Clonfert and the Cult

The afterlife of St. Brendan is double. There is an ecclesiastical cult, anchored at his chief foundation of Clonfert in Co. Galway — a cathedral and diocesan seat whose surviving twelfth-century Romanesque west doorway is among the masterpieces of Hiberno-Romanesque art, and where the saint is traditionally said to be buried — kept with a feast on 16 May and with holy wells and pilgrimages in Kerry and the west. And there is a vast geographic and cartographic legend: Brendan’s name written across the whole northwestern seaboard from Mount Brandon to the Hebrides, and “St Brendan’s Isle” set in the Atlantic on the medieval mappae mundi and the early-modern charts and globes, sought by real expeditions into the eighteenth century. Both are the memory of one man.

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

Clonfert: The Cathedral of the Founder

The center of the cult is the place Brendan founded. The monastery of Clonfert — Cluain Ferta Brénainn, “the meadow of the grave (or of the miracle) of Brendan,” in the southeast of Co. Galway near the Shannon — is by tradition his chief foundation, established late in his life, and it became the principal seat of his veneration and, in due course, the cathedral church and head of a medieval diocese (Ó Riain, A Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011, s.v. “Brénainn of Clonfert”). The annals and the Lives agree in making Clonfert the great house of Brendan’s founding and the place of his death and burial; the prefix Cluain Ferta itself, the “meadow of the grave,” carries the memory of the burial within the place-name (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011). It is at Clonfert, in the tradition, that Brendan was laid to rest, and it is around his grave there that the cult gathered.

The early history of the site is the ordinary turbulent history of a great Irish monastery. Founded in the sixth century, Clonfert grew into one of the major monastic schools of the Irish midlands, with the usual round of the annals — abbots recorded, the house plundered and burned more than once across the Viking and the later medieval centuries, and refounded and rebuilt in turn. By the high Middle Ages it had been reorganized along the lines of the twelfth-century reform: the diocese of Clonfert was fixed at the Synod of Ráth Breasail and confirmed at Kells, and an Augustinian community came to be associated with the church, as at so many of the old Irish foundations brought under the continental rule in that age (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011; standard surveys of the Irish reform church). Through all of this the dedication held: the church remained Brendan’s, and the see remained the see of Clonfert, so that the saint’s name was carried not only by the monastery but by the bishopric and its long succession.

The Romanesque Doorway

The present cathedral of St Brendan at Clonfert — small, much-rebuilt, and now a church of the Church of Ireland — is famous above all for one thing: its carved west doorway, one of the supreme surviving works of Hiberno-Romanesque architecture and sculpture. The doorway is conventionally assigned to the second half of the twelfth century, in the great age of Irish Romanesque church-building, and it is the principal reason the otherwise modest building is known far beyond its parish (Leask, Irish Churches and Monastic Buildings, vol. 1, The First Phases and the Romanesque, Dundalgan Press; standard surveys of Irish Romanesque). It is a richly orchestrated composition of multiple recessed orders — six orders of arches in the usual count — carried on engaged shafts, every order densely carved with the repertoire of Irish Romanesque ornament: chevron and zigzag, animal and beast-head motifs, foliage and interlace, the whole built up into one of the most elaborate decorative ensembles of its kind in Ireland.

Above the arched orders rises the doorway’s most celebrated and most unusual feature: a steep triangular gable or pediment over the arch, the field of which is filled with a tangent grid or arcade of small carved human heads — a remarkable assembly of faces, ranged in a triangular pattern, that has no close parallel and that gives the Clonfert front its strange and arresting character. Below and around the heads the gable is worked with further blind arcading and ornament, so that the upper register answers the carved orders below and the whole west front reads as a single sculptural program. The heads have invited a great deal of interpretation, none of it certain; what is not in doubt is the quality and the ambition of the work, which places Clonfert among the handful of Hiberno-Romanesque doorways — with Cormac’s Chapel at Cashel and the doorway at Dysert O’Dea and a few others — that define the achievement of the style (Leask, Irish Churches and Monastic Buildings, vol. 1; Stalley, surveys of Irish medieval architecture). The doorway is, in a real sense, the cult made stone: the lavishing of the finest available art on the west front of the founder’s church.

