The Legend of St Brendan: A Comparative Study of the Latin and Anglo-Norman Versions (review)

The stories of St Brendan, the sea-faring monk, delighted and entertained audiences throughout medieval Europe with versions of his adventures appearing at great distances from his native Ireland. It is not hard to see why, with tales of floating islands, giant fish, and lands populated only by sheep, punctuating long sea voyages that went far beyond the boundaries of the known world. There has been vigorous historical and literary interest in these stories from scholars of early Irish history and literature, as well as further afield. A new study focusing on two of the many versions of St Brendan's legends is thus welcome in an interesting but by no means overcrowded field.

J. S. Mackley's study juxtaposes the ninth-century Latin Navagatio Sancti Brendani abbatis and the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan and analyses them both through the lens of the theories of Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A structural approach to a literary genre [1973]). Mackley argues, following Todorov, that in order for audiences to follow the purpose of the texts the narratives need to be structured in a way that allows them to proceed from known realistic story elements towards a point of 'hesitation' when faced with unreal, fantastic elements. 'By reaching this "hesitation" the audience are potentially receptive to the didactic message presented in the two versions' (p. 3). His study then follows the structure of the texts themselves with detailed examination of each episode and where it fits in the model of fantastic/uncanny that he has developed.

There are four substantive chapters in this study. The first traverses familiar ground in detailing the Brendan story and the main hagiographical sources before moving on to discuss the manuscript sources for the two versions. The next three chapters then follow the 'fantastic/uncanny' model by detailing the known or familiar elements at the beginning of the texts (Chapter 2), then the 'marvellous' elements (Chapter 3), ending with the didactic message that is at the core of both texts, the path to salvation (Chapter 4). There are also two appendices, the first a detailed manuscript stemma of both texts and the second a translation of the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan.

There are many fascinating details in this analysis, with its very detailed reading of each episode in each text. The analysis of the journeying from mundane through uncanny to the marvellous and the divine reveals the theological depths within these seemingly fantastical stories. Unfortunately, the structure of the analysis where each episode of the two texts is directly compared allows for a great deal of repetition, and Mackley has fallen into this trap rather frequently. There are many examples of this: the episode of the Paradise of the Birds in the Navagatio, for instance, is described fully and then followed by a similarly detailed description of it from the Voyage. The impression of repetitiveness is further exacerbated by transitions between chapters and sections of chapters that repeatedly summarize what has just been spelled out in exhaustive detail.

Perhaps more challenging is the rather shallow historical context within which the literary analysis is situated. The discrepancy in dating Brendan's birth from the Irish annals is quite usual for early Irish events, and probably does not need the rather laborious footnote to explain it (p. 43, n. 126). The discussion on hagiography begins somewhat disconcertingly with a definition from a dictionary of literary terms (p. 22, n. 34), and then moves on to Delehaye's seminal The Legends of the Saints, without reference to the recent scholarship on Irish hagiography by Elva Johnstone, Máire Herbert and others.

However, these are relatively minor lapses. A more substantial difficulty with the contextual arguments is exemplified in the discussion of claustrophobia as a mild form of the 'uncanny'. I found this analysis to...