﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 1 3 



ashes, as though very long dead. Bran took warning and would not 

 land. He lay off shore and told the people his story ; then put out 

 to sea and was never heard of again. 



What fact, if any, is behind this delightful old pagan allegory? 

 Of course it may possibly embody a memory of summer isles of Eden 

 really visited ; or it may be no more than the play of sea-side fancy 

 among sunset clouds, or an echo of wonder-tales older than the 

 Odyssey. The legend, as a whole and in detail, has been exhaustively 

 considered in a valuable work by Mr. Nutt, 1 but we can get no 

 nearer than this to the origin of its germ. 



The Voyage of Maelduin 2 inherits from the Voyage of Bran and 

 borrows from many quarters, even one of St. Brandan's shipmates 

 being among its later acquisitions. Every successive editor and en- 

 larger of the story seems to have felt bound to outdo his predecessors. 

 Its wonders are manifold : ants as large as colts ; a supernatural cat 

 and its palace ; a horse-monster with blue claws ; a holy anchoret clad 

 only in his white miraculous hair ; a wicked monastery cook marooned 

 in a little private hell on a barren rock for having played the thief and 

 served uneatable food to his brethren. All told, this Voyage of 

 Maelduin is hardly convincing, except as to the possibilities of 

 Irish fancy unrestrained ; which compares ill with the dramatic grip, 

 epic power, and graphic quality of Icelandic narration. However, 

 it passes along the tradition of lovely tropical islands in distant seas. 



St. Brandan the Navigator was real, the abbot of a Kerry mon- 

 astery near the end of the sixth century. His experiences are sung 

 in twelfth century Latin verse and told in early Gaelic prose, as 

 well as in the fine English translation printed by Wynken de Worde, 

 successor to Caxton — not contemporary testimony, to be sure, but 

 probably reliable as to the main fact and general course of his 

 Atlantic journeying, with more or less of the details. 



Humboldt thought St. Brandan may have gone northward, visiting 

 the Orkneys ; but he seems to be wrong, for the narrative has a 

 southern cast. A writer in the Celtic Review, 3 Mr. Dominick Daly, 

 at first argued for the Bahamas — making the saint forestall Columbus 

 — with an ingenious marshaling of winds and current, and other 

 data not all quite so tenable. But he seems to have been converted to 

 Teneriffe and her island sisterhood by Markham's translation of 



1 Alfred Nutt : The Voyage of Bran. 

 2 Joyce: The Voyage of Maelduin. 

 3 The Celtic Review, vol. I, p. 139. 



