The Voyage of Bran was perhaps the earliest of the Immrama or ‘Voyage Tales’, but the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, (the Voyage of Saint Brendan) was to become one of the most influential texts of the Middle Ages. As Alfred Nutt commented“Of all classes of ancient Irish mythic depiction this is the most famous and the one which has most directly affected the remainder of Western European literature. For the Voyage of Saint Brendan, which touched so profoundly the imagination of medieval man, which was translated into every European tongue, which drove forth adventurers into the Western Sea, and was one of the contributory causes of the discovery of the New World

The Voyage of Saint Brendan is but the latest and definitely Christian example of the genre of storytelling which had already flourished for centuries in Ireland, and it seemed good to an unknown writer to dress the old half-pagan marvels in orthodox monkish garb, and thus start them afresh on their triumphal march through the literature of the world.”Tolkien was to take the Immram and create a great poem of one hundred and thirty two lines. Both the poem and the prose tale begin at Brendan’s monastery of Clonfert, Galway – his ‘Meadow of Miracles’, whose Celtic name is Cluain-ferta.

In both Tolkien’s “Immram” and the Latin prose tale, Brendan’s journey is to a place of ultimate holiness in which Tolkien summons up one of the master images of all of his work, The Tree of Tales, which is a symbol of another world between our own and heaven. Tolkien significantly removes the Land of Promise from the Atlantic, which we now know is not infinite, to leave us free of the need to think of it as an island at all and even to think of it in any particular terms whatsoever. He transforms it from a future haven from persecution for the Saints into a region outside time and mysteriously evocative of the less literal heaven.

Tolkien’s rewriting of the three episodes of the Navagatio makes his poem a successful and therefore, essentially happy, pilgrim’s progress towards salvation, surviving the demonic volcano under the cloud. Brendan toils into a difficult anchorage on the holy island of The Tree and he hears the song of the third fair kindred who are neither men nor angels but seemingly somewhere between these two. He is then ready for admission briefly to some paradise-like place beyond this world where he see things out of mind, and death becomes the only fitting climax to the poem. Lewis achieved the same effect in the Chronicles of Narnia. And the mythical planetary voyages of Dr Ransom in his Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet continue to have resonances for us in Star Trek.For both Tolkien and Lewis it was only by myth-making, only by becoming a sub-creator in inventing stories that man could ascribe to the perfect state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.“Our myths may be misguided” Tolkien said, “but they steer, however shakily, towards the true harbour, while materialistic progress leads only to a yawning abyss in the iron crown of the power of evil.”He composed a long poem recording his long night talk with Lewis which was instrumental in the latter’s conversion. He called it Mythopoeia – The Making of Myths, and he wrote in his diary,“friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort it has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, poet and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of our Lord”.In 1954 Lewis accepted the Chair of the Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. He died at his home in Oxford on November 22nd, 1963, the day on which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. You will find Lewis’s tomb in the churchyard of his own Parish, Headington Quarry. A plain slab marks the grave which is shared with his brother Warnie, Major W.H. Lewis. It is adorned with a simple cross and with the words “Men must endure their going hence”.Of other Inklings, Charles Williams lies beneath the shadows of the St Cross Church in the centre of Oxford and his fellow Inkling, Hugo Dyson, is buried not far away. But if you are searching for another grave you will have to travel far out of the centre of the city, where, in a plain grave in a public cemetery, you will find a grey slab of Cornish granite on which is inscribed the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892 – 1973.His requiem mass was held in Oxford four days after his death in the plain modern church in Headington which he has attended so often. Prayers and readings were especially chosen by his son John who said the mass with the assistance of Tolkien’s old friend Father Robert Murray and his Parish Priest Monsignor Doran. There was no sermon or quotation from his writings. However, a few weeks later when a memorial service was held in California, a short story Leaf by Niggle was read to the congregation:

“Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening and its branches groaning and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt and guessed and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the tree and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. “It’s a gift!” he said.

For J.R.R.Tolkien, the Master of Middle-earth, it was an epitaph well read.

As an Irish peasant I must return to Bangor where I was born and to those monastic literati of the sixth and seventh centuries, the nualitrides, who so vigorously exploited the new skill of writing in the vernacular to make of this region of South-east Ulster the cradle of written Irish literature. In doing so they allowed me to keep company with kings, to walk with Cuchulainn in Cooley and the Misty Isle of Skye, to weep with Deirdre for the sons of Usnach, to face down Maeve and fight the Morrigan, but most of all to talk with Comgall in his prime and hear the poems of the great Oisin.

Blog Links

Part 1 Adamson’s background

Part 2 The Inklings, Lewis and Tolkien

Part 3 Arthurian Legend

Part 4Voyage of Bran

Concluded