[Disputed: the precise dating of the Clonfert west doorway — the monument is securely placed in the second half of the twelfth century and within the Hiberno-Romanesque tradition, but scholars differ over whether the doorway belongs to the 1160s or to a somewhat later phase toward the 1180s, and over how much of the present composition (especially the triangular pediment with its grid of heads) is of one build or represents a later assembly and reassembly of earlier carved stones. The standard architectural surveys treat it as mid-to-late twelfth century while noting the uncertainty; the safe statement is “second half of the twelfth century” (Leask, Irish Churches and Monastic Buildings, vol. 1; Stalley, surveys of Irish medieval architecture).]

The Cult: Feast, Relics, and Pilgrimage

Around the founder’s grave at Clonfert the formal cult took its shape, and the same cult had a second, older center in Kerry, the country of Brendan’s birth. The feast is kept on 16 May, the day given for Brendan of Clonfert in the Irish martyrologies and carried into the wider Western and, latterly, the Orthodox calendars; it is by this date that he is universally commemorated, and the date anchors the liturgical life of the cult (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011; and see the companion file on the Orthodox reception). Brendan stands as patron of Clonfert and of its diocese, and his patronage radiates outward across the foundations and dedications attributed to him. The relic-tradition is the burial-tradition: the body is held to rest at Clonfert, and the cult of the grave there is of a piece with the Cluain Ferta place-name itself.

In Kerry the devotion took the characteristic Irish form of the holy well and the pattern — the patrún, the gathering of pilgrims on or about the saint’s day at a well or sacred site dedicated to him, with the rounds and prayers of popular devotion. Wells and sites bearing Brendan’s name are scattered through his home country in the Dingle Peninsula and across the west, and the most spectacular focus of pilgrimage is the mountain itself, treated below. The cult thus had two poles, eastern and western: the ecclesiastical and diocesan center at Clonfert by the Shannon, with the cathedral and the grave; and the popular, pilgrimage-and-well devotion of Kerry, rooted in the birthplace and in the mountain associated with the voyage. Between them they map the geography of the formal cult — Galway and Kerry, the two ends of the saint’s traditional life — before that geography opens out, in the place-names, onto the whole seaboard (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011).

Brendan in the Place-Names: From Kerry to the Faroes

Beyond the cathedral and the wells, the cult left its deepest mark on the map in the form of place-names. Brendan’s name is written across the northwestern seaboard of Europe with a reach matched by few saints, and the place-names are the cult’s geographic footprint — a track of dedications running from his Kerry homeland up the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland and, in the legend’s furthest extension, out toward the islands of the open Atlantic.

The greatest of these is Mount Brandon, Cnoc Bréanainn, the high peak at the western end of the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry — the second-highest mountain in Ireland and one of the country’s great pilgrimage mountains. By tradition it is Brendan’s own mountain, the place of his prayer and fasting before the great voyage; near its summit stands the remains of a small oratory and other early ecclesiastical features traditionally connected with him, and a pilgrim path, the Saint’s Road (Cosán na Naomh), climbs to the top, walked on his feast and on the old pilgrimage days. From the summit the pilgrim looks west over the Atlantic that the saint set out upon — the geography of the mountain and the geography of the legend joined in a single view. At the foot of the peninsula the name continues in the water and the shore: Brandon Bay, Brandon Point, and Brandon Creek — Cuas an Bhodaigh — the little inlet that tradition makes Brendan’s launching-place and from which, for that reason, Tim Severin’s reconstructed leather boat set out in 1976 to test the voyage (see the companion file on Severin’s voyage).

From Kerry the dedications run on up the western seaboard. They are scattered along the Irish coasts, and they cross to Scotland: in the Hebrides and the western isles Brendan’s name appears in church-dedications, among them Kilbrandon on Bute and in the islands — cill Bhreanainn, “the church of Brendan” — marking the saint’s place in the Gaelic Christianity of the Scottish west as well as the Irish. And at the legend’s furthest reach the name and the story run out into the northern ocean toward the Faroes and Iceland — the very islands the Navigatio describes the saint reaching, the lands of the sheep and the birds and the smoking fiery mountain — so that the place-name footprint and the voyage-narrative point the same way, northwest and out to sea. The point to hold is the scale of it: the name of Brendan is not local but written across the whole northwestern seaboard, from the wells of Kerry to the isles of Scotland and the rim of the Atlantic, the broadest geographic spread of any cult of the Irish saints of the sea (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011; Westropp, “Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic,” PRIA 30 (1912)).

