prophecies which were attributed to him and were often said to be
fulfilled by actual events in history. Thus one of the many places where
Merlin's grave was said to be was Drummelzion in Tweeddale, Scotland. On
the east side of the churchyard a brook called the Pansayl falls into the
Tweed, and there was this prophecy as to their union:--
"When Tweed and Pansayl join at Merlin's grave,
Scotland and England shall one monarch have."
Sir Walter Scott tells us, in his "Border Minstrelsy," that on the day of
the coronation of James VI. of Scotland the Tweed accordingly overflowed
and joined the Pansayl at the prophet's grave. It was also claimed by one
of the witnesses at the trial of Jeanne d'Arc, that there was a prediction
by Merlin that France would be saved by a peasant girl from Lorraine.
These prophesies have been often reprinted, and have been translated into
different languages, and there was published in London, in 1641, "The Life
of Merlin, surnamed Ambrosius, His Prophesies and Predictions interpreted,
and their Truth made Good by our English Annals." Another book was also
published in London, in 1683, called "Merlin revived in a Discourse of
Prophesies, Predictions, and their Remarkable Accomplishments."
VIII. LANCELOT
The main sources of information concerning Lancelot are the "Morte
d'Arthur," Newell's "King Arthur and the Table Round," and the
publications of the Early English Text Society. See also Rhys's "Arthurian
Legend," pp. 127, 147, etc.
IX. THE HALF-MAN
The symbolical legend on which this tale is founded will be found in Lady
Charlotte Guest's translation of the "Mabinogion" (London, 1877), II. p.
344. It is an almost unique instance, in the imaginative literature of
that period, of a direct and avowed allegory. There is often allegory, but
it is usually contributed by modern interpreters, and would sometimes
greatly astound the original fabulists.
X. ARTHUR
The earliest mention of the island of Avalon, or Avilion, in connection
with the death of Arthur, is a slight one by the old English chronicler,
Geoffrey of Monmouth (Book XI. c. 2), and the event is attributed by him
to the year 542. Wace's French romance was an enlargement of Geoffrey; and
the narrative of Layamon (at the close of the twelfth century) an
explanation of that of Wace. Layamon's account of the actual death of
Arthur, as quoted in the text, is to be found in the translation, a very
literal one, by Madden (Madden's "Layamon's Brut," III. pp. 140-146).
The earliest description of the island itself is by an anonymous author
known as "Pseudo-Gildas," supposed to be a thirteenth-century Breton
writer (Meyer's "Voyage of Bram," I. p. 237), and quoted by Archbishop
Usher in his "British Ecclesiastical Antiquities" (1637), p. 273, who thus
describes it in Latin hexameters:--
"Cingitur oceano memorabilis insula nullis
Desolata bonis: non fur, nec praedo, nec hostis
Insidiatur ibi: nec vis, nec bruma nec aestas,
Immoderata furit. Pax et concordia, pubes
Ver manent aeternum. Nec flos, nec lilia desunt,
Nec rosa, nec violae: flores et poma sub unâ
Fronde gerit pomus. Habitant sine labe cruoris
Semper ibi juvenes cum virgine: nulla senectus,
Nulla vis morbi, nullus dolor; omnia plena
Laetitiae; nihil hic proprium, communia quaeque.
Regit virgo locis et rebus praesidet istis,
Virginibus stipata suis, pulcherrima pulchris;
Nympha decens vultu, generosis patribus orta,
Consilio pollens, medicinas nobilis arte.
At simul Arthurus regni diadema reliquit,
Substitutique sibi regem, se transtulit illic;
Anno quingeno quadragenoque secundo
Post incarnatum sine patris semine natum.
Immodicè laesus, Arthurus tendit ad aulam
Regis Avallonis; ubi virgo regia vulnus
Illius tractans, sanati membra reservat
Ipsa sibi: vivuntque simul; si credere fas est."
A translation of this passage into rhyming English follows; both of these
being taken from Way's "Fabliaux" (London, 1815), II. pp. 233-235.
"By the main ocean's wave encompass'd, stands
A memorable isle, fill'd with all good:
No thief, no spoiler there, no wily foe
With stratagem of wasteful war; no rage
Of heat intemperate, or of winter's cold;
But spring, full blown, with peace and concord reigns:
Prime bliss of heart and season, fitliest join'd!
Flowers fail not there: the lily and the rose,
With many a knot of fragrant violets bound;
And, loftier, clustering down the bended boughs,
Blossom with fruit combin'd, rich apples hang.
