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The Voyage of Saint Brendan by Edward Reginald Frampton, 1908. Belfast poet Pádraic Fiacc wrote the poem LEGEND, where he suggests the great Irish evangelist St Brendan, met peacefully with the American Native Indian peoples – a different proposition to the later colonists who arrived from Europe searching for wealth.
The Irish Otherworld is more usually described as a paradisal fairyland than a frightening place. [6] Many Celtic Immrams or "voyage stories" and other medieval texts provide evidence of a Celtic belief in an otherworld. One example which is helpful to understand the Celtic concept of the otherworld is The Voyage of Saint Brendan.
Brendan discovering the Faroes and Iceland Stamp sheet FR 252–253 of Postverk Føroya Issued: 18 April 1994 Artist: Colin Harrison. An immram (/ ˈ ɪ m r əm /; plural immrama; Irish: iomramh [ˈʊmˠɾˠəw], 'voyage') is a class of Old Irish tales concerning a hero's sea journey to the Otherworld (see Tír na nÓg and Mag Mell).
The poem shares similar themes and elements with other Irish immrama, such as The Voyage of Brendan and The Voyage of Máel Dúin, both written in early to mid-900.. For example, both Bran's and Máel Dúin's voyagers reach an island of laughter or laughing people, [28] and in each case a crew member is left abandoned.
Despite the naming this tale is considered to form part of the Echtrae milieu, and may have been named as an Immram due to a conflation of Bran (Brain) and St. Brendan. [2] Generally, echtra was the Old Irish word for "adventure" (literally meaning an "outing".
Notable among these are the Irish immrama (tales of a hero's journey to the Otherworld), such as the immram of Uí Corra, or the sea voyages of the 6th-century Irish missionaries Saint Brendan and Saint Malo. These are the source for several legendary Atlantic islands such as Saint Brendan's Island and the Island of Ima. [3]
Norma Roche writes that the poem, along with "The Last Ship", are both full of regret for the loss of the Blessed Realm, and relates them to the Celtic immram tradition of tales about a hero's sea journey to the Otherworld; she notes indeed that Tolkien wrote a 1955 poem called Imram about the voyage of the Irish monk Saint Brendan. [6]
Fimi was surprised that Tolkien apparently linked immram in the shape of St. Brendan's voyages to Ælfwine's journey into the uttermost West, and went on doing so. [11] All the same, she notes the parallels between "the Western happy otherworld island and the geography and function of Valinor", commenting that the Celtic otherworld derives from ...