The Voyage of Saint Brendan in twentieth-century translation and scholarship

Record summary

The Navigatio Sancti Brendani describes Saint Brendan’s legendary Atlantic voyage through islands, monsters, liturgical observances, and otherworldly spaces. Mid-century translations and studies made it a recurring comparison point for claims that medieval Irish monks reached North America or Antarctic-like lands. The text is valuable precisely because it combines hagiography, voyage literature, biblical motifs, and learned geography. Its composition, manuscript families, and relationship to actual navigation remain debated; no single episode should be extracted as straightforward nautical reportage.