The Brendan Legend: Texts And Versions (The Northern World: North Europe and the Baltic C.400-1700 Ad; Peoples, Economies and Cultures)

405 Pages·2006·2.51 MB·English

by  Glyn S. Burgess

THE BRENDAN LEGEND
THE NORTHERN WORLD
North Europe and the Baltic c. 400-1700 AD
Peoples, Economies and Cultures
EDITORS
BarbaraCrawford(St. Andrews)
DavidKirby(London)
Jon-Vidar Sigurdsson(Oslo)
IngvildØye(Bergen)
Richard W. Unger(Vancouver)
PrzemyslawUrbanczyk(Warsaw)
VOLUME 24
THE BRENDAN LEGEND
Texts and Versions
EDITED BY
GLYN S. BURGESS
AND
CLARA STRIJBOSCH
BRILL
LEIDEN•BOSTON
2006
On the cover: (front) “Haylbran” from ‘Die wunderbare Meerfahrt des hl. Brandan’ (Michael
Furter (?), Basel 1491: Inc. typ. Ic II 7), by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek
Bamberg, Germany; (back) ‘The giant fish’ (Mathis Hüpfuff, Strassburg 1510).
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 1569–1462
ISBN-10:90 04 15247 4
ISBN-13:978 90 04 15247 2
© Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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CONTENTS
Searching for a Versatile Saint: Introduction .......................... 1
Clara Strijbosch
The Use of Animals in Benedeit’s Version of the
Brendan Legend ...................................................................... 11
Glyn S. Burgess
Brendan’s European Tour: The Middle Irish Poem
Mochen, mochen, a Brénaind and the Changing Nature
of Pilgrimage in the Eleventh Century ................................ 35
Thomas Owen Clancy
Oriental Eremitical Motifs in the Navigatio sancti Brendani ...... 53
Anna Maria Fagnoni
The Little Man on a Leaf and the Two Concepts
of the Dutch/German Reise ...................................................... 81
Walter Haug
The Island of the Birds in the Navigatio sancti Brendani .......... 99
Peter Christian Jacobsen
The Irish Life of Saint Brendan: Textual History, Structure
and Date ................................................................................ 117
Séamus Mac Mathúna
Navigatio sancti Brendani. Some Possible Connections
with Liturgical, Apocryphal and Irish Tradition ................ 159
Martin McNamara
The Hispanic Version of the Navigatio sancti Brendani:
Tradition or Form of Reception of a Text? ...................... 193
Aires A. Nascimento
vi contents
Brendan and Moses .................................................................... 221
Giovanni Orlandi
The Abbot and the Monastic Community in the
Gaelic Churches, 550 to 800 ................................................ 241
Hérold Pettiau
Between Angel and Beast: Brendan, Herzog Ernst and
the World of the Twelfth Century ...................................... 265
Clara Strijbosch
The Navigatio sancti Brendani and Two of its Twelfth-Century
Palimpsests: The Brendan Poems by Benedeit and Walter
of Châtillon ............................................................................ 281
Carsten Wollin
Ein hübsch lieblich lesen von Sant Brandon: A Look at the
German Prose Versions and Their Illustrations .................. 315
Karl A. Zaenker
Philological Remarks on the so-called Navigatio s. Brendani .... 337
Michaela Zelzer
Bibliography ................................................................................ 351
Index (compiled by Jude Mackley) .......................................... 377
SEARCHING FOR A VERSATILE SAINT:
INTRODUCTION
Clara Strijbosch
The Irish Saint Brendan received his fame not from his holiness or
from the miracles he performed, but from his travels. Shortly after
his death (c. 575), tales were told that he had sailed the Ocean. In
the Middle Ages stories about Brendan’s sea voyages spread all over
western Europe, from the coast of the Baltic Sea to Spain and
Portugal; as a result, the saint became known as Brendan the Navigator.
Already in the seventh century, stories of his travels circulated in his
home country of Ireland, but of this early complex of stories only
the outlines are visible. The Brendan tradition is vast and its earli-
est form is hard to grasp because the extant texts are relatively late
and located largely outside Ireland; the oldest extant manuscripts
date from the tenth century.1
The medieval Brendan tradition falls into the following four text-
types:
1. The Vita Brendani, preserved in five Latin and two Irish versions
and in manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Vita is an amalgam of episodes commonly found in a
saint’s life, i.e. biographical data, miracles performed by the saint
and sea voyages undertaken. Most versions of the Vita are conflated
with the text which follows:
2. The Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis, a tale of the travels of Brendan
and his monks over the Ocean before reaching a paradise-like
Promised Land of the Saints. This text combines elements of a
saint’s life, a marvellous sea voyage and an allegorical journey
through life, and it is closely connected with monastic culture. It
is a religious counterpart to the Irish travel-stories known as imm-
rama (‘rowings around’) and echtrae (‘outings’, ‘adventures’). It is of
the Navigatio that the earliest manuscripts survive, dating from the
1 A survey of manuscripts and studies on Brendan is to be found in Glyn Burgess