"Beneath such mantling shades for ever dwell
In virgin innocence and honour pure,
Damsels and youths, from age and sickness free,
And ignorant of woe, and fraught with joy,
In choice community of all things best.
O'er these, and o'er the welfare of this land,
Girt with her maidens, fairest among fair,
Reigns a bright virgin sprung from generous sires,
In counsel strong, and skill'd in med'cine's lore.
Of her (Britannia's diadem consign'd
To other brow), for his deep wound and wide
Great Arthur sought relief: hither he sped
(Nigh two and forty and five hundred years
Since came the incarnate Son to save mankind),
And in Avallon's princely hall repos'd.
His wound the royal damsel search'd; she heal'd;
And in this isle still holds him to herself
In sweet society,--so fame say true!"
XI. MAELDUIN
This narrative is taken partly from Nutt's "Voyage of Bram" (I. 162) and
partly from Joyce's "Ancient Celtic Romances." The latter, however, allows
Maelduin sixty comrades instead of seventeen, which is Nutt's version.
There are copies of the original narrative in the Erse language at the
British Museum, and in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The voyage,
which may have had some reality at its foundation, is supposed to have
taken place about the year 700 A.D. It belongs to the class known as
Imrama, or sea-expeditions. Another of these is the voyage of St. Brandan,
and another is that of "the sons of O'Corra." A poetical translation of
this last has been made by T. D. Sullivan of Dublin, and published in his
volume of poems. (Joyce, p. xiii.) All these voyages illustrated the wider
and wider space assigned on the Atlantic ocean to the enchanted islands
until they were finally identified, in some cases, with the continent
which Columbus found.
XII. ST. BRANDAN
THE 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 eleventh
century, and is preserved in manuscript in many English libraries. An
English metrical version, written probably about the beginning of the
fourteenth century, is printed under the editorship of Thomas Wright in
the publications of the Percy Society, London, 1844 (XIV.), and it is
followed in the same volume by an English prose version of 1527. A partial
narrative 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 may
be found under May 16, the work being arranged under saints' days. This
account excludes the more legendary elements. The best sketch of the
supposed island appears in the _Nouvelles Annales des Voyages_ for
1845 (p. 293), by D'Avezac. Professor O'Curry places the date of the
alleged voyage or voyages at about the year 560 ("Lectures on the
Manuscript Materials for Irish History," p. 289). Good accounts of the
life in the great monasteries of Brandan's period may be found in Digby's
"Mores Catholici" or "Ages of Faith"; in Montalembert's "Monks of the
West" (translation); in Villemarqué's "La Legende Celtique et la Poésie
des Cloistres en Irlande, en Cambrie et en Bretagne" (Paris, 1864). The
poem on St. Brandan, stanzas from which are quoted in the text, is by
Denis Florence McCarthy, and may be found in the _Dublin University
Magazine_ (XXXI. p. 89); and there is another poem on the subject--a
very foolish burlesque--in the same magazine (LXXXIX. p. 471). Matthew
Arnold's poem with the same title appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_
(LXII. p. 133), and may be found in the author's collected works in the
form quoted below.
The legends of St. Brandan, it will be observed, resemble so much the
tales of Sindbad the Sailor and others in the "Arabian Nights"--which have
also the island-whale, the singing birds, and other features--that it is
impossible to doubt that some features of tradition were held in common
with the Arabs of Spain.
In later years (the twelfth century), a geographer named Honoré d'Autun
declared, in his "Image of the World," that there was in the ocean a
certain island agreeable and fertile beyond all others, now unknown to
men, once discovered by chance and then lost again, and that this island
was the one which Brandan had visited. In several early maps, before the
time of Columbus, the Madeira Islands appear as "The Fortunate Islands of
St. Brandan," and on the famous globe of Martin Behaim, made in the very
year when Columbus sailed, there is a large island much farther west than
Madeira, and near the equator, with an inscription saying that in the year
565, St. Brandan arrived at this island and saw many wondrous things,
returning to his own land afterwards. Columbus heard this island mentioned
at Ferro, where men declared that they had seen it in the distance. Later,
the chart of Ortelius, in the sixteenth century, carried it to the
neighborhood of Ireland; then it was carried south again, and was supposed
all the time to change its place through enchantment, and when Emanuel of
Portugal, in 1519, renounced all claim to it, he described it as "The
Hidden Island." In 1570 a Portuguese expedition was sent which claimed
actually to have touched the mysterious island, indeed to have found there
the vast impression of a human foot--doubtless of the baptized giant
Mildus--and also a cross nailed to a tree, and three stones laid in a
triangle for cooking food. Departing hastily from the island, they left
two sailors behind, but could never find the place again.
