58 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Did the Irish anticipate the Norse also in the discovery of Green- 

 land and America ? It is possible, but there is no evidence of weight. 

 Dicuil's friends may have sailed beyond Iceland until stopped by 

 drift ice, and others of whom no record has survived may have escaped 

 the ice and come to land in the western hemisphere. Several passages 

 in the Icelandic sagas indicate that there came into the Norse world, 

 through their brethern who settled in Ireland in the days of the great 

 Viking expansion, stories of a land to the westward which Norsemen, 

 and possibly Irishmen, called "White Men's Land" and "Ireland the 

 Great."^ It was in the neighbourhood of "Wineland the Good," of 

 which also, as Nansen has pointed out, the earliest knowledge displayed 

 in northern literature seems to have come from Hiberno-Norse 

 sources. But, as will be seen, there were other descriptions of lands 

 lying out in the western ocean which were current in Ireland in the 

 ninth and tenth centuries besides any authentic records of the dis- 

 coveries of the anchorites. 



Ill 



The Versions of the Brendan Legend 



The story of the voyage of Brendan is extant in many manuscript 

 versions, almost all of which, however, can be classed as derived from 

 one or other of two texts, a Navigatio Brendani which has been pre- 

 served fairly pure, and a Vita Brendani which has, in almost every 

 manuscript, been contaminated by additions from the Navigatio. 

 Sufificient material is available however, to make possible a very full 

 restoration of the original Vita.^ 



The date of composition cannot be accurately determined. 

 There is at least one tenth century manuscript of the Navigatio,^ and it 

 is manifestly a copy of an earlier Vorlage. Two Lives of the Breton, 



1 Landnâmabôk, Eyrbyggja Saga, Eiriks Saga Rauda. In Landnâmabôk the 

 story of Ireland the Great is traced back to a certain "Ravn Hlymreks-farer," a 

 Northman who had dwelt in Limerick for a long period, apparently about the be- 

 ginning of the eleventh century. 



2 The Rev. Charles Plummer has published important studies on the relation- 

 ships between the different versions of the legend in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie 

 vol. V (1905), pp. 124-141, and in the introduction to his Vitœ Sanctorum Hiberniœ 

 (Oxford, 1910). Critical studies of value are to be found also in Carl Schroder's 

 Sand Brandan Ein lateinischer und drei deutsche Texte (Erlangen, 1871); Gustav 

 Schirmer's Zur Brendanus-Legende (Leipsic, 1888); Heinrich Zimmer's "Brendans 

 Meerfahrt" in Zeitschrift fur deutsches Alterthum, vol. XXXIII (1889), pp. 129-220, 

 257-338; and Alfred Schulze's "Zur Brendanlegende" in Zeitschrift fur romanische 

 Philologie, vol. XXX (1906), pp. 257-79. 



3 British Museum Addit. 3673 7, formerly of the Abbey of St, Maxim at Treves. 



