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 Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands 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.