The Immram Genre

The immram is an Old and Middle Irish narrative form: a sea-voyage westward over the ocean to a chain of wondrous islands. The genre sits exactly where pre-Christian otherworld saga meets Christian monastic allegory, and the Navigatio Sancti Brendani is its most thoroughly monasticized example — a Latin pilgrimage that disciplines and baptizes the native voyage-tale, replacing the pagan paradise of pleasure with the liturgically ordered Promised Land of the Saints.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic)

The Word and the Form

The Old Irish noun immram (plural immrama) is a verbal noun from imm-rá-, “to row about,” and so means literally “a rowing around” or “a rowing about” — a voyage made under oar and sail over the open sea. By convention modern scholarship reserves the term for a small group of vernacular Irish tales whose narrative spine is a voyage from Ireland westward across the Atlantic to a succession of marvellous islands, each with its own wonder, before the voyagers return or arrive at a final goal. The native medieval tale-lists themselves recognise immrama as a category, naming several such titles among the saga-types a fili (poet) was expected to know; the genre is thus not merely a modern editorial convenience but a classification the tradition made of itself (see the discussion of the tale-lists in Wooding, ed., The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature, 2000).

The immram must be distinguished from its close cousin, the echtrae (plural echtrai), “an adventure” or “an out-going,” the tale-type of the journey into the otherworld. The two overlap heavily and the medieval scribes themselves were not consistent — Immram Brain is in substance an echtrae, a summons to the otherworld, even though it bears the immram label, and the Echtrae Conle (The Adventure of Connla) shares its mythology. The working distinction drawn by modern critics is one of emphasis rather than of kind: the echtrae tends to be a single passage to a single otherworld realm, often reached by an invitation from a divine woman and frequently lying under a hill or across a lake, whereas the immram is a serial voyage over the sea through many islands, with the structural rhythm of departure, wonder, departure again. Mac Cana, Carney, and the contributors to Wooding’s anthology all stress that the boundary is porous; what matters for the history of the Navigatio is that the immram is the maritime, plural, and episodic member of the pair, and that it carries within it the older otherworld matter of the echtrae even as it Christianises it.

The Principal Immrama

Four vernacular immrama are conventionally counted. The first, and the most archaic in its mythology, is Immram Brain maic Febail (The Voyage of Bran son of Febal). Bran is summoned by an otherworld woman who sings of Emain, the Land of Women, and of a paradise across the sea where there is no sin, no sickness, and no death; he sails, reaches the Island of Joy and then the Land of Women, dwells there what seems a year, and on returning finds that ages have passed and that a companion who leaps ashore crumbles to ashes — the classic motif of otherworld time. The standard critical edition is Séamus Mac Mathúna, Immram Brain: Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), whose title itself registers the tale’s frankly sensual paradise. Immram Brain is the most “pagan” of the group: its Promised Land is a land of pleasure and of the sídh, the immortal women, not of the saints, and its Christian colouring is thin and arguably late, confined chiefly to the prophetic verses about the coming of Christ that some have read as later interpolation.

The second, and for our purposes the most important, is Immram Maíle Dúin (The Voyage of Máel Dúin), the closest secular analogue to the Navigatio. Máel Dúin sets out to avenge his murdered father; a druid prescribes the number of his crew, three foster-brothers force their way aboard against the prohibition, and the breaking of that geis (taboo) drives the voyage off course into a long sequence of wonder-islands — the island of giant ants, the island of huge birds, the island of the monstrous horse-beast, the island of the weeping people, the island of the mill of grievance, the hermit on his rock, and many more. The revenge-quest is at the end transformed into a quest of forgiveness: when Máel Dúin at last reaches his enemy’s island, he is counselled, in explicitly Christian terms, to forgive as God has forgiven him, and he returns home reconciled rather than vengeful. The tale was edited and translated by Whitley Stokes in Revue Celtique (the prose Immram Maíle Dúin, RC 9–10, 1888–89), and a full critical study and edition was given by H. P. A. Oskamp, The Voyage of Máel Dúin (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970). The structural kinship with the Navigatio — a sequence of discrete island-wonders, framed by a sea-voyage and resolved by a spiritual reconciliation — is so close that the relationship between the two texts has become one of the central problems of the genre.

