BRENDANO (BRANDANO), SANTO

BRENDAN (BRANDAN), Saint. — He belongs to the group of great Irish monks of the 6th century. Patron saint of the Ciarraige, an ancient people scattered in the western part of Ireland, he founded his principal monastery, said to have housed up to 3,000 disciples, at Clonfert in County Galway in 558 or 564, and died, according to the Annales of Ulster, in 577 or 583. Other foundations of his are placed on islands in the River Shannon and Lough Corrib. The fame and cult of the Saint were soon spread by seafaring peoples along all the Irish coasts, and from there into Scotland, England, and Wales. It is almost certain that B. traveled to the islands of Scotland to visit St. Columba and to Wales to visit St. David: it is possible that he also undertook long Atlantic voyages. The fact is that when the folklore of the Irish maritime peoples merged with Christian visionary literature, a most famous legend formed around his name, making him the hero of a wondrous journey to fantastic islands lost in the mystery of the ocean and inhabited by the spirits of the departed. The texts that give us the legend of B. derive from two documents: the *Vita Brendani* and the *Navigatio Brendani*, the latter of which has come down to us almost intact, while the *Vita* has suffered mutilations and interpolations. The full flowering of the legend of B. can be placed in the 9th century. The Latin text of the *Navigatio* is a literary work of value, written by an Irishman, almost certainly in Ireland, not later than the 10th century: it was spread by Irish pilgrims throughout Europe and had countless translations and adaptations into all vernacular languages and even dialects (for Italy, for example, texts survive in ancient Lucchese, Venetian, and Loanese dialects). These pilgrimages of B. in the vast ocean, full of spirituality and poetry, besides deserving, after the fine researches of Ozanam, Villari, and D’Ancona, to be counted among Dante’s sources, exercised a great influence on the imagination of seafaring peoples, down to the days of Christopher Columbus and beyond. The feast of B. occurs on May 16.