St Brendan’s Isle on the Maps

The strangest and grandest part of the afterlife is cartographic. For roughly a thousand years the mapmakers of Europe gave Brendan an island, and set it in the Atlantic Ocean. St Brendan’s Isle — Insula Sancti Brandani, later the Spanish San Borondón — appears on the medieval mappae mundi, on the early-modern portolan charts, and on the globes, a phantom land conjured directly out of the Navigatio‘s Promised Land of the Saints and lodged in the geography of the real world. On the great encyclopedic world-maps of the type of the Hereford Mappa Mundi and the Ebstorf map, and on the sea-charts that followed, an island bearing Brendan’s name takes its place among the islands of the western ocean, the legend transcribed into the literal map of the earth (Westropp, “Brasil and the Legendary Islands,” PRIA 30 (1912); Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, American Geographical Society, 1922).

The isle proved astonishingly durable, and it migrated. As the real geography of the Atlantic filled in with discovery, St Brendan’s Isle was not erased but moved, attaching itself in the late Middle Ages and the early-modern period to the region of the Canary Islands, where it became the famous phantom San Borondón, an island repeatedly “seen” on the western horizon from the Canaries — glimpsed in certain lights and lost again — and placed on the charts and globes as a real if elusive land. It appears, with Brendan’s name, on the globe of Martin Behaim of 1492, the earliest surviving terrestrial globe, set in the Atlantic among the other islands of that ocean — so that at the very threshold of the European discovery of the New World, the navigator-saint’s island was still part of the map of the world (Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, 1922; Westropp, “Brasil and the Legendary Islands,” PRIA 30 (1912)).

Nor was it only ink. The belief was concrete enough that real expeditions were fitted out from the Canaries to find San Borondón and take possession of it, and these searches went on, periodically, into the eighteenth century — voyages sent in earnest after an island that was not there, the last serious efforts falling in the seventeen-hundreds (Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, 1922). Only with the rigorous hydrography of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was St Brendan’s Isle at last struck from the charts, dropped quietly as the Atlantic was at last surveyed and found to hold no such land. T. J. Westropp, surveying the whole family of Atlantic phantom islands — Brasil, the Isle of St Brendan, and their companions — set the Brendan island in its company as one of the great persistent fictions of the ocean map, and William Babcock’s Legendary Islands of the Atlantic remains the classic account of the type (Westropp, “Brasil and the Legendary Islands,” PRIA 30 (1912); Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, 1922). It is the literal mark of the legend on the map of the world: for a thousand years the saint’s island lay in the Atlantic, in the imagination and on the parchment of Europe, and men sailed to look for it.

Two Cults, One Saint

The veneration of Brendan is thus best understood as double, the two halves answering to the two halves of the man himself. There is the ecclesiastical cult, concentrated and concrete: the cathedral and grave at Clonfert with its incomparable Romanesque doorway, the diocese that bore his name, the feast of 16 May, the wells and patterns and the pilgrim mountain of Kerry — the ordinary apparatus of a great Irish saint’s devotion, fixed to particular places one can still visit. And there is the geographic and cartographic legend, diffuse and immense: the name carried across the whole seaboard from Mount Brandon to the Hebrides, and the phantom island set in the Atlantic on a thousand years of maps and chased by real ships into the eighteenth century. Both are the afterlife of the saint; both are forms his memory took. The first kept him as a holy man at a holy place; the second turned him into a fixture of European geography. Together they make the most remarkable cult-legacy of any of the Irish navigator-saints — a feast and a grave at one end, and a moving island on the edge of the known world at the other (Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish Saints, 2011; Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, 1922).

References

Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. Ed. Carl Selmer. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959.
O’Meara, John J., trans. The Voyage of Saint Brendan. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976; repr. Colin Smythe, 1991.
Ó Riain, Pádraig. A Dictionary of Irish Saints. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011.
Leask, Harold G. Irish Churches and Monastic Buildings. Vol. 1, The First Phases and the Romanesque. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1955.
Stalley, Roger. Surveys of Irish medieval architecture (incl. Irish Round Towers, Dublin: Country House / Town House, 2000, and related architectural studies).
Westropp, T. J. “Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 30 (1912): 223–260.
Babcock, William H. Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography. New York: American Geographical Society, 1922.