Again and again expeditions were sent out in search of St. Brandan's
island, usually from the Canaries--one in 1604 by Acosta, one in 1721 by
Dominguez; and several sketches of the island, as seen from a distance,
were published in 1759 by a Franciscan priest in the Canary Islands, named
Viere y Clarijo, including one made by himself on May 3, 1759, about 6
A.M., in presence of more than forty witnesses. All these sketches depict
the island as having its chief length from north to south, and formed of
two unequal hills, the highest of these being at the north, they having
between them a depression covered with trees. The fact that this resembles
the general form of Palma, one of the Canary Islands, has led to the
belief that it may have been an ocean mirage, reproducing the image of
that island, just as the legends themselves reproduce, here and there, the
traditions of the "Arabian Nights."
In a map drawn by the Florentine physician, Toscanelli, which was sent by
him to Columbus in 1474 to give his impression of the Asiatic coast,--
lying, as he supposed, across the Atlantic,--there appears the island of
St. Brandan. It is as large as all the Azores or Canary Islands or Cape de
Verde Islands put together; its southern tip just touches the equator, and
it lies about half-way between the Cape de Verde Islands and Zipangu or
Japan, which was then believed to lie on the other side of the Atlantic.
Mr. Winsor also tells us that the apparition of this island "sometimes
came to sailors' eyes" as late as the last century (Winsor's "Columbus,"
112).
He also gives a reproduction of Toscanelli's map now lost, as far as can
be inferred from descriptions (Winsor, p. 110).
The following is Matthew Arnold's poem:--
SAINT BRANDAN
Saint Brandan sails the northern main;
The brotherhoods of saints are glad.
He greets them once, he sails again;
So late!--such storms!--the Saint is mad!
He heard, across the howling seas,
Chime convent-bells on wintry nights;
He saw, on spray-swept Hebrides,
Twinkle the monastery lights;
But north, still north, Saint Brandan steer'd--
And now no bells, no convents more!
The hurtling Polar lights are near'd,
The sea without a human shore.
At last--(it was the Christmas-night;
Stars shone after a day of storm)--
He sees float past an iceberg white,
And on it--Christ!--a living form.
That furtive mien, that scowling eye,
Of hair that red and tufted fell--
It is--oh, where shall Brandan fly?--
The traitor Judas, out of hell!
Palsied with terror, Brandan sate;
The moon was bright, the iceberg near.
He hears a voice sigh humbly: "Wait!
By high permission I am here.
"One moment wait, thou holy man!
On earth my crime, my death, they knew;
My name is under all men's ban--
Ah, tell them of my respite, too!
"Tell them, one blessed Christmas-night--
(It was the first after I came,
Breathing self-murder, frenzy, spite,
To rue my guilt in endless flame)--
"I felt, as I in torment lay
'Mid the souls plagued by heavenly power,
An angel touch my arm and say:
_Go hence, and cool thyself an hour!_
"'Ah, whence this mercy, Lord?' I said;
_The Leper recollect_, said he,
_Who ask'd the passers-by for aid,_
_In Joppa, and thy charity._
"Then I remember'd how I went,
In Joppa, through the public street,
One morn when the sirocco spent
Its storm of dust with burning heat;
"And in the street a leper sate,
Shivering with fever, naked, old;
Sand raked his sores from heel to pate,
The hot wind fever'd him five-fold.
"He gazed upon me as I pass'd,
And murmur'd: _Help me, or I die!_--
To the poor wretch my cloak I cast,
Saw him look eased, and hurried by.
"Oh, Brandan, think what grace divine,
What blessing must full goodness shower,
When fragment of it small, like mine,
Hath such inestimable power!
"Well-fed, well-clothed, well-friended, I
Did that chance act of good, that one!
Then went my way to kill and lie--
Forgot my good as soon as done.
"That germ of kindness, in the womb
Of mercy caught, did not expire;
Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,
And friends me in this pit of fire.
"Once every year, when carols wake
On earth the Christmas-night's repose,
Arising from the sinner's lake,
I journey to these healing snows.
"I stanch with ice my burning breast,
With silence balm my whirling brain;
O Brandan! to this hour of rest
That Joppan leper's ease was pain."
