[kenney] the legend OF ST. BRENDAN 67 



sixty men. Unfortunately Maelduin breaks the magical formula by taking on 

 board at the last minute his three foster-brothers. Because of this they are driven 

 out to sea by a storm. After various adventures they come to a palace where a meal 

 is spread out for them. When they leave one of the foster-brothers attempts to 

 steal a neck-band, and is slain by a little cat. They come to an island where everyone 

 is weeping, and the second foster-brother, landing, begins to weep also, and cannot 

 afterwards be distinguished. The third brother is lost in a like manner on the island 

 of laughter. Other passages to be noted are the description of the island of singing 

 birds; of the old hermit clad in white hair who is fed by angels; of the island of 

 smiths; of the transparent sea; of the silver pillar with canopy of silver; of the island 

 supported on one pillar; of the bird that carries a branch laden with large, grape- 

 like fruit; of the old hermit who, like Paul of the Navigatio, had been a grave-digger, 

 and now tells Maelduin that his voyage is at its end. 



It is evident that we have in Maelduin and Brencjan two elaborate, 

 and intimately related, literary developments, the one in Irish, the 

 other in Latin, of the folk-lore and mythology of ancient Ireland, 

 gathered around the central theme of a "happy otherworld" situated 

 in the western ocean. Of that central theme Alfred Nutt published 

 an extensive study in connection with Kuno Meyer's edition of "the 

 Voyage of Bran son of Febal."^ The relationships he thought to find 

 with the elysium beliefs of other races seem in some cases far-fetched, 

 but his conclusion is, perhaps, sufficiently conservative: "The vision 

 of a Happy Otherworld found in Irish mythic romances of the eighth 

 and following centuries is substantially pre-Christian; it finds its 

 closest analogues in that stage of Hellenic mythic belief which precedes 

 the modification of Hellenic religion consequent upon the spread of 

 the Orphic-Pythagorean doctrines, and with these it forms the most 

 archaic Aryan presentment of the divine and happy land we possess." 



villa's Cours de littérature celtique, vol. V: L'Epopée celtique en Irlande (1892), pp. 

 449-500. An English translation, not very close, was published by P. W. Joyce in his 

 Old Celtic Romances, and was used, he tells us, by Tennyson as the basis for his poem 

 on the subject. The version in verse has been edited by R. I. Best and Kuno Meyer 

 in Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts, vol. I (Halle and Dublin, 1907), pp. 50-74, and 

 by Kuno Meyer in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, vol. XI (1916), pp. 148-165. 



* The Voyage of Bran son of Febal, to the Land of the Living A n Old Irish Saga 

 edited and translated by Kuno Meyer, With Essays upon The Irish Vision of the Happy 

 Otherworld and the Celtic doctrine of Re-birth by Alfred Nutt, 2 vols. (London, 1897). 



