Monks at sea

The phenomenally silly song "St. Brendan's Fair Isle," by the Arkansas folk singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood, tells the wild tale of St. Brendan of Clonfert, sometimes called "Brendan the Navigator:"

We'd been on the ocean for ninety-four days,
And came to a spot where the seas were ablaze;
Those demons from Hades were dancin' with glee
And burnin' the sailors alive on the sea.
Well, St. Brendan walked on the blistering waves,
He drove all those demons right back to their caves,
And all of the saints wore a heavenly smile
As we sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle, fair isle
We sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle.

St. Brendan himself is something of a historical mystery.  He lived from around 484 to 577 C.E., although the first extant mention of him isn't until a hundred years after his death (in Adomnán of Iona's Vita Sancti Columbae), and the earliest account of him as an explorer is a hundred years after that, in the ninth century Martyrology of Tallaght.

The story is that St. Brendan and some of his fellow monks took off into the Atlantic Ocean in a leather-bound coracle in search of an enchanted island he'd heard was "somewhere in the western ocean."  Sources differ as to whether he found it, but upon his return he told (amongst other claims) of a place where "great demons threw down lumps of fiery slag from an island with rivers of gold fire" -- considered by some to be an indication that he reached the volcanic island of Iceland.

While St. Brendan's voyages might well be mythology -- no one, for example, gives much credit to his boat spending time riding on the back of a giant enchanted fish -- the idea of Irish and Scottish monks making it across the north Atlantic actually has some basis in fact.

A medieval illustration of St. Brendan of Clonfert and his fellow explorers (ca. 1460) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The twelfth century Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders) by Icelandic historian Ari Þorgilsson describes the arrival of the first Norse settlers in around 874 C. E., and states that they found some settlements already there -- small clusters of buildings inhabited by "holy men" called Papar (from the Old Irish word papa meaning "monk").  Þorgilsson said that the Papar were Christian ascetics, and when they found out the island was being taken over by pagan Norsemen, they basically said "there goes the neighborhood," upped stakes, and left.  The Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), which in general is considered pretty reliable as a historical document, concurs, and said that when the Papar took off they left behind items that confirmed their Christian faith, including books, bells, crucifixes, and crosiers.

Some historians believe that the place names Papey (which seems to mean "island of the Papar") and the Vestmannaeyjar (the "islands of the western men") hearken back to Irish and Scottish inhabitants who actually predated the Norse settlements, perhaps by as much as two centuries.

While all this is intriguing, it bears mention that despite extensive archaeological investigation of the locations of alleged settlements by the Papar, there have been no unequivocally Celtic artifacts located in Iceland yet.  So right now we're left with a couple of moderately-plausible historical documents and a highly mythologized account of a saint whose exploits include some highly questionable events such as an island inhabited by bow-and-arrow wielding pig-headed people and a place where Judas Iscariot is tortured by being frozen on one side and burned on the other.

I might believe that St. Brendan sailed to Iceland, but that bit is a little more than I'm willing to swallow.

A statue commemorating St. Brendan's voyage, in Bantry, County Cork, Ireland [Image is in the Public Domain\

Anyhow, that's our historical curiosity of the day.  Whatever the truth of the Brendan story, I find it incredible that back in the days before reliable maps anyone was willing to launch off into the ocean.  I have my adventurous side, but that's way beyond anything I'd ever consider doing.  And that goes double if I thought there was a chance that demons from Hades might burn me alive if my faith wasn't sufficiently strong.

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