and Clara Strijbosch, ed., The Brendan Legend. A Critical Bibliography, Dublin 2000.
2 clara strijbosch
tenth century and localised in the Lotharingian region. The Navigatio
was clearly an extremely popular story, as there are 125 surviv-
ing manuscripts from the tenth to the seventeenth century, from
all over western Europe. Moreover, the Navigatio has been trans-
lated and reworked in nearly all of the western European ver-
naculars, from Catalan to Norse. It was also the source of one
of the first vernacular romances, the reworking (c. 1105 or shortly
after 1121) by the Anglo-Norman monk Benedeit, who adopted
an independent attitude towards the Navigatio.
3. Sankt Brandans Reise/De reis van Sint Brandaan [Reise] originated
around 1150 in the Middle Frankish area (between Cologne and
Trier). The original, anonymous version O has been lost. The
Reise has been preserved in five versions, two in German verse
(the Middle High German version M and the Lower German N),
two in Middle Dutch verse (one in the Comburg Codex, C, the
other in the Van Hulthem Manuscript, H), and one in German
prose, P, extant in five manuscripts (b, g, h, l, m) and twenty-
four incunabula and early prints from the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. These versions can be divided into three branches: C/H,
M/N and P, deriving independently from the lost original O.
The Reise is a unique version of the Brendan legend with a highly
original framework. We are told here that Brendan throws a book
into the fire because he did not believe the marvels it contained.
He is then sent on a sea voyage to witness with his own eyes the
marvels in which he refused to believe; he finally returns to Ireland
with a rewritten book.
4. A group of shorter texts on Brendan, from Ireland as well as the
Continent. These consist of prayers to Brendan, episodes recount-
ing a story from his life or his stay on a paradise-type island.
One of the more substantial of these texts, as well as being the
first text in Irish wholly devoted to Brendan, is the short poem
entitled Mochen, mochen, a Brénaind.
For all these text-types the mutual influences have long been, and
still are being, discussed. The Brendan material is undoubtedly of
Irish origin and a legend concerning the saint was probably already
circulating in the seventh century. This version may have contained
episodes found in the later Vita Brendani, including not just a single
voyage but two voyages over the Ocean. Both the Vita and the
Navigatio were based on this text, and it is probably the Vita which
searching for a versatile saint: introduction 3
is closer to the original legend. Already at an early stage in their
development, the Brendan texts were amalgamated with material
from the Irish immrama and echtrae. But merely to see the Navigatio
as the ‘religious’ counterpart to the ‘worldly’ immrama, or the other
way around, seems oversimplified. It is probable that parts of the
immrama were incorporated into the Brendan material at various
stages and that at all these stages oral transmission had an impor-
tant part to play.2 However, by the tenth century the Navigatio had
found its shape in written form, as is seen from the first Navigatio
manuscripts which date from this period.
Because of its widespread popularity, Navigatio material permeated
all the other text-types. In five of the seven versions of the Vita
Brendani a Navigatio text has been inserted, more or less smoothly.
The Navigatio has been translated and reworked in many vernacu-
lars, and it is the source of two vernacular reworkings in the twelfth
century: Benedeit’s version and the Middle-Franconian Reise. The
monk Benedeit’s text has been described as the first romance in the
vernacular. Benedeit did not completely recast the Navigatio, but he
nevertheless adopted an independent attitude towards his source and
adapted the story to the expectations and desires of his courtly Anglo-
Norman audience. For its part, the Middle-Franconian Reise should
be considered to be a new version of the text. Though the influence
of the Navigatio cannot be doubted, the unknown author of the lost
twelfth-century Reise completely restructured his material, making use
of many other ancient and contemporary Irish and continental sto-
ries in order to tell his tale of Brendan.
The fourth category mentioned above, the short material on
Brendan, is too diverse and incoherent for us to come to any con-
clusions concerning its sources. It is clear from the role Brendan
plays here that he was known as a sea-voyager and probably as the
saint who landed on a paradise-like island. This is the form which
inspired the tale that Brendan discovered America, long before
Columbus set eyes on the ‘new’ continent.
One of the consequences of the wide distribution of Brendan mate-
rial has been that the study of Brendan texts has spread over all of
western Europe. For a long time historians of medieval European
2 On the search for the sources of the Brendan material, see Clara Strijbosch,
The Seafaring Saint. Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth-Century Voyage of Saint Brendan,
transl. Thea Summerfield, Dublin 2000, esp. pp. 125–65.