Originally published on About.com ’s Classic Literature Page
The historical
Saint Brendan was born in Ireland in the late fifth century and is thought to
have lived for approximately one hundred years, and although it’s widely
accepted that he founded several monastic cells in his native country, little
else is known for certain about the true events of his life. As with most
medieval saints, he’s more of a product of legend than he is of verifiable
records, and among the saints of his period his legacy is perhaps the most
fantastical. Any fan of medieval literature knows that vague knowledge often
lends itself to gorgeous visions and revisions by later seers and thinkers, and
as recorded in the utterly crystalline travel narrative The Voyage of Saint
Brendan, his is one of the most moving and compelling legends in all of
religious literature.
Written perhaps as early as two
hundred years after his death, and almost certainly based on a combination of
earlier written and oral versions, as well as on other intertwining folk and
epic elements, The Voyage of Saint Brendan recounts Brendan’s seven-year
pilgrimage in search of “the Promised Land of the Saints.” This isn’t
Palestine, the Biblical Promised Land, but rather an island where the sun never
sets and where visitors never get tired or hungry and are filled at all times
with complete satisfaction and bliss. Brendan hears of this land from Saint
Barrind, a traveling monk who visits Brendan’s monastery at Clonfert, and in
response he immediately assembles fourteen chosen monks who as a group resolve
to make the journey to their Promised Land.
After building a boat and preparing
to embark, however, a trio of monks from Brendan’s monastery rush to join them,
pleading that they will die on the spot if they aren’t allowed to make the
voyage too. Brendan admits them to their company, but with Christlike
clairvoyance, which he exhibits throughout the narrative, he proclaims that God
has prepared a special place for one of them along their journey but that the
other two are doomed to meet a “hideous judgment.” Thus none of the three is
destined to make it to the Promised Land of the Saints, and two of them are
destined for Hell, but Brendan remains silent about which is which, his words
setting up a tension that the reader looks forward to following but which is
borne out with a hilarious inattention to the reader’s attentiveness.
On the trip the
group encounter marvels that rival The
Odyssey in strangeness, but at less than one hundred pages, The Voyage
of Saint Brendan is itself a
marvel of succinct purity. They visit an island that turns out to be an
enormous fish named Jasconius, another island where food is magically left
prepared for them, despite the island being uninhabited—an episode that along with a few other
of this book’s most striking scenarios seems to have made it into C.S. Lewis’ The
Chronicles of Narnia—and an island called the Paradise of the Birds, where
a tree teeming with birds, which are in fact souls that were destroyed during
Lucifer’s fall but which are themselves blameless and are allowed to assume
corporeal form on holy days and Sundays, sings God’s praises with one voice.
The travelers also encounter a “coagulated” sea, which is probably ice, and which
from the description the narrative’s writer had clearly never seen, as well as a
stunning crystal pillar that rises from the sea up into heaven. Commentators
have suggested that this crystal pillar may be an iceberg, which the writer
would never have seen either but which through a combination of mutated
tellings and a cloistered imagination (it seems clear that the writer was quite
literate but had probably never left his monastery) becomes a fantastical
vision of the most sublime order.
On the trip the group encounter
marvels that rival The Odyssey in
strangeness, but at less than one hundred pages, The Voyage of Saint Brendan is itself a marvel of succinct purity. They
visit an island that turns out to be an enormous fish named Jasconius, another
island where food is magically left prepared for them, despite the island being
uninhabited—an episode that along with a few other of this book’s most striking
scenarios seems to have made it into C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia—and
an island called the Paradise of the Birds, where a tree teeming with birds, which
are in fact souls that were destroyed during Lucifer’s fall but which are
themselves blameless and are allowed to assume corporeal form on holy days and
Sundays, sings God’s praises with one voice. The travelers also encounter a
“coagulated” sea, which is probably ice, and which from the description the
narrative’s writer had clearly never seen, as well as a stunning crystal pillar
that rises from the sea up into heaven. Commentators have suggested that this
crystal pillar may be an iceberg, which the writer would never have seen either
but which through a combination of mutated tellings and a cloistered
imagination (it seems clear that the writer was quite literate but had probably
never left his monastery) becomes a fantastical vision of the most sublime
order.
Attempting
to tease out the real geography of The Voyage of Saint Brendan—or to
manipulate it to their uses—many modern readers have tried to make the claim
that Brendan beat both Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus to the New World.
As with so many other cases of scholars going to any length to bend a text to
the benefit of some particular nationality or cause, this is of course just
another laughable case of wishful reading. First of all, it doesn’t seem
possible that Brendan’s small ship—a currach—could
ever make it that far across the Atlantic. And just examining the book’s
internal evidence—if anything in this book could be used as serious evidence—the
group makes the same small circuit all seven years of their journey, following
the same rituals each year and not venturing beyond the magical geography that
only the most dedicated reviser of reality could attempt to locate on any
modern map of the world.
Simply reading The Voyage of Saint
Brendan for what it is—a thoroughly outlandish book of wonders written by a
true believer of perhaps the early tenth century—we’re left with a narrative of
surpassing beauty whose unsophisticated construction only adds to its sense of
uncluttered purity. Brendan’s seven-year circuit of devotions—which is rewarded
by a mere forty days of bliss in the Promised Land of the Saints, followed
immediately afterward by his death on the book’s final page—fills the reader
with a similar kind of devoted bliss, whether we share any of the book’s faith
or not. Reason tells us that this is all just religious hogwash, but the pleasures
of this book, as with any book of great beauty, are almost all beyond reason and belief.
As with Dante or Milton, we criticize and argue with the text’s fundamental wrongness,
but in suspending our disbelief and surrendering our imagination to it, we’re
afforded a brief bliss that may be one of our truest rewards in life.
—David Wiley
