Medieval Nature: Class 10, Bredan’s Voyage / The Sweet Hereafters
Several caveats before I begin properly: over 120 manuscripts of the Brendan voyage survive, in a variety of languages. Ages ago, I taught a translation of an early Latin version; I taught this Anglo-Norman version last, here, 11 years ago. I can’t say I’ve done much more than brushed the scholarship. Consider this presentation as just a hint of a reading and a glance in the direction of what might be worth further thought.
I’m talking about the variety of ends in Brendan’s quest; I’m hoping in later conversation to talk about the place of “Nature” in all this. One driver of my paper is Terran Andrew’s argument for “archipelagic” readings of islands over “insular exceptionalism.” In the political systems and interpretations she decries, “insular exceptionalism” marks an island as inherently separated from other places, demanding either that its inhabitants preserve themselves against the outside – think Brexit as one disastrous outcome – or that self-identified members of the mainland cut off the island and its inhabitants utterly from themselves except as a colonial resource. Another driver, naturally, is Richard Rouse’s 2016 review essay for postmedieval, where he champions a set of books advancing “North Sea archipelagic studies,” which collectively “highlight the connections, rather than the differences, between the disparate islands and territories bordering the North Sea.” With all the suspicion that I have about “blurring boundaries” and the supposed liberatory possibilities thereof, Andrews and Rouse have helped me.
Let’s bear in mind, then, that Brendan and his monks depart from Ireland – already an island on the edge of the known world – and, as they sail and row to a particular paradise, Adam’s first home (50-53), they encounter one island after another, some bare rock, some exploding, some lush and green, and one, visited repeatedly, an actual living, enormous animals, the whale Jasconius. As we heard already in today’s other presentation, Brendan’s voyage is monastic, in that he travels with monks, meets with monks, and celebrates Christian holidays in a monastic manner. The islands are not disconnected, then, but joined through the universal practice of Christian monasticism. Just as a tormented soul brings his torment with him wherever he goes – “why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” per Mephistopheles’s famous lament from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – so too a monk brings his universal practice with him wherever he lands, or indeed wherever he sails (675). The islands are refuges, but, as wonderous as they are, refuges of a familiar sort, as glorious as the monks welcomed in each.
And while Brendan has declared his intent to reach Paradise, and while he does reach it, finally, his journey takes him to one paradise after another. This is not a journey from an inviolate point a to an inviolate point b, not a chute, but a swirling through a sea of islands and fish and monsters and demons and angels, where some new paradise might turn up just over the next wave or amid the thick of fog.
Some new paradise, or some other hell: because that’s what first grabbed my attention, viz., that Brendan speaks of two hells, or possibly three. They lose a monk to one hell: there “they see hell quite open / Hell discharges fire and flames, / Burning poles and blades of metal, / Pitch and sulphur right up to the clouds, / And then receives them back, for they belong to it” (1210-4). When they find Judas, the tormented disciple speaks of two hells “separated by the sea” (1347), one “on the mountain, the other…in the valley” (1345), each of whose inhabitants falsely believe the others suffer nothing. The two hells, or three, suggest that the point of Brendan’s journey is not the destination, but the function, or the experience, of each place: the lesson it might impart, or the beings that might be met, whose meaning, that is, rests not on its separation from other places, but from what sense Brendan and his monks can make of it. The idea isn’t complete yet, but let’s try this for now: these are no more distinct islands than our own thoughts are islands separate from the other.
Let me list the paradises then. We have islands that would have struck monastic readers as like the dwelling places of the Desert Fathers. Pre-medieval texts spoke of holy men – chiefly men – who fled the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean to “deserts” to live singly or to cluster around a holy man. Desert monks were blessed with miraculous powers. They might be found dead, frozen in a state of perpetual prayer. They might revert to the unclothed purity of Eden but be covered from the prying eyes of the not-quite-as-holy by their hair, as was Mary of Egypt, and as was Paul the Hermit – a desert father! – in this story (1535). They might undo the Fall by having animals as servants. Saint Zosimus can bury Mary of Egypt when God sends him a lion to dig her grave. So too we have Saint Ailbe served by otters (like Cuthbert in Bede’s Life!), and Brendan and his monks provided with a whale as a living platform for monastic service. The ocean is a desert, teeming with birds and beasts and holy men, a perfect place to test oneself in a place at once of the world and outside it. That’s one paradise.
Another is the glory and delight of the otherworld. The fallen angels as birds, singing beautifully on the “Paradise of Birds” (546); the crystalline palace (270 ff), especially, that invites a monk to steal a goblet (308 ff), as happens with a visitor to the fairy otherworld in Gerald of Wales’ Itinerary through Wales, a boy who steals a golden ball and is barred forever from the almost Brahmin-like perfection of its tiny inhabitants. When the thieving monk repents and dies, his soul “goes to Paradise” (349): which one?[1]
And especially the New Jerusalem promised of Revelation: “the city itself pure gold, like to clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper: the second, sapphire: the third, a chalcedony: the fourth, an emerald” (21:18-19), and so on (1690).
The meal of the serpent (990) may even be drawn from Jewish belief in the meal of the end days, when the righteous will feast on Leviathan. Another paradise.
What awaits in each is respite from want (410 ff, the island with the enormous sheep). What most offer is s retardation of aging, uninterrupted health (422; 741), a liberation from labor (764), and, in the paradise of paradises, pure delight, a freedom, it seems, even from asceticism, as if monastic restraint had finally been exchanged for the delights of eternity: “the wood is always filled with game” (1753).
It would be a misreading to argue that the Voyage of Brendan has neither conclusion nor destination; but it would be a misreading, too, to brush aside its accumulation of paradises and hells, how its archipelago is open to all hopes and fears, how it operates by some other logic than the strict separation of life from singularly infernal or heavenly hereafter. I’m hoping we can do something with this archipelagic otherworld in discussion.
- Whereas Brendan is able to take a chalice with God’s blessing at 1100, a donation to his perfect practice. ↑
