BRENNER  PASS 495 been

born at Tralee in Kerry in A.D . 484 . The Irish form of his name is Brennain, the Latin Brendanus . Medieval historians usually call him Brendan of Clonfert, or Brendan son of Finnloga, to distinguish him from his contemporary, St Brendan of Birr (573) . Little is known of the historical Brendan, who died in 578 as abbot of a Benedictine monastery which he had founded twenty years previously at Clonfert in eastern Galway . The story of his voyage across the Atlantic to the " Promised Land of the Saints," afterwards designated " St Brendan's Island,'" ranks among the most celebrated of the medieval sagas of western Europe . Its traditional date is 565–573 . The legend is found, in prose or verse and with many variations, in Latin, French, English, Saxon, Flemish, Irish, Welsh, Breton and Scottish Gaelic . Although it does not occur in the writings of any Arabian geographer, several of its incidents—such as the landing on a whale in mistake for an island—belong also to Arabic folk. literature . Many of Brendan's fabulous adventures seem to be borrowed from the half-pagan Irish saga of Maelduin or Maeldune, and others belong also to Scandinavian mythology . The oldest extant version of the legend is the 11th century Navigatio Brendani . St Brendan's island was long accepted as a reality by geographers .

In a Venetian

map dated 1367, in the anonymous Weimar map of 1424, and in B . Beccario's map of 1435, it is identified with Madeira . Columbus, in his journal for the 9th of August 1492, states that the inhabitants of Hierro, Gomera and Madeira had seen the island in the west; and Martin Behaim, in the globe he made at Nuremberg in the same year, places it west of the Canaries and near the equator . During the 16th century the progress of exploration in these latitudes compelled many cartographers to locate the island elsewhere; and it was marked about roo m. west of Ireland, or afterwards among the West Indies . But in Spain and Portugal the older belief as to its situation was maintained . In 1526 an expedition under Fernando Alvarez left Grand Canary in search of St Brendan's island, which had again been reported as seen by many trust-worthy witnesses . In 1570 an official inquiry was held, and a second expedition undertaken, by Fernando de Villalobos, governor of Palma . Similar voyages of discovery were made by the Canarians in 1604 and 1721; and only in 1759 was the apparition of St Brendan's island explained as an effect of mirage . Among the numerous books which deal with the legend, the following are important: Die altfranzosische Prosaubersetzung von Brendans Meerfahet, by C . Wahlund (Upsala, 1900) ; La" Navigatio Sancti Brendani" in antico Veneziano, by F . Novati (Bergamo, 1892) ; Zur Brendanus-Legende, &c., by G . Schirmer (Leipzig, 1888); Les Voyages merveilleux de St .

Brendan, &c., by F .

Michel (Paris, 1878); and Acta Sancti Brendani . . . . Original Latin Documents connected with the Life of St Brendan, by P . F . Moran (Dublin, 1872) .