Tears started to Saint Brandan's eyes;
He bow'd his head, he breathed a prayer--
Then look'd, and lo, the frosty skies!
The iceberg, and no Judas there!
The island of St. Brandan's was sometimes supposed to lie in the Northern
Atlantic, sometimes farther south. It often appears as the Fortunate Isle
or Islands, "Insulae Fortunatae" or "Beatae."
On some early maps (1306 to 1471) there is an inlet on the western coast
of Ireland called "Lacus Fortunatus," which is filled with Fortunate
Islands to the number of 358 (Humboldt, "Examen," II. p. 159), and in one
map of 1471 both these and the supposed St. Brandan's group appear in
different parts of the ocean under the same name. When the Canary Islands
were discovered, they were supposed to be identical with St. Brandan's,
but the latter was afterwards supposed to lie southeast of them. After the
discovery of the Azores various expeditions were sent to search for St.
Brandan's until about 1721. It was last reported as seen in 1759. A full
bibliography will be found in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History,"
I. p. 48, and also in Humboldt's "Examen," II. p. 163, and early maps
containing St. Brandan's will be found in Winsor (I. pp. 54, 58). The
first of these is Pizigani's (1387), containing "Ysolae dictae
Fortunatae," and the other that of Ortelius (1587), containing "S.
Brandain."
XIII. HY-BRASAIL
"The people of Aran, with characteristic enthusiasm, fancy, that at
certain periods, they see Hy-Brasail, elevated far to the west in their
watery horizon. This has been the universal tradition of the ancient
Irish, who supposed that a great part of Ireland had been swallowed by the
sea, and that the sunken part often rose and was seen hanging in the
horizon: such was the popular notion. The Hy-Brasail of the Irish is
evidently a part of the Atlantis of Plato; who, in his 'Timaeus,' says
that that island was totally swallowed up by a prodigious earthquake."
(O'Flaherty's "Discourse on the History and Antiquities of the Southern
Islands of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland," 1824, p. 139.)
The name appeared first (1351) on the chart called the Medicean
Portulana, applied to an island off the Azores. In Pizigani's map (1367)
there appear three islands of this name, two off the Azores and one off
Ireland. From this time the name appears constantly in maps, and in 1480 a
man named John Jay went out to discover the island on July 14, and
returned unsuccessful on September 18. He called it Barsyle or Brasylle;
and Pedro d'Ayalo, the Spanish Ambassador, says that such voyages were
made for seven years "according to the fancies of the Genoese, meaning
Sebastian Cabot." Humboldt thinks that the wood called Brazil-wood was
supposed to have come from it, as it was known before the South American
Brazil was discovered.
A manuscript history of Ireland, written about 1636, in the Library of
the Royal Irish Academy, says that Hy-Brasail was discovered by a Captain
Rich, who saw its harbor but could never reach it. It is mentioned by
Jeremy Taylor ("Dissuasives from Popery," 1667), and the present narrative
is founded partly on an imaginary one, printed in a pamphlet in London,
1675, and reprinted in Hardiman's "Irish Minstrelsy" (1831), II. p. 369.
The French Geographer Royal, M. Tassin, thinks that the island may have
been identical with Porcupine Bank, once above water. In Jeffrey's atlas
(1776) it appears as "the imaginary island of O'Brasil." "Brazil Rock"
appears on a chart of Purdy, 1834 (Humboldt's "Examen Critique," II. p.
163). Two rocks always associated with it, Mayda and Green Rock, appear on
an atlas issued in 1866. See bibliography in Winsor's "Narrative and
Critical History," I. p. 49, where there are a number of maps depicting it
(I. pp. 54-57). The name of the island is derived by Celtic scholars from
_breas_, large, and _i_, island; or, according to O'Brien's
"Irish Dictionary," its other form of O'Brasile means a large imaginary
island (Hardiman's "Irish Minstrelsy," I. p. 369). There are several
families named Brazil in County Waterford, Ireland ("Transactions of the
Ossianic Society, Dublin," 1854, I. p. 81). The following poem about the
island, by Gerald Griffin, will be found in Sparling's "Irish Minstrelsy"
(1888), p. 427:--
HY-BRASAIL, THE ISLE OF THE BLEST
On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell
A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell;
Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest,
And they called it Hy-Brasail, the isle of the blest.
From year unto year on the ocean's blue rim,
The beautiful spectre showed lovely and dim;
The golden clouds curtained the deep where it lay,
And it looked like an Eden away, far away!
