An Irish monk who attempted to find Paradise by sailing west. He founded a community at Clontarf in western Ireland, served as its abbot, and worked as a missionary in Scotland and Wales. Some of his other exploits are recorded in a medieval tale, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot), which tells of the monk’s attempt to find Paradise on Earth. Together with 17 comrades, Brendan sailed in a leather boat called a curragh to a variety of fantastic places, including the Island of Sheep, the Paradise of Birds, the Island of Delights, and the edge of Hell, before finally working his way to the outskirts of Paradise itself. Brendan then returned to Ireland, where he rejoined his community and died among his brothers. The story of Brendan’s holy island sparked the medieval imagination; there are more than 120 surviving manuscripts of the Navigatio, indicating its popularity, and cartographers continued to put Saint Brendan’s Island on their maps until 1759.
The Navigatio is an example of Paradise literature, a subclass of religious and fantasy writing. Many works of Paradise literature feature pilgrims having amazing adventures with giants, talking birds, and dangerous animals. Brendan’s voyage, however, may have more basis in truth than most examples of the genre. In 1976 Timothy Severin, a writer focusing on exploration, decided to test the seaworthiness of the type of boat Brendan is supposed to have used. Through the summers of 1976 and 1977, Severin and his crew sailed their curragh Brendan from the saint’s traditional point of departure to the Faroe Islands north of Scotland, to Iceland, and along the Greenland coast to the island of Newfoundland off the Canadian coast. Severin’s trip proved that medieval monks could have made a voyage such as the one described in the Navigatio. Severin further suggested that Irish monks may have settled Iceland, Greenland, and on the eastern shores of North America during the medieval period, but for most historians that idea remains speculation.