11 - The saint and the world: the Middle Dutch Voyage of Saint Brendan

Summary

In memory of Marlies, whose journey came to such a sudden end

Just like King Arthur, the Irish saint Brendan more than five hundred years after his death (c. 580) enjoyed considerable popularity as a protagonist in fictional narrative. Besides his Vita three other texts about him were in circulation. The first, the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (hereafter cited as Navigatio), has been handed down in more than forty manuscripts and been translated into various languages, including Middle English and Middle Dutch. The original was probably written in Lotharingia between the eighth and tenth centuries.

A few centuries later two other Brendan stories were written in a vernacular tongue. The first of these, Le Voyage de saint Brendan by Benedeit (which will not be discussed here), is a free, but not essentially different, version of the Navigatio. In addition, around 1150 an entirely independent Brendan story, De reis van Sint Brandaan (The Voyage of Saint Brendan, hereafter cited as Voyage) was composed in a Middle Frankish dialect, presumably in the Rhineland region. This Frankish Voyage was handed down in three versions: a Middle Dutch and a German text in verse, both extant in two manuscripts, and another German one in prose. All versions of the Voyage which have survived go back to a lost original of which the contents can be reconstructed quite satisfactorily despite differences in detail between the extant texts.