Prev | Current Page 173 | Next

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 1823-1911

"Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic"

Another of these is the voyage of St. Brandan,and another is that of "the sons of O'Corra." A poetical translation ofthis last has been made by T. D. Sullivan of Dublin, and published in hisvolume of poems. (Joyce, p. xiii.) All these voyages illustrated the widerand wider space assigned on the Atlantic ocean to the enchanted islandsuntil they were finally identified, in some cases, with the continentwhich Columbus found.XII. ST. BRANDANTHE legend of St. Brandan, which was very well known in the Middle Ages,was probably first written in Latin prose near the end of the eleventhcentury, and is preserved in manuscript in many English libraries. AnEnglish metrical version, written probably about the beginning of thefourteenth century, is printed under the editorship of Thomas Wright inthe publications of the Percy Society, London, 1844 (XIV.), and it isfollowed in the same volume by an English prose version of 1527. A partialnarrative in Latin prose, with an English version, may be found in W. J.Rees's "Lives of the Cambro-British Saints" (Llandovery, 1853), pp. 251,575. The account of Brandan in the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists maybe found under May 16, the work being arranged under saints' days. Thisaccount excludes the more legendary elements. The best sketch of thesupposed island appears in the _Nouvelles Annales des Voyages_ for1845 (p.


Pages:
161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185