The river at Hóp and the Styx
The fortunate island on which the monk Mernoc lived (at the beginning of the “Navigatio”) was called “Insula Deliciosa.” The great river that Brandan found in the Terra Repromissionis, and that ran through the middle of the island, may be compared to the stream that Karlsevne found at Hóp in Wineland, which fell into a lake and thence into the sea, and where they entered the mouth of the river. But the river which divided the Terra Repromissionis, and which Brandan could not cross, was evidently originally the river of death, Styx or Acheron in Greek mythology (“Gjǫll” in Norse mythology). One might be tempted to suppose that, in the same way as the whole description of Wineland has been dechristianised from the Terra Repromissionis, the realistic, and therefore often rationalising, Icelanders have transformed the river in the Promised Land, the ancient river of death, into the stream at Hóp.
Other passages also of the descriptions of the Wineland voyages present similarities with Brandan’s voyage; and similar resemblances are found with other Irish legends, so many, in fact, that they cannot be explained as coincidences. The “Navigatio Sancti Brandani” was written in the eleventh century, or in any case before 1100[345] (but parts of the legend of Brandan may belong to the seventh and eighth centuries). The work was widely diffused in Europe in the twelfth century, and was also well known in Iceland; we still possess an Old Norse translation of parts of it in the “Heilagra Manna sǫgur” [edited by Unger, Christiania, 1877, i.]. Through oral narratives the mythical features which are included in this legend have evidently helped to form the tradition of the Wineland voyages.
Wine-fruit and wine in Irish legend
In the tale of the voyage of Maelduin and his companions (“Imram Maelduin,” see above, [p. 336]),[346] it is related that they came to an island where there were many trees, like willow or hazel, with wonderful fruit like apples, or wine-fruit, with a thick, large shell; its juice had so intoxicating an effect that Maelduin slept for a day and a night after having drunk it; and when he awoke, he told his companions to collect as much as they could of it, for the world had never produced anything so lovely. They then filled all their vessels with the juice, which they pressed out of the fruit, and left the island. They mixed the juice with water to mitigate its intoxicating and soporific effect, as it was so powerful.[347] This reminds us of Tyrker in the “Grönlendinga-þáttr,” who gets drunk from eating the grapes he found.[348]
Wine is, moreover, a prominent feature in many of the Irish legends of sea-voyages. The voyagers often find intoxicating drinks, which make them sleep for several days, and they are often tormented by burning thirst and come to islands with springs that give a marvellously quickening drink. In the tale of the voyage of the three sons of Ua Corra (twelfth century ?) they arrive at an island where a stream of wine flows through a forest of oaks, which glitters enticingly with juicy fruits. They ate of the apples, drank a little of the stream of wine, and were immediately satisfied and felt neither wounds nor sickness any more. In the tale of Maelduin there is an island with soil as white as a feather and with a spring which on Wednesdays and Fridays gives whey or water, on Sundays and the days of martyrs good milk, but on the days of the Apostles, of Mary and of John the Baptist, and on the great festivals it gives ale and wine [cf. Zimmer, 1889, pp. 163, 189].
Resemblances to Lucian
Brandan’s Grape-island, Maelduin who intoxicates himself by eating the wine-fruit, and the stream of wine flowing through the oak forest, all bear a remarkable resemblance to what the Greek sophist and satirist Lucian (second century A.D.) relates in his fables in the “Vera Historia” about the seafarers who came to a lofty wooded island. As they wandered through the woods they came to a river, which instead of water ran with wine, like Chios wine. In many places it was broad and deep enough to be navigable, and it had its source in many great vines, which hung full of grapes. In the river were fish of the colour and taste of wine. They swallowed some so greedily that they became thoroughly intoxicated. But afterwards they had the idea of mixing these wine-fish with water-fish, whereby they lost the too-powerful taste of wine and were a good dish. After wading through the river of wine they came upon some remarkable vines, the upper part of which were like well-developed women down to the belt. Their fingers ran out into twigs full of grapes, their heads were covered with vine-branches, leaves and grapes, instead of hair. “The ladies kissed us on the mouth,” says Lucian, “but those who were kissed became drunk on the spot and reeled. Only their fruit they would not allow us to take, and they cried out in pain if we plucked a grape or two off them. On the other hand, some of them showed a desire to pair with us, but two of my companions who complied with them had to pay dearly for it; for ... they grew together with them in such a way that they became one stem with common roots.” After this strange experience the voyagers filled their empty barrels partly with ordinary water, partly with wine from the river, and on the following morning they left the island. In the Isle of the Blest, at which they afterwards arrived, there were, in addition to many rivers of water, of honey, of sweet-scented essences and of oil, seven rivers of milk and eight of wine. We even find a parallel in Lucian to Maelduin’s white island with the springs of milk and wine, as the travellers come to a sea of milk, where there was a great island of cheese, covered with vines full of grapes; but these yielded milk instead of wine [cf. Wieland, 1789, iv. pp. 150 ff., 188 f., 196]. A direct literary connection between Lucian and the Irish myths can hardly be probable, as he is not thought to have been known in Western Europe before the fourteenth century; but he was much read in Eastern Europe, and oral tales founded on his stories may have reached the Irish. The resemblances are so pronounced and so numerous that it does not seem very probable that they should be wholly accidental. Such an oral connection might, for instance, have been brought about by the Scandinavians, who had much intercourse with Miklagard (Byzantium), or by the Arabs, who in fact preserved a great part of Greek literature, and who were in constant communication both with Celts and with Scandinavians.
Connection of the Brandan legend with northern waters
That a mythical island like the Isle of Grapes—or perhaps others as well, such as the “Insula Deliciosa”—might be the origin of the “Vinland hit Góða” of the Icelanders, to which one sailed from Greenland (and of Adam of Bremen’s Winland), appears natural also from the fact that many of the islands and tracts that are mentioned in the “Navigatio,” and that for the most part are also mentioned in the older tale of Maelduin, are undoubtedly connected with northern and western waters. That this must be so is easily understood when one considers the voyages of Irish monks to the Faroes and Iceland. The Sheep Island, which was full of sheep, and where Brandan obtained his paschal lamb, must be the Faroes, where the sheep are mentioned even by Dicuil (see [p. 163]), just as the island with the many birds also reminds us of Dicuil’s account of these islands; the island on the borders of Hell, whose steep cliffs were black as coal, where one of Brandan’s monks, when he set foot ashore, was instantly seized and burnt by demons, and which at their departure they saw covered with fire and flames, may have some connection with Iceland.[349] But it also bears some resemblance to the Hell Island that Lucian’s voyagers come to, surrounded by steep cliffs, where there were stinking fumes of asphalt, sulphur, pitch, and roasted human beings. When Brandan arrives at the curdled sea (“mare quasi coagulatum”), and has to sail through darkness before he comes to the Land of Happiness, or when we hear of a thick fog like a wall about the kingdom of Manannan, we again think of the northern regions where the Liver Sea lay, and where Adam of Bremen had his dark or mist-filled sea.