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language: Latin (tr. Joseph J. O’Meara)
country: Ireland
year: medieval
form: hagiography
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 7.7.23
The Voyage of Saint Brendan (tr. Joseph J. O’Meara) was, in 2014, my first foray into hagiography, and I still don’t have a lot to compare it to in those terms (The Miracle of Saint Mina was only my second, lol). it’s a brisk and moderately wacky (but not unexpectedly so for a medieval text, and, unlike Saint Mina, Saint Brendan does not induce divinely ordained mpreg).
the titular saint is visited by a man named Barrind, who brings him a story of a journey he undertook to visit his son (a successful and apparently miracle-working monk). he reports that his son often visits part of Paradise, an island called the Promised Land of the Saints. in what I must say seems rather like hubris, Brendan decides “if it is God’s will — and only if it is — to go in search of the Promised Land of the Saints”, bringing with him a group of monks from the community of which he is the head or abbot. over the course of seven years, he and his followers have a series of fantastic encounters: with demons, with a sleep-inducing well, with a 140-year-old man waiting for the foretold hour of his death to arrive, with an island-fish named Jasconius, and more. they eventually reach the Promised Land of Saints — most of them, anyway — and then return home, after which Brendan dies.
it’s a reasonably fun ride! you can clearly see some classical influence at (very distant) work — the soporific well obviously recalls the lotus-eaters and the Island of Smiths is not unlike the encounter with the Laestrygonians, and of course the whole form of the journey is the Odyssey: a sea-voyage prolonged by the will of (a) god, though in this case the prolongation appears to be benevolent. at the same time, despite its Christian trappings, it does feel very much like the medieval Irish narrative it is, with Brendan in the position of — say — Fergus in the Táin as he identifies hazards and miracles or maybe almost Cú Chulainn as he singlehandedly drives away demons with the power of his faith. also he’s explicitly described as leading sacrifices at Easter, but I’m assuming this is just a bit of medieval liturgical practice that I’m not familiar with and not actually sacrifice.
several of the demons are also racially marked, as “Ethiopians”, which is something I’m going to need to find scholarship on to adequately address, but it’s definitely…dubious.
moods: adventurous, wacky