391. Tundal the monk
Many Christians have written books or painted pictures depicting the horrors of hell. Perhaps none are more vivid than the writings of the Irish monk Tundal, who lived in the twelfth century. Tundal claimed to have had visions of hell. In the center of it, he said, Satan was fastened with red-hot chains to a burning gridiron, but his hands were free to grab hold of sinners. With his teeth he crushed them, afterward swallowing them down his burning throat. Other demons plunged hell's inhabitants into fire then into icy water, or beat them into flatness on an anvil. To make the fiery place even more repugnant, sulfur added its foul stench to the air. Hell was full of fire, yet the fire gave no light, so the people suffered in thick darkness. While the Catholic church authorities sometimes questioned such visions (realizing that it was easy to go over borad and emphasize hell more than heaven), descriptions such as Tundal's had a great effect on peoples's imagination. The Vision of Tundal, written around 1149, was translated into at least fifteen languages, and some of the copies were lavishly (and frighteningly) illustrated.
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