The remaining two are shorter and more overtly ecclesiastical. Immram Snédgusa ocus Maic Riagla (The Voyage of Snédgus and Mac Riagla) sends two monks of Iona out to sea, where they visit islands of marvels and at last an island of the men of Ross who had been set adrift, encountering Enoch and Elijah and the great bird that recites the Gospel. Immram Ua Corra (The Voyage of the Húi Corra, the sons of Conall Derg úa Corra) is a penitential voyage: three brothers who had set out to plunder churches repent, take to a boat as a penance, and journey through a sequence of islands of reward and punishment, including a vision of hell, before some of them reach a holy island. Both were edited by Stokes in Revue Celtique (the Immram Snédgusa ocus Maic Riagla, RC 9, 1888; the Immram Ua Corra, RC 14, 1893). In these two the monastic and the visionary have already absorbed the saga frame; they are closer in spirit to the Navigatio than is Bran, though far less artful.

A caution on chronology must be entered at once. The surviving manuscripts of the vernacular immrama are in several cases later than the earliest manuscripts of the Navigatio, and the language of the texts as we have them has been variously dated; the relative chronology of the tales, and the direction of borrowing between them, cannot be read straight off the dates of the codices.

The Navigatio and Máel Dúin: A Disputed Priority

Because Immram Maíle Dúin and the Navigatio share so much — the off-course voyage, the recurring islands, the bird-choir, the hermit on the bare rock, the redemptive turn at the close — the question of which influenced which has been argued for more than a century, without settled resolution.

[Disputed: The priority and direction of borrowing between the Navigatio Sancti Brendani and Immram Maíle Dúin. (a) An older view, going back to the nineteenth-century editors and to Zimmer, held that the Latin Navigatio drew on a pre-existing vernacular immram tradition (Máel Dúin or its sources), so that the monastic Latin text Christianised native saga material. (b) A counter-view, associated especially with James Carney (“Review of Selmer’s edition,” Medium Ævum 32, 1963, and subsequent work), argued that the influence ran the other way: that the Navigatio is the older and the more coherent composition and that Immram Maíle Dúin borrows wonder-islands from it, the secular tale elaborating motifs the Latin pilgrimage had first organised. (c) A mediating position, represented by contributors to Wooding, ed., The Otherworld Voyage (2000), treats both as drawing on a common stock of voyage-motifs and a shared monastic milieu, so that neither is simply the source of the other. The dispute turns on the dating of the Navigatio (commonly eighth–tenth century) against the dating of the language of Máel Dúin, both of which are themselves contested, and it remains open.]

What is not disputed is the closeness of the two, and that closeness is precisely what makes the genre legible: the Navigatio and Máel Dúin are the same voyage told in two keys, one Latin and monastic, one vernacular and saga-coloured.

The Blend of Monastic Allegory and Native Saga

Here is the interpretive heart of the matter. The immram is the form in which the Irish church took the native otherworld-voyage and made it carry a Christian meaning. The native materials are unmistakable — the western paradise across the ocean, the islands of wonder, the dilation of otherworld time, the woman who summons from beyond the sea — and they descend ultimately from the pre-Christian Irish imagination of the síd, the immortal land of the gods. The genius of the immram, and above all of the Navigatio, lies not in suppressing this material but in re-reading it: the islands become stations of the soul, the voyage becomes the peregrinatio pro Christo of the Irish ascetic who set out in a curragh “to seek the place of his resurrection,” and the destination is shifted decisively from a paradise of the senses to the Land of the Saints.

The contrast with Immram Brain makes the point exactly. Where Bran sails to Emain, the Land of Women, a realm of pleasure, no sin and no death conceived as the fulfilment of desire, Brendan sails to the Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum, the Promised Land of the Saints, conceived as the goal of ascetic renunciation. Where Bran’s voyagers feast and dally, Brendan’s monks keep the Office: the whole architecture of the Navigatio is liturgical, the seven-year cycle of recurring islands organised around the feasts of the Church year, so that the voyage is at once a journey through space and a journey through the calendar. The most telling single transformation is that the Navigatio keeps the form of the otherworld voyage while inverting its content: the pagan paradise of pleasure becomes a disciplined pilgrimage of prayer, and the Land of Women becomes the community of the holy dead. In a phrase that captures the dynamic of the whole genre, the Navigatio disciplines and baptizes the immram — it takes the native saga of the wonder-voyage and orders it to the ascetic and liturgical life, so that every marvel is also a lesson and every island a stage of the soul’s ascent. The wonder is not denied; it is consecrated. (On the otherworld topography and its Christian re-reading see H. R. Patch, The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950, esp. the chapters on the Celtic voyage; and on the voyage-motifs and their hagiographic re-use, the essays of Dorothy Ann Bray and others collected in Wooding, ed., The Otherworld Voyage, 2000.)