A peasant who heard of the wonderful tale,
In the breeze of the Orient loosened his sail;
From Ara, the holy, he turned to the west,
For though Ara was holy, Hy-Brasail was blest.
He heard not the voices that called from the shore--
He heard not the rising wind's menacing roar;
Home, kindred, and safety he left on that day,
And he sped to Hy-Brasail, away, far away!
Morn rose on the deep, and that shadowy isle,
O'er the faint rim of distance, reflected its smile;
Noon burned on the wave, and that shadowy shore
Seemed lovelily distant, and faint as before;
Lone evening came down on the wanderer's track,
And to Ara again he looked timidly back;
O far on the verge of the ocean it lay,
Yet the isle of the blest was away, far away!
Rash dreamer, return! O ye winds of the main,
Bear him back to his own peaceful Ara again,
Rash fool! for a vision of fanciful bliss,
To barter thy calm life of labor and peace.
The warning of reason was spoken in vain;
He never revisited Ara again!
Night fell on the deep, amidst tempest and spray,
And he died on the waters, away, far away!
XIV. ISLAND OF SATAN'S HAND
The early part of this narrative is founded on Professor O'Curry's
Lectures on the manuscript materials of Irish history; it being another of
those "Imrama" or narratives of ocean expeditions to which the tale of St.
Brandan belongs. The original narrative lands the three brothers
ultimately in Spain, and it is a curious fact that most of what we know of
the island of Satanaxio or Satanajio--which remained so long on the maps--
is taken from an Italian narrative of three other brothers, cited by
Formaleoni, "Il Pellegrinaccio di tre giovanni," by Christoforo Armeno
(Gaffarel, "Les Iles Fantastiques," p. 91). The coincidence is so peculiar
that it offered an irresistible temptation to link the two trios of
brothers into one narrative and let the original voyagers do the work of
exploration. The explanation given by Gaffarel to the tale is the same
that I have suggested as possible. He says in "Iles Fantastiques de
l'Atlantaque" (p. 12), "S'il nous était permis d'aventurer une hypothèse,
nous croirions voluntiers que les navigateurs de l'époque rencontrèrent,
en s'aventurant dans l'Atlantique, quelques-uns de ces gigantesques
icebergs, ou montagnes de glace, arrachés aux banquises du pôle nord, et
entraînés au sud par les courants, dont la rencontre, assez fréquente,
est, même aujourd'hui, tellement redoutée par les capitaines. Ces
icebergs, quand ils se heurtent contre un navire, le coulent à pic; et
comme ils arrivent à l'improviste, escortés par d'épais brouillards, ils
paraissent réellement sortir du sein des flots, comme sortait la main de
Satan, pour précipiter au fond de l'abîme matelots et navires." As to the
name itself there has been much discussion. On the map of Bianco (1436)--
reproduced in Winsor, I. p. 54--the name "Ya de Lamansatanaxio" distinctly
appears, and this was translated by both Formaleoni and Humboldt as
meaning "the Island of the Hand of Satan." D'Avezac was the first to
suggest that the reference was to two separate islands, the one named "De
la Man" or "Danman," and the other "Satanaxio." He further suggests--
followed by Gaffarel--that the name of the island may originally have been
San Atanagio, thus making its baptism a tribute to St. Athanasius instead
of to Satan. This would certainly have been a curious transformation, and
almost as unexpected in its way as the original conversion of the sinful
brothers from outlaws to missionaries.
XV. ANTILLIA
The name Antillia appears first, but not very clearly, on the Pizigani
map of 1367; then clearly on a map of 1424, preserved at Weimar, on that
of Bianco in 1436, and on the globe of Beheim in 1492, which adds in an
inscription the story of the Seven Bishops. On some maps of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries there appears near it a smaller island under the
name of Sette Cidade, or Sete Ciudades, which is properly another name for
the same island. Toscanelli, in his famous letter to Columbus, recommended
Antillia as a good way-station for his voyage to India. The island is said
by tradition to have been re-discovered by a Portuguese sailor in 1447.
Tradition says that this sailor went hastily to the court of Portugal to
announce the discovery, but was blamed for not having remained longer, and
so fled. It was supposed to be "a large, rectangular island extending from
north to south, lying in the mid Atlantic about lat. 35 N." An ample
bibliography will be found in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History,"
I. p. 48, with maps containing Antillia, I. pp. 54 (Pizigani's), 56, 58.