can NEVER ask too many questions. How else can we learn?

Anyhow, "heaven" is either neamh or na Flaithis

"hereafter" or "afterlife" is "the world to come" : an saol atá le teacht

Shara,

oisin's translations are correct but generally ppl just say "Neamh"....instead of "hereafter"

i mean you can use it if you want but it seemed you were looking for the Irish equivelant of "heaven or hereafter"


so if you needed the best one to use it would be

Neamh

For a lot of folks from the non-Abrahamic religions, Neamh is not a comfortable term, as it is Abrahamic in origin. Granted, translating each and every name for the afterlife would be a pain in the toin, but it might be handy to do up a thread along those lines for future reference since some of the people that come here are not Christian. Here's a short list of examples-

The Land of the Young: Tír na nÓg - Gaelic (Irish)
House of Donn: Teach Donn - Gaelic (Scottish and Irish)
The Field of Reeds: ???? - Egyptian
The Elysian Fields: ???? - Hellenic (Greek) as well as Nova Roma
Chicomemictlan (the eternal house of the dead): ???? - Aztec
Dreamtime: ???? - Australian Native (Aborigine)
Pulotu (place of the dead): ???? - Polynesian/Maori
Nirvana (ultimate enlightenment): ???? - Buddhist
Happy Hunting Grounds: ???? - Sioux (but common among American Native tribes)
Valhalla (hall of fallen warriors): ???? - Nordic/Icelandic/Germanic (Asatru, etc.)
Heofonríce (kingdom after life): ???? - Anglo-Saxon

Who wants to take a crack at this list?

A common expression if you are speaking about someone who has departed is "ar shlí na fírinne" - "on the way of the truth"

For example:
"Tá sé imithe ar shlí na fírinne" means "he has passed on to the next life", literally: "He has gone on the way of truth"

As always, it depends on the context.

Slan go fóill,
Conn.

WRT to afterlifes, I'd just like to interject that "heaven" is not of Abrahamic origin. There's actually no mention of an afterlife in Torah (the five books of Moses). In the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures, there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus on the state of the dead: it's not terribly important. The Sages and the Rabbis debated about "The World to Come," but they all agreed that what really mattered was our lives in THIS world, not what may or may not exist after death.

There was Sheol, a shadowy netherworld where the shades of the dead were said to congregate. Sheol is essentially identical to the Germanic Hel and the Greco-Roman Hades.

Valhalla, as I understand, was available only to those warriors who fell in battle and were chosen by Odin and the Valkyries for their bravery and prowess: everyone else ended up in Hel.

Egyptians--at least as far as we know--did not originally believe in an afterlife. The Pharaoh lived forever, beyond the grave, because he was a god and therefore could not die. Eventually, the idea of a personal afterlife was extended to the rest of the royal family and the nobility, and gradually worked its way down through the centuries to the common man and woman on the street.

Nirvana is not really an afterlife, but the transformation and antithesis of life: the extinction of individual existence through total unification with the cosmos.

oh god, here starts another debate

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