The Latin Background and the Question of Genre

If the Navigatio leans on one side toward the native immram, it leans on the other toward the Latin monastic and visionary literature of the wider Church, and this double inheritance is what distinguishes it from the vernacular tales proper. For the Navigatio is Latin, not Irish; it is a learned ecclesiastical composition, and behind it stand the desert-monastic books the Irish read avidly — the Vitae Patrum (the Lives and Sayings of the Desert Fathers) and Athanasius’s Life of Antony in its Latin versions, with their hermits in the wilderness, their demonic assaults, and their angelic consolations. The hermits whom Brendan meets on their bare rocks — Paul the Hermit fed by an otter, the community of Ailbe living in silence and fed by miraculous loaves — are Egyptian abbas transplanted to Atlantic islands. Behind the Navigatio stand also the Latin Visio literature of the otherworld (the visions of hell and paradise that culminate, much later, in the Visio Tnugdali and in Dante), and above all the Scriptures: the paradise of Genesis, the Promised Land of Exodus and Joshua to which the very name Terra Repromissionis alludes, and the heavenly Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. The standard text remains Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, ed. Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), with the accessible translation of John J. O’Meara, The Voyage of Saint Brendan (Dublin: Dolmen, 1976; repr. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991).

This Latinity raises a real generic question: is the Navigatio an immram at all? Some scholars hold that it is — that it is the supreme example of the genre, the form realised at its fullest — while others insist that the immrama proper are the vernacular Irish tales, and that the Navigatio is a Latin hagiographic vita-cum-voyage that uses immram motifs without being a member of the vernacular tale-type. The dispute is partly terminological, but it has substance: it asks whether genre is defined by language and milieu (in which case the Navigatio stands apart) or by narrative form and motif (in which case it stands within). The cautious and now common position is to say that the Navigatio belongs to the otherworld-voyage tradition broadly conceived — the framing chosen for Wooding’s anthology — while noting that it is a Latin and monastic text drawing on, and contributing to, the vernacular immram corpus rather than simply one of its members.

The Afterlife of the Genre

The voyage-form outlived the Middle Ages. The Navigatio itself was translated and adapted across Europe — into Anglo-Norman (the Voyage de saint Brandan of Benedeit), German, Dutch, Italian, and Norse — and it placed “Saint Brendan’s Isle” on maps of the Atlantic into the early modern period. The vernacular immrama had a long afterlife of their own in scholarship and in literature: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, drew directly on Stokes’s translation of Immram Maíle Dúin for his poem “The Voyage of Maeldune” (1880), turning the island-sequence into a Victorian allegory of the futility of vengeance, and Irish writers from the Revival onward have returned repeatedly to the form. The wonder-voyage over the western sea, baptised once by the Irish monks into a pilgrimage of the soul, has proved one of the most durable inheritances of early Christian Ireland.

References

Mac Mathúna, Séamus. Immram Brain: Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women. Buchreihe der Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 2. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985.
Oskamp, H. P. A. The Voyage of Máel Dúin: A Study in Early Irish Voyage Literature. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970.
Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. “The Voyage of Máel Dúin” (Immram curaig Maíle Dúin). Revue Celtique 9 (1888): 447–495; 10 (1889): 50–95.
Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. “The Voyage of Snedgus and Mac Riagla.” Revue Celtique 9 (1888): 14–25.
Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. “The Voyage of the Húi Corra.” Revue Celtique 14 (1893): 22–69.
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. Ed. Carl Selmer. Publications in Mediaeval Studies 16. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959.
O’Meara, John J., trans. The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Journey to the Promised Land. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976; repr. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991.
Wooding, Jonathan M., ed. The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
Patch, Howard Rollin. The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature. Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, n.s. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Carney, James. Review of Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, ed. Carl Selmer. Medium Ævum 32 (1963): 37–44.